John Gunther Inside U.S.A., Harper & Brothers: New York and London, 1947, 979 pp.
Table of Contents:
Foreword—ix
Chapter
1. California the Golden—1
2. A Bouquet of California—18
3. More About California, Its How and Why—42
4. Life and Works of Henry Kaiser—64
5. Ghosts and Silver in Nevada—76
. . .
[p. ix] Foreword
This book follows its companion volumes Inside Europe, Inside Asia, and Inside Latin America as a reporter’s attempt to chart another continental segment of the known political world of today. Inside Europe was in part a study of nationalism, Inside Asia, of imperialism, Inside Latin America of colonial politics and economy; this book is a study of democracy in action. Its central spine and substance is an effort—in all diffidence—to show this most fabulous and least known of countries, the United States of America, to itself.
We begin with California—its crackpotism, its climate intellectual and otherwise, its social and political topography—and proceed slowly up the Pacific coast . . .
. . .
. . . Here, in the first gaunt years of the Atomic Age, lies a country, a continental mass, more favored by man and nature than any other in history, now for the first time attempting with somewhat faltering steps to justify its new station as a mature world power. Here, beyond anything else on the whole earth, is a country blessed by an ideal geography and almost perfect natural frontiers, by incalculable bulk and wealth and variety and vitality. by a unique and indeed unexampled heritage in democratic ideas and principles—and a country deliberately founded on a good idea.
What are we doing with it?
Where are we all going, and how fast, and to what end?
What are its forces, problems, and influences?
[p. x] Who runs it, and how well?
[p. xvi] . . .
Chapter 1, California the Golden
Give me men to match my mountains, State Capitol inscription, Sacramento
[p. 1] California, the most spectacular and most diversified American state, California so ripe, golden, yeasty, churning in flux, is a world of its own in this trip we are beginning. It contains both the most sophisticated and the most bigoted community in America; it is a bursting cornucopia of peoples as well as of fruit, glaciers, sunshine, desert, and petroleum. There are several Californias, and the state is at once demented and very sane, adolescent and mature, depending on the point of view. Also it is blessed by supernal wonders in the realm of climate, and a major item controlling its political behavior is the Pacific Ocean.
The story of California is the story of migrations—migrations both into and within the state. The intense fluidity of America, its nomadism, is a factor never to be discounted . . .
California and the Nation
A very good case may be made that California, next to New York, is the most important state in the union; which is one reason why I begin with it. It is, for instance, the one above all others that could best exist alone; several other states claim this honor (Missouri for example), but in actual fact California is unique in self-supporting attributes; it has everything—industry, agriculture, commerce, and the vital asset of a 1,054-mile coastline.
California, with twenty-five electoral votes now (more than any state except New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania), and more to come after 1950, likewise plays a cogent political role in national affairs; its impact is never to be ignored. Historically this can be proved again and again, as witness—
Item: California decided the Wilson-Hughes election in 1916. Had not California gone for Wilson, by a dramatic and scant plurality (3806 votes), the United States might conceivably have stayed out of World War I.
Item: It was a series of delicate and intricate maneuvers within the [p. 2] California delegation that enabled Franklin D. Roosevelt to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1932.
Beyond this is the fact that California holds in microcosm the fundamentals of almost all American problems from race relationships to reconversion, from the balance between pressure groups and the democratic process to the balance between factory and farm. If either Fascism or Communism should ever smite this country, it is more likely to rise first in California than in any other state.
. . . California is the seaboard, or perhaps one should say airboard of the future, not merely to the Orient as is obvious but to much else . . . Frederick J. Turner. the historian of the frontier, wrote in 1914 that “the age of the Pacific Ocean begins, mysterious and unfathomable in its meaning to our own future.” (1) As quoted by Carey McWilliams, Brothers Under the Skin, p. 16. All of the McWilliams books, aside from being fascinating reading, are indispensible to the study of California, particularly Southern California Country. California was, as we all know, the jumping off place for the war against Japan, and it might well be the same thing—if Jingo blatherskites on either side commit treason against the human race—in a war against the Soviet Union. Meantime, with Europe seemingly crumbling and exhausted, the Golden State is the gateway to an Asia that may have much peaceful meaning for the United States. Consider merely the matter of Pacific trade. With modern air techniques, the great worlds of China, Japan, Australasia, India are only a jump away.
