16.95
W.T.
B.H.
WESTWARD TILT
Neil Morgan
Foreword by James A. Michener
&
The move to the American West in the last
twenty years is the largest migration in the
history of the world. Since the Second World
War more people have moved to California
alone than have immigrated to the United
States from abroad.
Yet not much is known about the new West,
and that which has been learned is often misin
terpreted. In this first extraordinarily readable
survey of the political, social, economic and
cultural forces of eleven Western states Cali
fornia, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana,
Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona
and New Mexico a perceptive reporter has
succeeded in portraying the startling growth
and power of a region that may soon dominate
this country.
The Western migration is without preced
ent. Born of a modern American phenomenon
a people so prosperous and so mobile that
they are free to move in search of a more satis
fying way of life Westerners of today are
characterized by their self-confidence and
hope in the future. They have found a wide
variety of "amenities": sunshine and outdoor
living in California, Nevada, Arizona and New
Mexico; fishing and boating in Oregon and
Washington; hunting in Wyoming and Mon
tana; skiing in Colorado and Idaho and almost
everywhere the scenic extravagance of the
rawboned West, escape from urban crowding,
a leisurely pace and amiable human relation-
(continued on back flap)
Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin
4/63
978
Morgan
Westward tilt
978
Morgan $6.95
Westward tilt
WESTWARD
TILT
WESTWARD
TILT
Neil Morgan
Foreword by James A. Michener
RANDOM HOUSE
New York
FIRST PRINTING
Copyright, 1961, 1962, 19631 by Neil Morgan
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions.
Published in New York by Random House, Inc., and
simultaneously in Toronto, Canada,
by Random House of Canada, Limited.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63^644
Manufactured in the United States of America by Kingsport Press, Inc.
Design by Ruth Smerechniak
FOR
Reverend S. L. Morgan,
one of the best reporters.
In my early professional life I left my home in Pennsylvania
to take a job in Colorado, and for the first time caught the fire and
fury that characterizes life in the West. As a teacher of sociology,
I began to take mental notes on the differences between my old
home and my new; and almost all that I saw I liked. It seemed to
me then, as it does now, that a new type of man was being reared
in the West. He was taller, ate more salads, had fewer intellectual
interests of a speculative nature, had a rough and ready accept
ance of new ideas, and was blessed with a vitality that stood out
conspicuously to a stranger from the East.
Years later when I was working in the Pacific Ocean areas,
trying to interpret them to America, I was freshly drawn into
speculation about that part of our land which fringed the Pacific,
and my earlier experiences were recalled. I began jotting down
random notes concerning this vivid part of our nation. The more
I studied, the more I became convinced that on our Western slope
we were building what amounted to a subnation whose future was
brilliant, chaotic and well beyond the imagination of any single
individual. In fact, I became so impressed with the prospects of
this new culture that I made tentative plans for writing an ac
count of it.
FOREWORD
At this point I returned to Pennsylvania, where comparisons
between East and West were constantly forced upon me, for
Pennsylvania stood in powerful contrast to a state like California.
Pennsylvania was losing three seats in Congress; California was
gaining eight. California had over three hundred thousand
students enrolled in junior colleges; Pennsylvania had only fif
teen thousand three hundred. In Pennsylvania backward-looking
business leaders still clung to traditional industries that were on
the decline: coal, steel, railroads; whereas California had shifted
to electronics, the so-called brain factories, and aviation, whose
horizons seemed unlimited.
As a result of these factors, our federal government was
awarding to Pennsylvania only 3.6 percent of all federal defense
contracts, while California, because of her superior educational
system, was garnering more than twenty-four percent of all such
contracts. If this trend was projected into the future, the rich
West would get richer and the poor East would get poorer.
On the other hand, Pennsylvania preserved a rich, solid his
torical tradition; California always seemed to me deficient in this
regard. Pennsylvania citizens had stable, if conservative, views on
national problems; whereas Californians could not be depended
upon for any consistent point of view. And the general stability of
Pennsylvanians seemed more reliable than that of Californians.
I was considering doing a book on this subject when I had the
good luck to visit the former American ambassador to Mexico,
Robert C. Hill, as he was about to make a flying visit to the West
ern districts of Mexico, and I observed that in Mexico the same
relative problem existed. But in Durango I discovered much more,
for we were joined by a red-haired, taciturn newspaperman with
a good reputation for accuracy. He was Neil Morgan, of the San
Diego Evening Tribune., and he had made himself an expert on
Mexico.
Late one night, after a poker game in the almost inaccessible
port of Las Cruces in the arid state of California Baja Sur, Mor
gan and I began comparing notes, and I discovered that in his
own way he had been studying the West as I had been doing, but
with two improvements: he had been gathering his impressions
FOREWORD (fa
from the inside; and his scope of speculation far exceeded mine.
I also discovered that he had already assembled most of the
information that I was going to have to ferret out. And his gen
eralizations were so perceptive and precise that I suggested he
write the book and not I. He rose to the bait and outlined an ap
proach that went well beyond what I had suggested. Then he
asked, "Where could I find a publisher?"
I replied, "Bennett Cerf might take a chance," and within a
few days the publisher had telephoned Neil Morgan and West
ward Tilt was underway.
It has been completed with substance and insight. What
Morgan has to say about the new leadership of the West and its
portent good and bad ought to be heard. As our industrial
giants begin to center in the West, as our more enterprising in
telligence begins to operate there, and as our more inventive
young men and women either are born there or migrate to the
area, the capacity of the West will be multiplied.
Immediately after the census of 1970, when we witness the
transfer of political power from East to West, we will all be
forced to contemplate the things Morgan writes about now. And
if, as I suspect, the American borderlands of the Pacific Ocean
develop economically as the Atlantic borderlands have been de
veloping for the last two thousand years, the world power of this
area will also be enhanced, as well as the purely American power.
I have watched this growth from two opposing vantage
points, one in the Pacific and one in Pennsylvania, and I must ad
mit that I am perplexed as to which direction our new subnation
will take. Many of my Eastern friends take pleasure in deploring
the garish architecture, the John Birch Societies, the overempha
sis on youth and the development of a culture which has only a
parochial significance. I, on the other hand, view with envy the
West s freedom, its wild joy in living, its vital experimentation
in the arts, and its willingness to cultivate new industries and new
ways of doing old jobs.
But until I talked with Neil Morgan and read his book, I
was not aware that the region had already produced a journalist
who understood what was happening in his own backyard. In the
#) FOREWORD
years ahead we must all come to grips with the philosophical,
moral and political significance of Morgan s new lands, I am so
glad we met and talked after that poker game in Las Graces, for
he has helped me to do some hard thinking.
JAMES A. MICHENER
Fore-word by James A. Michener vii
Prologue THE FOOTLOOSE MIGRATION 3
7 THE REALMS OF CHANGE
/ The Good Life: Trademark, Not Obsession 15
2 Science, Industry, and Amenities 27
3 The Education Rush 42
4 Of One Thing, Less: Hate 56
j The Indian Nations: Better Times for Many 74
6 The Fight to Save the West 89
// CALIFORNIA: CENTER OF GRAVITY
7 Southern California: The Restless Kind 109
8 Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave 131
y San Francisco: Narcissus of the West 154
10 Northern California: A Vast and Virile World 179
1/7 THE QUIETER WEST
n Oregon: Green and Gangly 205
12 Washington: The Gentle People 225
73 Mountain North: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming 244
14 Colorado: A Tug of War 266
/ j Utah: Gold-plated Zion 283
IV THE SOUTHWEST
1 6 Nevada: Test Tube of Change 307
/7 New Mexico: A Don ble Life 323
1 8 Arizona: It Leapfrogged History 341
Epilogue THE WEST: AMERICA TOMORROW? 373
Acknowledgments 381
Bibliography 388
Index 397
DRAWN BY EDWARD HALSBERG
Scientific, Industrial and Military Complexes 33
Indian Lands and Offices 81
Government Parks and Forests 93
Land Use 103
South em California 1 1 5
Northern California 183
Oregon 211
Washington 233
Idaho, Montana, Wyoming 251
Colorado 273
Nevada, Utah 295
, jV<?w Mexico 337
Prologue
THE FOOTLOOSE
MIGRATION
In that dimly recalled era when it was de rigueur to deplore California,
even Frank Lloyd Wright was a conformist. He propounded a puckish
theory that America was tilted, and everything loose was sliding into
Southern California.
Today an awesome hunk of America has come loose. The move
to Western America is the largest migration in the history of the
world. Since the birth of the nation, its geographical center of popula
tion has been moving inexorably westward across West Virginia,
Ohio, Indiana and into Illinois. Now it is within fifty miles of crossing
the Mississippi River. California is supplanting New York as the most
populous state. Americans are moving to California in greater numbers
than today s entire immigration to the United States. The five boroughs
of New York City would have to be emptied of every man, woman and
child to match the population increase of the past decade in the eleven
states between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
The West is that one-third of the nation between the Rockies and
the Pacific. It includes all of California, Oregon, Washington, Ari
zona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and much of Montana, Wyoming, Colo-
^t) W E S T WARD T I L T
rado, and New Mexico. Historically, this region has been a citadel of
natural resources which has been raided and plundered by the East.
There is poetic justice to the Westerner in this westward tilt induced
by migration. Now the West is raiding the Midwest, the East, and
South; stealing* scientists, teachers, industrialists, and technicians
bright young men who have a restless probing spirit that drives them
in search of some better life. The West is plundering the rest of the
nation s most dynamic resource: human energies.
Yet the move West is one of the least-understood wonders of our
modern world. Less is written of it than is written about Disneyland.
Most reportage is understandably haphazard, shallow, or distorted.
Most journalists who try to interpret the contemporary West parrot
that malignant stereotype of the West created by Eastern editors whose
rare forays to the region are for a whiff of Hollywood saffron or a
sojourn in San Francisco- which they assume to be an oasis of urban
ity in an uncivilised desert. The Western past has been recorded with
more charm and less bias than its present. Its stagecoaches are better
understood than its freeways, its United States marshals than its city
managers, its Gold Rush than the westward tilt of today.
Those lacking firsthand knowledge of the West cannot be
blamed for their woeful misconceptions. Their source materials range
from the Lewis and Clark Journals to television serials eulogizing
Wyatt Earp or Matt Dillon; from The Grapes of Wrath to rosy,
superficial magazine stories, designed to please food advertisers, about
the California migrant worker of today; from tabloid reconstructions of
the cultist scandals of the Southern California Thirties to breathless
gossip by Hopper and Parsons of fresher intrigue; from Helen Hunt
Jackson s pamphleteering against the United States Indian policy, to
grave punditry in left-wing journals about conservatism afoot in the
West.
In 1957, Walter Prescott Webb, a historian of the West, found
that ten standard school histories of the United States devoted an aver
age of only six or seven pages out of each one hundred pages to the
western three-fifths of America. He concluded that this disparity was
due to the brief span of Western history, and to the relative scarcity in
the West of the historic problems of labor, industry, urbanization, and
the Negro. But if Webb s theory is true, American history is being
written today in the West with a heavy hand and on many pages. The
West has become one of the most urban regions of America. Its boom
ing cities and the influx of science and industry are the overwhelming
facts of the contemporary West. Moreover, the Negro is moving into
Western cities today in avalanches.
The truth is that this is a vastly misunderstood region, even by
The Footloose Migration ( j
those who live in it, because it is exploding too fast in every direction.
Interpreting its cities, in the words of one brilliant Westerner, Wallace
Stegner, is "like trying to hold a stethoscope to the chest of an angry
cat." Its subtleties and intricacies discourage those who prefer a tidy
problem with only one answer. There is a startling absence of studies
of Western mores and attitudes. The Westerner is easy prey for the
quick-impression writer who knows he can buy his audience cheap
through time-proven broadsides at seashore culture or freeway mad
ness.
Americans have sought to interpret the twentieth-century move
westward in historic terms, but this is a move without precedent. It
does not fit traditional migratory patterns. This continental tilt has
been born of a modern American phenomenon: a nation so prosperous
and so mobile that its people are free to go in search of a more lux
urious way of life. The Westerners of today are the first people in
world history to attain that freedom in the mass.
They seek a wide spectrum of amenities: sunshine and warmth
in California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, fishing in Oregon,
boating in Washington, hunting in Wyoming, skiing in Colorado
and almost everywhere, the scenic extravagances of the rawboned
West, escape from conventional urban crowding, the leisurely pace
and more amiable human relationships which derive from that pace
and which lead many toward concentration on the less tangible pur
suits of the arts and the intellect.
Because of this quest, growth in the West has been at the rate of
about forty percent each decade, twice the national average. Many
cities of California and Arizona have grown at four to fifteen times the
national average. There is an air of inevitability about Western
growth, but its causes and its nature are widely misinterpreted.
Migration to Florida, heavily weighted by the retired, comes
close to being a purely climatic migration, but the move West is a
younger one. The median age of the West is falling below the national
average. The millions moving there seek far more than warmth and
sunshine; they are moving West to build their future, and they have
dreams of the super-life.
As the new Westerner has been set free from other regions to
seek these amenities, industrial evolution has provided a new world of
industry so footloose that it can move with him, oblivious to the tradi
tional industrial requirements of location. The industries of the space
age are less dependent on pivotal market areas and power resources
than on an environment which will lure the scientist and skilled techni
cian. Western factories are short on smokestacks and spur lines. Their
products may be electronic components so small that they are flown
6) WESTWARD TILT
away, or the actual aircraft itself. One of the most significant prod
ucts of Western factories is ideas; the "think factory" and the labora
tory are the epitome of the industrial move West.
Thus, sustained by footloose industry, the newcomer to the West
develops a sense of having discovered the life of tomorrow. The se
lectivity that dominates this migration provides a unity among its
diverse people. They are integrated by common bonds of supreme self-
confidence and hope in the future. And it is this common spirit of the
new breed dominating the westward tilt which has unified for the first
time the vast area between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific
Ocean. Its vitality is obvious from the pulp mills of Montana to the
electronics plants of Phoenix, from the missile producers of Denver to
the aircraft and space industry of Seattle. It is obvious in the rapid
urbanization of the cities of every Western state.
This eleven-state West was unified until the past decade only
tenuously, and largely by the overwhelming factor of aridity. As re
cently as 1957, another widely accepted Walter Prescott Webb
theory labeled the West an oasis civilization, a land of deficiencies
whose most dependable asset might be tourism. Webb called West
erners "a normal people trying to create and maintain a normal civili
zation in an abnormal land . . . seeking to conquer the Great
American Desert." He noted that the West of that day had contrib
uted less than its share of listings to Who s Who.
Then the explosions began in science, industry, and education-
even in cultural affairs. Nobel laureates and scholars began the trek to
Western campuses. Research men and industrialists found an eager
market for their abilities everywhere in the eternal sunshine of the
Arizona desert, near the coves and straits of Puget Sound, beside the
ski slopes of the Rocky Mountains, and in the air that had the smell of
freedom all along the pounding Pacific Coast. During the first two
years of the graduate fellowship program of the National Defense
Education Act, from 1959 to 1961, Calif ornians received far more
fellowships than any other state. The University of California has bred
or lured eleven Nobel laureates; no other American campus comes
close. After them followed skilled technicians and workers. Mu
seums, concert halls, theaters, and art galleries began to spring up at
an accelerated rate. The Western newcomer was obviously moving
with giant strides to plug the gaps of Western life, to speed the West
through its muscle-bound adolescence, to create the super-America
which the West has suggested in men s minds for more than a century.
Slowly until recent years but not with a rush, the West is shoul
dering its appropriate burden of leadership in the federal government.
In 1940, Westerners in major Washington roles included one under-
The Footloose Migration (7
secretary, three assistant secretaries, four chairmen, fourteen members
or commissioners, and four administrators or directors. In 1960, there
was one cabinet member, the treasurer, two under-secretaries, six as
sistant secretaries, seven chairmen, fourteen members or commis
sioners, and five administrators or directors. The appointments of
President John F. Kennedy reflect the rising tide of Western power.
The West has grown in waves.
Gone are the years when California nurtured Technocracy, the
EPIC (End Poverty in California) movement, Old-Age Revolving
Pensions, "Ham and Eggs," and the Townsend Plan. The Depression
gave birth to more spurious mutations in California, itself an unsteady
but besieged infant, than in any other state. Waves of Utopia seekers,
most of them elderly, washed up on the California shores in the years
just before the Great Depression. Then, over much of the West, came
the tides of migrant workers whose tragedy was immortalized
by John Steinbeck. But the sons and daughters of many of their num
ber now are prosperous ranchers in the fertile Great Central Valley of
California, and more than a few of their grandsons and granddaugh
ters drive sports cars between their classrooms and their fraternity
and sorority houses on the campuses of California.
The aircraft boom of World War II brought new towns and
cities, new industries, and new millions over the Rockies to the Pacific,
from Seattle to San Diego. This wave was almost tidal; with it came
the military, for millions of acres of land lay cheap and ready to bear
its burden, and the war had turned toward the Pacific. But the cities
were not ready; and the blight of the precipitous growth of those years
still disfigures some of them.
The West anticipated the next wave, for there was the precedent
of the westward migration that followed World War I. Millions like
myself sensed something hopeful and exciting in their first breath of
Western air. As fast as we could shed our uniforms after World
War II, we became Westerners. It was not disturbing that the jobs
we found at first did not always match our dreams; we knew that in
such a fresh land, so serene and self-confident, we would have the
chance to show what we had.
Something less impulsive and more orderly has been happening
since the ipjo s. This is the wave that is bringing new strength to in
dustry, science, and education. It brings new millions of trained, re
sponsible citizens who are acutely conscious of what the West offers
and of the shortcomings of its adolescence. Already they are its lead
ers. They have every intention of helping to do what only mankind can
do to augment nature s grandiose handiwork. They are the catalysts
of the dramatic maturing process which is now so evident.
#) WESTWARD TILT
Climate has been vastly exaggerated as a cause of the westward
migration. In fifteen years I have interviewed nearly five thousand per
sons who have moved West. Climate is one motivation, but it is a
superficial one. In the golden sunshine of a dazzling February day in
San Francisco, it is quixotic to inquire of a new native why he left Bos
ton. He feels himself suspended between turquoise bay and azure sky,
and he can only regard his questioner as an insensitive fool for asking.
The world around him brims with reason enough. But that is only
part of what brought him West, and he will admit it in moments when
God and nature have not paralyzed his reasoning. To cross the moun
tains is an act of emancipation. Descending the western slope of the
Rockies, the pilgrim imagines himself in the land of tomorrow. He is
likely to try anything, because this land has little history of failure
and less of restriction; since he assumes he will succeed, he has a better
chance to do it. The West seethes with the spirit of Why not? It is
young and eager, cocky and eternally hopeful.
Despite the regional unity of the new West, its surface pattern is
a marvel of diversity. Party politics are unpredictable. Nine of the
eleven Western states gave Richard Nixon pluralities over President
Kennedy in the 1960 election. But after the 1962 elections, only eight
of twenty-two Western United States senators were Republicans. Re
publican governors outnumbered Democrats by seven to four. What
ever his party, the Westerner is a political paradox. He has an almost
emotional commitment to individualism, and a generally stronger
abhorrence for federal intervention than the people of other regions.
He is aggressively liberal in economic affairs, but distrustful of big
debt. He is slow to move toward sociologic reform, lacking the cul
tural flexibility of older regions, and yet he bears the scars of some of
the most extreme reform movements in American history. More re
cently, a voluble small group of extremists has unfairly stamped parts
of the West as reactionary.
One characteristic shared by the states of the new West is the
relative lack of social need. In this prospering land, the burning cause
is the bizarre oddity. At Christmas, service clubs cast about frantically
for targets for their charitable instincts. The migrant worker has the
lowest net income in America, but often he is driving a late-model car;
welfare systems, usually generous, give him a last-line bulwark
against crisis. The slums of Western cities cannot be compared in
misery with those of cities in older regions; no settlement house exists
in the West. Racial conflicts are milder than in other regions; the few
serious racial crises of the West have been related to the tensions of
wartime. No strong voice of social consciousness has been heard in the
The Footloose Migration (9
West since World War II; social crisis has not reached a level to pro
voke reform.
The mobility of the Westerner is another regional trait which ac
cents his differences from other Americans. It is not surprising, since
he is the kind who has pulled up roots and migrated, that even in the
West he keeps moving. In 1960 barely one-third of the Calif ornians
over five years old were living in the same house as five years pre
viously. One in seven had moved to California within those five years.
In Northern California, utility-company records show that one in three
householders changes residence each year; in urban Southern Cali
fornia the figure soars as high as one in two. (Random comparison
shows that about one in ten householders move each year in Wauke-
gan, Illinois, and even fewer in Brooklyn.) The Westerner, usually
having experienced a major move already in coming West, is quick to
exploit opportunities for other moves which will bring him closer to
his job or to a better one, or provide him more amenities, or better suit
his changing family status. He is freer because generations have not
tied him to the land or to the home; nor is he usually as involved with
neighbors as are people in other regions. The Westerner who thinks
he can improve his status with a move picks up his telephone and
calls for a moving van.
Such mobility blurs the Westerner s sense of community respon
sibility and creates a fluid community pattern which often frustrates
accomplishment. Westerners have a lower rate of church affiliation
than those of other regions. Many problems of city planning in the
West are attributable to mobility.
But this mobility has its virtue. Because he travels more than the
people of other regions, the Westerner is less provincial. He has
fifty-two percent more passports than the national average. From 1951
to 1961, the total number of passports issued in the United States
tripled; in the Pacific Coast states, it increased nearly eight times. On
transcontinental flights, there are more Westerners than Easterners.
Statistics for the entire air transport industry are not available, but an
American Airlines survey of its 1961 passenger traffic on non-stop
flights between Los Angeles and New York showed that forty-five
percent of the passengers resided in metropolitan Los Angeles and only
thirty-three percent in metropolitan New York, an area with half
again as many people. Metropolitan Los Angeles only recently has
passed metropolitan Chicago in population, but another American Air
lines survey showed that between those two cities more than twice as
many passengers reside in Los Angeles than in Chicago. The
growth rate of all airline passenger traffic in Western cities has been
70) WESTWARD TILT
far above the national average. The sheet fact of distance has made a
traveler of the Westerner. A defense industry executive living in La
Jolla made fifty-nine round trips between California and the East
Coast during the year 1959. He lew at night to save time, and in that
year he slept one night out of every three in the air.
It is distinctly west of the Rocky Mountains that the Western es
sence of non-provincialism is evident. To the east, where the Rockies
drop off to the Great Plains down from Montana through eastern
Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico the land goes to wheat and
pasture, and the people begin to face toward Midwest cities and to
ward Texas. They do not think in terms of the new West. Their
politics become more predictable. They are more traditional. Theirs is
an agrarian economy. The plains states boomed before the turn of the
century, and since then have lagged behind the national average of
population growth. Of all the states of the nation, New Mexico has the
most ingenuous tolerance of racial differences; but even on that state s
eastern plains, oriented toward Texas and the South, ugly prejudice
suddenly appears.
It is California which dominates the new West. Of every one
hundred Westerners in the eleven states, fifty-eight are in California
and twenty-five in metropolitan Los Angeles. Washington, the sec
ond most populous Western state, ranks twenty-third among the fifty
states. There are four million more Calif ornians than the combined
population of the ten other Western states. In population, others rank
as follows: Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico,
Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada.
The casual student of maps (which only suggest the vast dimen
sions of the West) may need reminding of the contrasts in population
density. There are so many more people in California than in the rest
of the West that an almost colonial quality sometimes is detected in
the relations between California and the other Western states. In 1961
I attended a conference of Western governors in Salt Lake City at
which California s Governor Pat Brown arrived two days late. It was
obvious that nothing much would be settled until Brown appeared.
In those two days, resentments of other states toward California oc
casionally flared most of them involved California s aggressive
search for Western water and power, some were connected with
California s tremendous market for raw products of the Western
states which are less economically sophisticated. When Governor
Brown finally arrived at this conference, there was a subtle closing of
ranks among some other governors.
