From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind [Hardcover]

Stephen Schwartz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 1998

A history of California from the sixteenth century to the present day which attempts to show that American national culture developed first in the East, and spread Westward across the frontier, in opposition to the more common theory that American identity is rooted in Westward expansion.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Stephen Schwartz, author of From West to East, believes that California is a paradigm of radicalism, American style. "California was radical from the beginning," he writes. "...it stands apart... in that its cultural identity is that of radicality; not based on a radical ideology or ism per se but, experientially rather than conceptually, ever embodying the new." Moreover, Schwartz argues that the idea of American culture spreading from East to West with westward migration is actually a misconception; he posits that, in reality, a wholly unique, multicultural society formed in California has been influencing the nation ever since. From the Spanish Conquest through the Red Scare and to the Berkeley free-speech movement, Schwartz documents the state's history, weaving its disparate strands into a tapestry of labor unions and captains of industry, artists, politicians, soldiers, and martyrs. From Hollywood films to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and the presidency of Ronald Reagan, California has played a key part in helping shape America's image of herself, a role Stephen Schwartz attempts to chronicle in From West to East.

From Publishers Weekly

From its beginnings, California has embodied the new, maintains Schwartz in this ambitious, unorthodox history. By the time the U.S. annexed the state in 1848 after the war with Mexico, California already had a cosmopolitan identity utterly different from that of other West Coast states, he further argues. The era after the 1848-50 Gold Rush saw a waning of Hispanic traditions and Native cultures, and conflicts between farms and railroads, whites and nonwhite immigrants, as well as the rise of a bohemian subculture by the 1890s. Schwartz, a San Francisco Chronicle correspondent, aims to write a "hidden" or "secret" history of Californians' forging of a nonconformist cultural identity. He sometimes overstates his case, but his entertaining narrative offers new vistas on the Golden Gate State as a crucible of American experience. Along with thumbnails of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Ambrose Bierce, Lincoln Steffens and avant-garde composers Harry Partch and Henry Cowell, he peoples his saga with social activists, utopians, cranks, artists, anarchists, Wobblies and Hollywood communists. Although Schwartz extols a postwar California mindset shaped by Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan and the Beats, he opines that the post-1965 California scene has "produced little of lasting value in the literary and artistic fields." His iconoclastic chronicle deserves a place alongside Kevin Starr's standard histories.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First Printing edition (March 10, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684831341
• ISBN-13: 978-0684831343
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,008,581 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Too Little California; Too Much Stalin, September 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (Hardcover)

The NY Times and California historian Ken Starr are correct: Stephen Schwartz, the author of this book, seems to want to use California as a means of persuing a vendetta against communism. The whole thing is the author's private history; I don't think there is much for anyone who really cares about or is interested in California.

As a scholar, Schwartz lacks credibility.... His book does have some interesting stories, however, from California labor history.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book of extraordinary breadth, compassion and discernment., November 30, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (US, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (Hardcover)

Stephen Schwartz sings a paean to the experimentalist and revolutionary roots of California. From the few shreds of information about the indigenous peoples of the region through the coming of the Spanish, the arrival of the Americans and all the brawling, boiling cauldron of turmoil and triumph that followed, Schwartz remains true to his task of charting the formation of a unique section of America and of rendering its struggles and strife, its tragedies and transcendence real and stunningly palpable to the reader fortunate enough to happen upon this work. Throughout it all, he maintains his objectivity, but never hides his primary allegience: a love of freedom and a boundless sympathy for explorers, tradesmen, priests, shamans, empire builders, unionists, radicals and artistic originals of every possible stamp and hue as long as they demonstrate a respect for that freedom in whatever their endeavors. Yes, every type of character, even some villains, are given center stage and admired if they remained true to that experimentalist vision, no matter what the consequences, but are soundly criticized if they betray their own unique qualities and submerge themselves in some capitulation to the gray forces of mediocrity that always inhabit each age. Sometimes such mediocrity and stultifying forces were represented by the railroads, sometimes by forces on the left, such as the Communists. However, contrary to some reviews I have read, there is nothing rabid about Schwartz's appraisal of such forces. He never loses a sense of compassion and goes out of his way to examine the personalities of these historical personages to find some bit of redeeming grace. Clearly he loves the radicals, the anarchists who were loud, clear and unambiguously vociferous in forwarding their agendas as much as he finds little of value in the deadening straitjackets of the Communists whose hidden, clandestine activities drew no inspiration from the historical ethos of experimentalism in freedom that he succeeds so well in documenting. Schwartz writes well and has an ear for the music of language. To engage such a large mass of historical material and bring not only the major players, but even the minor ones to light with such verve and verisimilitude is a rare accomplishment indeed. You will be educated, you will be entranced, you will be entertained, but most of all, at the end, you will be grateful to the author for having the talent, the concern and the love of his subject that allowed him to make history come alive for you.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars "From West to East" is Cold War history revisited., July 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (Hardcover)

Stephen Schwartz ignores the key sentences in Kevin Starr's review of his book: "The real business of 'From East to West,' meanwhile, is Schwartz's one-man crusade to show how Russian-controlled Stalinism infected and corrupted an indigenous left-utopian California tradition." The book's thesis: "Beginning in the 1930s and rising to incandescence through the 1940s and the mid-1950s, the indigenous left tradition of California...became increasingly controlled by pro-Stalinist communists."

The most important thing, as Starr notes in the first sentence of his review, is that the book "is not what it claims to be." Nowehere in the jacket description is there any mention of Schwartz's anti-Communist obsession, and in few places in the book itself--aside from the prologue and epilogue--is there much about its pretentious subtitle, "California and the Making of the American Mind." As Starr says, this is a book that the publisher has! tried to market one way, but which heads off in its own "idiosyncratic" direction.

The (pink) litmus paper test for Schwartz is whether or not a writer or cultural figure was sympathetic to Communism. Some of the loonier judgments that Schwartz's anti-Stalinist seismograph leads him to: John Steinbeck's 'In Dubious Battle' "failed completely as a novel" and the film of 'The Grapes of Wrath' "was and remains a colossal and absurd failure." Carey McWilliams' 'Factories in the Field' "contains a good deal of balderdash," while Mike Davis's 'City of Quartz' "is incoherent and replete with mistakes." Woody Guthrie did not sing "real folk music," and Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' was a "rant...that seemed to reflect brain damage." Finally, Robinson Jeffers is guilty of a "dour outlook and pretentious verse."

More importantly, serious issues and events--like civil rights, the Japanese-American internme! nt camps--get sidetracked in the search for "commies.&! quot;

The book, Starr warns, "should not be compared to formal history." Or, it should be added, to anything resembling literary or cultural history. It is, as Schwartz uses the word, a "rant."