Inventing the Dream
Starr, Kevin
INVENTING THE DREAM: CALIFORNIA THROUGH THE PROGRESSIVE ERA Kevin Starr/Oxford University Press/$19.95 Vincent Fitzpatrick A he word "Hollywood" is, in a certain restricted sense, the richest...
...In both San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Progressives managed to depose SP mayors and install "Olympian, reconciling father-figures": In Los Angeles, the man was George Alexander, Scottish-born, seventy years of age in 1909...
...Dressed in Mexican costume, he and Mariana . . . would perform the old dances and sing the old Spanish songs...
...meanwhile, it availed itself of the Spanish past for its own purposes...
...Johnson trusted no one, and there were fewer and fewer who trusted him...
...But Helen Hunt Jackson was no mere glorifier of the past...
...The Ticos of Ojai, the Danas of Nipomo, the Sepulvedas of Palos Verdes . . . used to a world of barter and simple credit...
...It was ignored...
...The sunny Mediterraneanism of it all soothed her ever restless nerves...
...succumbed to the seductions of compound interest...
...Not even the Los Angeles dog pound escaped his reforming notice...
...A Ramona Pageant at Hemet began during Helen Hunt Jackson's lifetime, ran for years, and was followed by other such celebrations of the mission past...
...They took an idle race and put it to work∔a useless race that they made useful in the world...
...As the police closed in upon previously protected establishments, Pearl Morton and her girls boarded a train for San Francisco, which after a raft of sensational graft trials was beginning to grow weary of virtue...
...Was it the inevitable child when sunny skies, Franciscan missions, Protestant boosterism, and Jewish immigrant ambition were mated to a machinery capable of projecting dreams before millions without the mediation of concepts or (for its first thirty years) any but incidental language...
...Twenty-eight years in the Senate rendered Hiram Johnson a solitary, inaccessible figure, an anachronism in the frock coat and high celluloid collar of an earlier day∔the days of the Progressives...
...The tone of Johnson's rise to national office in 1912 was set by a disastrous swing through California by Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, during which he assiduously pushed the theme of Republican "unity," managing in the process to snub the Progressives continually, and Johnson personally on at least three occasions...
...the gradual bankruptcy of the dons...
...Ramona was a major component of Southern California's self-consciousness into the thirties, no doubt helped by a 1927 movie version, and its popular theme song...
...Los Angeles, to whom she had a letter of introduction, referred Mrs...
...The mission myth of Catholic California was crystallized in 1884 by a New England lady named Helen Hunt Jackson, who arrived in 1881 to write articles for the Century magazine on California's outdoor industries: bees, sheep, citrus, olives...
...Writers like Frank Pix-ley, Bronson Howard, Thomas Nelson Page, Gertrude Potter Daniels, Ella Wheeler Wilcox∔forgotten today, but in their time the rage of middlebrow America∔made their homes in this "Western clearing house of Eastern genius...
...Aside from the embarrassment involved, the Progressives were left without a successor to the aging Alexander...
...But its imaginative life remained Spanish, and its primary mode of social thought became Utopian...
...The play's author, John Steven McGroarty, was a Presbyterian who "fell so much under the spell of Franciscan California that he converted to Catholicism∔which is a paradox, because the mission myth was an essentially Protestant creation for an essentially Protestant Southern California...
...The result, Ramona, tells the tale of a lone surviving Catholic ranch, preserving the old culture into the 1860s, despite the Yankees' race hatred and the depredations of their land courts...
...Hollywood itself lies on the southern slope of the hills that divide California's North and South...
...But she seems nearly singlehandedly to have set in motion the dual process by which displaced Yankees like herself embraced California's Franciscan past and, quite naturally, began to look to the Mediterranean, rather than New England, as an inspiration for original American modes of clothing, architecture, decoration, and food appropriate to California...
...The resulting Report (1883), written in collaboration with Abbott Kinney (the visionary creator of the now monumentally tacky Venice), uncovered more recent offenses against Indian property and lives...
...But that is the mark and the price of truth...
...By 1894 the Mount Lowe Incline carried visitors five thousand feet up into the San Gabriel Mountains, where the snow remained year-round, and a three-million-candle power searchlight pierced the sky or picked out prominent sights below...