Although California leads the way, and certain tensions inevi-
The Footloose Migration (u
tably result from one state being so rich and so large, there is wide
spread economic strength among the Western states. With one-third
of the land area of the fifty states, these eleven have fifteen percent of
the national population, earn seventeen percent of personal income,
produce nineteen percent of agricultural commodities, furnish fifty-
four percent of its lumber, extract twenty-three percent of its minerals,
and erect twenty-seven percent of its buildings.
Some of the notable misconceptions about the West are economic.
The West is not agrarian. Agricultural employment represents a lower
percentage of the labor force than the national average. More
Westerners live in the cities than the national average. Industry domi
nates the job marketand so does the federal government. In New
Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, government employment by federal,
state, and local agencies is the primary source of work. Only in Ne
vada, where tourism dominates, do services loom near the top as the
source of jobs. Manufacturing is the leading source of employment in
California, Oregon, and Washington, the three Pacific Coast states. In
agriculture, crops are more important than livestock in the coastal
states and in Idaho and Arizona; livestock dominates in the other six
Western states.
The overriding factor in Western unity is growth. Between 1950
and 1960, the population increase of these eleven Western states was
more than seven and two-thirds million. This accounted for more than
one-fourth of the nation s growth. California s growth made up two-
thirds of the growth of the West. The California increase of nearly
five million persons was far more than the combined growth of Florida
and Texas, the next ranking states in growth. California alone ac
counted for almost one-fifth of the nation s growth during that decade.
Yet no Western state lost population rank in relation to other states be
tween 1950 and 1960. Arizona and New Mexico each moved past
three other states. Four states moved up one position: Colorado, Idaho,
Montana, and Utah. The remaining five held their rank; among them,
California is expected to pass New York by mid-1963 to become the
most populous state.
California has been the hardest hit of the Western states by the
four big problems of growth: urban sprawl, traffic congestion, air
pollution, and water shortage. But it moves, often aggressively, to
solve its problems; it must, or be buried under the avalanche. Again,
Walter Prescott Webb s old theory of aridity as the unifying factor in
the West is subordinated, though it still has some validity; the voters
of California approved the largest bond issue ever submitted to Amer
ican voters one and three quarter billion dollars to channel water
as far as six hundred miles from the lush green north to the arid ocher
;^) WESTWARD TILT
south. In the opinion of the Stanford Research Institute, this water
shortage will prove the simplest to solve of the four major physical
crises of California.
Lewis Mumford wrote in The Culture of Cities that, "the natural
conditions of a region, so far from being nullified by the increase of cul
ture and technical skill, are actually magnified." Californians will ar
gue that point; more than any other Americans, more than the people
of any other country or any other age, they are controlling their en
vironment with their technical skills, their massive self-confidence,
their boundless energies, and their unprecedented prosperity.
It is yet to be seen whether Californians and other Westerners,
having conquered their environment, will in turn be subdued by that
environment into taking their hard-won ease and lolling in the sun
shine. But there is increasing introspection among Westerners, and
encouraging signs that the transition is being made from the raw,
youthful phase of hacking out the clearing for a cabin to a period in
which affairs of culture are of primary concern.
With California in the van, the West has struck out ahead of the
rest of America like a scouting party of the future. The West has be
come a center of innovation. The newest ideas of industry and science
go into quick, full use in its new cities. It is an unorthodox land to
which people are driven not by poverty but by high energy, neuroses,
and daring. Its social problems are not the conventional ones of
prejudice, poverty, and oppression; rather they are the new social
problems of finding worth-while goals, of aim and direction, of integ
rity.
The West is the most dynamic region of America today. It is the
most intense in its feelings, the most open to commitment to causes,
good or bad, right or left. But newness and bigness are not adequate
in themselves. Rapid growth and vigor are not goals but symptoms.
In dedication and direction, the West flounders like America, only
more so.
The westward tilt is wiping out most of the American frontier
finally and forever. The driving urge of the American to move on and
conquer new lands soon will have nowhere to spend itself but in space
and space will remain an arena for the few. The westward rush in
America has a somber element of the climacteric. Soon there will be
nowhere else to seek new resources, new values, new meaning, except
within ourselves.
If the new West is indeed scouting ahead in the directions which
the nation will take, its responsibilities are awesome, and its actions
deeply involve the future of America.
Part I
THE
REALMS
OF
CHANGE
y
THE GOOD LIFE
Trademark, Not Obsession
The regional culture which once was thought to make the West quaint
is crumbling in the avalanche of the westward tilt. Highways slash
through Mormon country now, and Mormons are leaving the farms for
missile factories. Jetliners have put the homeland of Navajo and Hopi
within commuting range of the Eastern anthropologist. Industry has
begun to push logging aside in Oregon, and paeans to Northwestern
forests have taken on an air of literary mustiness. San Francisco is
threatened by freeway, slum and subdivision; Indians of the Laguna
Pueblo have grown prosperous by mining uranium; in Nevada, the
prospector has given way to the pit boss; Los Angeles grapples with
the ravages of megalopolis. And yet the old jokes about barbecue cul
ture have begun to boomerang.
The new Western culture is not a finished thing, but a few points
are certain. There is very little of a regional nature about it. It belongs
to the people of all the states of the nation; they form the composite of
the Westerner today. Its common bonds are energetic creativity and
supreme self-confidence. It does not pause to defend itself against
?6) WESTWARD TILT
charges of cultural immaturity; it is too busy, and it is not self-
conscious.
After vast research, Earl Pomeroy, the University of Oregon
historian, found the West Coast to be more prosperous and more ur
ban than the nation as a whole, more literate and more criminal. In a
privately distributed monograph, he wrote: "It reads more, drinks
more, goes to church less, and has more automobiles and smaller
families. It is more in favor of birth control and also of foreign cars.
Its people move more, travel more, camp out more, . . , It has
more space, more wilderness, and also more suburbs and more new
suburbanites and newcomers generally. ... It produces more doc
tors than its share in the natural sciences and in education, slightly less
than its share in the humanities, social sciences and arts, but has fewer
resident chemists, economists and historians. ... It receives aca
demic honors much more than the rest of the nation nearly fifty per
cent more Guggenheim fellowships than its population justifies." To a
somewhat less dramatic degree, these assertions are valid for the en
tire West.
Only within the past five years have Westerners sensed their com
mon ties enough to consider that there is such a thing as a Western
culture. In 1958 a two-day conference was held at Carmel, California,
under the sponsorship of the American Council of Learned Societies.
Significantly, the impetus for the conference came from an Eastern
savant, Dr. Howard Mumford Jones of Harvard, who was spending a
sabbatical at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
at Stanford. It was Dr. Jones impression that something of import
was occurring in the West and he wondered if anybody knew what it
was.
The participants concluded that there is nothing regional about
Western culture in the old sense of the regionalism of the South or the
Midwest, but that Western culture is showing accelerated symptoms
of national trends; it is regional only in that Westerners, particularly
along the Pacific Coast, are pioneering busily in advance of the na
tional culture.
Such a premise is not easily accepted east of the Rockies, and
certainly not in the cities of the East, whose cultural aristocracies are
accustomed to the notion that they guard the national culture in family
vaults. The assumption outside the West is that the Westerner still is a
sybarite, excited only by the clear and present challenge of how to ex
pend his unparalleled prosperity. This has been, until recently, a de
fensible generalization; it no longer is valid.
The changing cultural patterns of the West merit continuous
study. On the surface, they are easy to dismiss as insignificant. A
The Good Life: Trademark, Not Obsession ( 77
closer look reveals a hungry, energetic drive to compensate for lost
time. It is epitomized by the transplanted family of the scientist, tech
nician, or educator, which has hardly unpacked before it plunges into
the civic symphony, little theater or art classes; the new arrival sets
out to establish whatever accustomed amenity is absent on the local
Western scene.
A casual, easy manner of living continues to be an inherent part
of the Western culture, but people from other areas find it difficult to
understand that this is not evidence of a shallow culture. The good life
is a Western trademark, not a Western obsession. The new Westerner
can both live better and do more.
The best gauge of the more superficial cultural tides of the West
is the magazine Sunset, which calls itself "the magazine of Western
living." Sunset has been both symbol and symptom of the West. More
than thirty years ago it divested itself of its involvement with the arts
and the world of thought; it had tried, and it had failed. It began to
thrive when it adopted an undeviating absorption with the sensuous
life of the Westerner. Sunset is the how-to bible of the Westerner in
four matters: gardening, food, travel, and home. In the West espe
cially, these interests are strong. The people of the eight states pri
marily served by Sunset (an area with only minor economic differences
from the West as a whole) earn about fourteen percent more than the
national average. In 1961, on a per capita basis, these Westerners
were buying twenty percent more automobiles than the national
norm (and one hundred and twelve percent more imported cars),
eighty-one percent more frozen foods, twenty-three percent more
paper products, fifty-two percent more passports, fifty-five percent
more gardening supplies, one hundred and sixteen percent more new
homes, twenty-five percent more wine, and forty-six percent more dish
washers.
Each year, Sunset publishes a cross-index of subjects dealt with
in the magazine. Topics for 1961 included okra fritters; minus tides
for June; sightseeing in San Francisco from a helicopter; how to be
have around bears; booby birds of the Gulf of California; a bridge
across your pool; how to banish skunks; roof-top gardens grown in
artificial soil; how to have "happy" tomatoes.
Sunset has sensed and capitalized on Western regionalism. Its
interest has been in the superficial phases of Western life which are
distinct from those of other regions. Gardening is its closest tie with
its reader; Westerners have been noted until recently for their aversion
to apartment living, and most newcomers inherit gardens often for
the first time in their lives.
The circulation of Sunset, above seven hundred thousand in
l8) WESTWARD TILT
1962, is almost entirely in the West, with close to half a million of
that number in California. Only about one in twenty-three copies goes
east of the Rocky Mountains. With this distribution, its editors are
free to concentrate on the Westerner. The best-selling book in the
West, after the Bible and the dictionary, is the Sunset Western Garden
Book, published by the Lane Book Company, a subsidiary of the
magazine. More than a million copies have been sold since its first
edition appeared in 1939. The reason is obvious; garden books pub
lished in the East do not work in the West, a different horticultural
world. Similarly, the Southern Californian has learned that the garden
magazine he read back East is of little help to him when his patio
contains eucalyptus, orange trees, fuchsias, and orchids, ice plant,
bougainvillaea and geraniums. Even his mealybug and white grub
may not succumb to the same insecticides as their Eastern cousins. His
planting schedule is so different as to befog the mind of an Eastern
or Midwestern gardener. In areas of the Southwest where frost never
intrudes, the gardener has perpetual blossoms ( and perpetual labors ) ,
and may grow three or four crops of vegetables in a year* His new
enemy will not be ice or snow but the parching brilliance of the desert
sun; he will not be forcing plants in hothouses, but by generous irriga
tion that will send his water bill soaring. Sunset slips an arm around
him and whispers instructions with its "climate-zoned how-to hand
book and Western plant encyclopedia."
Sunset has not only a thick monthly issue which tells the West
erner what he could be growing, building, or cooking, or where in the
West he could be traveling; there also are more than seventy Sunset
books with the same disturbing inference that he is not living Western
enough. There is even a book on growing African violets which sold
at such a wild rate that Sunset book editors no longer scoff at any sug
gestion. Notably, these Western books are bought all over the world. If
Western living means the sybaritic life, the whole world wants it. In a
volume entitled Landscaping For Western Living, ten pages were re
vised with the result that the same book had a lively sale in the East
under the title Landscaping For Modern Living.
Sunset promotions are as self-assured and flamboyant as the West
itself, but the best of them center around its seven-acre home-office
estate in Menlo Park, a suburban town thirty miles south of San Fran
cisco and near the Stanford campus. The architecture had to be good,
and it had to be Western; Sunset has developed such a following with
architectural how-to-do-its that the American Institute of Architects
has teamed with the magazine to make annual awards for Western
houses. In 1951, with adobe, redwood, and glass, the magazine built a
The Good Life: Trademark^ Not Obsession ( / 9
low, rambling structure designed by Cliff May. It is more related to
the Spanish ranch house than to Madison Avenue, but in this garden
setting is the headquarters of one of the big money-makers in the mag
azine world (gross revenue in excess of eight million dollars a year, and
advertising pages among monthly consumer magazines second only to
Fortune). Forty thousand sightseers troop through the estate each
year; they find pretty editorial assistants padding about on deep car
pets in their stocking feet, or sitting at desks beside picture windows
shaded by big oaks and looking out to a vast rolling lawn on which
the staff holds noontime putting contests. Employees wince as they
overhear the inevitable remark: "You mean they pay people to work
here?"
My first visit to Sunset left me with a strong awareness of the
flexible, self-sufficient spirit that pervades life in the West. The maga
zine had arranged to serve lunch for a group of visitors coming from
San Diego, five hundred miles south of Menlo Park. A Los Angeles
representative of the magazine drove to San Diego that morning from
his home in Pasadena, one hundred and twenty miles north of San
Diego, and escorted the visitors aboard an Electra made by Lockheed,
a California firm, and flown by Pacific Southwest Airlines, a California
intrastate line. The flight from San Diego to San Francisco took
seventy-five minutes, and we went from the airport to Sunset in an
other half -hour by bus.
Minutes after our arrival, San Diego and San Francisco friends
sat sipping wines from the nearby Napa and Livermore valleys. A
warm sense of neighborliness enveloped the group. The beams and
ceiling of the rooms, exposed on one side to the open air, were unfin
ished, crosscut California redwood. The floor tiles were from the Cali
fornia desert community of La Quinta. The chicken, raised nearby and
broiled on outdoor spits, was crisp and brown; the crab was California
seafood at its best.
The return flight after lunch took sixty-six minutes. The Pacific
glittered blue and bright to our right, its surf breaking like lace
against the rocky cliffs and beaches. On our left was the panorama of
California forests, valleys, mountains, and desert. When we stepped
off the plane in San Diego at mid-afternoon, husbands parted from
wives and returned to their desks. The Sunset man said he d like to
stay and visit, but he had to make a speech that night in Los Angeles,
and he wanted to get home first to see his family.
The euphoria pervading that day was no accident; it was a con
trived Sunset euphoria, capitalizing on the facets of Western living
which make it gracious and casual. But it also fitted the pattern of the
20) WESTWARD TILT
West drawn by critics of Western living who deplore its ease and
sensuality. We had not heard a word that day about problems of any
kind, except for a plaintive query about curbing crab grass,
But in the process of the westward tilt, even Sunset, the arbiter
of the good life of the West, is developing a social conscience. However
unsophisticated the California culture of the 1930 $, it is vastly com
plex today. The importance of this transition is not lost on the maga
zine staff, which so far has made only the mildest of forays beyond its
unique Western world of garden, home, food, and travel into the
deeper new Western culture which is ambitious for more education,
better government, public buildings that are more handsome, cities
that run smoother, sounder economic balance, more productive use of
leisure time, and a new emphasis on the arts.
A Stanford professor who had participated in that 1958 Car-
mel conference told me: "Sunset could be a terrific force for good in the
West today, if they got into ideas and Western problems. They could
spearhead an emerging sense of Western responsibility," If the West
is to achieve some buoyant, aggressive culture, its goals must be
etched in greater depth than the Western living patterns of home,
garden, food, and travel. Although Sunset is the leading regional voice
of the West, it is unreasonable to expect that it will fill such a role.
The one regional news magazine, Fortnight, collapsed after a brave
but barren decade of publication. The only regional liberal magazine
of any importance, Frontier, has a circulation of less than six thousand.
"There is enough blood to keep the patient alive, but not to get up out
of bed and walk," sighed Phil Kerby, Frontier s editor, "Yet we are
showing a modest improvement."
The spotty history of periodicals in the West is evidence of the
lack of any unanimity of tradition. The magazine Los Angeles and one
in Phoenix called Point West are slick local journals modeled after the
most successful city magazine of the West, San Diego. San Francisco,
a graveyard for periodicals, has fostered two non-regional literary
magazines, Contact and the San Francisco Re-view. Among historical
magazines, Montana is the liveliest in the West; the Montana Histori
cal Society has the second largest membership of any historical society
in the United States, and Montana has more subscribers in New York
City than in the two most populous counties of Montana. The pattern
of university quarterlies in the West has been erratic and generally
undistinguished .
Arizona Highways is the handsomest of all state-subsidized mag
azines and has the largest circulation: a four-hundred-and-fifty-thou-
sand monthly average, about four times the circulation of the next
largest state magazine. It carries no advertising. Its subscription reve-
The Good Life: Trademark, Not Obsession (21
nue in 1960 was 1.3 million dollars, which came within sixty thousand
dollars of meeting costs, requiring one of the lowest subsidies of any
state magazine. Its editor is Raymond Carlson, a mild, graying rosa-
rian who was plucked out of an anonymous clerical job in the Arizona
Motor Vehicle Department in 1937 and handed the responsibility
for the magazine. Then it was a homely, black-and-white technical
journal which on more than one occasion had devoted its cover to an
itemized budget for the Arizona Highway Department. Today it is a
showpiece of the graphic arts. Carlson, who has shrugged off bids to
join the magazine world of Madison Avenue, has a salary set by the
Arizona legislature of less than one thousand dollars a month. But he
has wide editorial latitude, and on one occasion the legislature hastily
repealed an Arizona law to support him in a budget dispute with the
state auditor.
There is a growing demand for a more mature approach to local
affairs in the West; it is suggested by the success of city magazines
such as those in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, three of the
fastest-growing cities of the nation. A study of newspapers in these
three cities is also revealing. To a far greater extent than the Western
average, newspapers of Los Angeles and San Diego have increased
their coverage of national and international affairs and have widened
their range of features and columns of opinion. In Phoenix, a competi
tive daily was launched in 1962, in contrast to the national trend of
newspaper mergers, a trend followed even in San Diego and Los
Angeles. With too few exceptions, the Western newspaper is more pro
vincial than are many of its readers; most Western newspapers have
not widened their outlook much since World War II, but their read
ers have. Generally, Western newspapers stress local affairs, and at a
somewhat low level of sophistication. The Westerner s interest in intel
lectual affairs is appeased, like the interest of most people in the nation,
by publications originating in the New York area. The strength of
New York publications in the West is eloquent. The New York Times
has inaugurated a West Coast edition. More copies of the Wall Street
Journal are sold in California now than in the state of New York. Cir
culation figures of The New Yorker show Californians second only to
New Yorkers, and Harper s magazine s circulation is greater in Cal
ifornia than in New York.
Robert R. Kirsch, book editor of the Los Angeles Times, ex
ploded in print one summer day in 1961 when praising a new Los
Angeles magazine: "The mistake many publications [in Los Angeles]
, made in the past was to assume that their existence depended on a kind
of regional loyalty: Southern Californians ought to support a local
magazine to show Easterners we are not barbarians and to prove to
22) WESTWARD TILT
San Franciscans that they have no monopoly on culture. As long as
this show4hem-back-East-and-up-North attitude persisted, local peri
odicals have swung between barely disguised boosterism and a kind
of citrus-belt imitation of successful Eastern periodicals such as The
New Yorker. I bear my share of responsibility, I have gone back to
New York loaded with statistics and anecdotes designed to prove that
we are just as literate, just as cultured, just as human as those who
live within commuting distance of New York City. Man, I am through.
We don t have to prove a thing. We merely have to act instead of re
acting. Let Time magazine discover Southern California; let the New
Yorkers finally figure out that people out here buy and read books,
think, listen to music, look at paintings, compose, create. As the old
psychiatrist gag goes, it s their problem."
Although book publishing in the West is still in an exploratory
phase, bookslike almost everything else are bought by Westerners
at a greater rate than by the nation as a whole. They also are written
at a prolific rate. In the Doubleday office in San Francisco, the largest
editorial office in the West representing a book publisher, close to five
hundred book manuscripts are read each year. Writers, like scientists
and educators, have been part of the new pilgrimage to the West: men
as diverse as Joseph Wood Krutch in Tucson, Mortimer Adler in San
Francisco, Ted Geisel in La Jolla and, from an earlier pilgrimage,
Stewart Holbrook in Portland, Oliver La Farge in Santa Fe, Aldous
Huxley in Los Angeles. And here, too, the sense of individualism is
sustained. A bookseller was found guilty of violating obscenity laws
in Los Angeles for selling Tropic of Cancer after Leon Uris and Frank
Baxter testified for the prosecution. In Marin County, across from San
Francisco, a bookseller was found innocent on the same charge after
Eugene Burdick and Mark Schorer testified for the defense.
In a three-storied Victorian house in San Francisco, Mortimer
Adler presides over the Institute for Philosophical Research, which is
supported by the Ford Foundation. He and his staff spent eight years
preparing The Idea of Freedom, the first volume in a series whose
purpose is to apply the inventory process to Western thought on great
ideas. Though more of the Great Books series chosen by Adler have
been sold in California than in any other state, he suspects this is be
cause of a superior sales force in California.
But writers of the West are running behind their region. The
last big contemporary novel of the Western landscape was The Grapes
of Wrath, and it seems as obsolete in the West today as Booth
Tarkington. Most of the so-called beatnik writers have proved them
selves untalented as well as unwashed, and have gone out to look for
work. Some of the more successful Western writers Irving Stone,
The Good Life: Trademark, Not Obsession (23
Paul Wellman, David Lavender find their Western themes in the
past. Contemporary social fiction of the West only nibbles at corners
of the scene; there are literary gold fields still unexplored.
Trade publishing of hard-cover books will not soon thrive in the
West. One reason is sheer economics. Because of low volume, it costs
about three cents in San Francisco to put a paper jacket around a book
for which the same operation would cost one cent in New York. Some
of the most active book publishers of the West are the University of
California Press, Binford & Morts of Portland, and Caxton Printers of
Caldwell, Idaho. There are also a few intriguing small book pub
lishersamong them George Chambers Arizona Silhouettes at Tuc
son, which reprints rare historical collectors items; and Hesperian
House, a modest firm with offices in a one-time Chinese overall factory
in San Francisco s Jackson Square, which has a splendid two-volume
anthology of California writing among its titles. Among university
presses of the nation, California ranks third and Stanford seventh in
volume of books published.
In music and in art, Los Angeles is the do-it-yourself center of
the world; nowhere is there a greater saturation of weekend painters or
of semiprofessional orchestras (fifty or more, playing for pleasure
their own, if for no one else s ) . California has led New York State since
the 1957-58 season in the number of radio members who contribute
funds to sustain broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic. On the
1960 tour of that orchestra, Leonard Bernstein recalled incredulously,
"They stood and yelled for the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra in Las
Vegas! Las Vegas was the wildest! We played for seven thousand peo
ple at ten dollars top. The only way I could send them away after three
encores was to say, You want to get back to the gambling tables, and
so does the orchestra! "
Milton Katims conducts the Seattle Symphony in a new civic
opera house before a loyal and musically literate audience (sixty-two
percent of the symphony budget is provided through the box office,
with almost five thousand regular subscribers a startlingly high par
ticipation). A hypnotic twenty-six year old, Zubin Mehta, presides
over the renaissance of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, soon to be per
forming in a new Music Center. The San Francisco Opera Company,
which extends its season to the other major cities of the Pacific Coast,
has had no more crises of impending collapse in recent years than
has the Metropolitan Opera Company. From Salt Lake City and from
Phoenix, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Orpheus Male Chorus
launch world tours. Summer opera abounds. None is more picturesque
than those at Santa Fe, New Mexico (in an amphitheater which looks
up to the Jmez Mountains ) , and at Central City, Colorado, high in the
24) WESTWARD TILT
Rockies. The programs of the Aspen music festival, founded in 1949,
are consistently superior to any other in the nation; here in this same
majestic setting are an annual jazz festival, a design conference, and
the Institute for Humanistic Studies, a forum of cultural study for
executives.
The Shakespeare festival of San Diego ranks with the finest of
North America; and the one at Ashland, Oregon, is not far behind.
