In the interwar years, California assuredly experienced its share of combative politics and economic poverty; yet culturally it was a Pacific Eldorado whose achievements could scarcely be matched by any other state. This was particularly true of the Golden State’s literary output, photographic works, and architectural marvels.
The state’s literary masters included John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, and Robinson Jeffers. Steinbeck was raised by upper-middle-class parents in Salinas and attended but did not graduate from Stanford University. His fictional works were set mostly in the farmlands and coastal areas of Central California. Critical notoriety and commercial success awaited publication of his novel Tortilla Flat (1935), which narrated the drunken and romantic escapades of a group of poor, mixedblood Spanish, Mexican, Indian, and Caucasian male idlers in Monterey whose complexions were “like that of a well-browned meerschaum pipe.” The following year Steinbeck published In Dubious Battle, which dramatized the plight of migratory farm workers who, led by communists, went on strike for more humane working conditions. Steinbeck’s road trips throughout the San Joaquin Valley beginning in 1936 resulted in his journalistic writings and epic novel on the travails of the Okies and Arkies in depression-era California, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The book won a Pulitzer Prize. Steinbeck was fascinated by marine life and wrote his next book, a work of nonfiction titled The Sea of Cortez (1941), about his Pacific expedition to Baja’s Gulf of California with his biologist friend Edward F. Ricketts. In this marine specimen-gathering voyage from Monterey into Baja’s gulf waters, Steinbeck probed deeply into what this Pacific excursion revealed to him about the natural world and humankind’s place in it: “The disappearance of plankton, although the components are microscopic, would probably in a short time eliminate every living thing in the sea and change the whole of man’s life. . . . One [species of marine life] merges into another. . . until what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life; barnacle and rock, rock and earth. . . And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it. . . . [O]ne thing is all things - plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time.” The public quarreled far less with these reflections than with the author’s political views. Denounced more than praised in Salinas because of his left-wing politics and unflattering depictions of big growers, Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.
William Saroyan’s talent was almost entirely self-developed. Raised in poverty in Fresno, he did not graduate from high school, nor attend college. For much of his hardscrabble career he lived and wrote in San Francisco, where he turned out the book that launched his success, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934). In addition to other critically acclaimed novels and short stories, he wrote plays, including the Pulitzer Prizewinning The Time of Your Life (1939). The drama portrayed the lives of hapless, good-hearted men who frequented a dockside San Francisco tavern. Characteristically, Saroyan rejected the Pulitzer award and prize money, insisting that art remain free of the taint of money and authority.
Robinson Jeffers was and remains California’s greatest poet. Ensconced in Tor House, the stone family citadel he built with his own hands on a Carmel bluff overlooking Pacific rollers, Jeffers etched into verse nature’s sculpting of the Big Sur coast, and similarly, fate’s often turbulent shaping of human lives. “Great poetry,” he wrote, “appeals to the most primitive instincts. . . . It is a beautiful work of nature.” In poems such as Tamar (1924) and Roan Stallion (1925), Jeffers showed the power of untamed human capacities for incest and murder - morality and civilization notwithstanding.
Just as Jeffers’s poems captured the grandeur of the Big Sur coast, the photographs of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Dorothea Lange similarly captured the grandeur of the Central California shoreline, Yosemite Valley, and the human spirit respectively. Weston and Adams lived in Carmel, hungrily photographing its Pacific seascape. However, it was Adams’s stunning black and white depictions of Yosemite Valley that would ensure his fame. Lange’s iconic photograph titled Migrant Mother spoke volumes about the hardships endured by the Okies and Arkies entering California in the 1930s.
Architecturally, the Golden State abounded with noteworthy structures and brilliant designers. Some 700 buildings nationwide, including those on the campuses of UC Berkeley and Mills College in Oakland, were the handiwork of Julia Morgan. Hearst Castle, overlooking the Pacific in San Simeon, was one of her masterpieces of design. In the Bay Area the landscape was graced by the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, the West Coast’s leading art gallery, and by the California Palace of the Legion of Honor museum, as well as by the world’s most photographed structure of its kind - the Golden Gate Bridge linking San Francisco to Sausalito, completed in 1937 as a public works project. In southern California, the soon to become famous bungalow style of homebuilding was introduced by the Pasadena brothers Charles and Henry Greene. Scripps College in Claremont, founded in 1926, is known throughout the country for the understated elegance of its Spanish Revival architecture and aesthetic landscaping. By contrast, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, sculpted during the years 1921-55 by Simon Rodia from Pacific sea shells, Chinese pottery shards, broken glass, bathroom tiles, and other cast-off material, symbolized the energies and refuse of a city on the move.
