Stockton, California: Holt's Caterpillar Tread, Chapter 9 and a $500 UBI

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Stockton, California, sits where the San Joaquin Valley meets the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, land once home to the Yachicumne, who built villages on raised mounds above seasonal floods. In the 1840s German immigrant Charles Maria Weber, barred as a foreigner from a Mexican land grant, partnered with William Gulnac, who secured the eleven square league Rancho Campo de los Franceses and passed it to Weber. After trying mining in the 1848 Gold Rush, Weber turned the riverfront into an inland port supplying the southern gold fields and laid out a town in 1849, named for Commodore Robert F. Stockton.

Draining the Delta's peat soil drew large immigrant workforces: by 1880 Stockton had California's third largest Chinese community, and in 1912 it became home to the first Sikh gurdwara in the United States. On Thanksgiving Day 1904 Benjamin Holt tested a continuous track tractor that a photographer said crawled like a caterpillar, and its use hauling artillery in World War I influenced the armored tank. In the 2000s Bay Area commuters tripled home values, the crash made Stockton the national leader in foreclosures, and in June 2012 it became the largest U.S. city to file for Chapter 9. It exited in 2015 and in 2019 launched a privately funded basic income pilot.

• Stockton was the first California community with a name of neither Spanish nor Native American origin.
• During World War II the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds held about 4,200 Japanese Americans as an assembly center.
• In April 1918 British Colonel Ernest Dunlop Swinton traveled to Stockton to thank Benjamin Holt and his workers.
• One in every 30 homes received a foreclosure notice, and unemployment rose above 13 percent.
• The SEED program gave 125 randomly selected residents $500 a month for 24 months with no strings attached.