Theater groups all over the West are giving vent to the Westerner s
rage for experimentation and his passion for hyperactive use of leisure
time. Hundreds were being turned away at almost every performance
in the 1961-62 season of the Theater Group at the University of
California at Los Angeles, which is led by John Houseman, the film
producer. Theater-in-the-round burgeons in a dozen Western cities.
Little theater is in every hamlet, and experimental theaters in every
city and on every campus. Summer repertory is as rampant in Southern
California as in New England. Touring companies of Broadway pro
ductions have been reaping rich harvests in the West. More than
forty theaters are in active operation in Los Angeles. Playbill, which
publishes all Broadway theater programs, launched a Los Angeles edi
tion in 1962. In the summer of that year, Time magazine observed:
"Los Angeles has been struggling for years against smog and a stigma
of cultural inferiority. Only the smog remains."
Los Angeles vies now with New York as an art market and a
center for collectors. Art critics deny the existence of a West Coast
style, but they concede a vigor, an optimism, a freedom from acad
emies. One can be certain only that new galleries, new wings, new
acquisitions are being amassed all over the West. In Los Angeles,
the success of gaunt young James Strombotne as an artist is measured
in part by the names of Hollywood collectors who own his work.
Sculptor Donal Hord dominates the San Diego art scene. San Fran
cisco painters including Diebenkorn, Bischoff, and Oliveira pass in
and out of the glare of discovery, from a school sometimes called New
Figurative. New Northwest artists do not descend from Callahan,
Tobey or Graves, or Southern Calif ornians from Rico Lebrun, and
San Francisco has three or four schools of painting, not merely one.
The artists of Sante Fe and Taos cling to their unique position, and a
half-dozen artists of the Southwest are roaring financial successes at
one-man shows in New York and Los Angeles and at regional galler
ies.
In architecture, the ranch house, the sliding glass wall, the out
ward trendall born or first accepted in the West have moved on to
every other region. The West is no longer infested with motley "home
sick" architecture derived from many regions. The Western tradition
The Good Life: Trademark, Not Obsession (25
in architecturethe most undeniably regional innovation of the West
has passed from Henry and Charles Greene, Bernard Maybeck,
and Ellsworth Storey in Pasadena, Berkeley, and Seattle, to the inter
pretations of more current men: Belluschi, Wurster, Spencer, Camp
bell, Wong, Jones, Emmons, Ladd, Becket, Pereira, May, Graham,
Thiry, Neutra, Mosher, and a hundred more. Thomas Church, the
Western landscape architect, has suggested new directions for land
scape architecture everywhere. In the field of medium-cost tract hous
ing, the thousands of California homes built by Joseph Eichler are
notable.
As Wallace Stegner wrote in a summary of that 1958 Carmel
conference for the Saturday Review, there is "from Seattle to San
Diego a tremendous stir, a great swell of energy and optimism and
creativity, and this may be the truest, though not necessarily the most
traditional expression of a really regional spirit. For the ferment is not
simply economic, not just a building boom and the skyrocketing of the
electronics and aircraft and missile industries. This society urban,
opulent, anxious, energetic, highly unionized, with a per capita income
exceeded by that of only four or five states, growing at a furious rate,
located in a region whose climate is on the whole more beatific and
whose natural setting is more spectacular than those of any other sec
tion this society is not sitting on its hands or relapsing into Spanish-
California somnolence. In spite of the sports cars and the Rolls-
Royces (thirteen of the forty U. S. Rolls-Royce agencies are in
California), and in spite of the swimming pools and the homes that
cost two, three, four hundred thousand dollars, this society strains for
something more. . . . Contribute regionally to the national culture?
We are the national culture, at its most energetic end . . . not a
region but the mainstream, America only more so.""
There is a thread that has run through the more sober writings
of the West s past and present. Lord Bryce wrote: "The West may be
called the most distinctly American part of America because the
points in which it differs from the East are the points in which Amer
ica as a whole differs from Europe." Again: "What America is to
Europe, what Western America is to Eastern, that California is to the
other Western States. . . ."
The Westerner thinks of himself less as a Westerner than as a
Portlander, a San Franciscan, a Montanan, or a Pasadenan. There
are sharp differences of outlook. But inexorable forces are bringing
the Western states closer to each other and demonstrating the necessity
for more regional consciousness in economic affairs and in matters in
volving natural resources. The unity is more easily achieved because of
the yeasty emergence of a self-confident Western outlook concerned
26) WESTWARD TILT
with both the casual life and the intense cultural drives of the new
Western millions.
The excitement that is still inherent in the West pushes and
prods its people. It is an asset, but it is not a guarantee. The highly
urbanized West Coast may be America s newest city, embodying the
risks and hopes of all American cities. The West of today is very likely
a close kin of the America of tomorrow. It is a hopeful image, for
from their high threshold of abundance and energy, Westerners are
devoting time and patronage in support of cultural and scholarly ac
tivities at such a rate that they seem likely to accomplish within a cen
tury what it has taken most of the nation two or three hundred years
to build.
SCIENCE, INDUSTRY,
AND AMENITIES
High on a California mesa above the Pacific Ocean, on the northern
outskirts of San Diego, lies the weathered and forgotten hulk of an
amphibious landing craft, last used in training soldiers during World
War II. A city block to the east, beyond a row of eucalyptus trees,
scientists and secretaries move about the business campus of General
Atomic, where nuclear reactors are old hat and physicists are coaxing
the phenomenon known as nuclear pinch on toward the goal of con
trolled fusion.
This juxtaposition is symbolic of the maturing West. The onrush
to the West has been in waves; the roiling eddies have not always sub
sided before the next wave roared in. The wave of immigration which
brought General Atomic to California is distinct from the one that
brought the landing craft. Yet in two decades no one seems to have
had time to set fire to, or haul away, a useless relic of another era.
General Atomic provides an example of the new white-collar
West. The demarcation between factory and laboratory exists less in
the West than in any other region, and nowhere does industry place
more emphasis on the laboratory than there. General Atomic produces
28) WESTWARD TILT
commercial nuclear reactors while its research people in adjacent
laboratories probe the outer limits of their scientific disciplines.
The wide open spaces of the West, its abundant power, and the
geography of the Pacific war led to the establishment of aircraft and
shipbuilding industries in the West during the Second World War.
The postwar readjustment in Western industry was unexpectedly
minor industry underwent a rapid transition which is not yet under
stood by much of America. It still relies heavily on federal military
spending, but it is long past the crisis in which it would wither to
nothing were there a decline in armament. The unprecedented migra
tion to the West has brought with it a solid industrial nucleus which
now is inherent to the area. Not only people have moved West; small
basic industry has moved there in a continuing wave. At the end of
1962, the atomic power divisions of three of the nation s leading cor
porations were competing to build a nuclear power plant for a group
of New York electric utilities. All three of the divisions General
Electric, General Dynamics and North American Aviation are based
in California.
The scientist has spearheaded the move since the mid-fifties,
when the West began to assume major stature in the exotic industries:
space, missilery, and electronics. In 1961, one-third of the missile
workers of the nation and one-fifth of those working in electronics
were employed in California. But not all of Western industry is in the
glamor category. It was only in 1946 that aircraft production sup
planted food processing as California s major manufacturing activity,
and today agriculture remains California s largest industry. The total
farm income is the highest of any state; it exceeds three billion dollars
a year, far ahead of Iowa and Texas, California supplies more than
one-third of the nation s canned and frozen foods and vegetables,
about one-quarter of the nation s commercial production of vegetables,
more than one-third of its fruits, more than half of its nuts, and an
encyclopedic list of two hundred other agricultural commodities from
artichoke to zucchini. The state has seven million acres of irrigated
farmland; even pastures are irrigated and sprinkled. The farms are
large and mechanized; more than one-fourth of all the crawler tractors
on United States farms are in California.
Urban sprawls are diminishing farmland in some areas. Con
tinued expansion of California farm acreage is dependent on more
water primarily that promised by the one-billion-seven-hundred-and-
fifty-million-dollar Feather River project which will pump water
from northern California southward as far as six hundred miles.
Heavy construction is also an important economic factor in the
West, and it draws on the steel output of two major Western steel
Science, Industry, and Amenities (2$
mills at Provo, Utah, and at Fontana, near Los Angeles which were
spawned by the Pacific shipbuilding industry during World War II.
Japanese steel has become a major source of competition, but the
Western steel industry predicts steady expansion in the decade ahead.
In a move aimed at decreasing competition from steel mills east of the
Rockies, the Kaiser Steel Corporation at Fontana cut its prices sharply
in late 1962; the move was a big step in the direction of eliminating
that historic phrase, "prices slightly higher west of the Rockies."
The steel baron of the West is Henry J. Kaiser, whose mill is at
Fontana. Kaiser is the dominant Western industrialist, but his son
Edgar, president of Kaiser Industries Corporation, is taking a larger
role in the family empire. From the gently curving, twenty-eight story
Kaiser Center beside Lake Merritt in Oakland, sixty affiliated Kaiser
companies are directed. Offices in this showplace structure look down
on a three-acre roof garden with lawn, trees and shrubs planted in a
light-weight synthetic soil developed by the University of California.
Into the building went Kaiser aluminum, Kaiser steel, Kaiser concrete,
Kaiser aggregates, Kaiser dolomite, and Kaiser gypsum products.
The Howard Hughes empire, with assets estimated in the neigh
borhood of one billion dollars, sprawls through Southern California,
Arizona, Texas and even into Scotland with operations that include
electronic armament control systems, missiles, oil-well drilling, real
estate, a brewery, and space vehicles.
San Francisco is the headquarters of such industrial giants as
Standard Oil of California (ranked fourteenth among United States
corporations as listed in the Fortune Directory of 1962), Crown Zel-
lerbach, Foremost Dairies, and California Packing. Across the bay at
Oakland are three Kaiser corporations ranking among the top two
hundred United States corporations. Southward at San Jose is FMC
Corporation.
In the Los Angeles area, the industrial kings are mostly in avia
tion and oil: Lockheed Aircraft, North American Aviation, Douglas
Aircraft, Tidewater Oil, Union Oil of California, Carnation, Hunt
Foods and Industries, Signal Oil and Gas, Richfield Oil, Northrop
Aircraft, Rexall Drug & Chemical, and Litton Industries.
These first two cities of the West dominate the industrial pattern
of the region. The only other corporations ranking within the top two
hundred in the 1962 Fortune survey were Boeing at Seattle, Weyer
haeuser, the lumber, pulp and paper firm at Tacoma, and another lum
ber giant of the Northwest, Georgia-Pacific of Portland.
But the size and growth of Western business are understood
better in terms of the individual than in corporate massiveness. In the
summer of 1961, Gordon O. Baskin, a native of Albany, New York,
.JO) WESTWARD TILT
then thirty-seven years old, founded and was installed as president of a
new Los Angeles bank. Fourteen years before, he had been a cab
driver. The father of five children, he had supported his family by sell
ing hot dogs at football games in the Los Angeles Coliseum while he
took a course in economics and business administration, Baskin s vice-
president and secretary at the new bank was the former manager of
the loan department of a Beverly Hills bank the man who had agreed
to give Baskin an unsecured loan of two thousand dollars with which he
had launched his quick business spiral.
In the savings and loan field, Bart Lytton arrived in Los Angeles
in 1940 with little but an extra pair of socks. By 1962, he personally
controlled assets of about half a billion dollars, and showed a net
worth approaching thirty million dollars.
Similar stories of business success are more common throughout
the West than in the tightly regimented patterns of older regions and
bear a kinship to the Eastern pattern of half a century ago.
One of the empire builders of the West was A. P. Giannini, a
classic example of the aggressive, free-wheeling entrepreneur who be
came a Western phenomenon. His philosophy of the bank as a money
store for those less than wealthy was typically Western in its concep
tion, and it has profoundly affected American banking. Giannini was
an innovator with flair and daring who took his bank into every cross
roads of California and pioneered in making small personal loans.
Now the Bank of America, from its brain center on the eleventh floor
of the headquarters building on San Francisco s Montgomery Street,
casts a shadow across the land from West to East. The largest non
government banking institution in the world, it has more than eight
hundred branches in California, close to eight million deposit accounts,
and total resources in excess of twelve billion dollars.
The reputation of Montgomery Street as the financial hub of the
West is attributable in a large part to the Bank of America. A major
skirmish in the nation-wide warfare over savings interest rates in
early 1962 involving banks and savings and loan companies-
was set off when the Bank of America raised its interest rate on de
posits, a heady gamble which cost the bank an estimated thirty-seven
million dollars a year.
Near the Bank of America s headquarters is the office of James B.
Black, board chairman of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the
behemoth of Western power. As much as any man in the West, he
bridges the gaps in understanding and outlook between America s
East Coast and West. Born in Illinois, the son of a flour miller, he
graduated from the University of California and has lived since in
the Bay Area except for eight years in New York. He still commutes
Science , Industry, and Amenities (31
to the East to attend board meetings of United States Steel, Shell Oil,
and others; he has served as a trustee of the Ford Foundation. His
distinctions are notably diverse: he is the only Western board member
of United States Steel, and he also is Shirley Temple s father-in-law.
Black believes that New York bankers and industrialists have a
firm understanding of Western growth. "You find some who don t
think much beyond the Atlantic Coast, but they are in the minority.
The people I know in New York are impressed by what is going on
in the West and very interested in being a part of it. They are quite
alert to what people in business in the West are doing."
Business, industry, and science have been more alert than most
sociologists and editors in sensing the implications of the westward
tilt. There are reasons; for one thing, the statistics of the tilt are less
elusive than its motivations and goals. But the man of the white-collar
West gives thought to why he is here, and he is capable of some
crisp answers.
J. R. Dempsey, a blond, blue-eyed young man who was born
in Alabama, is president of the General DynamicsAstronautics plant
at San Diego. How does he live? With his wife and three children in
La Jolla on a hillside overlooking the golf course and the Pacific; in
airplanes, much of the time; intensely, because he is obsessed with the
seriousness of the world s predicament. He believes the larger assets
of the West are freedom and freshness. As a missile manufacturer,
he senses that Westerners are intent on one goal, and he believes it is
the best that any people can have. "We ve made a good start,"
Dempsey says, "toward eliminating the absurdities of life."
Young men like Dempsey are the new breed of the West in
industry and science. In an era when they are sought after and wooed
by industry, such men have come West, and factories and laboratories
have followed them; they can do their work in whatever area offers
them and their families the best life. In such a pattern, Motorola has
come to Phoenix, Varian to Palo Alto, Beckman to Los Angeles
and hundreds of others. General Atomic at San Diego is a classic case.
In 1955 the late John Jay Hopkins, board chairman of General
Dynamics, entrusted to Dr. Frederic de Hoffmann, an Austrian-born,
Harvard-schooled theoretical physicist, the task of choosing the site for
a nuclear research laboratory to be known as General Atomic. Many
were startled that de Hoffmann chose San Diego. Before he toured
the country to study possible sites, de Hoffmann had not visited San
Diego. His impressions of the West Coast were relatively vague; he
had been at Los Alamos from 1944 to 1955, but he was more ac
customed to the streets of Washington, New York, Boston and Vienna
32) WESTWARD TILT
than to those of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
I sat with de Hoffmann in his office, which faced the foothills
east of San Diego, and asked why he had come West. He spoke with a
passion that most scientists in the West display when they answer the
question.
"A revolution is rapidly coming in the United States," he said.
"Very modern, advanced industries need technical people to run them.
You make better products if they are firmly rooted to their ultimate
base in pure science.
"If you want to do this, you must choose an atmosphere where
not just development and production can go forward, but where the
thinking and the scientific part can flourish. This means an open
atmosphere. This is possible in Chicago or New York, but it is no
longer half so easy there as it is here. There is a surge of new life in
the West much like the frontier spirit. There is a recognition that this
area lives by its wits. If you are to make a good life in this part of the
West, you realize it will be by having intellectually bright enterprises
that will constantly stay up with the future. Everywhere I go in the
West, this sort of world is much more in evidence than it is in the
East. There is an excitement here, an alertness. The people of San
Diego voted six to one to deed three hundred acres of city land to us
for this laboratory. This has made an enormous difference in our effort
in recruiting people. It told them that here was a community that
understands; not just the city council, but eighty-five percent of the
people."
General Atomic scientists and their wives are prominent in
Parent-Teacher Associations affairs, in musical and artistic circles,
and in helping to interpret the scientific revolution to the citizens of
the area. The warmth of their welcome has made their integration
almost casual.
"The whole world is the realm of this laboratory," de Hoffmann
went on. "We are building nuclear reactors on five continents, and
people of many nations are moving constantly in and out. If you ask
any of these people what they think distinguishes the Western United
States, the first thing they mention is the politeness of Westerners.
It sounds trite, but it is very true. The individual is much more
honored, and is much more an individual here in the West. The man
you meet casually on the street will almost always be friendly to you.
In the East, he will be outgoing toward you only if you prove yourself
to him first."
De Hoffmann has not overlooked the asset of Western scenery.
^ De Hoffmann said, "There is a chance in the West for us to get
out into nature and see that we are not the only almighty thing but
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WESTWARD TILT
that there is something more almighty, and to get slightly humble.
This is very hard to do when you live in a city of four or five million
and never have the chance to contemplate anything other than your
fellow man. There is a greater respect here not only for the individual
but for nature. Somehow related to it is a stronger drive to think that
almost anything that can be started, if only started with enough vigor,
can be done successfully,"
To a scientist of the new West like de Hoffmann, and to hun
dreds of thousands more, the cultural opportunities of the West have
been a prime factor in their choice of the area, I wondered if de
Hoffmann a connoisseur of wines, an avid reader, a brilliant scholar,
a collector of antique stamps found the West a cultural desert.
"People from the East underestimate considerably what culture
there is here now," he said. "They set up arbitrary standards of metro
politan culture. There is, in fact, a considerable appreciation of cul
tural matters in the West. We may have planned ahead enough, may
have enough space, for instance, never to get into the question of
really having slums, and at the same time be able to devote our atten
tion more aggressively to cultural things."
De Hoffmann foresees a new dimension to cultural growth in the
West. "East Coast culture is built on the traditional European pattern.
There is culture for a few in the East. In the West, the benefits of
education and nature are going to all. We can build cultural activities
in the West in the same way, making them accessible to the larger
part of the population. If we make this transition, we have a very
large chance of keeping up with Eastern culture, and even surpassing
it."
From the fervor with which he discussed it, I suspect that of all
Western virtues, the one dearest to de Hoffmann is the freshness and
diversity of its people. It is the virtue he most fears losing.
He left no doubt that he prefers the good life of the West Coast,
where there is more leisure time. "More leisure may make kinder
people," he said. "If there were more leisure time around the world,
I suspect we would have fewer problems."
Several hundred yards away from de Hoffmann s General
Atomic, on a steep Pacific cliff side, Dr. Jonas Salk s Institute for Bio
logical Studies is being built. The design by Louis I. Kahn, the Phila
delphia architect, is for a twelve-million-dollar complex including
laboratories, a series of residences for seventy scientists which Kahn de
scribes as looking "like a Pompeiian village," and a castle-like meeting
house. Here, Salk says, "we will be looking into the most elementary
processes of life." Some of the most eminent research men of the na
tion will converge to carry on their work in one of the most scenic
Science, Industry, and Amenities
settings in Southern California, which was donated to the Institute by
the city of San Diego.
A few steps south along these Pacific cliffs is a new campus of
the University of California, built in conjunction with the highly re
spected Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Dr. Herbert York,
former Director of Defense Research and Engineering, with the De
partment of Defense, is chancellor, and men such as Dr. Harold Urey,
a Nobel Prize winner, were entrenched on campus before the enroll
ment reached two hundred students. From the hub of this scientific
community emanate underwater explorations of the Pacific and In
dian oceans, and research projects in geophysics, planetary physics,
atmosphere research, and molecular biology.
Such projects certainly are not without precedent, but a decade
ago this San Diego scientific community General Atomic, the Salk
Institute, and the University of Californiadid not exist. The sites
were owned largely by the city of San Diego under century-old Pueblo
deeds. The city then had only the climate, the property, and the
willingness to part with land in order to encourage the development
of its future city. Other city land nearby went to provide the
site of a million-dollar legitimate theater. City planners pored hard
over designs for University City, a town with a projected population
of about eighty-five thousand, rising on land adjacent to this new
complex.
Part of this grand design has been the dream of Dr. Roger Re-
velle, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and now
the chief research dean of the University of California. Here again is
the compelling voice of a California scientist: "I think we are develop
ing less emphasis in the West on physical things and more on intel
lectual, esthetic, and moral matters. There are signs of greater interest
in good art, literature, and drama and, if you will, in a kind of reli
gion which incorporates a set of values and sense of purpose. We need
this in California perhaps more than most people, because here we
tend to be uprooted. We will get it here because we need it, and
because it naturally follows a life of intellectual and emotional ful
fillment."
Certainly it is too soon to know if this remarkable San Diego
scientific community will be as distinguished as anticipated. But rarely
has a new little world been launched as auspiciously, in an environ
ment of financial abundance, scenic delight, intellectual integrity and
dedication. It comes close to meeting the terms of the vision which
has lured men westward in search of the promised land and the
better life, the quixotic goal held out for the West by Walt Whitman
in Song of the Redwood-Tree:
36) WESTWARD TILT
/ see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years,
till now deferred . . *
The new society at last, proportionate to Nature . . .
Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America,
heir of the past so grand,
To build a grander future.
The Western man of science is not always so philosophical.
A bar at La Jolla is a favorite cocktail stop for some of the bright
young men of the San Diego scientific complex. Recognizing their
creative drives, the proprietor lined the walls of the men s room with
blackboards. Physicists and engineers chalk up imperfect equations
to challenge each other, and Kilroy writes on the walls in Latin.
At the nearby Navy Electronics Laboratory, an order was published
that no more calendar girls were to adorn the walls. The men in the
Human Factors Division, whose job is to predict the frailties of man
kind, set an example of compliance. They moved their nudes to the
ceilings.
Throughout the West, science and industry tend to travel in
tandem.
The Martin Company chose Denver as the site for production
of the Titan missile. Close by, the university town of Boulder gained
sudden stature as a research center, primarily through the establish
ment there in 1960 of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Ever since the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory was set up in
1943 and the Trinity Project came into being in southern New Mex
ico, industry involved with nuclear warfare has been an inherent
part of the Albuquerque economy.
Even Arizona is feeling the birthpangs of a scientific commu
nity. "The world s largest hi-fi set" was built at Litchfield Park by the
Arizona division of Goodyear Aircraft Corporation as part of an en
vironmental testing facility. Old Fort Huachuca, founded in 1877
as an Army outpost to control the warring Apache Indians, is now
the headquarters for a multimillion-dollar military electronics test
range. The Hughes Aircraft Company has been making missiles in
Tucson, not far from Kitt Peak, where a national observatory was
dedicated in 1960. The industrial explosion of Phoenix principally
in electronicshas occurred because Arizona living has seemed attrac
tive to thousands of scientific people and white-collar workers. Backed
by the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Museum of Natural
History has set up a biological research station in Cochise County.
Boeing long has dominated the industrial scene in the Pacific
Science, Industry, and Amenities (37
Northwest, and its space research programs, centered at Seattle, are
the prime intrusion of the laboratory into the more pastoral traditions
of this region. There is an increasing emphasis on research at the
campuses of the University of Washington and the University of
Oregon.
But it is in California that the marriage of science and industry
has reached full flower. Los Angeles presents the clearest example,
but the pattern of white-collar factories for exotic products which has
sprung up in the vicinity of the Stanford University campus, south
of San Francisco, has much in common with the phenomenon of
recent industrial growth near the Harvard campus on the opposite
seaboard. While the output of many of these factories is concerned
with the military establishment, the new scientific-industrial com
munities of the West can no more be dismissed as tenuous than can
the Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology complex. Today
the layman, befuddled by the world of computer and transistor, tends
to classify as "defense work" the production of items which already
are an integral part of his everyday civilian life.