...For offending Hiram Johnson, Hughes forfeited [the Presidency...
...Senate, where he served as a Republican...
...Bishop Francisco Mora of...
...Jackson to Don Antonio de Coronel and his young wife Mariana...
...Jackson met him, had had a varied career...
...In her frustration, Mrs...
...Knowing, as an inhabitant, the nation that Hollywood has helped to create, and seeing, through Starr's work, what was developing in California in the seven decades before, one cannot escape heartache...
...Then there is Hollywood...
...From 1879 to her death in 1885, she devoted her life to the cause of the Indians: After extensive research in the Astor Library of New York, she assembled what was in effect a massive legal brief regarding violated Indian rights, A Century of Dishonor (1881), and sent it at her own expense to government officials and members of Congress...
...The Mission Play cost $1.5 million to mount∔in 1912...
...This "wonderful old man" (to quote the Progressive weekly review California Outlook) threw himself with remarkable energy into the work of reform...
...Jackson as an expert on Indian affairs that in 1883, while she was in Southern California, she received a commission from the Department of the Interior to investigate the condition of the Mission Indians...
...NEXT MONTH: BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS...
...By 1929, the pageant had been seen by 2.5 million people...
...The South's identity as an integrally Catholic region came to an end with the secularization of the missions and Vincent Fitzpatrick, of Human Life International in Washington, D.C., was a writer at Santa Fe Communications in Hollywood, California...
...The new mayor also told the new police chief to rid the city of prostitution...
...a young girl, in the lavish starched white pinafores and oversized floppy hair bows of the period, petting her dog in the shade of a palm tree . . . Pasadenans envisioned themselves establishing standards of lifestyle for the rest of Southern California...
...In 1846, during the resistance, he had been commissioned by the embattled Californian government to ride to Mexico City with American flags captured in battle...
...The most spectacular of these was conceived by Frank Miller, the builder of the fantastic Mission Inn in Riverside...
...The Progressive-Republicans sat on their hands that November, and Wilson carried California, the swing state...
...Helen Hunt Jackson was by no means the most industrious or eccentric of California's mythmakers...
...But [mjidway through Alexander's second term, Los Angeles city prosecutor Guy Eddie∔a vigorous warrior against vice, gambling, and illegal liquor sales, a closer of salacious cabaret and vaudeville shows, and a leader in the Good Government Group∔was himself arrested on a scandalous morals charge...
...Hollywood the phenomenon appears just before 1920 (that is, at the end) of this second installment of Kevin Starr's multi-volume history, Americans and the California Dream...
...Pasadena Daily News editor Lon Chapin, editorializing in 1907, took pride in "the high character of citizenship that has made the city what it is: Beautiful, Cultured, Moral, and Esthetic...
...So well known was Mrs...
...Although her more youthful writings about the Church of Rome "ran in the Whore of Babylon vein," by May of 1883 Jackson was publishing an essay in the Century entitled "Father Junipero [Serra] and His Work," which "shows a total sympathy with the context and purposes of Spanish Catholicism...
...There was a flurry of firings and appointments as Alexander cleaned out Harper appointees who had not had the sense or the decency to resign...
...Jackson resolved to write an Uncle Tom's Cabin for the Mission Indian...
...The opening-night front row included the union-busting Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times, Henry Edwards Huntington of the Southern Pacific, and Bishop Thomas James Conaty of Los Angeles...
...Already for her∔and because of her, eventually for all of Southern California∔the days of the padres shimmered in a golden haze of mingled myth and memory, free of fanaticism and injustice, their cruelty and pain forgotten...
...Henceforth, the mission era was part of American history...
...Johnson went to the Senate as a Republican∔but also as the man who had caused the defeat of Charles Evans Hughes...
...So much was the Gold Rush a Yankee invasion that San Francisco had become the literary capital of the nation in the decade following the Civil War, while the first book published in Los Angeles did not appear until 1881∔and that was Reminiscences of a Ranger, by Ma-jor Horace Bell, a Protestant Hispanophile whose hero and literary model was Bernal Diaz, the eyewitness chronicler of the downfall of the demonic Aztec civilization...
