Peter Schrag, a longtime opinion page editor at the Sacramento Bee who wrote a well-received book about the conundrum of California governance, died on March 19, the New York Times reported. He was 94.
In Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future (1998), Schrag contended that the popularity of voter initiatives hamstrung the State Legislature and eroded representative government. "While purporting to empower grass-roots Californians, these initiatives transferred power to the older, wealthier voters who turned out at the polls regularly, Mr. Schrag demonstrated," the Times wrote. "These voters' abhorrence of taxes hurt working class and minority populations that benefited from the public services that the revenue paid for."
Paradise Lost was named a New York Times Notable Book, and attracted local and international media attention.
He graduated from Amherst with a bachelor's degree in history in 1953, and spent two years as a journalist at the El Paso Herald-Post before taking a job in the communications department at his alma mater for a decade. His experiences there led him to write Voices in the Classroom (1965), exploring how race and class distorted the promise of an equal education in America's K-12 public schools.
In the early decades of his career in journalism, Schrag wrote for Saturday Review and Harper's. He became education editor of Saturday Review, and eventually rose to the position of executive editor.
In 1978, Schrag was hired as editorial page editor at the Sacramento Bee, despite never having written a newspaper editorial. With Schrag at the helm, the editorial page opposed Proposition 13, "which in 1978 capped property taxes and hollowed out school budgets, as well as later initiatives to mandate three-strikes criminal sentencing; prohibit bilingual education; and to shut the doors of public schools and health care services to undocumented residents," the Times noted.
"We were liberals as the state was turning conservative and sometimes reactionary," Schrag wrote in an unpublished memoir.
His 1971 piece in Harper's, "The Decline of the WASP," caught the attention of Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, who asked Schrag to expand it into a book, which was published in 1973 under the title The End of the American Future. Schrag's other books include Test of Loyalty (1974) and California: America's High-Stakes Experiment (2006).