But the West cannot shrug off the hazards of its dependence
on the federal dollar. California received twenty-four cents of each
defense dollar in 1961. In research and development contracts, the
state drew more than forty-one percent, as contrasted with twelve
percent for New York. In the uneasy economy of the summer of 1962,
this had become a national issue. Secretary of Defense Robert Mc-
Namara was defending his department on the grounds that contracts
were going where the work could be performed most efficiently, by
the people best qualified to do it; senators from the East and Midwest
had begun to charge that California was pirating scientific brainpower.
More than half of California s economic growth between 1947 and
1957 was attributable to defense industry. San Diego, which is even
more dependent than Los Angeles, has had seventy-eight per
cent of its total manufacturing employment in the defense industry in
1959; the figure in Los Angeles recently has been estimated at less
than fifty percent. Denver, Albuquerque, Tucson, Phoenix, San Jose,
and Seattle also have an unhealthy reliance on the Pentagon. In most
cases, dependence is declining as these cities struggle to diversify
their economies with non-military industry. Cuts in defense spending,
or elimination of specific production programs from Washington,
react like tidal waves on the people of such cities; thus San Diego was
depressed in 1963 through the staggering losses incurred by General
Dynamics in its jetliner production, and by subsequent declining em
ployment at San Diego plants when General Dynamics failed to bid
successfully for new government contracts.
WESTWARD TILT
The dangers inherent in such federal cities have been described
by Peter Madison in a study for the Falk Foundation Center for
Political Research at the University of California at Los Angeles. The
obvious danger is in the yoyo tendency that prevails because of the
rise and fall of defense contracts. A more subtle danger is that the
forces of a federal economy create a local federal elite "which is in
the community, but no longer wholly of the community. The federal
elite in the Los Angeles area in science, industry, and the military
helps shape the great decisions of national security. Their counsel is
and must be based on national needs. Yet the elite s decisions, also
vital to this federal community, have been made with the community
as a bystander. A federal city sees the ironic paradox of its own
citizens helping shape its destiny without reference to community
needs."
A former Los Angeles mayor, Norris Poulson, stated: "All they
want or need from us is services and low taxes. . . . They give to
local charities, they mean well; but they re just not seriously interested
nowadays in local matters."
J. R. Dempsey of San Diego put it this way: "We spend a great
deal of time at the plant. Most of our waking moments and energies
are wrapped around building missiles and the other things we are
building now. When we leave the plant, we tend to look for relaxation
and not to participate in community affairs probably to the detriment
of upholding our real responsibilities in the community. In my work,
I am traveling a good deal of the time, and an evening at home is
something that I cherish. I don t like to go to civic dinners or lunches
because it takes time. Time is our most critical commodity."
It was Thomas G. Lanphier, Jr., a former vice president of
General Dynamics Convair, who commuted from his home in La
Jolla to the East Coast fifty-nine times in one year. His case is ex
treme, but not unusual. No community should hope for any degree
of local involvement from a man who must live like this. The remark
able thing is the extent of community contribution that often is made
by many men of this caliber, even in federal cities like Los Angeles
and San Diego.
About one in every ten persons employed in Southern California
is working in an industry which depends primarily on defense con
tracts; and while increased defense spending has heightened the po
tential hazards of the federal city in Southern California, another
familiar hazard has proved to be exaggerated that of Southern Cali
fornia s "weather-oriented" income. Only about one percent of the
Los Angeles work force is in the movie business. Tourist spending
accounts for only about two percent of California income. The elderly
population coming to California for retirement is no longer a signifi-
Science , Industry , <znJ Amenities
cant economic factor. California has a lower ratio of persons sixty-five
years old or over than the national average: 8.8 percent in California,
as against nine percent for the nation, and nine to ten percent in
Ohio, New Jersey, and New York.
In vivid contrast with past eras, when the image of California
was tinged by its aged, one of the most significant population re
sources today is the highly trained young technician and scientist.
The number of California members in the National Academy of
Sciences has climbed steadily in recent years until it is the largest of
any state. In 1962, there were one hundred and thirty-five academi
cians from California, one hundred and four from New York, and
ninety-three from Massachusetts. Yet the same problems of cleavage
exist between the scientist and the community as between the industri
alist of the federal city and his community.
It is not a Western phenomenon that the non-scientific commu
nity is woefully unaware of the work of the new scientific-industrial
community; this is a national failing. But it may be most obvious
in the West. A woman reporter in Los Angeles, assigned to interview
a visiting Nobel Prize winner, asked him what he could tell her about
his work.
"What do you know about physics?" he asked.
"Nothing, really," she said.
"Then I m afraid I can t tell you anything," he said.
In San Diego, a poll in 1960 showed that only thirty-eight
percent of the citizens knew the principal product of the city s largest
factory, General Dynamics Astronautics, manufacturer of the Atlas
missile. The situation is probably not much different in other com
munities. Today s citizen is prone to assume that the product of the
bizarre new factory which has no smokestacks, no railroad siding, and
makes no odor is mysterious and complex. It is another thing when a
man can smell the burning rubber at the tire factory, or see the steel
desks being loaded into a box car. But the Atlas missile is taken
from its birthplace under canvas, and a million dollars worth of tiny
electronics parts may roll out of the Motorola plant in Phoenix at
night on a single truck and trailer. It is a pity that the layman does
not make the effort to understand the missile or the transistor as he
did the tire and the desk; the chasm widens between the scientist-
industrialist and the rest of his community.
One of the most formidable fortresses of this kind of spurious
mystery is the think factory, whose occupants usually prefer that their
places of business be known by almost any other name. The most
notable one in the West is a long low building on Main Street in
Santa Monica. It is unadorned by neon or gaudy lettering, and it is
protected by blue-uniformed guards. The RAND Corporation, once
40) WESTWARD TILT
described by the Russians as "an American academy of death and
destruction," has been more aptly termed an "arsenal for ideas."
RAND was the first and has remained the largest of the pure think
factories. It is a non-profit research corporation which was formed
soon after the end of World War II, a time when Air Force generals
grew disturbed by the fact that the scientists who had helped win
the war were heading back to their campuses. RAND was conceived
by General Hap Arnold.
It was unprecedented then to gather scientists together for
studies vital to national security in a university-like setting rather
than an industrial environment. Now there are others, such as Lincoln
Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Institute
of Air Weapons Research at the University of Chicago.
The RAND staff totals over one thousand, with a professional
staff of about six hundred. Standard RAND gags give a hint of its
functions. ("It has no IN basket, only an OUT basket"; and "RAND
stands not for research and development, but for research and no
development")
RAND is in California primarily because Douglas Aircraft Com
pany offered it a temporary home. An original RAND staff member
recalls General Arnold s dictum: "Get as far away from Washington
as you can and still be in the United States."
I spent an afternoon at RAND with Brownlee Haydon, an
assistant to the president. He is a soft-spoken, patient and deliberate
man who takes seriously his responsibility of bridging the gap be
tween the lay mind and the research mind. "We have a sixteen-year
record of not spilling the beans," Haydon said. "We are trusted with
secrets both by industry and the Air Force." But without involving
national security, some RAND accomplishments can be cited. For
instance, the Air Force, the largest business in the world (it dwarfs
General Motors ) , with its aircraft spread all over the globe a decade
ago, was stockpiling replacement engines in hundreds of different
locations. RAND told the Air Force to stockpile only minor, everyday
replacement parts and to airlift engines when necessary. This deci
sion, reached by logistic research done by mathematicians at RAND,
has saved the taxpayer millions of dollars.
In 1947, when the United States stood on the threshold of
supersonic flight, even before the missile age, RAND turned to the
study of exotic metals that were light, strong, and heat-resistant.
RAND scientists examined the periodic tables and urged the United
States to spend money in improving the ductility of beryllium; they
called it a "dream metal." Today, beryllium is used in missile nose
cones.
Science, Industry, and Amenities (42
Although RAND is most closely related to the Air Force, the
benefits of such studies go to all the services and are shared by the
nation as a whole. RAND also does research for the AEC, ARPA,
NASA, and other government agencies. In its work, the company
wends its way meticulously along the thorny path of competitive en
terprise, often playing a catalytic role. The Air Force once contracted
with rival firms for two missiles. Both firms were working with
RAND on design problems. One firm had failed to solve its propulsion
problems. The other had guidance troubles. RAND advised the Air
Force to take the front end of one company s missile and the rear end
of the other, almost literally bolting them together for a test.
The Air Force listened, signed a joint contract with the two
firms, and a well-known missile was the result.
A typical project at RAND involves many specialists. Chemist,
propulsion engineer, material engineer, physicist, mathematician and
aerodynamicist all may bring their training into focus on a single
project.
An engineer at RAND may dream up a rocket which is then
examined by his colleagues. A physicist would tell him how it can
carry a weapon; an economist would tell him how expensive it would
be; then a RAND social scientist might ask, "Do you really want
that kind of weapon?"
RAND is a young man s company, but it has grown a little older
since its start. The average age of personnel is about thirty-seven.
More than half of those actually engaged in research have graduate
degrees, and more than one-fourth of these are doctorates. A typical
starting salary for a Ph.D. from Princeton or the University of
Chicago at RAND is nine thousand five hundred dollars, but such men
may have turned down pay of fourteen thousand elsewhere. "All my
heroes are at RAND," said one young Ph.D.
To the science-oriented youth of the 1960*8, the West indeed
may seem as much a land of outsized heroes as to the schoolboy of
another generation who found his heroes in the West of Zane Grey.
Californians alone make up forty percent of the roster of men named
in 1960 by Fortune as "great American scientists," and they number
forty-seven percent of those named in the same year by Time (a
variation of opinion between Henry Luce s science editors ) . The heroes
of the new West are men not of the past, but of the future. That
seems appropriate; the new West is dominated by the young, and
best understood by them, just as the changing terms of science and
industry are grasped most readily by the young. It is within the
power of these fresh young waves of Westerners to give shape and
meaning to the new world about which they display such intensity.
THE EDUCATION
RUSH
From the special public school classes for emotionally disturbed chil
dren at Las Vegas to the nuclear laboratories on the teeming Cali
fornia university campuses, the new West has embraced education as a
creature of its own discovery, a panacea for the ills of violent growth
and a talisman through which the West will fulfill its dream.
California has been building a new school a day. Sixty-two
cents of the tax dollar in California more than a billion dollars
a year goes to education of some sort. It is possible for a Californian
to ascend to the most obscure heights of graduate study at state ex
pense.
At frigid Bozeman, Montana, a modern, circular field house
and a new chemistry building have risen on the campus of Montana
State College just across the street from a little white farmhouse and
a pasture which marks the start of the Montana rangeland. The six
campuses of the University of Montana have only eleven thousand
students, and the seven campuses of the University of California have
more than sixty thousand; but Montana is adapting the progressive
California master plan of education to its own needs.
The Education Rush (43
Phoenix businessmen, restless at legislative budget delays, have
tossed sure-fire real estate speculations into their Arizona State Univer
sity Foundation; as much as half a million dollars has been available
to begin a campus construction project before the Arizona legislature
could clear its appropriation. Like all the West, Arizona is a state
largely dependent on public educational facilities; the territory was
settled after the state university had taken hold as a favorite American
institution.
At Colorado Springs, in 1961, before the new Air Force Acad
emy had reached its full four-year complement of cadets, three cadets
were among the thirty-two Rhodes Scholars chosen in the United
States. Only Harvard, with eight, and Yale, with four, exceeded that
number. Three Western campuses ranked in 1962 among the top
eleven in the nation in the cumulative number of Rhodes Scholars
since 1904: Stanford, with twenty-six, and the University of Washing
ton and little Reed College in Portland, each with twenty-one. (Selec
tions from Southern California campuses have been notably sparse. )
Utah, thirty-seventh in the nation in personal income, leads the
nation in percentage of college graduates. From the main Mormon
campus, Brigham Young University at Provo, an educational empire
has been launched by Dr. Ernest L. Wilkinson, a former Washington
attorney who once won a thirty-five-million-dollar mineral-rights settle
ment from the United States government for the tiny Ute Indian
tribe. Brigham Young, with more than twelve thousand students, is
among the largest church-related institutions in the nation. Its student
body was ninety-three percent Mormon in 1961. Smoking is forbidden
on the campus; and the Mormon curriculum emphasizes courses in
family living, sociology, social sciences and nursing. The church owns
sites throughout the West where junior colleges are planned.
In the idyllic mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico, a new campus
is being built for the nation s third oldest college, St. John s College
of Annapolis, Maryland. At Annapolis, St. John s confines itself to
three hundred students and to a four-year liberal arts curriculum built
around great books; it has abolished the departmental system and
eliminated majors and minors at the undergraduate level. St. John s
College in Santa Fe will be a Western echo of the Annapolis campus.
Forty communities offered sites to St. John s; the selection narrowed
to three sites in California and to Santa Fe. There, St. John s will be
an institution unique in the Southwest.
The Berkeley campus of the University of California added its
ninth Nobel laureate in 1961. With the two additional Nobel laureates
on University of California campuses at Los Angeles and San Diego,
the University is the runaway leader in the Nobel Prize sweepstakes;
WESTWARD TILT
it has enough of them to field a football team. (Stanford and Harvard
have five, and the California Institute of Technology has three. ) Cali
fornia has about nine percent of the nation s population and about
eleven percent of its total personal income; but Californians are prone
to boast that thirty-seven percent of the living United States winners
of Nobel Prizes reside in California, and that twenty-eight percent
of the living United States Nobel laureates earned degrees in Cali
fornia colleges and universities. Twenty-two percent of the members
of the National Academy of Sciences live in California; in 1961, the
University of California was tied with Harvard for leadership in
number of academicians.
The stresses of growth among Western colleges are of such an
awesome nature that higher education there has become more clearly
a critical public challenge than elsewhere. Facing unparalleled quan
tity, Western educators and Western taxpayers have become acutely
quality-conscious.
The college-age population of California will double between
1960 and 1970. In those years, the college-age group is expected
to rise in New York by only forty-five percent, and in Illinois by
fifty-eight percent. Only two states, both much smaller, will have
sharper increases than California: Nevada s college-age group will
rise from fourteen thousand to thirty-two thousand, and Arizona s from
seventy thousand to one hundred and forty-five thousand.
The result of this challenge in California was an academic
armistice which halted overlapping between state institutions and set
an orderly pattern of growth. A master plan for higher education was
enacted by the California Legislature in 1960. It laid down ground
rules for the University of California, the sixteen state colleges and
about seventy junior colleges. It committed the University to main
taining intellectual leadership by limiting its enrollment to the top
thirteen percent of high school graduates, and by reserving for the
university the right to bestow doctoral degrees. It restricted state
college admissions to the upper one-third (junior colleges are open
to all high school graduates). The bill also encouraged chancellors of
the seven university campuses to develop autonomy and diversity,
despite their joint budget and joint academic senate.
This pioneering California plan for education seems to be work
ing. Sooner than the rest of the nation California faced the challenge of
sheer quantity in higher education. Studying the successes and flaws
of California techniques, other states have been girding for the new
peaks of enrollment which lie ahead. There is something for everyone
in this sharp division among university, state college and junior col
lege; but it is designed to bring the better student to" the better teacher
The Education Rush (4$
and to avoid clogging the upper reaches of the university system with
the casual student. Another revolutionary technique has been sched
uled for inauguration in the summer of 1963: a year-round university
operation created by the addition of a twelve-week summer semester.
For the student, it will mean the opportunity to complete college in
three years instead of four; for the University of California, it will
mean accommodating more students in existing facilities, the equiva
lent of adding a new campus for seventeen thousand students at no
further cost for buildings or equipment.
Thus the West is no longer an educational wilderness. At least
three California campuses rank on any list among the dozen most
distinguished of the nation: the University of California at Berkeley,
Stanford University at Palo Alto, and the California Institute of
Technology at Pasadena. Berkeley and Stanford have large enroll
ments: close to twenty-five thousand at Berkeley and nearly ten thou
sand at Stanford. Caltech is compared often to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in everything except size; its student body is
fewer than fifteen hundred, but its faculty is in excess of four hundred.
The significance of these campuses is not limited to science.
The University of California began to achieve its preeminence in
science at a time when Russian scientific advances had swung the
United States attention sharply in that direction. But the Berkeley
scientific picture has been overemphasized; the humanities prosper
also. The English department at Berkeley includes among its scholars
Mark Schorer, Henry Nash Smith, Bertrand H. Bronson, George R.
Stewart, and James D. Hart. The history department is outstanding;
and philosophy, art, and music are strong.
The University of California s extent and influence is awesome.
The unparalleled mechanization of California farms is due largely to
the experimentation over the years at the Davis campus, which has
made the transition from cow campus to a school of genuine agricul
tural science. The University reaches nine hundred miles away to
operate the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, and it oversees seven
oceangoing ships; it owns hospitals at Los Angeles and San Francisco.
At its Livermore Radiation Laboratory, its physicists operate one of
the world s notable nuclear research centers. It owns 25,877 acres,
parks twenty thousand cars, employs three thousand professors, offers
eight thousand courses, and spends more than a third of a billion
dollars each year. Anxious that size not dominate, the University of
California was busy early in 1963 with plans for a cluster of twenty
small liberal arts colleges to be built on its Santa Cruz campus, a
forested, two-thousand acre-expanse overlooking Monterey Bay.
The University Extension of the University of California is the
WESTWARD TILT
largest In enrollment and scope, and its students amount to more than
one-fourth of all extension students of public universities In the nation.
The typical California Extension student Is a married man, thirty-two
years old, who has attended college. Three out of five Extension stu
dents have bachelor degrees, and one in ten has a graduate degree.
In 1962, more than one hundred and fifty thousand Calif ornians
met under Extension auspices in two hundred and eleven communities
for courses, discussion programs, and conferences on subjects ranging
from Spoken Mandarin to Urban Development, from Mortuary
Science to Thermal Management of Spacecraft, Two out of every
three California lawyers sharpen their wits on current legal matters
by attending Extension courses, and In the summer of 1962, a course
for doctors involved a field trip to Japan for the study of the side
effects of oral contraceptives*
There are more than one thousand Extension courses and semi
nars, which are mainly taught by academic men and women but
often by high-powered specialists. Elizabeth Arden has been an Ex
tension teacher, and so have Dr. Edward Teller, George Gamow, and
Erskine Caldwell. Extension students have studied violin under
Jascha Heifete, physics under Harold Urey, and been taught creative
writing by Aldous Huxley.
In the Los Angeles area It has become difficult to find enough
buildings to accommodate University Extension students. Classes in
philosophy conducted by Dr. Abraham Kaplan had to be televised
by closed circuit. Classes In political science, announced during the
Presidential campaign of 1960, were sold out so rapidly that more
than five hundred refunds had to be made. A course in prehistoric
and medieval arts conducted by Dr. Karl With was announced for
a classroom which would hold thirty-seven students; attendance finally
Was frozen at five hundred and twenty-five after an elementary school
auditorium had been acquired for the class sessions.
In a recent school term, fourteen Los Angeles men, each one a
Doctor of Philosophy, went to Extension officials with a request for a
night course In the Theory of Games. Extension knew just where to
find its man; the mantle fell on a physicist from the RAND Corpora
tion, a man not a bit awed by the caliber of his students.
Partly because of its hyperactive University Extension, Cali
fornia is the most-schooled state of the nation. It leads the states in
expenditures for public schools, in number of high school graduates,
and in enrollment and attendance at public schools and colleges. It
ranks second only to Utah in median school years completed by per
sons twenty-five years of age and older, Los Angeles men and
The Education Rush
women in the 25-10-29 age bracket have an unprecedented median
education levelbeyond the thirteenth school year.
Though these facts seem hopeful, it is also true that California
falls behind New York in conferring degrees (more Calif ornians drop
out of college ) and in graduate study. It also lags in the number of
public school teachers, indicating that larger classes still prevail than
in some other states.
Only one in five California college students are on the campuses
of private institutions. Stanford University is the most prestigious of
the independent universities in the West. The University of Southern
California (at Los Angeles) is the largest, with about fourteen thou
sand students. After Stanford, second in size, the independent univer
sities drop away sharply in enrollment: among Denver University,
Seattle University, the University of the Pacific (at Stockton) and
the University of San Diego, there is no student body in excess of
four thousand. Among independent colleges which do not rank as
universities, California Institute of Technology leads the field in the
sciences. Notable in many fields are the Claremont Colleges, a federa
tion of five independent colleges east of Los Angeles, with a combined
student body of fewer than five thousand.
Measured in quantity, the independent schools of California have
a small role, but the quality of many is exceptional. They anticipate
the ability to almost double their student capacity by 1975. Neverthe
less, the staggering fact is that the college-age avalanche in California
is so great that the independents share of students by then will have
dropped from one in five to one in ten.
Even at Stanford, which has a reputation in the West as a rich
man s school, four out of five students are from public schools. This is
an unusual proportion for a university like Stanford, but it is not
unusual for the West. However, Western universities no longer
are attended almost entirely by Westerners. Phillips Andover and
Phillips Exeter lead in private schools contributing students to Stan
ford; both are Eastern schools, and the Stanford students coming from
them are about half Eastern and half Western in origins. The Cali
fornia Institute of Technology has spread its net across the country;
only about half the students are Calif ornians. This has given Dr.
Lee DuBridge, the president, a unique opportunity to explore regional
differences in education. He has found that students attending private
schools in the East often are better prepared for college than Western
students, but he believes Western public schools prepare students
better than do those of many Eastern states. Caltech is one of the
schools which skim the cream of the high school market. With only
WESTWARD TILT
one exception in its president 1 s memory, every Caltech student who
has been admitted has also been accepted at the other institutions to
which he has applied.
The scholastic aristocracy of the Caltech student is exceeded
only by that of the faculty. The average student IQ at Caltech is
one hundred and forty-two; the average faculty IQ has not been made
known. But that distinguished body includes astronomers, working
under Ira S. Bowen, who man observatories at Palomar Mountain
and Mount Wilson and huge twin radio telescopes at Owens Valley,
all in Southern California. It also includes chemists like Linus Pauling,
a Nobel laureate who has been outspoken on the issues of nuclear war,
but who is not above probing the chemical qualities of a commercial
chlorophyll deodorant (he once announced that a popular deodorant
did not banish odor, but that it did paralyze the sense of smell ) . At
Caltech young theoretical physicists like Kicharcl P. Feynman and
Murray Gell-Mann have pioneered in research on the decay of evanes
cent nuclear particles. It is not always easy to distinguish between
the young faculty and undergraduates as they huddle in discussion in
the sunshine of the sedate Caltech campus, or mingle in the Caltech
laboratories, which outnumber classrooms by four-to-one.
The Caltech seismological laboratory has contributed as much as
any on earth to the understanding of earthquakes, seismic waves, and
the structure of the earth. A strain gauge devised at Caltech is sensitive
enough to detect a shift of one-sixteenth of an inch between the West
and East coasts. The jet-propulsion laboratory at Caltech is one of
several departments which has fostered the space-age industrial de
velopment of Southern California in much the same way as Massa
chusetts Institute of Technology has fathered a scientific cluster near
Boston. (In 1961, a wind tunnel at Caltech was junked because its
maximum test speed, only 1.2 times the speed of sound, rendered it
useless for testing aircraft and space vehicles then being engineered
by the industrial companies which had pooled funds to build the
tunnel with Caltech. It had been radically revised during the fifteen
years since it had been built in order to double its speed, but by 1961
it was obsolete.)
This all-star faculty, with the highest percentage of members of
any American college in the National Academy of Sciences, is the
pride of President DuBridge, who has been referred to as the senior
statesman of science. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Caltech in 1926,
under his distinguished predecessor as president, Physicist Robert A.
Millikan. Caltech in its present form was then only six years old.
But by that year, Millikan had gathered a small group of able scien
tists on his olive-shaded campus and there was a spark of the devotion
The Education Rush
to pure science which later was to blaze. At Berkeley, the University
of California was barely beginning to give warning of its future
greatness. Across Los Angeles at Westwood, building was getting
under way on the campus of the University of California at Los
Angeles.