Architect William Alexander Levy (later known simply as William Alexander) designed Hangover House, so called because it was perched on a hillside overlooking Aliso Canyon
Figure 10.3 Migrant Mother, photographed by Dorothea Lange. This image captures the poverty and uncertainty experienced by so many Dust Bowl migrants who relocated to California's Central Valley during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USF34- 009058-C.
In Laguna Beach. Affording a dramatic view of the Pacific, this flat-roofed, modern-style glass, steel, and concrete residence was completed in 1938. Though Alexander, who worked briefly with Frank Lloyd Wright, was not preeminent in his field, architectural historian Ted Wells has attested to the national importance of the three-bedroom, multi-storied, structure that anticipated by nearly 20 years a home design that would later become very popular in California. The owner, Richard Halliburton, was a celebrity adventurer and lecturer, known for having swum the length of the Panama Canal, climbed the Matterhorn, flown around the world in an open cockpit biplane, and with the aid of a ghost writer regaled readers with numerous travel books recounting his journeys. His last adventure, sailing a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco, ended in his death in a Pacific storm in 1939.
The physical structure that best represents California during the interwar decades was the 80-foot statue of the mythical goddess Pacifica, erected on Treasure Island, the site of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Created by artist Ralph Stackpole, the semi-Buddhist mother goddess figure represented the ambitions of San Francisco, indeed of all California, to become the commercial hub of the entire Pacific Basin. An approaching war from across that ocean would temporarily thwart that dream.
Figure 10.4 Statue of the Court of Pacifica at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, 1939. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
SUMMARY
During the 1920s and 1930s Greater California emerged as the super state of the Pacific Rim. Its world-class infrastructure and economy were unmatched by any other state and few, if any, nations in that ocean region. Oil derricks, aqueducts and water irrigation systems, dams, croplands, highways, bridges, shopping centers and motels geared to the emergent car culture, movie houses, and Pacific fun zones transformed the landscape. They afforded physical evidence of an extraordinarily diversified economy that included moviemaking, agribusiness, and petroleum, maritime, automotive, aircraft, and banking enterprises. As ever, California’s economy was hitched largely to Pacific Basin markets and trade routes. Charles Kingsford-Smith’s epic transpacific flight dramatically symbolized this.
As California returned to political conservatism in the 1920s, new religious forces made themselves felt mainly along the coast from San Francisco down to San Diego. The
International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, the Self-Realization Fellowship, and Buddhist temples attracted followers. Meanwhile, women, having earlier obtained voting rights, succeeded in gaining a larger measure of equality with men in both society and the professions. Middle-class white females enjoyed a far greater measure of this equality, and accompanying rights and opportunities, than did women of color and those in the working class.
The Great Depression of the 1930s hit California hard. The state’s voters supported Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to the presidency in 1932. Labor strikes in the fields and ports, culminating in a 1934 San Francisco-centered shutdown of the nation’s West Coast docks, rocked the state, showing how critical Pacific shipping was to California’s economy. That same year a socialist ran for the governorship, and throughout the decade an assortment of panaceas was offered by citizens to help the elderly and unemployed. Though poverty was widespread, cultural production in the state was of a high order, as evidenced in literature and the other arts. The building of the world-renowned Golden Gate Bridge and the erecting of the statue of Pacifica in San Francisco Bay testified to an irrepressible optimism among Californians - an optimism that as usual looked westward to the Pacific for brighter days.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
• What evidence is given in the chapter in support of the claim that California became a super state in the 1920s and 1930s?
• Describe the state’s major aqueduct-irrigation-hydroelectric generation projects of the 1920s and 1930s. What was their significance?
• What factors led to the development of California’s car culture?
• In what ways was California a Pacific Eldorado during the Great Depression of the 1930s?
• What was the significance of the 1934 West Coast dock strike, spearheaded in San Francisco?
FURTHER READINGS
Jeremiah B. C. Axelrod, Inventing Autopia: Dreams and Visions of the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Los Angeles’ sprawl in the 1920s was envisioned and planned more than previously thought, according to this critically acclaimed study.