California, Its Beam and Bulk
California, the thirty-first state to enter the union, is the second state in area (158,693 square miles), and the third in population (somewhere around eight and a half million). It contains the highest point in the United States (Mount Whitney, just under 15,000 feet) and not more than eighty miles away is the lowest point, Death Valley, 276 feet below sea level. California is the first state in value of agricultural products, airplane manufacture, gold mining, eggs, wool, and production of electricity. Thus one glimpses again its astonishing diversification; to be first in both agriculture and airplanes is really something. It has the highest living standard in the country, and the third highest per capita income of any state (2)—$1,480 as against $1,150 for the nation as a whole. It contains the single [p. 3] richest county (Los Angeles with its citrus crop) and the biggest county, San Bernardino.
. . .
Carey McWilliams, Brothers Under the Skin, p. 16.
Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country.
Frederick J. Turner, 1914
California is, it is often said, two states; the dividing line is the [p. 4] Tehachapi, one of the few semilateral mountain ranges in the United States. 3. [3. The only actual east-west range I can think of is the Unita in Utah.] Suppose the Sierra Nevada to be a giant dinosaur; the Tehachapi is the last flick of its bony tail, whipping over the sea. But more than just this spine of mountain divides northern California from the south. The chief criteria of demarcation is water. Above the Tehachapi, speaking roughly, water is abundant; below, it is scant and precious. As interesting as any line drawn by river or rail is the right of way of the Los Angeles Aqueduct; Los Angeles is below the Tehachapi, but part of the water supply of a community of three million people lies above. Water aside, the fact that the state is two states causes other problems, for instance the matter of duplication in institutions and the like. There is a state capitol in Los Angeles as well as Sacramento; there are three penitentiaries; the university is split in two, with separate campuses—virtually autonomous—at Los Angeles and Berkeley. [4. California, A Guide . . . ]
Northern California is itself so variegated—and its characteristics are in general so well known—that to describe it in a paragraph, no matter how tentatively, is neither possible nor necessary. Here are the Golden Gate and the wonderful complex of communities around San Francisco; here are Mount Shasta, Lake Tahoe, and the only active volcano in the United States (Mount Lassen); here is the upper Sonora, of which John Muir wrote, “For a distance of 400 miles, your foot crushed a hundred flowers at every step.” Here are those fascinating communities, Carmel, Monterey, and Salinas. The whole gamut of California history may be traversed in twenty miles in this region, from Monterey which . . . was the old Spanish capitol, to Salinas which was a mecca of the Okies.
Southern California, the third of the state below the Tehachapi, is something else again; it has a mood and character absolutely different from the north, so much so that it is practically a different commonwealth. This is the California of petroleum, every religious cults [sic KR], the citrus industry, towns based on rich rentiers like Santa Barbara and Pasadena, the movies, the architecture in the United States, refugees from Iowa, a steeply growing Negro population and devotees of funny money. It is, above all, the world where climate is worshipped as a god. “The most valuable ingredient of the California way of life, sunshine, is free,” as Life once wrote. Yet all southern California would shrivel and disappear—almost overnight—if it were not for imported water. Everything depends on irrigation, i.e. artificial rain. The “rain” comes by pipe and canal.
I began this section by saying that the population of California was “around” eight and a half million. There is a reason for this lapse into [p. 5] the a`peu pres, namely that no one knows what the exact figure is. In 1940 it was 6,907,387. But with the war—as we all know—came a tremendous influx not merely of military personnel but of defense workers and their families. By 1943 the population was estimated at 8,373,800 and by 1944 at 8,842,700; today it is probably about the same, though some estimates go as high as 9,200,000. Conservatively, it is agreed by all authorities that in five years the state has gained at least 1,500,000 people, an increase of 22.4 per cent.
Some astonishing details are released if we break these figures down. For instance, San Diego jumped from a population of 203,341 in 1940 to an estimated 362,658 in 1946—a rise of not less than 78 per cent. The San Francisco area rose from 1,461,800 to 1,840,500 (26 per cent), and Los Angeles County from 2,916,400 to 3,357,000 (15 per cent). Los Angeles is today the fourth largest city in the country. Some single counties in the Bay region—more than doubled their population in the war period; they rose 100 per cent or more. This prodigious increase came, moreover, atop other increases; for instance, the population of the state rose 65 per cent in the years from 1920 to 1930, and it is entirely possible, even probable, that within the next few decades it will surpass New York and Pennsylvania to become the most populous in the union.
The median age in California is, incidently, thirty-three. This compares to twenty-nine for the United States as a whole and twenty-three in the “youngest” state, New Mexico. The reason for this is, of course the great number of old folks who have poured in from the Middle West; most Californians today are not, as is well known, California born. Another population figure is that about one-ninth of the people of the state are foreign born. To an outsider, this figure may seem high and striking; actually—as we shall presently see in connection with other states—it is comparatively low.
