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By Kerry Tremain Californians are used to the abuse. Just prior to the election that recalled Governor Gray Davis and elected Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the New York Times wrote, “New York, like most states, makes it difficult for voters to indulge in fits of pique at politics-as-usual by installing an action hero in the governor’s office,” and sniffed that, while New York has fiscal problems of its own, “no one seems to be trying to replace George Pataki with Robert DeNiro.” The Washington Post followed suit, variously castigating the recall as “appalling,” “preposterous,” a “folly,” a “melodrama,” and a “soap opera [with] no attractive characters.” Despite evidence that California’s populist revolt shook out the political logjam in Sacramento, the Post opined that “no one who cares about America’s democracy can welcome this spectacle.” They did note the state’s importance as the fifth largest economy in the world, that is, “if California were a separate country--and right now that doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.” Since well before Jerry Brown ’61 was tagged “Governor Moonbeam,” California has been dogged by the pervasive prejudice that it constitutes a weird appendage on the American body politic. “California infuriates the eastern establishment because it is so vital,” says State Librarian and historian Kevin Starr, MLS ’74. “They’re snobby towards Schwarzenegger because he was a body builder; they sang the same song about Reagan. But don’t forget that Schwarzenegger did an end run around the pundits. He didn’t need their approval to win.” California’s “nutty” politics is a staple of late night television, too, and as humor it’s admittedly irresistible. On Comedy Central’s While it would be easy enough to blame this “Kooky California” theory on a vast East Coast media conspiracy--and we do--the idea resonates with California editorialists as well. Post-election maps made clear that California contains two states: the blue coastal liberals and the red inland conservatives. Both have their own safe congressional districts and their own media outlets, and each thinks the other is nuts. One thing recall voters of every hue shared was a deep distrust of state government. But, despite the anger directed at Sacramento, the long list of candidates, ranging from porn-king Larry Flynt to actor Gary Coleman, embarrassed most Californians. We were painfully aware that our reputation as “Kooky California” gave the rest of America all the explanation required. Where did this caricature come from? And why does it have such staying power--on both sides of the Sierra? Starr, the historian, blames people like my Great Uncle Louie. “The idea originates with the migration of midwestern eccentrics into southern California in the 1920s,” he says. “San Francisco always had a reputation as a formal, stately city. Southern California had something else: the religious cultists like Aimee Semple McPherson, the swamis, the noir novels, and the scandalous Hollywood lifestyles.” Uncle Louie, a theater pipe organist, left Missouri after World War I to homestead a plot in Rainbow, California, near Anaheim. There, he grew exotic vegetables and gave full flower to his spiritual urges. He taught his daughter how to hunt for fairy rings. He read horoscopes. And he led a San Diego order of the followers of Aleister Crowley, the occultist and black magician who called himself the Anti-Christ. In City of Quartz, L.A. chronicler and critic Mike Davis devotes a fascinating section called “The Sorcerers” to the odd confluence of physics and metaphysics that developed around Cal Tech in Pasadena from the mid-’20s onward. By the late 1930s, a Crowley-inspired club called the Agape Lodge was headed by John Parsons, a prominent Cal Tech scientist and a founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab. According to Davis, Parsons returned from the lab to his mansion at night “to perform blasphemous rituals (with, for example, naked pregnant women leaping through fire circles)… under the long-distance direction of Crowley.” From this peculiar mix, Parsons’ friend L. Ron Hubbard eventually fashioned Scientology. (Uncle Louie is said to have taken an immediate dislike to Hubbard.) “Saturday Evening Post articles in the 1930s began depicting southern California as eccentric,” says Starr. “That reputation only spread to the rest of California after World War II with the beatniks in San Francisco, and then the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and the hippies. Later, you had the Manson murders. These built upon the reputation of California as eccentric.” Berkeley history professor Kerwin Klein gives the “Kooky California” theory an earlier provenance. “By the end of the 18th century, a lot of educated northern and western Europeans held an idea of ‘The West’ as a really special place,” he says. “You can trace the history of that idea from ancient Greece, on to Rome, and then on to Western Europe, each succeeding the other as the imperial center of European power. It’s established even before it becomes known as Manifest Destiny in the United States. People genuinely believed that history rolls from East to West. It’s built into the place names--like Berkeley, which comes from Bishop George Berkeley, who wrote a poem on his way to Bermuda to establish a colony: ‘Westward the course of empire takes its way…the noblest offspring is the last.’ “There isn’t any place further to go if you’re European,” says Klein, who sports a pompadour and hangs Elvis posters on his office wall. “California’s on an Asian ocean. To the eastern establishment, that was a stunningly foreign idea. California is literally the last place, and it could be heaven on earth or it could be hell.” According to Klein, in all of American history, no other place has generated as much apocalyptic hyperbole as California. Events like the Gold Rush and earthquakes periodically reinforce that rhetoric. “It hit a frenzy point when the 1960 census revealed that California had overtaken New York as the most populous state in the nation,” he says. “Every East Coast publication--Life, Look--ran cover stories about how California is the Future. It’s going to be ranch homes. It’s going to be engineering. It’s going to be beaches. It’s going to be this weird mixture of science and hedonism. That becomes the cliché that returns, most recently in the Silicon Valley cycle.” From the first American settlements, Klein says, the apocalyptic language of eastern Protestantism surrounded California with an air of strangeness and eccentricity, one reinforced by the “amazingly cosmopolitan environment” that existed here from the start. California bore a special place in the nation’s mythology that those left behind in the East envied and resented--and still do. “No one spoke of Ohio falling into the ocean,” he says. California’s founding myths have served the state by attracting successive waves of energetic and talented immigrants looking to reinvent themselves. “The fact is that we have the ability to take people from unusual backgrounds and help them reach their full potential. If that’s eccentricity, hooray for it,” says Starr. Our mythologies have also obstructed a truer picture of California’s strengths and vulnerabilities. Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff says that the “Kooky California” story undercuts the seriousness of our political choices and their consequences. By any number of measures--its industries, its innovation, its size, its diversity--California is the most important state in the union. And we’re no more kooky than the rest of the country, which also experiences political protests, mass murders, and religious cults. Uncle Louie may have been drawn to his dream of California, but it’s crazy to think he represented the state’s character. His own family thought he was a bit off the deep end. Yet Californians can’t seem to shake the bipolar view that alternates between the dream and its betrayal. Many of our best writers and intellectuals still look over their shoulders to the East, where the state’s image is darkly filtered through the conceits of the New York Times or the New Yorker. The recent fires in Los Angeles offered only the latest opportunity for editorializing on the collapse of the golden dream. On the shiny side of the looking glass, we take our cues from Hollywood, whose vast star-making machinery floats somewhere over the rainbow from the city it inhabits. In his inaugural address, Schwarzenegger recited from this Hollywood script, evoking the “golden dream by the sea” that will miraculously rescue us from our fiscal hell. But, to his credit, the new governor also acknowledged the distance between the myth he’s created and the work to be done: “It’s no secret I’m a newcomer to politics. I realize I was elected on faith and hope.” Growing up in Sacramento, Joan Didion ’56 was told and retold heroic stories of her pioneer stock and the journey west. Now transplanted to New York, Didion believes she and her home state have been deluded by our own recycled myths. In her latest book, Where I Was From, she writes that we celebrate the rugged individualism of our pioneers and entrepreneurs, overlooking the casualties of their climb and the fact that, from the beginning, California was built with federal subsidies for railroads, irrigation canals, and military technology. In seeking to shatter the state’s illusions, Didion runs a different risk, of spiraling into disillusionment. Neither the state nor the country can afford that. California is the site of several portentous experiments--of energy policies and technologies less dependent on petroleum, of a huge agricultural industry adapting to environmental constraints, of the capacity of information technology to address social and economic problems, and, perhaps most important, of the best path to a multicultural society. Starr, for one, finds Didion’s concerns beside the point for our multicultural state-in-the-making, and attributes California’s apocalyptic imagery to 19th-century Anglo moralizers whose influence is fading. He believes historians may use Where I Was From to describe our era as one in which the Anglo-Americans who dominated California for a century and a half can no longer do so. “The true Californian knows there are a million Chinese in California. There are a million Filipino Americans. There’s a sea of humanity. California is Mexico. California is Asia. It is the South Pacific,” Starr says. Starr’s portrayal brought to mind Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, where my wife, whose mother grew up in Depression-era Alabama, works in a clinic run by a Lakota Indian and high school basketball star from South Dakota. Named for the orchards grown on a former hacienda, Fruitvale was built by Portuguese canners before falling on hard times during the postwar urban flight. Now, despite its problems, the neighborhood thrives again with businesses founded and patronized by Saigon refugees, Louisiana longshoremen, Fijian Muslims, and farmers from Guadalajara. They send their sons and daughters to Laney College and sometimes to Berkeley. Their stories, and similar ones throughout the state, complicate and ultimately transform the golden tale of Forty-Niners and wagon trains. “We’ve always been more culturally diverse than was acknowledged,” Starr says. “But at this point, with a majority minority state, we’re trying to work out how we all get along.” What could be less kooky than that? Where does this caricature come from? And why does it have such staying power--on both sides of the Sierra? WAY OUT WEST: The author’s Uncle Louie (center), here leading an occult ceremony, was among a group of eccentric midwestern immigrants that gave California its offbeat reputation in the 1920s. |
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