After recalling those early days at Caltech, Lee DuBridge said
recently, "California scientists and educators were seldom seen in the
East before World War II, and there was a kind of separate colony
out here. Once you were in California, you might get back to see
your friends in the East once a year, or once in five years. Very few
Californians were on government boards or involved in the governing
boards of professional and scientific societies."
Today, DuBridge s list of active affiliations in national societies
and boards is enormous. "But I m not even a good example," he pro
tested, "because I ve been reducing my affiliations. Many other West
ern educators have many more. It is common to see professors travel
ing back and forth to meetings in the East five, seven, ten or fifteen
times a year. I see these same faces on the jets. Yet the Eastern edu
cator who comes to California once a year thinks he has done a
tremendous thing. We are trying to get our Eastern counterparts ac
climated to the idea of three or four trips each year to the West to
attend meetings and participate in affairs out here. Now it s the
Easterner who needs to be educated. The Easterner has not learned
that you can cross the country in four or five hours. He is the
provincial one now!"
Caltech boasts of five alumni who are Nobel laureates: Pauling,
Carl D. Anderson, who discovered the positive electron and the mu
meson; Edwin McMillan, the physicist who went on to the University
of California to work on the synchrotron; William Shockley, a physi
cist who did basic research with Bell Laboratories leading to the
transistor; and Donald Glaser, who invented the hydrogen bubble
chamber, now such an important tool in nuclear physics investigations.
Two of these men, Anderson and Pauling, serve on the Caltech
faculty. Three other Nobel Prize winners (Robert A. Millikan,
Thomas Hunt Morgan, biologist, and George W. Beadle, biologist,
now president of the University of Chicago), also served for long
periods at the university. In 1961, a new and young member of the
Caltech faculty, Rudolf Mossbauer, was awarded the Nobel Prize
for his brilliant work on the emission of gamma rays from atomic
nuclei. Other alumni who have made their names famous in techno
logical industry are Marquardt, Beckman, Ramo, and Wooldridge.
Caltech students do not confine their high IQ to pure science.
The word for their football team is sincere; it once lost twenty-five
JO) WESTWARD TILT
games in succession. The Caltech man excels in extra-curricular fields
where the Caltech mind and not the body -is challenged. Igniting
a homecoming bonfire on a rival campus prematurely is not in itself
an ingenious prank, but Caltech men once did it through the use of
what seemed to be a log, but turned out to be a radio-controlled
napalm fire bomb. The classic triumph of extra-curricular Caltech
ingenuity occurred at the Rose Bowl game of 1961. One under
graduate posed as a reporter and interviewed the leader of the thou
sand-man University of Washington card stunt cheering section.
During the next two days, in a frenzied burst of activity, and with
the aid of a printer and a series of lock-picking invasions of hotel rooms
occupied by Washington undergraduates, the Caltech men set their
stage meticulously. At half-time during the Rose Bowl game, with all
the nation watching over television, the University of Washington
student body spelled out CALTECH instead of WASHINGTON,
displayed a Caltech beaver instead of a Washington husky, and
spelled HUSKIES -backwards. In the summer of 1962, a Caltech
graduate student understandably called for help from Pasadena police
when he faced the head of a seven-foot anaconda snake emerging
from a bathroom fixture. Another Caltech student and two
friends had been tugging on the other end of the anaconda from
another apartment. The anaconda had been their own secret, and
they faced its loss reluctantly. The opposing factions tugged for more
than an hour before learning they were at odds over the snake; then
the Humane Society took over.
With its raids on Eastern faculties, Stanford has gone far toward
justifying its intention of becoming the "Harvard of the West." Stan
ford has been emphasizing the humanities and social sciences. Among
the distinguished men who joined the faculty in 1961 were Gordon A.
Craig, professor of German history, after twenty-five years at Prince
ton; Albert J. Guerard, literary critic, after twenty-three years at
Harvard; Albert H. Hastorf, former chairman of the psychology de
partment at Dartmouth; David M. Potter, American history professor,
after nineteen years at Yale; and Emile Despres, former head of the
economics department at Williams. Fifteen professors moved from
Ivy League faculties alone to Stanford between 1957 and 1961.
Some of these men had their first introduction to Stanford
and to the West during sabbatical years spent at the Center for Ad
vanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on a wooded knoll just one
mile west of the Stanford campus. The center referred to colloquially
as "the Casbah," a vaguely phonetic attempt to meld the first
letters of the Center s awkward name was established by the Ford
Foundation to provide one year s free work time to fifty post-doctoral
The Education Rush ( j/
fellows. The Center, which pays the salary of the fellow for the year,
is a gem of Western architecture: redwood and glass, set informally in
a grove of oak trees, with Stanford s Hoover Tower looming below
in the flatland toward San Francisco Bay. It is reached by a narrow,
winding road that rises from a terrain of rolling fields. Bicycles are
parked beside the cattle gate which serves as the entrance to the
Center, and an old water cistern stands nearby, enhancing the pastoral
setting. A gardener and a cook are in attendance. Each fellow is pro
vided his own office: an informal room with floor-to-ceiling glass
facing outward toward the trees. Each office has a chaise longue and a
desk with two file drawers and a dictating device. The Center requires
nothing of its fellows; the result is that most of them work at a furious
pace.
But even here, there is time for frivolity. When I visited the
Center, a notice on the bulletin board had been posted by Dr. Abraham
Kaplan, the philosopher from University of California at Los Angeles,
that galley proofs of his book, The New World of Philosophy, were
available in the Center library. "To those who are interested," Kaplan s
memo concluded brashly, "my counsel is, lose no time in reading
them!" Another bulletin-board notice concerned "an academic jazz
combo" which would play at a forthcoming social for fellows and
their wives. One of the American astronauts was in space on the
morning that I visited the Center, but it was difficult in its insulated
setting to find any relation between that world, and this.
The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
was established with a five-million dollar Ford Foundation grant in
1954. Directors had considered five possible locations in the areas of
Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco. A
poll had been made in 1953 of those chosen as the first fellows, and
the vote clearly indicated a preference for a Western location.
"The reasons the Center was established at Stanford are simple,"
Preston Cutler, assistant director of the Center, told me. "There is a
good year-round climate. There is a great deal of building in the
area, and adequate housing available for the fellows and their families.
There are leading educational and library resources in the area. Dis
tance is of considerable importance. Most people who come to the
Center are farther away from home here than in the other locations;
geographical isolation is a positive factor for work like this. Then
there is a rather strong component in the romantic idea of spending
a year with one s family in California. For those fellows who later
move to the West, and there have been many, it is partly the climate,
partly that they see the West as a growing area with more academic
opportunities, and partly just the simple fact of having made contact."
j.2 ) WESTWARD TILT
A sort of running mate to the Center, In the stratosphere of
scholastic research, is the Center for the Study of Democratic Institu
tions. It was set up on a sunny hilltop estate in Santa Barbara by the
Fund for the Republic under Dr. Robert M. Hutchins, who regards
Santa Barbara as just as much in the American mainstream as his
former haunt the University of Chicago. The Center operates on a
million-dollar-a-year budget. Its savants gather each morning at
eleven in a conference room facing the Pacific; for two weeks each
year, they are joined by many of the great scholars of the world.
In the words of Dr. Hutchins: **We are the only institution in the
world trying to carry on what used to be called a civil conversation
. . . free from any ideology, without polemics, solely as a process of
learning." Early in 1963, the Center was battling for funds to survive.
The terminal grant from the Forcl Foundation to the Fund for the
Republic will expire early in 1964, and twenty million dollars is
sought to underwrite the studies of the Center in the next decade.
Political conservatives have labeled the Center as "little Moscow on
the hill." But Justice William 0, Douglas insists the Center is con
ducting the most important educational work in the United States
today.
But what of the less esoteric institutions of the West? The
University of California has been subject to sniping on the grounds
that it uses its Nobel laureates as window dressing. Is the University
emphasizing research to the detriment of the job of teaching its under
graduates? Is it not a mark of the academic nomeaux riches to cite its
ascendancy in Nobel laureates, in Guggenheim fellows, in Rhodes
scholars, in raids from Eastern faculties? At Berkeley, Allan Temko,
an architectural critic and lecturer in journalism, told me: "Our stu
dents have little sense of custodianship, as at Harvard and Columbia,
where they are taught as students are in England that they are the
elite, that they are in training to run the country, to be the best,"
The excitements and the dangers of higher education in the
West were sensed acutely by Dr. Samuel B, Gould, who served for
three years as chancellor of the Santa Barbara campus of the Univer
sity of California before going to New York City in the summer of
K)6z to direct an educational television network. Gould had come
West in 1959 after five years as president of Antioch College in
Ohio. His reputation in education is that of a fiery conservative. At
Antioch he had made his name as an outspoken champion of intel-
lectualism. His move to the West had shocked his scholastic fellows;
his departure for the East reassured many of them that their biases
against Western education were accurate.
The Education Rush
"The picture that one has back East I had it before I came here
of higher education in California is a kind of playboy picture: big
athletic events, fraternities and sororities, and the wonderful outdoor
life of year-round swimming parties," Gould said before he left the
West. "In many ways it was true here at Santa Barbara. I have been
changing that. We have the best freshman class scholastically in the
history of the institution. This is just the beginning. We will be
able here to create a climate for learning, the kind of climate that I
think is going to make a tremendous difference on the West Coast.
"I came West to find out something. I was head of a very fine
institution of excellent academic reputation. A lot of people thought
I must be out of my mind to come here and take on a minor role in a
tremendous university system that heretofore had never distinguished
itself particularly. But I wanted to find the answer to one thing
that s never been discovered, as far as I know: Is it possible in an
institution of great size, as is going to be the case all over our country
with many of our institutions, to build quality, and personal relation
ships between faculty and students? Can you get quality in mass edu
cation? Everybody says it is not possible that you must adapt your
self to so many realities and make so many compromises that you
might as well settle for a kind of mass mediocrity. I don t believe it.
No one has ever kept foremost this matter of interpersonal relation
ships: the student as an individual and the things you can do for him
as an individual, even though he is part of a tremendous number.
This is what we are going to do here. The ratio here of student to
professor is as low or lower as in some of the small colleges: one
and thirteen.
"I think California is just coming into its cultural heritage," he
said, "just beginning to mature, to take the place which it should have
and will have in the whole American and world structures. Something
different and exciting is happening here. To a certain kind of educator,
this has tremendous appeal, even though he may have great security
where he is. There also is a great feeling of adventuresomeness and
pioneering in coming West. The center of the United States, and
therefore the center of a good part of the world, is going to be con
centrated here in the next twenty-five to thirty years. It is important,
if you want to be in the mainstream of things, to be where these
things are going to happen.
cc We have a tremendous reservoir of all kinds of things here in
the West and at Santa Barbara: human talent, energies, resources.
Leaders in all walks of life are expressing their tremendous interest in
helping us. Industry is seeking out combinations of physical and
intellectual climate today, with a very important impact adding a
WESTWARB TILT
new dimension to the whole conception of business. Today s en
lightened industrialist is eager to have his people as close as possible
to the cultural influences that he knows will make a richer life for
them. We have it in Santa Barbara, with the coming of research
divisions of General Motors, Raytheon, General Electric s TEMPO,
and a host of smaller companies. This means that the whole feeling of
America has changed. This is happening out West, I think, more
than anywhere else. This is what I have great hope for, up and down
our coast.
"What lies at the heart of this Westward movement is something
that is a part of the American character. It s a good thing to have
it out in the open again. God knows we need it, Americans have
essential characteristics that many people have forgotten about. One
is that we are revolutionary. The second is that we are pioneers. The
two relate, of course. This is what took us out of New England and
Pennsylvania and sent us into Kentucky and later into Nebraska and
all the way to Oregon. There was a feeling that you ve got to go and
do something somewhere else, for the sake of building something
else. Americans have a general unrest, an unwillingness to be shack
led, to be put into a mold. These two characteristics of Americans
need to be cultivated continuingly, because we are in such danger of
falling into a stereotype. These are the spirits that are bringing people
to the West.
"Things can be done here, I think it s terribly important that
they be done, because this has become the center of a good part of the
American world,"
And what of these aspirations for the West when in 1962 he
left the West for New York? Tacitly, he said he still believed it
possible to blend quality with quantity in the massive University of
California system. Although in his three years at Santa Barbara,
Gould had fought to bring in renowned teachers and new educational
ideas to bolster the undergraduate students, it was an era in which
the university was more interested in adding graduate research scien
tists to the faculties; prestige, rather than the personal and individual
development of the student, seemed a paramount consideration to
university regents. Gould s primary concern was with the under
graduate. He was silent on the subject, but many of his friends
speculated that his dreams had been stalled by the organizational
bureaucracy of the giant university system. Yet he said, earnestly:
"I would still love to come back to Santa Barbara. I still think the
West is the great potential for the United States of the future."
Western provincialism is more apparent among educators today
than in other spheres of Western life. There is an unwillingness to
The Education Rush ( jj
understand that the West owes much to the East in education, as in
other matters, and a lack of historical perspective can be injurious to
the forward march of educational technique. Some Western educators
are disbelieving when confronted with evidence that their pet theories
or devices have been in use for years in the East. In educational
fields one sometimes feels that the spirit of California is developing
into a kind of nationalism. There is not always found in the West
the same dedication of intellect that distinguishes some older cam
puses.
Yet the new symbol of the West is intellectual activity. It is a
Western yearning to have an activity even an avocation that re
quires considerable knowledge and the exercise of brain power. The
new Westerner is oriented to education and to the campus. With his
prosperity and his leisure, he is able to insist and he is beginning to
do so that new generations be schooled to a degree and in numbers
heretofore unknown in world history.
Western education has outgrown some of the embarrassments
of adolescence, like the loyalty-oath furor after World War II which
for a time threatened to split the University of California. Its troubles
are not over: witness the unhappy smear campaign, the product of a
small band of extremist Californians, which helped to drive Dr. Buell
G. Gallagher in 1962 back to the College of the City of New York,
after a six-month tenure as first chancellor of the huge California
state college system. But Western educators have developed an apti
tude for innovation. They have learned new ways to encourage clas
sical scholarship and research at the same time that they train engi
neers and practitioners. Necessity has fathered a flexibility in the
West which will be influential in the American educational system.
In the West, prosperity has brought with it a compulsion to
excel to justify the region, and to justify the Westerner for having
gone West. In the opinion of the Westerner, education is one way to
do it. The motives for the education boom in the West may be held
suspect by some, but the results have become impressive. With the
continuing influx of distinguished scholars to Western campuses, its
raw enthusiasm will be mellowed. If the West is to spur a golden
renaissance of the nation, that stir of evangelistic zeal will be felt
first on the Western campus.
OF ONE THING, LESS
Hate
fr
Hillsborough is a suburban town south of San Francisco which has
been a sanctum of inherited wealth. One Sunday afternoon in 1962,
after visiting friends on the fringe of Hillsborough, I turned on to
Skyline Drive for the run back along the hilly ridgepole of the San
Francisco Peninsula to the city. Just outside Hillsborough, taken by
the sight of a fog bank rolling in off the Pacific to fill the valleys
while the sun shone with fine golden unconcern on the hills, I pulled
off the highway and found myself at an attractive golf club called
Crystal Springs.
In a moment, I had quite forgotten the spectacle of the fog.
The bar and club rooms of Crystal Springs were almost filled with
Negroes. A few whites were scattered through the club, but on the
golf course, coming in from their games, were only Negroes. Notably,
the bartenders were Chinese. One Negro woman, just in off the course,
her hair in pin curlers, sat at the bar fanning herself with a ten-dollar
bill. Whole families lounged in ease while their men golfed.
A small postscript, added to the Crystal Springs sign beside
Skyline Drive, told the story: OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Inside, on a
Of One Thing, Less: Hate
bulletin board, was a placard announcing that another country club
some miles distant was "now inviting public play."
Crystal Springs obviously was a weekend escape from the less
glamorous living conditions of the crowded Negro ghettos of San
Francisco. But in his suburban break for freedom, the San Francisco
Negro was not ghettoized; Crystal Springs clearly was in rich man s
country.
In the course of the next several days I discussed the status of
minorities in San Francisco with some of the most knowledgeable
leaders of the city. Not one of them had heard of any battle to de
segregate Crystal Springs. There had not, in fact, been a battle. What
I had stumbled on there was another scrap of evidence of the strong,
silent evolution of minority rights in the new West. None of the San
Francisco leaders to whom I talked seemed to be conscious of where
Negroes were playing golf or even if they were playing at all. This
attitude was reminiscent of the story told by A. P. Tureaud, a long
time attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, in New Orleans. He said he went to Thurgood
Marshall, now a federal judge but at that time chief counsel for the
NAACP, and asked him to take up the complaints of Negroes who
were being barred from city-owned New Orleans golf courses.
Marshall was busy with dozens of suits involving school de
segregation and lunch-counter sit-in demonstrations. He lashed out at
Tureaud: "Golf! I m not interested in Negroes playing golf!"
"But, Thurgood," Tureaud answered, "you ve got to tend to the
whole Negro, golfers and everybody else!"
It is a fact beyond challenge that in the West today, "the whole
Negro" is exploiting his greatest opportunity for liberty in American
history. That fact cannot be explained away by anything short of the
gratifying truth: tolerance, in this new land of the West, is more
prevalent and more a matter of custom than it is in any other region of
America.
As Walter Prescott Webb has pointed out, the West clearly is
the most cosmopolitan region of America. In the West live far more
than half of the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Indians of the nation.
Here, too, are Americans of Spanish or Mexican descent. And like the
rest of the nation, the West has the heritage of the European civiliza
tions.
Tolerance in the West has not evolved, as some have insisted,
because the Negro is a minority so small that a sort of dignity of
rareness imparts a reverse prestige to his status. There were only
about five thousand Negroes in San Francisco on the eve of World
War II, but by 1962, there were about eighty thousand.
$$) WESTWARD TILT
Los Angeles is sometimes described as the second largest Mexi
can city, because Mexican-Americans traditionally have been the
dominant minority there* They are no longer. In the past two decades,
while Los Angeles County has grown in multiples exceeding that of
any other American metropolis, its Negro population has grown at a
far faster rate from ninety-seven thousand to more than four hundred
and sixty thousand- In the past decade, of the million and a half Ne
groes who have migrated from the South, about one in four have come
to California. Negroes have entered Los Angeles County at the rate
of two thousand each month; Los Angeles has become a focal point
of the Negro migration. There was a ninety-one percent increase
among California Negroes from 1950 to 1960: from 462,172 to
883,861, California, close behind New York, was the state with the
second greatest Negro gain. The Negro migrated into other western
states at a similar rate between 1950 and 1960. His number rose in
Washington from 30,691 to 48,738; in Arizona, from 25,974 to
43,403; in Colorado, from 20,177 to 39>99 2 J * n New Mexico from
8,408 to 17,063; in Nevada, from 4,320 to 13,484,
"The Negro feels he has a better chance here," says John Buggs,
executive secretary of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human
Relations. The Commission, which is one big reason for that feeling
among Negroes in Los Angeles, was founded by the Los Angeles
County board of supervisors in the wake of "zoot-suif or "pachuco"
riots by Mexican-American youths in Los Angeles during World War
II * Its educational program is directed through neighborhood councils.
Another organization, the Los Angeles County Conference on Com
munity Relations with scores of affiliates has been the largest local
humanitarian group of its kind in the nation; its specialty is the quiet
negotiation of potential racial frictions.
It would be easy for the Westerner to be chauvinistic on this
subject. He could point with pardonable pride to a host of Western
Negroes who have made good, who have fought for and been granted
their liberties, who live well and under comparatively few of the
pressures familiar to the Negro. Ralph Bunche came from the Univer
sity of California campus at Los Angeles, and two Negroes have
served as president of the student body, which now numbers about
twenty thousand. One of the first Negroes to serve as stewardess
with a major airline was Diane Garrott of Los Angeles. Her father,
an attorney, was California s first Negro state policeman; her grand
father was the first Negro police captain in Los Angeles, her grand-
uncle was the first Negro dentist in California. David Williams, a
Negro, is a municipal court judge in Los Angeles, living in a hundred-
and-fifty-thousand-dollar home in Bel- Air; his son was president of
Of One Thing, Less: Hate (59
his junior class at Stanford University. Judge Williams home was
designed by Paul Williams, son of a Los Angeles fruit dealer and
now a highly regarded Southern California architect. From his offices
in Los Angeles, Norman Houston directs a seventeen-million-dollar
life insurance business. In San Francisco, Negroes serve as municipal
judge and deputy city attorney, and are ranking members of the
California governor s staff. After twenty-six years as a state
assemblyman, Augustus Hawkins of Los Angeles in the 1962 general
election became California s first Negro congressman. In Arizona,
a Negro has served a south Phoenix precinct in the State House of
Representatives since 1951. Mexican- Americans and Negroes are not
uncommon in the California legislature.
But the point is that except for occasional exhibitions of tolerance
displayed for political and commercial exploitation, Westerners do not
bother to play the tolerance game. Their consciences are not hurting.
The test of Western tolerance is not that Westerners would be
pleased to have dinner with Lena Home or Ralph Bunche, but that
relatively few are disturbed when a Negro family occupies the next
table in their favorite restaurant. It is still a different matter when a
Negro family buys the house next door; an empirical prejudice exists in
such cases, involving the economics of real estate values, but such
prejudice rarely is the blind hatred one finds in other sections of the
country.
The Negro influx has been accepted more easily in most neigh
borhoods in San Francisco than in Los Angeles or San Diego. Ap
parently the greatest resentment among whites when a Negro moves
into a previously all-white Western neighborhood comes from those
who have lived previously in economically underprivileged areas of
the nation, not necessarily the South. A greater proportion of in-
migrant whites falls into this category in Los Angeles and San Diego
than in San Francisco. Racial housing patterns are breaking freer in
the West each day, but the issue still is sticky.
Negro leaders concede a high rate of tolerance in West Coast
cities in regard to hotels and restaurants; discrimination rears its head
more frequently in smaller towns and especially in resort areas. The
NAACP has singled out the hotels and casinos of Las Vegas and
Reno as making the Negro feel unwelcome. For once, perhaps, the
Negro is fortunate; white Anglo-Saxons themselves are the objects of
blatant discrimination in these casinos as soon as they begin to run out
of money.
In San Francisco, the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill is owned by
Ben Swig, a Jew who came West from Boston and regards San
Francisco as freer from prejudice than any other city in the nation.
60) WESTWARD TILT
"I am supposed to have the fanciest hotel in the city," Swig
told me, "but we take a Negro in here without any questions into our
dining room to eat, into our Venetian Room to see a show, or to rent
a room. We had a Negro teachers convention several years ago, and a
few of our regular customers said they d never come back to the hotel
again. But every meeting of Negroes we ve had has been well-behaved.
There is less intoxication among Negroes than among our white
people."
In San Diego, Negro fashion models have moved easily among
the luncheon tables at Point Loma Inn, a resort hotel. The manage
ment employed a Negro model on its staff for the first time in 1962.
There were only three complaints.
There is more social intermingling of Negro and white in San
Francisco than anywhere else in the West, and more than I have found
in any other city in the United States, It is centered in bohemian North
Beach, where the Negro became a familiar part of the scene during the
reign of the beatnik. The beatnik is gone, but the Negro has remained.
A Negro man and a white woman drinking, dining or dancing, and
seemingly unnoticed by predominantly white patrons, is a common
sight in North Beach clubs and restaurants.
Defying such trends in the metropoli of the West are the pockets
of prejudice.
Utah, regrettably, has not yet escaped its maelstrom of preju
dice and counter-prejudice. Two-thirds of the citizens are members
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and all non-
Mormons are referred to as gentiles. Many gentiles traditionally have
been distrustful of Mormons in Utah, and there is an historic tension
between Mormon and Mason. The beehive, adopted by the Mormon
church as its symbol for industriousness, appears also in the older
Masonic ritual, and Masons commonly believe that the Mormons
"stole" their ritualism. Masons do not accept Mormons; inversely, it
is rare that a Mason is converted to Mormonism.