Most of the war workers who entered California from 1940 to 1945 went into two extremely volatile industries, aircraft and shipbuilding; hence the issue of reconversion was more than normally acute. Beyond this, the influx produced other problems, for instance the fact that no one can guess how California will vote next time. Again shall the state attempt to get rid of the new “in-migrants,” as some people wish, and if so, how; if not, how will it possibly find jobs and residence for them all? The housing problem in the state is, as everywhere, anguishing. Most responsible Californians hope that the new arrivals will stay and find jobs and a place to live; out of a new melting pot they hope to absorb new strength; the motto is, “Don’t talk reconversion, but convert instead.”
California ia so celebrated for Central Valley and its agriculture—avocadoes, melons, spinach, asparagrus, grapefruit, olives, what not—that one is tempted to think of it as predominantly rural. This is not true [p. 6] from the population point of view, even though agriculture (and associated industries like canning) support more people than any other industry. But California is an urban state, not rural; even Los Angeles County is an urban area. The simplest of statistics tells the story. About 80 per cent of the total population lives in cities and metropolitan areas; not less than 5,200,000, over half the total number of people in the state, are clustered around Los Angeles and San Francisco alone.
California and Texas
These two great states are often compared and this comparison is worth exploring for a paragraph or two. Suppose we outline some similarities first. Both states are giants; both have a martial history and tradition; each was an independent republic for a time, under its own flag, something that can be said of no other American state except Vermont [ftn. 5 notes the independent status of Rhode Island and North Carolina.] But whereas Texas was independent, legitimately and actually independent for ten close-packed, stormy years, the California “republic” lasted only a few weeks. The fact that Texas was an independent state, albeit briefly, is an inescapable reality to most Texans; it is the cause of what we will later describe as “Texas nationalism;” a visitor to Texas is reminded of it ceaselessly. No such spirit cxists comparably in California. In dozens of visits to the state, in conversation and inquiry with a 100 Californians, I only heard its former independence mentioned once.
Both Texas and California are empires in a manner of speaking; both have what might be called—not too literally—strong imperialist tendencies. For twenty years California and Arizona have been squabbling (largely over questions of water and irrigation); I heard one Californian say, in mild disgust, “If we came out against smallpox, Arizona would be for it.” Also. Californians are apt to think of Nevada as a kind of satrapy and its Senator McCarran is often described by Californians as their “third” senator.
Texas is, in a way, more raucous than California; California is more romantic. On most political issues, California is more sophisticated; in things religious, it is more eccentric. Californians, like Texans, love to tell tall tales, but theirs don’t have quite the folk lore quality of Texas tales. Californians are, by and large, less self-conscious about their glories. During the butter shortage I saw a waitress at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco point at a pat of prune jelly.” California butter!” she exclaimed briefly. I had the feeling that no Texan would have spoken about anything in his state in quite this humorously contemptuous way. [p.7]
Finally, take the world of culture. Here California compares to Texas as Paris, say, compares to Albania. California is (New York alone excepted) the most “European” of all American commonwealths; Texas is a kind of vacuum. In the whole history of Texas, there are not a dozen poets, sculptors, scientists, musicians, whose names can even be recalled; an artist in Texas is as rare as an icicle in the Sahara; in the entire expanse of the state today, with its population of 6,400,000, there is only one writer of any consequence. But consider California; California swarms with poets, artists, men of science. There is no opulence in America to surpass it, even in New England. Think of the procession that begins with Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce and continues today with Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck. In between consider Isadora Duncan, David Starr Jordan, Jack London, Frank Norris, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Atherton, Henry George, Luther Burbank, William Saroyan, Donald Culross Peattie. All these were either California born or for definite reasons of literary associaton and residence are California marked. Or take, in an adjacent field, American Nobel Prize winners. There have been thirty-one so far. Not one is Texan. But six were either born in Cslifornia or live there today. Such a fracas over academic freedom as occurred at the University of Texas would be inconceivable in California; its university is by most standards one of the six or eight best in the country; it has no regent trouble.
Sometimes people compare California to Florida, but from an intellectural point of view there is no comparison. Think of the European migration that has little by little converted the lovely balcony of hills near Santa Monica into a kind of Salzburg, a kind of Florence. Stravinsky, Montemezzi, Aldous Huxley, Isherwood, Artur Rubinstein, Emil Ludwig, Heifetz, Remarque, Franz Werfel, Thomas Mann—none of them went to Florida [Ftnte 6: Could one possibly imagine such an institution as San Francisco’s Bohemian Club existing in Miami?] All of them chose the land between Los Angeles and the radiant California sea. Why? Because climate can be intellectual as well as physical.