Giles Brown, Ships that Sail No More: Marine Transportation from San Diego to Puget Sound, 1910-1940 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1966). This well-researched book is one of the few comprehensive histories of West Coast shipping during its halcyon years.
California History, 87/2 (2010). The entire issue, replete with telling photographs, is devoted to the work and influence of California poet Robinson Jeffers.
Philip L. Fradkin, A River No More: The Colorado River and the West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). As the title suggests, the author traces the diminishing supply of Colorado River water available to western states in recent times of drought, hoping that clearer hindsight will result in better foresight in the shaping of public policy regarding the river.
Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm
Labor, 1900-1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). The forced repatriation in the 1930s of half a million Mexican workers and some Mexican Americans and its impact on their national and cultural identity is explored in this work.
Michael Hiltzik, Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century (New York: Free Press, 2010). The author treats the immensity, benefits, and human costs - in terms of labor exploitation, lax safety practices, and deaths - of this epic construction project.
Robert V. Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1953). This classic study of religious experimentalism and exoticism in nineteenth-century California provides a prologue for somewhat similar developments in the 1920s and 1930s.
Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). According to the writer, a partnership beginning in the 1920s between cities and the military led to the establishment of bases and airfields in California.
Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). The encounter between corporate farming and migratory labor in the fields of depression-ridden California is traced in this classic expose and brief on behalf of agricultural workers, first published in 1939.
Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Labor conditions, unionism, and radicalism are at the heart of this account on Pacific Coast maritime workers during a tumultuous decade.
John Niven, The American President Lines and Its Forebears, 1848-1984 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1987). The history of America’s maritime trade with Asia, going back to the gold rush era, is related through the dealings of shipping magnate Robert Dollar and his successors.
Stephanie S. Pincetl, Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use in California (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). In addition to chronicling California land use policy since 1850, this book calls for an invigorated understanding of citizenship to combat environmental degradation and create public spaces more nurturing than shopping malls.
Charles F. Queenan, The Port of Los Angeles: From Wilderness to World Port (Los Angeles: Government and Community Relations Division, Los Angeles Harbor
Department, 1983). Within this sweeping history of the Port of Los Angeles, an entire chapter is devoted largely to the dredging, expansion, and commerce of the harbor from 1921 to 1945.
Walter A. Radius, United States Shipping in Transpacific Trade, 1922-1938 (New York: Stanford University Press, 1944). One of the few studies in its field, this book is an invaluable source of statistics and commentary on America’s Pacific commerce in the interwar years.
Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2010). California’s role in a Chinese transnational commercial network, operating from Mexico, is detailed in this provocative volume.
Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987). Mexicana and Mexican American women are at the center of this study of the struggles and successes of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America Union during the Great Depression in California.
George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Just as American history cannot be understood apart from its immigrant roots, this book shows how a segment of Los Angeles history in the twentieth century is best seen as an amalgam of negotiated identities and allegiances among border-crossing Mexicans.
Harvey Schwartz, ed., Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2009). The history of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, an outgrowth of the 1934 San Francisco and West Coast dock strikes, is told sympathetically through first-hand recollections.
David F. Selvin, A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). The San Francisco dock strike at the center of a tie up of West Coast trade is viewed through the eyes of a witness who happens to be a labor historian.
Tom Sitton and William DevereU, eds., Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). This collection of essays reveals the dynamism of America’s first decentralized city while showcasing the promise of urban studies scholarship.
Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). The strikes, fears of communism, and social messiahs of depression-era California are featured in this engaging work.
Kevin Starr, Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). The construction and meaning of America’s gateway to the Pacific are treated in this work by a master historian.
Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). This volume offers both a panoramic overview and a detailed account of southern California’s dramatic rise in the early twentieth century.
John Steinbeck, Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988). This compilation of seven newspaper articles written by the prominent California novelist served as the basis of Steinbeck’s fictional masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath.
Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (New York: The New Press, 2004). One of the signal contributions of this study is that it connects California’s agricultural dominance in the United States with the use of numerous Mexican farm laborers from the state’s Pacific Rim neighbor to the south.
Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Drawing heavily from interviews, the author provides testimonies of women who lived in America’s largest Chinese enclave from the turn of the century to World War II.
World History