Negroes have joined the Mormon church, but they are not known
to have been granted temple rites or to have entered the priesthood.
The Utah State Commission on Civil Rights, headed by Adam Dun
can, a Salt Lake City attorney, in 1959 focused blame for prejudice
against the Negro in Utah on the Mormon church. Mormon dogma
proscribes that Negroes are the descendants of Cain, and that they
are colored because Cain killed Abel. The Indian has his color, Mor
mon theology holds, because he is descended from Laman, son of the
Prophet Lehi, who led the white tribe of Joseph from Jerusalem to
the western hemisphere in 600 B.C. Laman sinned by rebelling against
Of One Thing, Less: Hate (61
his father and his brother Nephi. It is notable that there were barely
four thousand Negroes in Utah in 1960, less than one half of one
percent of the population.
At a time when American industry has been self-consciously
inserting non-discriminatory notices in help-wanted advertising, some
Utah industrial brochures carry lines like these: "An overwhelmingly
white population"; "A population composed almost entirely of those
born in the U. S." By contrast, a smiling photograph of a pretty
Negro girl employed as a mathematician by the Hughes Corporation
in Los Angeles was appearing in 1962 in Eastern newspaper adver
tisements under the caption: CALIFORNIA AIRCRAFT CONCERN is BE
LIEVER IN JOB EQUALITY.
A curious sidelight in Utah is that state statutes allow inter
marriage between white and Negro but prohibit marriage between
white and Oriental. This is in contrast to most of the West, where
public feeling is not aroused by marriage between white and Oriental,
but marriage between white and Negro is considered taboo.
The Navy has been a liberalizing influence for Orientals on the
Pacific Coast in the years since World War II; Japanese war brides
are numerous. The saga of the Japanese-Americans in the West since
their deportation from the West Coast at the start of World War II
has been one of the quietest but most exciting racial chapters of
American history. Western whites do have a guilty conscience about
this matter; the deportation was impetuous, brutal, and showed a
hopeless misunderstanding of the Japanese-American. When the Japa
nese were allowed to return to their homes in West Coast cities, they
had been dispossessed by the Negro whose migration westward be
gan with the demand for labor during World War II in West Coast
war factories. With infinite patience and forbearance, the Japanese
set out to rebuild their respect and status in the West. The job has
been done, and in the process the noblest virtues of each race have
been displayed.
The largest Oriental community in America is Chinatown of
San Francisco. It is not an enforced ghetto but a voluntary enclave.
Its people increased from fewer than 25,000 to 36,445 between the
1950 and 1960 censuses, as Immigration relaxed regulations applying
to families of Chinese residing in the United States. (Los Angeles,
with a population three times greater than San Francisco, has fewer
than 20,000 Chinese.) At one time, close to 20,000 Chinese were
jammed into a twenty-block area of San Francisco s Chinatown; they
lived ten and twelve to a basement. The San Francisco Housing
Authority helped to ease crowding with construction of large low-
cost housing projects in and near Chinatown.
62) WESTWARD tILT
Also years ago, Chinatown was a scandal of tuberculosis, but the
worst is over now, although the case rate among Chinese in San
Francisco still is more than three times greater than among Cau
casians.
Even the new housing projects of Chinatown maintain the in
sularity and tradition that have made the Chinese neighborhood of
San Francisco so notable; multi-hued balconies and pagoda roofs
brighten one of them. The herb shops, the daily Chinese language
newspapers, the temples, and the tongs are in San Francisco still. This
Chinatown has retained much more of an oriental atmosphere than
New York s Chinatown. The abacus is still in use instead of the cash
register at many places along Grant Avenue, and the clatter of domi-
nos echoes from the windows of basement rooms. The visitor can
enter Kong Chow temple, where Kuan Ti, the patron deity,
rules. Beniamino Bufano s steel-and-granite statue of Sun Yat-sen
stands at St. Mary s Square. The Chinese telephone exchange is housed
in a pagoda on Washington Street. Chinatown is ruled from a building
on Stockton Street which houses the "Six Companies," representatives
of Chinese families who control community affairs known formally
as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.
But change is coming to Chinatown too. Family solidarity has
begun to fade as newlywed couples establish their own homes, some
times outside Chinatown where higher wages often are available to
the Chinese. Perhaps one-fourth of the Chinese here now attend
Christian churches. A six-story savings and loan building on Grant
Avenue, in the heart of Chinatown, has been built in modern Oriental
design incorporating San Francisco s first outdoor elevator. Yet the
community still has no rival in the matter of its traditional self-
government. Family associations and religious and welfare agencies
within Chinatown still are all-powerful.
San Francisco continues to regard its Chinatown with affection
ate indulgence. A Chinatown leader recently appeared before the City
Board of Permit Appeals in behalf of a poultry-market owner named
Mar Yet, who wanted to move his market a block down Grant Ave
nue. Mar Yet had come up against a health code forbidding live
poultry within twenty-five feet of a residence. Mar Yet had been
operating within twenty-five feet of a residence at his old site, for there
is hardly anywhere in Chinatown that is not within twenty-five feet
of a residence. The lofty permit-board members nodded approval, and
their usually grim-faced enforcement officers sat by smiling. Live
poultry is to Chinatown what hot dogs and hamburgers are to the
Caucasian.
Chinatown has a fourteen-million-dollar garment factory busi
ness which has been considered illegal under San Francisco zoning
Of One Thing, Less; Hate (63
regulations. But more than two thousand Chinese are employed in its
one hundred and twenty-five separate shops. City officials debated at
length, and finally passed a compromise plan which allowed most of
them to continue operation within a multi-block zoning sanctuary.
Many other parts of the West are almost totally free of prejudice.
There is an engaging tolerance in New Mexico between native
(descendants of the original Spanish settlers and others of Spanish
origin) and Anglo (everyone else). Anglos even refer to themselves
as Anglos. It is a situation which has little precedent one in which
the Anglo-Saxon white has accepted a racial label, and proceeded to
share it with Jew, Negro and Oriental.
Anglos in New Mexico enjoy telling how a native returned
to the state and inquired one day in a barbershop how much was being
paid for votes in a current election.
"Don t know," said the Negro shoeshine boy. "They haven t ap
proached us Anglos yet."
Those who migrate to New Mexico are drawn, in part, by the
racial and cultural diversities of the region. They tend to sharpen
and illuminate these diversities because they place a high value on
them. This may be chauvinism, but it allows for little prejudice. One
of Santa Fe s most prominent Anglo families is Chinese. The patriarch
of the family came to Santa Fe about the turn of the century, opened
a laundry, and later became a restaurateur. Today they are com
pletely accepted by Santa Fe s Anglo millionaires and artists. They
are not the exception.
When a Negro family moved into the scientific community of
Los Alamos not long ago, there was a faint undercurrent of grum
bling. But when a physicist s wife took the new arrivals to church with
her on the following Sunday morning and sat with them in a front
pew, the incident was closed. Nothing more was heard.
Another white spot free of minority onus is the Basque com
munity of the West. Basques from Spain first came to the West in
Gold Rush times; most of them became sheepherders in the grazing
lands of eastern Nevada, California, Utah, and particularly in Idaho
and Oregon. In California and Nevada, French and Spanish Basques
are about equal in number. In 1959 about six thousand Western Bas
ques gathered at Sparks, Nevada, for a huge barbecue and music
and dancing. In Boise, Idaho, during music festivals, the Basques,
gay and vibrant, are the stars of the show. They are much sought after
in inter-marriages. Though their temperament historically has been
mercurial, they have become respected businessmen and community
leaders.
For almost a century, Nevada had the sociological symptoms of
64) WESTWARD TILT
a feudal state. "We used to call Nevada c a Mississippi with shoes on, "
recalled Governor Grant Sawyer. "But now there is new thinking. For
ninety-six years, Nevada had been passing laws against minorities. In
1961 we put through a civil rights bill which would have been ab
solutely inconceivable two years before. Many of our statutes aimed
against Indians, against Mexicans, against inter-racial marriage, have
been found unconstitutional or have been repealed. We are sensing
our obligation to our sister states to take our place in national affairs."
The Mexican-American is a poignant example of the collision of
cultures. In the main, he has had no stomach for the hectic American
pace. He has stayed to himself in settlements of Los Angeles such as
Rose Hill, Happy Valley, Clover, Custer, and Bunker Hill. His family
table often provides the staples of his homeland: the flat, round tortilla
of ground corn, the frijole, or bean, the sopas^ enchiladas, tamales.
His sons and daughters, like the Negro, drop out of schools at regret
table rates; often home does not offer adequate support of the new
customs which the sons and daughters are learning at school. Only
one out of ten California workers is a farm laborer, but two out of
five Mexican-Americans work on farms. Only a few of them go into
technical or professional work, although noticeable advances are being
made in training Mexican-Americans for such work and making such
jobs available to them.
There are about a million persons of Mexican ancestry in Cali
fornia, most of them in Southern California and in the agricultural
areas of the Great Central Valley. Some of them are direct descendants
of those early settlers who preceded the United States pioneer, and
these families are the aristocracy of their Mexican-American com
munities.
Thousands of the Mexicans in the West are braceros migrant
farm workers brought in from Mexico under bilateral treaty, and
under the supervision of the United States Labor Department. These
people reach the United States under circumstances plaintively sug
gestive of the floods of Irish into the United States during the potato
famine. One of the five United States labor stations which process
braceros in the interior of Mexico is located near Guaymas. When I
visited there, four thousand Mexican men were standing behind a wire
fence in a vast, dusty field, waiting to be called forward by United
States authorities. Some had not left the compound for three days;
they had come by foot, by burro, and by bus from remote villages as
distant as two hundred miles, hoping that their papers would be found
in order, that they could pass the physical examination of the United
States doctors, and that the call from north of the border for workers
Of One Thing, Less: Hate (6j
would be heavy enough to include them. If their luck held, they would
be taken by train into the United States to work the harvests at rates
of about seventy-five cents to one dollar an hour.
Late one night I stood i n line at the Flower Street office of
Western Union in downtown Los Angeles.
"I can t accept it," the clerk was saying. "This book doesn t show
a telegraph office at Obregon."
The customer at the window, a Mexican man of about thirty-five,
stared impassively. In his hand he held three ten-dollar bills. Behind
him in a line were other Mexicans, all holding United States currency.
Another clerk, without looking up, said, "Look under Ciudad.
That means city."
"Ah, there it is," said the clerk. "Ciudad Obregon. That s all
right. I can take it."
The Mexican smiled and gave the clerk the money order and a
message to go with it to be sent back home.
A few minutes later I was having coffee with the citizen from
Obregon in a little cafe nearby. He told me that each week he sent
home to his wife and five children, thirty dollars from his wages on a
farm job near Los Angeles. Mexicans trust the telegraph; it does not
occur to them to mail money. Western Union accepts United States
dollars, and the Mexican national telegraph pays off in pesos.
"Besides," the man said, smiling gently. "My family needs the
money soon. My sisters have many muchachas, too, all hungry. That
is why I am here."
Even the lowest American wages, transmitted so faithfully to in
land Mexico, can make princes of paupers in that poor land. When
these braceros return to their villages, the sewing machine or the
transistor radio that they bring home is the marvel of the season.
In Southern California, the Mexican-American is not the target
of prejudice that he is in Texas. He is in a kind of limbo: neither
accepted nor rejected. He is a vague part of that misty legend of early
California, a residue of the caballero and the vaquero, and he is not in
anybody s way. He is amiable and anxious to please, and he has in
exhaustible energy and patience. Too few Californians have seen more
of his country than the corrupt border towns; there is neither enough
respect for the charm of Mexico, nor appreciation of the dignity of the
Mexican. The Mexican is in California usually because poverty has
driven him out of his own country. The Calif ornian is moving too fast
to notice, or to wonder why.
The incongruities of contemporary Western life for the Mexican-
American, who is so little understood in his displaced status, are
symbolized in the brisk message on a plaque erected by the Los
66) WESTWARD TILT
Angeles Board of Public Works on Olvera Street, at the heart of the
original pueblo of Los Angeles. Olvera Street is a tourist attraction
today, lined with stalls offering Mexican food, pottery, glassware,
silver and fabrics. With a nervous eye on the insurance adjuster, the
City of Los Angeles warns visitors:
IN KEEPING WITH THE ATMOSPHERE OF AN OLD MEXI
CAN STREET, THIS STREET HAS BEEN COVERED WITH SPAN
ISH TILE AND BRICK, THE SURFACE OF WHICH IS SOMEWHAT
UNEVEN. USERS DO SO AT THEIR OWN RISK.
The ghettos of Western cities are neither as cruel nor as des
perate as those of older cities, but they exist.
In Los Angeles, the Negro community of Central Avenue was
born with the coming of the railroads. Central Avenue begins at the
railroad yards, and at first it was the home of Pullman porters and
dining-car waiters. The avenue terminates twelve miles away in
Compton, a defense plant city. As Wesley Marx has pointed out,
Central Avenue is a "living display of Negro memories and aspira
tions." It teems with fish shops, second-hand stores and churches.
Compton, a mass-produced suburb that hardly existed at the end of
World War II, is itself a case study. In 1955 its population was about
five percent Negro; today, Negroes are in the majority in Compton and
there is very little racial tension. The more prosperous Negro families
are breaking out into other areas of Los Angeles, especially along
Adams and Western avenues. The Negro finds it most difficult to buy
homes in new suburban areas; very few are open to minority groups.
In minority housing, San Francisco is unique. It is a city where
people encroach on slums. The Fillmore district, where grotesque
Victorian scroll-saw castles were unmercifully spared by the earth
quake and fire of 1906, is reverberating to the blast of dynamite.
The Fillmore is like a dusty attic jammed with mementos of the past.
The fire raced up the hills from downtown San Francisco but was
stopped short of the Fillmore by the width of Van Ness Avenue and
by dynamite. Until San Francisco was rebuilt, the Fillmore was the
commercial center of the city, but before World War II, it had
deteriorated. It harbored "Little Osaka," the Japanese-American com
munity. When the Japanese were interned, the Negroes moved in,
and the Fillmore s curlicued castles were divided into apartments and
furnished rooms. Antique shops gave way to television repair shops;
vegetable stands became pool parlors or barber shops.
But now San Francisco is attempting to blast out the slums of
the Fillmore. Whites are pushing back into the area. Houses formerly
occupied by Negroes are up in price in anticipation of redevelopment.
Of One Thing, Less: Hate ( 6j
New housing going up in the area is attractive to whites and too costly
for most Negroes. The city has blundered as a result of a narcissistic
determination to maintain its cityscape; it is driving the Negro out of
the Fillmore by its slum clearance program.
When Fillmore homes were razed in the first San Francisco Re
development Agency project, the residential families forced out were
paying a median monthly rental of thirty-nine dollars. With help from
the city, these displaced families found living quarters elsewhere at a
median rental of fifty-eight dollars a month. Apartment houses being
built in these razed portions and in the Golden Gateway and Diamond
Heights projectshave a rental scale from one hundred and ten dollars
a month for "efficiency apartments" without bedrooms to five hundred
and ninety-five dollars for apartments with three and four bedrooms.
Obviously, the Redevelopment Agency does not expect that many dis
placed Negro families will be able to go back once the slums are
cleared.
A second project in the Fillmore was expected to evict about seven
thousand persons. In the proposed redevelopment of white slum
areas the Tenderloin and Skid Rowanother ten thousand are to be
rendered homeless. San Francisco appears quixotic in its gestures to
ward making a place for these homeless. As Dr. Ellis D. Sox, public
health director, asked bluntly in a meeting of civic leaders in 1961:
Where in hell are they going to go?"
One Negro minister in the Fillmore said, "Most of these
people pulled up and left the South for the same basic reason that the
Pilgrims came to America: freedom and opportunity. There are no
signs in California which read: COLORED ONLY. But the Negro who
walks into a lunch counter in many parts of the state still is not sure
whether he faces an unpleasant scene. The law says we can live any
where we want, but it s remarkable how often a home has just been
rented or the last house in the tract has just been sold. Our people
have more chance here, certainly. Some of them will say that they can
get anything in San Francisco except a job. That s an exaggeration,
but unless he is better off financially than most, the Negro is living in
a ghetto much like the one he left behind in the South. What disturbs
me is that San Francisco hasn t faced the problem yet. And it is here.
It is not going to go away."
Yet one Negro mother said, "I would rather take a little insecu
rity than no security at all, which we have been used to. At least my
kids can go to good schools here. We see opportunity all around us
here, whether we can grab hold of it or not. We smell freedom here,
and maybe soon we can taste it."
Many Negro families who are being forced out of the Fillmore by
68) WESTWARD TILT
slum clearance are spilling over into the Mission District in the east
central area of the city, chosen in 1776 by Juan Bautista de Anza as ,
site of the Mission Dolores. Today the Mission District sustains the
highest incidence of juvenile delinquency in San Francisco. For years,
it was the workshop of the city, a respectable working-class suburb,
the center of the Irish population. But when the district started down,
it went fast.
An Episcopal chaplain in the Mission District told me, "The
Mission is tragically hard to escape. But San Francisco seems to in
sist on thinking of it in terms of the glories of its past."
Before our visit was ended late that night, the chaplain had em
ployed all his wiles and those of his faith to ward off as helplessly
as Officer Krupke in West Side Story a rumble quite as ominous
as the celebrated stage rumble of the Jets and the Sharks. Within
the shadows of one of his churches that night were the flash of knife
blade and of needle, the seething teenage knots on street corners, the
stalking watchfulness of private police. There were the feverish,
frustrated, violent conversations of Negro, Puerto Rican, Mexican,
Samoan, Oriental and white boy and girl alike and the urgent en
treaties of their youthful contemporaries against violence.
The chaplain reported that Sunday school teachers from Metho
dist and Episcopal churches in the Mission District had met recently
to ponder poor attendance. The Methodists even gave their Sunday
school enrollment to the Episcopalians in an effort to hold together a
semblance of organization for those who would attend either school.
In a Mission District high school, with a student body of hun
dreds, a graduating class of four was among the highest since World
War II. In much of the Mission, women do not walk the streets after
dark. A stabbing occurred on the steps of one of the churches in the
Mission while I was in the city. In at least one Mission school, there
had been bans on high pouf hairdos: they had served as concealment
for scissors and knives.
All over the West, educators are beginning to seek special help
in coping with the acute problems of the heavy Negro influx. They are
the typical ones of the culturally and economically deprived: high
truancy rate, drop-outs and disciplinary problems. In the Fillmore,
under a Ford Foundation grant, about seventeen hundred school
pupils have been receiving special classroom attention. About eighty-
five percent of them are Negroes from low economic strata.
Across the bay from San Francisco, in Berkeley, a city about the
size of Little Rock, more Negroes live than in Little Rock. Berkeley
has only one huge high school, and it has been always totally inte-
Of One Thing, Less: Hate (69
grated. Yet residential areas are basically segregated, and thus ele
mentary schools are generally Negro or white. This is, almost without
exception, the only kind of educational segregation that takes place in
the West. In Berkeley, its effect is that Negro and white students do
not meet until high school. There has been little discord, and evidence
of successful integration is abundant. In the spring of 1962, for the
first time, the Berkeley High School student body president was a
Negro.
Berkeley needs another high school, but its leaders have hesi
tated, fearing it might be a step backward. Because of sheer geogra
phy, another school would provoke a districting situation resulting in
one mostly-Negro and one mostly-white school This is an ironic facet
of the Negro situation in many Western cities. But there are leaders
of immense good will who guard the natural tolerance of their com
munities. If integration cannot be maintained at Berkeley, in the
shadow of the University of California, it cannot be maintained any
where in the West. There is as little discrimination in the Bay Area as
anywhere in the country. Open testimony of this on the Berkeley cam
pus of the university is that interracial dating has increased sharply in
recent years. A disproportionately large share of Freedom Riders
went into the South from the Berkeley campus. Reactionaries in
Berkeley consider such antics as evidence of the infiltration of Com
munism into the University, but the tolerance of the Bay Area wraps
an insulating blanket around those who do not conform; it is in the
San Francisco tradition, and it is not necessarily Red.
South of Berkeley is Oakland, an industrial city with more than
fourteen hundred factories, where the Negro explosion has been im
mense. With less than half the population of San Francisco 367,548
compared with 740,316 Oakland had in 1960 a larger Negro
population: 83,618 against 74,383. At one time during World War
II, Oakland had a higher proportion of Negroes than any other city
outside the South. One high school, McClymond, is almost entirely
Negro; this, in the West, is rare, although elementary schools fre
quently have solid minority blocs. From McClymond have come two
noted athletes: Bill Russell to basketball and Frank Robinson to
baseball. At Technical High on Broadway in Oakland, the Negro
minority has become larger as the Negro residential districts have ex
panded. The Oakland Negro, once confined to one area, has broken out
of residential patterns through sheer force of numbers and lives in
widely scattered areas. A University of California study of the Bay
Area by Professor Davis McEntire showed that only 6.5 percent of the
residents of any area where Negroes had moved admitted to any
70 ) WESTWARD TILT
objection to their new neighbors. The Negro s job opportunities in the
industrial East Bay are not so limited as those of the San Francisco
Negro across the bridge.
The Negro nationalist -the Muslim has not found a ready
audience in the West. This movement, centered in New York s
Harlem, has been involved in sporadic violence which has appeared
relatively seldom in San Francisco and Los Angeles. (Its national
membership was estimated in 1961 at about 3,000.) Richard Wright,
the Negro novelist, has likened the Muslim movement to a Negro Ku
Klux Klan. Its reputed goals are Negro domination of the white and a
nationalist return of the Negro to Africa. The leader of the Muslims in
San Francisco was convicted of draft evasion in the summer of 1961,
but his case stirred small interest. A Muslim outbreak in Los Angeles
in the spring of 1962 led to the usual sniping at police methods, but it
was soon ended.
Negroes have become a potent political force in California. In
Los Angeles, in 1962, there were Negro members on the fire com
mission and police commission; Negroes had been influential in the
election of Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, who upset the entrenched
regime. A Negro judge, Thomas L. Griffith, Jr., was presiding over
municipal courts. It is safe to assume that the California Negro was a
crucial factor in Pat Brown s victory over Richard Nixon for the gov
ernorship.
Although the West is coping more effectively than other regions
with prejudice, the heavy influx of Negroes in recent years has
brought new problems.
In its first two years of operation, in 1959-61, the California
Fair Employment Practice Commission heard about eleven hundred
complaints of job discrimination, most of them involving Negroes.
The FEPC found instances of discrimination in hiring in about one-
third of the cases reported; all but four were resolved through con
ference and conciliation. Nevertheless, forty percent of the unemployed
in Los Angeles are Negroes; a high proportion of the incoming Negro
wave is still unskilled.
San Francisco was the first California city to establish a fair
employment commission. Since 1957 it has served to open some
doors of employment for the Negro notably the municipal railway
and the waterfront. But its budget has been cripplingly low and its
scope meager; it has no authority to go into educational or conciliatory
work in inter group relations. Negroes are given employment oppor
tunities in all city-related jobs; some of them operate cable cars, and
the list of Negro police officers grows.
The head of a large San Francisco brokerage house told me that
Of One Thing, Less: Hate (77
a Negro stock broker he had hired in 1961 was the first in the city.
Another brokerage firm uses Chinese girl board markers exclusively.
Many Orientals are hired in white-collar jobs and particularly in the
garment industry, but Negroes still are on a last-hired, first-fired basis
in most fields.
The crime rate of the incoming Negro, generally ghettoized, im
poverished and under-educated, is predictably high. With just over
ten percent of San Francisco s population, Negroes commit thirty to
forty percent of its crime. Municipal Judge Albert A. Axelrod, in
whose court vice cases composed a major component, estimated in
1961 that eighty percent of the defendants coming before him were
Negro.
Poverty, as always, is at the core of the minority crime rate;
cramped housing is the strongest indication of it. On the Pacific
Coast, urban renewal projects have been augmenting rather than
alleviating the concentration of Negro families in constricted areas.
