Customer Reviews

California, the great exception

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

That is how California's emergence is described by the exemplary Carey McWilliams, journalist, social critic, and keen observer of all things Californian.

The book is dated: it was written in '49 and lightly updated in '74 and centers primarily on San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is a measure of McWilliams' penetrating and witty grasp of the state and its foibles, follies, and fandangos that most of what he wrote is still so relevant and even indispensable.

McWilliams' central premise is that the discovery of gold catapulted California through what took other regions of the planet centuries to go through--hence our individualism, do-it-yourself lifestyles, and general motion and mayhem. We've been doing reenactments of the Gold Rush ever since. As he puts it: "Essentially California developed 'outside' the framework, the continuum, of the American frontier. The difference is that between a child raised in the home of his parents, with relatives and familiar surroundings, and the child taken from his home at an early age and brought up in a remote and different environment." Quite so. In a nation of wandering pioneers we are largely, even now, somehow a state of orphans.

California as "the great exception," then, not in terms of snobbery or entitlement, but of being the place where so many Americans--and men from other countries--rushed in to pan for gold, and stayed, and established a tradition of messy but vital cultural infusions. Tip the continent sideways, someone once said, and what falls down lands in California, land of wonder and many griffins.

You might also want to check out McWilliams' SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: AN ISLAND ON THE LAND.