...When the opera or symphony played in Los Angeles, the Pacific Electric Railway ran special cars to and from Pasadena...
...By 1910, the Progressives had captured the state, and broken the power of the SP through the direct nomination of candidates...
...The stranglehold maintained by the "SP" over California's transportation, utilities, physical development, and politics appears like a James Ridgeway "Age-of-Reagan" hallucination come true...
...Through all the variations of their middle-class life∔from the Valley Hunt Club to the Arroyo Culture∔Pasadenans sought the emblematically genteel...
...The mission myth depicted Spanish California as a busy Utopia, with no labor troubles and with Father Junipero Serra as the original booster...
...Brought to Southern California as a teenager in 1834, Don Antonio, in semi-retirement when Mrs...
...INVENTING THE DREAM: CALIFORNIA THROUGH THE PROGRESSIVE ERA Kevin Starr/Oxford University Press/$19.95 Vincent Fitzpatrick A he word "Hollywood" is, in a certain restricted sense, the richest word in the English language of the late twentieth century: That is to say, it evokes in the imagination of nearly every member of our civilization literally thousands of particular faces unspeakably lovely, endearing, or hideous, lighted and magnified from every angle, the architecture and costume of nearly every civilization and era, the music, accents, and slang of every country and subculture the microphone has invaded since Lee deForest laid down a sound track on a strip of film in 1922...
...The San Fernando Valley, even at its southernmost edge, is dotted with the non-Hispanic-named towns of Van Nuys, Woodland Hills, Burbank, and Glendale...
...Starr manages to make the tangled story comprehensible, and every major character (as throughout the book) is full, round, and colorful...
...McGroarty, for instance, used to give speeches in Protestant churches extolling the padres...
...In the new regime, Don Antonio served as mayor of Los Angeles in 1853 and state treasurer in 1867...
...Land of Sunshine, edited by Charles Fletcher Lummis, while publishing the writings of several rather strident feminists, also "featured a continuous array of photographs depicting the joys of domestic life in the Southland: a woman seated, book in lap, by a window opening out on a spacious garden...
...TUrning to antiquarianism in middle life, he filled his home with the artifacts of Old California...
...One center of this dual search was Pasadena...
...I If there was a touch of conflict even in Pasadena's search for an aesthetic ideal, it was as nothing to the bitterness of the struggle to break the domination of the Southern Pacific From 1907, the League of Lincoln-Roosevelt Republican Clubs was the core of the Progressive Movement, and the League remade California politics although it never exceeded one hundred members...
...Ramona made some atonement to Spanish California by acknowledging what had been done...
...And yet Hiram Johnson, now heading for Washington . .. was alone as never before...
...The Land Act of 1851, which placed upon them the burden of proving title to their holdings, ensnared them in the courts for years, and they sold off acre after acre to pay legal fees...
...Alexander rooted out irregularities in the harbor and aqueduct projects and persuaded the voters to set up a board of public utilities to regulate rates in an open, fair manner...
...At a dinner held in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on 8 July 1916, with Johnson himself presiding, the Progressive Party ceremonially disestablished itself...
...Among early residents were the widow of James Garfield and the orphaned children of John Brown...
...Organizations such as the Social Purity Club, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, and the Shakespeare Club upheld a sense of heritage braced by a conviction of white upper-middle-class Protestant caste, raised at the time to a high level of defensive self-consciousness because of the wave of European immigrants arriving in the East, 43 Catholic and Jewish, and labor troubles in Los Angeles, Catholic and Jewish also...
...Walter Raymond, a Boston travel magnate, opened the Hotel Raymond in 1886, with "two hundred rooms, elegant service, catering exclusively to Raymond and Whitcomb tours, which introduced a large number of wealthy Easterners to the delights of Southern California...
...A paradox, obviously, was involved in turning into a founding fable a story whose central characters either hated or were being destroyed by Americans...
...As the Progressives lost elections and were reabsorbed into the Democratic and (mainly) Republican parties, where they were not entirely welcome, Progressive Hiram Johnson managed to be elected to a second term as Governor of California, and then to the U.S...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