Negroes displaced by urban renewal projects have been finding alter
native housing in pre-existing Negro sections. But in many communi
ties, citizens groups were springing up to encourage listing of housing
for sale or rental on a non-discrimination basis. Many white real
estate agents were co-operating, and some were joining citizens
groups. Even more important, the activities of such groups were not
arousing heated controversy.
Universities throughout California have shown the lead in break
ing housing barriers. Many state colleges and universities require non-
discrimination pledges from prospective lessors who seek tenants
through campus housing offices. Some teeth have been put into mi
nority housing efforts by a California statute passed in 1959 which
created a "right of action" for damages by any person denied housing
of a "publicly assisted" status because of race; this applies to property
which carries any loan guaranteed by federal or state governments.
Mexican-Americans and Oriental-Americans have a far greater
degree of housing mobility in California than do Negroes; obstacles to
their free choice of housing are disappearing at a faster rate than are
the obstacles facing Negroes. As the Negro bursts out of his Western
ghetto, he seldom moves singly into a previously white neighborhood;
he moves with the group. The Mexican or Oriental is not so restricted
and will strike out more often on a family-by-family basis, according
to his economic level, to seek appropriate housing.
One silver lining appears, and it has a Western label. Here
again is a suggestion that the easy, brash culture of the West may
more readily make its way through the maze of contemporary Ameri
can problems. A University of Michigan survey showed in 1960 that
7-2) WESTWARD TILT
more and more whites had been moving from the San Francisco-
Oakland metropolitan area to suburban areas, and that non-whites
were taking their places in the cities. This is not unique but an
increasing number of non-whites also had been moving into suburban
communities of the Bay area. It was the only area in the study where
such a suburban trend was established.
Restrictive housing practices work to keep non-whites out of
suburban areas in most parts of the nation. But in San Francisco,
there are such desirable interracial suburban areas as Merced Heights
and Ingleside Terrace; both have attractive sweeping views of coastline
and city. Negro families are scattered through most of San Francis
co s neighborhoods at all steps of the economic scale; the first volatile
test cases in each neighborhood are history, and those following are
easier. In most parts of San Francisco, those who can pay the price
can make the grade. This is not true throughout the West yet; but
as San Francisco has established trends in other fields, it is likely
that this trend in racial patterns will influence other cities and finally
other towns of the West. The path will not be rosy all the way; but
it will be faster and more direct than the paths of older, more tradi
tional areas toward the ends set forth by the verdict of the United
States Supreme Court.
Prejudice is not as entrenched in the West as in older areas. Its
patterns gradually are dissolving, and it cannot be thought of in the
same sharp terms as elsewhere. Change comes easier in a newer en
vironment; neither ethnic shadings nor prejudices are as strong in
California as in much of the country. The Californian is new, he is ab
sorbed in his unfamiliar surroundings, and he is so busy becoming a
Californian that often he forgets to hate. He will find around him an
unusual proportion who have not learned to hate, or who have lost
the urge. He is not reminded of prejudice by the ever-present
symbols of segregation that exist still in the South. If he is from Chi
cago, he has left behind the South Side and the memories of its race
riots; if he is from New York, the ghettos of Harlem, the West Side
and the Bronx seem a distant dream, and he is happy to find that there
are very few streets or neighborhoods in the West where his wife may
not walk in safety.
The new Californian may take his family to dinner at a restau
rant which has been recommended to him, and find himself led to a
table next to a group of urbane Negroes or Mexicans or Orientals. It
may be the first time he has dined under such circumstances, but he is
in territory new to him and he is less sure of its mores. It occurs to
him that he may incur the hostility of his Western peers quite as
readily by refusing to be seated as by being seated. He sits down
Of One Thing, Less: Hate (73
and dines, and he notes, grudgingly perhaps, that no one has sus
tained any embarrassment. He is better prepared for his next en
counter with racial equality. The tolerance factor of the new West is
at work.
Rafer Johnson, the Negro decathlon champion who bore the
United States flag in the Olympic Games at Rome in 1960, came
from Kingsbury, a small farming town outside Fresno in the Central
Valley of California. The son of a machinist who brought his family
to California in 1945 from Dallas, Johnson became president of the
student body at the vast University of California at Los Angeles.
After his victory at Rome, a reporter asked him if it was the greatest
day of his life. "No," Johnson replied softly. "That was when my
father moved from Texas to California."
THE INDIAN NATIONS
Better Times for Many
The Indian is changing as markedly as any element of the West. His
setbacks and his progress are clouded by the emotionalism of some of
his^ white sympathizers, and by the expediency of those who, for
political or financial gain, still stand in his way. Some of his friends
are more dangerous than his enemies. Americans have been condi
tioned by history to mistreatment and neglect of the Indian, but after
their sympathies have aroused them to action in his behalf and then
they find themselves duped, they are seldom prone to take further
interest in him. This happens much too often. Professional Indian
sobbers easily can turn a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year profit by
raising money purportedly to relieve Indian poverty; it is being done
all the time, and it is one more example of the well-advertised gulli
bility of Americans.
T t^ A f erican Indian ^ not dying out. He is increasing rapidly
In the Southwest, under the enlightened administration of Indian
affairs and with benefit of sudden wealth from oil, gas and uranium
nghts, Indians are prospering for the first time since their subjugation
The Indian Nations: Better Times for Many (75
In frontier days. Through education and economic independence,
they are moving toward integration as citizens with equal rights.
Ancestors of two major tribes of Arizona, the Navajo and
Apache, came from the north late in the thirteenth century, when a
twenty-three year drought was desolating the region. These are the
two tribes which fought back hardest when the white man s squeeze
play began with the arrival of the Spaniards. The darkest days for
the Navajo came when Colonel Kit Carson rounded them up and
marched into their stronghold at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, in
1864; he led them on their notorious "Long Walk" to the Bosque
Redondo on the Pecos River -after destroying their sheep and or
chards and taking their horses. The United States experiment with
displaced colonization did not work. In 1868, the Navajos, ailing and
homesick, were returned to their reservation. War, disease, and
starvation had decimated the tribe; only about nine thousand were
left.
In 1879, the Mescalero Apaches under Chief Victorio left their
reservation and started a four-year reign of terror in southern New
Mexico and Arizona. Geronimo led the San Carlos Apaches from
their reservation to join the Mescaleros in all-out war. But the United
States cavalry dug in, and Geronimo surrendered in 1886 to General
Nelson A. Miles.
Thereafter, the Indians stayed home on the reservations, except
for those who disappeared, quite understandably, to go get drunk
when they had the money. Of course, this did not put an end to the
white man s horror. But the Indians could not be blamed when Pancho
Villa made his raids across the border, or when there was a big ex
plosion at Trinity, near Alamogordo, in 1945.
Relations have been improving slowly between Indian and white
man. The basic evidence is that the Indian is surviving more readily
than before. The Indian population of the United States has shown an
increase in each decennial census since 1930. The most abrupt in
crease appeared in the last census: from about 343,000 in 1950 to
523,591 in 1960. Of these, about 350,000 live on reservations.
Arizona ranks first among the states in Indian population, Oklahoma
is second, and then come New Mexico and California. There is less
Indian land now than in 1900, but it has increased slowly since 1940.
Almost half of it is in Arizona; virtually the entire northeast quarter
of the state consists of Navajo and Hopi reservations. Today more
than twenty-one million acres of Arizona is Indian territory; New
Mexico ranks second with six and a half million acres, and Montana
is close behind.
J6) WESTWARD TILT
The Navajo tribe has doubled in the past quarter century to about
ninety thousand in number. This alone is indicative of the Navajo
genius for survival, for tribal lands in northeast Arizona and north
west New Mexico are part of the most formidable desert on the
continent.
Paul Jones, the distinguished tribal chairman of the Navajos,
talked to me in his office at Window Rock, on the border of New
Mexico and Arizona. "My people say to me, *We have been placed
where only a lizard could survive. But our gods sent wealth from
below the ground. We are not forgotten. "
The Navajos change is the most significant of all tribes; their
progress in dealing with their problems is serving as a pilot for
federal officials and for many other tribes. It is natural that they
should lead not only because they are the largest in number, but
because their reservation is the largest (about the size of West Vir
ginia), and the gross sum of their mineral royalties exceeds that of
any other tribe. But beyond that, the modern Navajo has strong
capabilities as a citizen. He is independent and dignified, but capable
of infinite gaiety and subtle humor. (An Indian Bureau official found
an old Navajo still practicing polygamy, once common in the tribe,
and explained that this was against federal law. He advised the old
man to decide which wife he would keep and to tell the others they
were no longer wives. The Navajo stared through the white man as
though he were not present, then answered amiably as he strode
away, "You tell em.")
Much has been accomplished among the Navajos in recent years,
by the tribe itself or with federal assistance. Leading United States
lumbermen have been appointed to an advisory board to counsel the
Navajos on their lumber reserves and on the operation of a new seven-
million-dollar sawmill. Other jobs are being provided for Navajos in
a thirty-million-dollar pulp and paper mill at Snowflake, to the
south of the reservation. On the reservation itself there is a model farm
to teach agricultural techniques. Many new schools have been built.
A soil conservation program is under way to try to keep the meager
topsoil from blowing away. A utility authority is being set up to pro
vide power, gas and water. A park commission is working on tourist
facilities. Two Congressional appropriations of twenty million dollars
each led to the construction of reservation roads, particularly two paved
highways: Indian Route 3 across the reservation from Window Rock to
Tuba City in Arizona; and Indian Route i, which runs southwest
across the reservation toward Phoenix, and is highly traveled because
it cuts the distance between Denver and Los Angeles by one hundred
and ninety miles. Routes 3 and 8 were the first paved roads into
The Indian Nations: Better Times for Many (77
Canyon de Chelly, one of the most stirring juxtapositions of remote
grandeur and gentle beauty in America. Indian wagons with rubber
tires are pulled by small Indian horses along the floor of the canyon,
where corn and peaches grow beside ancient Pueblo dwellings set into
the soaring canyon cliffs. From the rim of Canyon de Chelly, the
wagons look like toys. Far to the north against the horizon loom the
wild, twisted skyscrapers of Monument Valley, memorials to the
power of wind and erosion in this grotesque, gripping land.
The new highways into Navajo land the first paved roads to
venture deep into the reservation reward the traveler handsomely,
but Navajo leaders are pleased by the roads because they will help to
feed their people.
One who has been on the Navajo reservation before is surprised
to find that a paved road leads now to the Hopi town of Oraibi, perched
precariously for centuries atop a mesa and probably the oldest settle
ment on the continent. The traveler is also jolted by the incongruity
of the supermarket in lonely little Tuba City; not many years ago, most
Navajos furthest venture into sophistication was to sit on the floor
of a trading post and eat peaches from a can.
Traditionally the Navajo has been a semi-nomadic sheepherder
and dry farmer. But a recent survey showed that only twelve percent
of Navajo income came from farming or sheep raising. The largest
share, sixty-six percent, is from salaries and wages earned both on and
off the reservation. The mean family income is about twenty-five
hundred dollars annually, a sharp increase over past years. But an
equally significant increase has been in the federal budget. In 1944,
the total United States Indian budget was about twenty-six million
dollars; in 1959, expenditure for Arizona Indians alone was about
thirty million dollars.
An outstanding difference between Arizona Indians and those of
other states is that the Arizonans are mixing widely with non-Indians
and moving toward assimilation. They seem to be in a hurry; in many
Navajo communities, there are more Indians in pickup trucks than on
horseback, more Sunday sermons than native rituals, more treatment
by white doctors than by medicine men.
The leader of the Navajos, Paul Jones, is a phenomenon in
American politics. There is no more eloquent or reasonable spokes
man for the Indian than he. He was unanimously nominated, and re-
elected to a second four-year term by the Navajos in 1959 over an
aspirant who pledged to dole out Navajo royalties then close to nine
hundred dollars for each Navajo man, woman and child on a per
capita basis. Jones has insisted that tribal royalties be used to build
WESTWARD TILT
roads, tribal halls, tourist facilities and sawmills, and to attract simple
industry that will provide jobs. Such is the faith of the Navajos in
Jones that they voted for him rather than for a man who stood ready to
put cash in their hands.
Now nearing seventy, Jones is a stocky man with a big stomach,
short-trimmed, graying hair, and glasses. He sits behind a modern
steel desk in a simple government office looking out on the red stone
ceremonial arch that gives the Navajo capital of Window Rock its
name. On the wall behind him, beside a fine gray and beige Navajo
blanket, are an American flag and plaques from the Boy Scouts and
service clubs. When we talked he wore a gray plaid sports jacket
and a braided leather tie studded with turquoise. Not only his dress
and manner but his attitudes reflect compromise between the historic
positions of Indian and white.
For the first hour of the interview, he spoke guardedly, obviously
giving answers he had given before. But when we traveled around the
reservation, he visibly relaxed. His own story is a modest saga of
Navajo perseverance. "I had very little education. Like most Navajo
children of that day who had any, I was picked up from my hiding
place by force and sent to school. I graduated from the eighth grade
on the reservation. A fellow who wanted to be a missionary to China
where he died later onwas going back to New York to study
medicine. I wanted to see the country; I d never been outside New
Mexico. I had a little money saved, and I went along with him sight
seeing. I was eighteen. I saw New York and Boston and Washing
ton. Then my friend said, *I think you ought to go back to school. You
do janitor work for me around the church here, and you can go to
school from my house. That s the way I started school in New Jersey.
The following year I went back to high school, in Grand Rapids.
That s where I graduated. When World War I broke out I was
picked up out of Grand Rapids, and three weeks later I was on my
way to France. I spent twenty-two months overseas. I was gassed, and
my heart was broken down when I came back. I wanted to study
medicine and be a doctor, but it took me two years to get back my
health, and I was on the reservation here for a while.
"Then I went back to Grand Rapids to college and studied
bookkeeping and typing. I thought I d get a job easy I was one of
the first of the Navajos to get a college diploma. But it took me a year
to get a job in Chicago. I went to work for the National Tea Company
at the bottom and worked up to assistant shipping clerk in the whole
sale department. I married a Navajo girl and I lived in Chicago nine
years. But my wife s health broke down with tuberculosis. The doctor
said she couldn t be cured, but it might be nice for her to be with her
The Indian Nations; Better Times for Many (79
people back on the reservation. So we returned. I started working for
the federal government here. My wife died in 1938. I remarried two
years later, and buried my second wife too. My third wife and I have
been married for twenty years now.
"Since I had been working as an interpreter, both the Navajos
and the Bureau of Indian Affairs thought I would be a good man to be
leader of the tribal government, so in 1955 I resigned from govern
ment service and was elected to this position. I don t feel my efforts
in trying to help the Navajos have been in vain. A lot of them have
been appreciative, and I am grateful for that. I composed the tribal
council of seventy-two members to operate by the committee system.
They are working together very nicely. We have committees working
on Indian health and on the problems of alcohol.
"I tell my people: Adopt new methods. Acquire vocational train
ing and trades. The Navajos should be assimilated. There should be
no reservations; we should be full-fledged American citizens. "
The Navajos are moving in that direction. They and Jones have
been helped immeasurably by Wade Head, an exceptional area di
rector for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Long at Gallup, New Mexico,
he was transferred late in 1962 to the Phoenix office. *We can t
build schools fast enough now to take care of Navajo children whose
parents are anxious to educate them," Head said. This is a complete
reversal from the days before World War II, or even from a decade
ago. You don t make progress in this kind of work by trying to push
people. The Navajos are proud and individualistic; they are taking
what they like of our culture and keeping the best of their own."
They certainly are being exposed. At Window Rock, in the
recently built Navajo Civic Center, Guy Lombardo and his orchestra
played one night when I was there. Harry Belaf onte and Fred Waring
were future attractions. The Navajos are also seeing much more of the
tourist.
For Wade Head, the completion of the highways in 1961 and
1962 was the climax to eight years of effort. Uranium, gas and oil
discoveries had made his Gallup headquarters a hot seat. The bureau
serves more than 1 30,000 Indians, including those of the nineteen pueb
los in New Mexico, the Jicarilla Apaches and Mescalero Apaches,
and the Ute tribes of Colorado. The Mountain Ute tribe of Utah and
Colorado, primitive and usually poorly educated, has cash assets
totaling about twenty million dollars from gas and oil, and a potential
income of about the same figure over the course of the next twenty
years. There are fewer than one thousand Mountain Utes, and each
family has elaborate plans for development, for housing, and for
schooling.
So) WESTWARD TILT
"Some people think they are throwing their money around,"
Head said. "But most of the Indians are very philosophical about
their new wealth. They enjoy the irony of it."
Some, in fact, are throwing it around. The Navajos, who have
had no per capita distribution of this new wealth, sometimes find
jobs tilling the fields of Apaches and Utes who do have cash. These
nou-veaux riches are prone to spend their time gambling and drinking.
Although the liquor problem of the Indian has decreased since the
bootlegger was pushed aside, only within the past decade has it been
legal to sell liquor to Indians. The problem still is acute at Gallup, a
dusty, dirty little railroad town in western New Mexico which is the
closest thing to an urban center around Navajo territory. But it is not
so bad as it was in the months after New Mexico had legalized the sale
of liquor to Indians, and Arizona had not. Indians swarmed across the
line and converged on Gallup. The population of Gallup is about
fifteen thousand; one Saturday afternoon, a road check revealed twenty-
two thousand Indians coming into town. Gallup still must have
more liquor stores and bars than any town its size, and Navajo and
white police can be found collecting drunks at almost any hour of the
day or night. But the percentage of Indians who are drinkers is not as
high as that of non-Indians. Those who do drink are learning to hold
their liquor better, and they are getting better liquor than they did in
the bootleg era. University and church groups have been participating
intelligently in Indian seminars on the alcohol problems.
Still, even the casual tourist, tuning in his car radio in the
neighborhood of Gallup, will hear wine commercials in the Navajo
language. And Paul Jones said, "We organize groups around the res
ervation for public works, to improve roads and dig wells. The first
pay they get, a good portion of it goes into liquor. The doctor over at
the hospital says we are responsible for so many broken bones and so
many killings that when our people don t have money to buy liquor,
the hospital doesn t get filled up. Just the other night I was over at a
ceremonial near the railroad. It was about fifteen hundred yards from
the nearest bar, and the bartender had contributed quite a bit of
money to bring the crowd to his location. We had our policemen there,
and we had the police cars filled all night."
Jones explained that tuberculosis had been controlled among the
Navajos, and child mortality had declined sharply, but that today
the number-one killer on the reservation is alcohol.
"In what form?" I asked.
"In the form of the automobile," he said with a wry smile. "Liquor
still is forbidden on the reservation, but Navajos now own cars and
pickup trucks. They go into town and haul liquor back. There s? all
KEY
Area Office
Agency
Indian Lands and Offices
WESTWARD TILT
kind of fighting and killing going on. They run over sheep, or they
run over themselves."
Wade Head is optimistic. "The Indian is slowly learning about
liquor, and Gallup is improving its attitudes toward the Indian."
Head s most dogged and persevering work on behalf of the In
dian has been in the field of schooling. There are forty-nine boarding
schools on the Navajo reservation. Close to five hundred Navajos are
away at trade schools and collegesmany at the state universities of
New Mexico and Arizona and some of them will graduate. One was
at Harvard in 1961; one has become a doctor. The tribe has set aside a
ten-million-dollar fund whose income is used for educational loans. In
1954, half of the Navajo children were unschooled; by 1961, thirty
thousand of them more than double the number six years earlier
were in school. The federal government has built schools quickly, and
Head has been one of the leaders in the fight to integrate Indian pupils
into off-reservation public schools. About one-fourth of the Navajo
children now in school are at Bureau schools away from the reserva
tion. Off-reservation boarding schools were introduced during the Tru
man administration to accommodate unschooled Navajo youth in a five-
year program designed to provide basic knowledge and trade skills.
Now these large off -reservation schools are used primarily for regular
schooling; in addition, twenty-four hundred Navajo children are en
rolled in public schools in towns on the periphery of the reservation,
and housed in dormitories operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
These are at Albuquerque, Gallup, Winslow, Aztec, Magdalena, and
Ramah, New Mexico; at Flagstaff, Holbrook, and Snowflake, Ari
zona; and at Richfield, Utah. Navajo children living in these dormi
tories are as young as six years old, and attend both grammar and high
schools. The Bureau of Indian Affairs pays in-lieu taxes to the host
public school districts. There have been remarkably few problems of
racial tension involved; Head is high in his praise of public school ad
ministrators in the three-state area who have participated in off-reserva
tion schooling.
"The Navajos are on the move to get educated," Jones explained.
"We ve never had that before. Now parents use force to get the kids to
go to school. In my time, they hid us from the white people. In World
War II, many of our men saw the outside world for the first time and
brought back the word that their sons and brothers should go to school.
It has taken hold."
It is not that simple, of course. Navajo families living in hogans
and huts seldom are able to pay for the several changes of clothing
which their children must take with them when they leave the reserva
tion for schooling. From tribal funds comes almost a million dollars
The Indian Nations: Better Times for Many ( 83
each year to provide clothing for all children who go to school; this has
proved a powerful persuader. But leaders like Jones and Head must
also contend with Navajo prejudice. Just ahead of me when I visited
Jones was a delegation of Navajos who had come to the tribal head
quarters to protest the assignment of a Negro teacher to their school.
They insisted that she did not speak good English; she had a southern
drawl, and these Navajos had not heard one before. Among the
Navajos, as among some other Indian tribes, the Negro is not held in
high esteem. Negro teachers, Jones said, have been assigned to the
Navajo reservation only within recent years, and he himself felt that in
general they were less sympathetic than white teachers toward the
Navajo lack of education. For Jones, that incident posed a knotty
problem. He was serving as a member of Senator Goldwater s advisory
board on civil rights. "Now," he sighed, "I find my own people dis
criminating against colored people."
The impact of the great Navajo rush to the schools will be felt
within a decade, and there is ample cause to hope that effective and
unemotional redress for long years of Indian mistreatment and neglect
is in store. Politically the Navajo is making himself felt; in his path,
other tribes are sure to follow. There are still Navajo precincts with
out voters, but several thousand Navajos vote in each election.
The Indian s political renaissance began with a visit by Dwight
Eisenhower to a Navajo tribal ceremonial at Gallup during the presi
dential campaign of 1952. He promised the Navajos that the federal
government would consult them on Bureau of Indian Affairs appoint
ments. It may have been blithe campaign oratory, but its impact on
the Navajos was incalculable. An estimated ninety-five percent of the
small Navajo vote went to the Republican ticket. After the election
Navajos rallied behind Glenn L. Emmons, a Gallup banker, as their
candidate for commissioner of Indian Affairs. In a full-page news
paper advertisement, the tribe pleaded its case in a manner Madison
Avenue would have approved:
"Navajo life is an intense drama. The striving of the will of our
people is the moving force in this drama. The Navajos must be turned
from anticipated death, from fatalism to action, from inferiority to
healthful pride; but under the leadership of the past and present in
Washington, that goal is not yet reached. We cry out for a leader who
will truly give us physical and spiritual life. If this does not occur un
der Republican leadership, we must be ready to meet the long Indian
Night perhaps the last.
"Democracy today is locked with anti-democratic forces in a
world-wide struggle. The Navajos, and in a large measure every other
84) WESTWARD TILT
tribe, have waged a comparable struggle for many lifetimes. . . .
"During most of its one hundred and twenty-seven years of opera
tion, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has pursued a shoddy course of
costly mismanagement and political maneuvering under administra
tions of both parties. At times it seemed that the Bureau was going far
out of its way to force many American Indians to the status of second-
class citizens. . . . Budget dollars for Indian reservation develop
ment have come grudgingly and in stingy amounts. The Navajos of
Arizona and New Mexico are long-suffering testimonials of the Bu
reau s bad faith. Americans are rightfully proud of their treaties
made and kept with other nations. Yet not once in the eighty-four-year
period since the signing has the Bureau, or the Congress, lived up to
the full terms of the Treaty of 1868 between the United States and the
Navajo Indians. . . ."
Emmons was appointed. He helped the Navajos, and he helped
Gallup too. After the Santa Fe Railroad converted to Diesels, Gallup,
which had survived as a low-grade coal mining town, was dying out.
Emmons brought Indian Bureau area offices and a hospital to Gallup.
Federal payrolls boosted Gallup s economy.
Emmons gave way under the Kennedy administration to Philleo
Nash. Under the two commissioners, Western Indians have turned an
important corner in their relationship with the federal government.
They regard Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior, as a staunch
friend. Senator Barry Goldwater is another highly respected ally of the
Navajos. He has visited every Indian reservation in Arizona, a remark
able feat even for a politician. Goldwater s conservatism coincides with
the liberal attitude in the matter of the Indian: Do not abolish the
reservation yet. Don t try to change the Indian overnight, even in the
name of equal rights and full citizenship. Don t kick him out into the
world; go slow. Give Indians a chance through education, through
good health, through job opportunity, to make their own way, in their
own time.
Even Oliver La Farge, the Santa Fe author and long-time critic
of Indian policy (his Navajo novel, Laughing Boy, won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1929) concedes that Indian policy in the Gallup area is en
lightened. "The story with the Navajos is to protect Indian rights and
encourage Indian enterprise. You can t ask within the same area that
other tribes be treated differently; so the Indians have very little to
complain about here and a good deal to be grateful for. But outside this
area, you begin to run into the same old problems: sale of Indian land,
and policies which tend to force the Indians out of their community."
The conclusion is inevitable that there is a strong correlation be
tween the new wealth of these Indian tribes in the Southwest and their
The Indian Nations: Better Times for Many (85
recent progress. In Oregon, where checks as high as forty-three thou
sand dollars were handed in 1960 to members of the Klamath Indian
tribe upon sale of reservation lands, Indians paid their back bills,
bought cattle and real estate, and invested in government bonds. For
the first time, a Klamath Indian was initiated into a Masonic lodge.
Promoters of get-rich-quick schemes who had moved into the area in
anticipation of this Indian windfall were disappointed. There was no
debauchery, no splurging on expensive new cars, no outbreak of in
dolence.
But few tribes have been so fortunate as to receive such wealth, or
to have the opportunity to prove their capability of coping with it.
Elsewhere in the West, very little of significance is happening among
Indians. At Great Falls, Montana, the predominantly Indian commu
nity known as Hill 57 is a squalid, sequestered slum, a favorite target
of federal Indian policy critics everywhere. Among the most pathetic
of Indian tribes is the Papago, whose bleak reservation lies in the
fiery desert south of Tucson. Some have become farm workers, miners
and railroad workers, but many are nomads still weaving baskets,
building their shelters from clay, and finding their food and medicine
in desert weeds.
The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, whose towns are the most
picturesque of all American Indian settlements, are slowly turning
away from their old traditions. There are about 2 1,000 of them, and in
their everyday tribal costumes and long hair there is not a trace of the
white man s influence. The Pueblos, as one tourist put it, are "more
Indian than other Indians." But even they are coming down out of the
hills to the white man s towns, drawn by the higher standard of living
that city wages provide.
The first known inhabitants of the Pueblo country are referred
to by anthropologists as Sandia Man. Artifacts from a cave east of
Albuquerque place his era at about 35,000 to 30,000 B.C. An arroyo
near Folsom in the far northeast of New Mexico gave up traces of hu
man habitation dated at about 23,000 B.C. These later people are
called Bison Nomads; they roamed the plains from Mexico to Canada.
The pueblos of New Mexico were the first apartment houses of
North America. They were also the first annuities. Ancestors of con
temporary Pueblo Indians did the building, but the smart boys of the
twentieth century are charging admission. If one climbs to the lofty
pueblo of Acoma, atop a mesa west of Albuquerque, one is presented
with a list of photographic charges: eight-exposure black-and-white
cameras, $1.50; 35mm. color cameras, $3.50; 8 mm. motion-picture
cameras, $8; i6mm. motion-picture cameras, $15.
Taos is the northernmost of the pueblos, a relatively prosperous
86) WESTWARD TILT
one and famed because of the nearby artists colony. There is no more
beautiful setting; one stands on the Taos plateau with a sense of awe.
The blue mountains that shield the plateau are remote. There is a feel
of other-worldness, a startling luminosity of colors, a tang in the brisk
lightness of the air, an intimation of the eternal past in the adobe vil
lages of native and Anglo and in the adobe pueblo of the Taos Indian.
The Indians of Taos are eager to be photographed for fifty cents.
They might do better if they imported blankets from the Navajos, for
they drape themselves in green-and-white checked blankets suspi
ciously like those offered at the J. C. Penney store in downtown Taos.
In the Laguna pueblo west of Albuquerque, where a Laguna In
dian made the famed Jackpile uranium strike, Indians handle mechani
cal equipment and are the core of the mining work force. In the
Santo Domingo pueblo, Henry Kaiser executives who sought to run a
railroad spur to a gypsum plant found that their proposed route cut
through a red clay mound which has provided ceremonial clay for the
Santo Domingos. In three or four centuries, the Santo Domingos had
taken out perhaps only a cubic yard of clay. Kaiser wanted to level
the mound, and Kaiser men from Oakland came to talk the problem
out with the Santo Domingo chiefs. After a day of immense corporate
frustration, the spur line was re-routed.
In California, there are Indians in every county in the state, but
in only six or seven counties do they number more than one thousand.
About three-fifths of the Indian population live on insignificant reser
vations in unproductive hill country. Others live on land allotments or
homesteads, work on ranches or, increasingly, find their way to in
dustrial jobs in the cities. The Indian population of Los Angeles
County quadrupled between 1950 and 1960. The situation in San
Diego County is more typical. With no oil or uranium on their lands,
very little timber and nothing whatever to attract the tourist, the eight
hundred Indians on the county s reservations are impoverished and dis
heartened. The total Indian population of the county, just over two
thousand, is almost the same as in 1910. Many who have left the
reservations have jobs in construction work or as maintenance men
and are living at somewhat higher standards than those who stay be
hind on the barren land. Many reservation Indians still show hostility
toward Indian agents.
The most prosperous California Indians are the Agua Caliente
tribe of the Palm Springs area. History does not credit their tribe
with bravery or intelligence, and only about one hundred members of
the tribe survive. Several picturesque canyons, two cemeteries and a
church remain as tribal property. Most of the thirty-one-thousand-acre
reservation, checkerboarded by land once owned by the Southern Pa-
The Indian Nations: Better Times for Many (8j
cific Railway, has been distributed among the Indians on an individual
basis. Because the white man feels as he does about Palm Springs, the
Indians are rich; they are worth an estimated three hundred and thirty-
five thousand dollars each in land valuation. The city of Palm Springs
in 1960 paid almost three million dollars for two sections of the reser
vation on which the city airport is located. The tribal chairman has
been Mrs. Eileen Miguel, who lives in an eighty-five-thousand-dollar
home on a bluff overlooking the new fifty-million-dollar Palm Canyon
Country Club development. The Indians old water hole, revered for
the curative quality of its mineral springs, is in the center of down
town Palm Springs; it took an act of Congress to lease the springs for
the construction of a luxurious spa, heavily patronized by the film
crowd from Los Angeles. One John Joseph Patencio of the Agua
Caliente tribe has a hundred-thousand-dollar business in Palm Springs
which he describes as 4C the first Laundromat owned by an American
Indian."
The major hope of other tribes and of the federal men involved
with Indians throughout most other states is that the momentum of the
Navajo movement will give impetus to better times for them, too.
There are very few reservations in the other states whose land will
support their population.
The Indians cause would be spurred by the emergence of more
leaders like Paul Jones. He says, "Since our old way of life is not pay
ing, why stick to it? You can t just sit around in a blanket and have
people come look at you. You have to work to live."
Also you have to know how. And you must have the chance. One
persistent Indian problem becomes more critical as the education levels
of the Indians rise: those who could help most are likeliest to abandon
the reservation for a better chance at life. It is a rare person, Indian or
white, who will return to a searing land like this after he has dis
covered how others live.
One of these rare men like Paul Jones is Peter Homer, chairman
of the Colorado River Indian tribal council. His mother chose to live in
the old way, but his father became a railroad hand and saw that edu
cation unlocked doors. As a boy, Pete Homer was chased down by
Indian police several times and returned to school; invariably his
father was the one who called the law. Finally he was shipped to
Phoenix Indian School. His whole family on the reservation died in the
flu epidemic of 1918; away at Phoenix, he did not know of their death
for many months. A fine athlete, Homer played professional baseball
and pitched for two years each in Oakland, Milwaukee and Holly
wood. In Rose Marie, the Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald movie,
he was an Indian spear carrier. His baseball career over, he returned
88) WESTWARDTILT
to the Colorado River in 1937 with a Shasta Indian wife, six children,
and a job with the Reclamation Bureau. He did not plan to stay, but a
sense of duty prevailed. "Reservations will not be improved by educa
tion," he said recently, "if the best educated Indians all go away to
live." Today Homer is just as intent on staying on the reservation as he
was when Indian police dragged him away to school.
THE FIGHT TO SAVE
THE WEST
Wherever the impacts of spiraling population are felt, Westerners to
day begin to talk fast about saving the West that they knew, even
yesterday. Because they are so mobile a people, they are vitally inter
ested in both urban planning and in conservation of rural or wilder
ness areas. In each case, the motivation is their quest to create a con
trolled environment.
On days off, and on weekends, Westerners rush to beaches and
parks often to nearby state and national parks. They tolerate urban
crowding with the reassuring knowledge that they are only a few hours
distant from trout stream or ski run. But as they grow accustomed to
the wondrous openness of park or wilderness, they ponder the failure
of city or state government to exercise more effective control over ur
ban growth.
It is this realization that makes Westerners begin to read and
study, to join planning or conservation groups, in unprecedented num
bers. Soon they are aware that the philosophy of Western natural
resources is undergoing a transition in the westward tilt. When the
West was sparsely settled, those who exploited its natural resources
WESTWARD TILT
its timber, oil and minerals, its grass, water and farmland became a
powerful, vested political force. That power is declining.
The rising power is with the millions who have more leisure and
more money and are more eager to travel than ever before. They
are interested in preserving areas where they can fish, hunt, hike,
swim, ski, and camp without being trampled by their neighbors from
the cities. So the concept of Western natural resources has changed;
through powerful organizations and lobbies, the sportsman, the con
servationist, and the tourist are beginning to exert more political pres
sure than mine owners, cattlemen and lumbermen. But their interests
are diverse, and the hunter on a motor scooter is as much an enemy of
the wilderness as is the logger.
The new leisure power is evident on every side. One of the classic
examples is in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a saucer of gentle land
overlooked on the west by the twenty-two summits of the most dra
matic mountains in America: the Grand Tetons. John D. Rockefeller,
Jr., stayed with his three sons in the Jackson Hole country in the sum
mer of 1926. The next year he began buying lands there, and he didn t
stop for more than twenty years. Rockefeller tried hard to give the
land to the nation as part of the Grand Teton National Park. But it was
1950 before the opposition of cattlemen and local citizens could be
overcome and the gift accepted for the purpose Rockefeller proposed.
Teton County income in taxes on the striking, seven-million-dollar
Jackson Lake Lodge (built and operated on leased land in the park by
a non-profit Rockefeller corporation ) is greater than the former income
through taxes on those thirty-five thousand undeveloped acres of Jack
son Hole which some residents fought so hard to withhold from pub
lic domain. Because of a Rockefeller endowment and the ingenuity of
Raymond Lillie, who manages tourist facilities, Grand Teton is the
bellwether among national parks in innovation and development of
tourist services and facilities.
Beneath the sheer escarpments of the Grand Tetons, I watched a
Cadillac limousine pull in among the pines of the Colter Bay shore. Its
four occupants moved into two of the tent cabins designed and built
in 1961 as a compromise between the rough outdoor life which fathers
seem to like to recall for their children, and the softer life more fa
vored in the realistic present. The cabins are an ingenious combina
tion of log, canvas and concrete. Into one tent cabin went husband and
wife; into the other, a nine-year-old boy and the family nurse. The
rates were five dollars a night for each tent cabin. Five miles away, in
the more posh confines of Jackson Lake Lodge, rooms with picture
windows and private baths were available, but here was a family going
camping with limousine and nurse.
The Fight to Save the West (91
It is not necessary to arrive at the Grand Tetons with tents, camp
stoves, air mattresses, mosquito netting or sleeping bags piled on car
roofs. Many families camp only rarely, but enjoy an opportunity to
sample camp life without investing in equipment. All the items needed
for camping are available for rental by occupants of the tent cabins
down to coffee cup and spatula. Axes are for rent, and there is abun
dant fallen timber so that fathers can make a great show of cutting
firewood with their sons. This display lasts usually only for a day or
two; when the camper has made his point, he may buy a sack full of
chopped wood for a few cents.
Such understanding of the vacationer has been combined in all
the Jackson Lake facilities with equal appreciation of the environ
ment. Laurance S. Rockefeller, board chairman of the Grand Teton
Lodge Company, is elated that the tent-cabins at five dollars a night
are more sought after than the best twenty-five dollar lodge rooms;
the more rustic setting is closer to nature, and to his heart. A small
sign is posted beside the cashier s window of the Jackson Lake Lodge
reminding guests that no one is making any profit from their visit. In
such an atmosphere, there seems to be a keener sense of good fun than
at many national parks.
One school teacher declined an appointment as superintendent of
schools in a nearby Idaho county because it would have interfered with
his summer job as a tour bus driver in Grand Teton National Park. An
other teacher, from California, was my guide during a trip on a rubber
raft down a fast but placid stretch of the Snake River from where
the Tetons seem to loom almost vertically. The raft trip is another of
Lillie s shrewd diversions for the vacationer. It is a thirty-mile trip,
usually requiring about six hours, including a stop for a picnic lunch
on a grassy shore of the Snake. There is very little white water this
near the headwaters of the savage Snake which begins its flow just
north of Jackson Lake near Yellowstone Park, flows southwest to cross
Idaho and turns northward through Hell s Canyon, deepest of all
American gorges, finally meeting the mighty Columbia River in south
eastern Washington.
A highway follows the course of the Snake through Jackson
Hole; but from the water it is not seen, nor are motors heard. There is
little trace of man. The guide stands manning the sweep as the raft
slips silently downstream; the only sound is the lapping of water
against raft and bank. On the shores and the islands in the stream are a
succession of wonders. From a beaver lodge a canal leads into a grove
of quaking aspen; the beavers had exhausted the supply of deciduous
trees along the bank and cut their own aquatic skid road into the forest.
From their tiny caves bored into a river cliff, a corps of cliff swallows
$2) WESTWARD TILT
emerge and dance their rhumba step along the bank. Above them is a
wild splash of color: lupin, wild rose and Indian paintbrush; beyond
those, buckwheat and sagebrush rim the top of the cliff, and a buck-
and-rail fence of native lodgepole pine cuts into view at the edge of a
pasture. A raven perches in solemn dignity on an island in the stream,
and a moose with an awesome spread of antlers canters out of the trees
to stare with hauteur at our leisurely, effortless passage through his
domain. Far above us, clouds gather and curtain off from view the
highest of the Tetons.
In the evening, after my trip down the Snake, a Fulbright scholar
from India served me a cocktail. My waitress at dinner was a Paris girl
who had transferred from the Sorbonne to the University of Wyo
ming, and whose eyes twinkled wildly when she talked of the con
trasts. Later that evening I met a San Francisco builder, a vintner
from Sonoma Valley and a New York City designer. All showed a
keen interest in these mountains and in the Rockefeller improvisations
aimed at bringing the casual vacationer closer to nature. Despite the
crowding and cacophony of many of the national parks and most
vacationlands of America, nature-minded visitors are growing more
numerous, and their voices are raised more often in conservation af
fairs.
The national park system is predominantly Western, although by
far the heaviest tourism at any park is at the Great Smoky Mountains
National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee, the closest of the
major parks to areas of large population. About eleven million acres
lies in national parkland west of the Mississippi River, and less than
three and a half million acres to the east of the Mississippi. The three
parks most heavily visited in 1960 were Eastern, and yet the total at
tendance at national parks west of the Mississippi in that year was al
most double that of Eastern parks.
Habits of the park visitor are changing. The house trailer, that
monstrous enemy of mountain road traffic, has become a fact of life in
the parks. The first trailer accommodations provided in national parks
were at Grand Teton; now they are commonplace, and demand for
trailer space is so great that parks are lowering the maximum dura
tion of stay allowed for trailers. Between 1955 and 1959, while visi
tors to Yellowstone increased only three percent, the number of house
trailers increased one hundred and ten percent, and the number of
boats by one hundred and eight percent. Most of the boats are power
boats, and their increasing use on waters such as Yellowstone Lake
has set off controversy. The Park Service has closed three arms of
Yellowstone Lake to motorboat traffic in the spirit of the 1916 law set
ting up the national parks "to leave them unimpaired for the enjoy-
KEY
National Parks and Monuments
National Forests
State Parks
Government Parks and Forests
WESTWARD TILT
ment of future generations," and to guard*.; when compatible with other
goals, the ancient virtues of peace and silence.
Another villain of park and wilderness lovers is the motorized
trail scooter. Since 1958, more than fifty companies have gone into the
manufacture of gasoline-driven, two-seater scooters; some of the
scooters can negotiate a forty-five percent grade with a four-hundred
pound load, and later fold down to fit into an automobile trunk. Their
noise carries across remote mountainsides, sending naturalists into
apoplexy; their wheels set off rock slides and dig ruts that lead to
erosion.
The national parks wrestle with other problems which are unique
to the characteristics of each park; crowding is a perpetual crisis at
some parks, like Yosemite. The granite domes and towering water
falls above Yosemite Valley make it, for me, the most compelling
scenery in America. Nowhere else in the world have I repeatedly fallen
so totally under the spell of nature. Obviously I am not alone in my
attachment for Yosemite Valley. There are about eleven hundred
square miles in Yosemite National Park, and fewer than ten square
miles on the valley floor. Yet almost all of the more than a million
visitors to Yosemite each year huddle on the valley floor, creating a
condition of urban crowding during the summer which threatens to
destroy the Yosemite spell. The Park Service combats crowding by
encouraging visitors to explore the more rustic facilities of the magnifi
cent Yosemite high country. But the crowding is rapidly making
Yosemite the arena of a showdown in the battle between conservation
ists and others like the National Park Service, who contend that it is
their prime duty to make room for the people. The narrow old Tioga
Pass Road, which crossed the ridgepole of the Sierra Nevada in Yo
semite National Park at almost ten thousand feet, has given way to a
wide, high-speed and comparatively dull highway. The change was
fought bitterly by many who believe that it is an irreverence to speed
through scenic grandeur such as this.
Far to the north, Yellowstone tourism in the record-breaking
summer of 1962 recovered completely from the earthquake of Au
gust 17, 1959, which took twenty-eight lives and caused an overnight
exodus on the highways comparable only to Pasadena after a Rose
Bowl game. One significant change in tourism at Yellowstone is that
its southern gateway, through Jackson Hole and Grand Teton Na
tional Park, has displaced its northern portal as the most popular point
of entry into the huge park. This is because more park visitors come
now from California than from any other state.
Grand Canyon is unique in that visitors must leave the major
highways, travel about sixty miles to the canyon, and then retrace
The Fight to Save the West ($5
their route to continue their journey. Park Service people at Grand
Canyon like that; visitors are not there for a casual drive-through, but
because they want to see the canyon. My most recent visit to Grand
Canyon was in the chill, calm days of October. At sunrise I was almost
alone outside old El Tovar Hotel, a few steps away from the rim of the
earth s most violent aberration. Later I visited John S. McLaughlin,
who had served as park superintendent at Grand Canyon for six
years. He is a tall, quiet Scot with a mustache and an unswerving love
for the outdoors. It is bizarre to associate anything as gargantuan and
forbidding as Grand Canyon with a pet, but McLaughlin talking
about Grand Canyon reminds one of a hunter s soliloquy about his
favorite hound.
"One of the greatest thrills I get," he said, "is to go out to Mather
Point in the afternoon and watch visitors stop their cars and take
their first look at the Canyon. I like to watch their movements and hear
what they say. Most of them are quite overwhelmed by it, and you can
see it on their faces. This is true especially of people from the East and
Midwest. Of course some Texans go up and take a look and turn
around and walk away. They just don t want to admit it."
More people visit Grand Canyon than ever before, although the
rate of increase has leveled out. In summer, visitors sleep in cars and
jam hotels sixty miles away in Williams. By October, the North Rim is
closed, and the Harvey hotels on the South Rim have empty rooms.
The same questions are asked today at Grand Canyon as were
asked when the Park Service began almost fifty years ago: how did it
happen, and when? To handle such questions, answered in every en
cyclopedia, the Park Service has opened a sleek modern visitors center
on the South Rim, and conducts nature lectures nearby. A new camp
ground and trailer park have been added as part of the Park Service s
Project 66 program which sets 1966 as a target year for completing
an ambitious series of improvements in national parks.
Even at Grand Canyon, there is change. "People don t stay as
long as before," McLaughlin said. "A good percentage of them come
to the rim and take a look, are here a couple of hours, and then get
back to Highway 66. A few take the trail trips down into the Canyon,
a smaller percentage than in past years. It takes at least a day consid
erable time for today s tourist. The average American is not as inter
ested in physical exercise as his father was. A great proportion of the
people who actually hike to the Colorado River at the bottom of the
Canyon are Europeans."
At Grand Canyon, as everywhere, the Park Service is anxious to
maintain natural conditions as primitive as is compatible with ac
commodating the teeming visitors. At the Canyon, the Park Service has
WESTWARD TILT
nature s wilderness on its side. Even El Tovar Hotel, built in 1905
and the overnight home of every United States president since that
time, may disappear eventually from the rim; the Park Service is
anxious to return the Canyon edge to nature. In the case of El Tovar,
this is an awkward problem; the hotel was built by the Santa Fe Rail
road eleven years before the Park Service was created. But the Harvey
Hotels management concedes that the Park Service will win its point
and the hotel will be rebuilt away from the rim. There is a certain
fatalism in the air here, where millions of years can be measured in
mere hundreds of feet of red rock.
One of the major national park fights of recent years was taking
place as this book went to press: the effort led by Secretary of the In
terior Stewart Udall to establish Canyonlands National Park, a remote
three hundred and thirty thousand acre area in southeast Utah. Canyon-
lands would include the red rock gorges, buttes, and spires knifed by
the torrents of the Green River and Colorado River in the area of their
confluence near the uranium mining town of Moab. This is a wilder
ness reached now by only the very dedicated tourist, and it is one of the
most rugged spectacles in America. The park, as originally proposed
by Secretary Udall, would have included close to a million acres. But
the boundaries were cut after Governor Dewey Clyde and Senator
Wallace F. Bennett of Utah, both Republicans, had protested that the
park would "lock up" mineral resources important to Utah s economy.
Exploratory drilling has taken place in the area, but no oil or gas dis
coveries are known.
"This is the finest area in America outside the park system,"
Secretary Udall told me. "It has, in its way, greater variety and gran
deur than the Grand Canyon. In some of the Western states, such as
Utah, tourism is the future of the state. Even if oil were discovered
here, it would be gone in fifty years; a park would preserve its scenic
beauty, and have even greater value a thousand years from now."
Canyonlands is one of half a dozen proposed parks that Secretary
Udall has been seeking in an effort to increase national park acreage;
the rate of acquisition of Park acreage dropped sharply during the
administrations of Truman and Eisenhower. This quest seems com
patible with the report in 1962 of the Outdoor Recreation Resources
Review Commission headed by Laurance S. Rockefeller. After a three-
year study by its eight members of Congress and seven private citizens,
the commission noted that "one of the main currents of modern life has
been the movement away from the outdoors. It no longer lies at the
back door or at the end of Main Street. More and more, most Ameri
cans must traverse miles of crowded highways to know the outdoors.
The Fight to Save the West
The prospect for the future is that this quest will be even more diffi
cult." This is true, even in the new West.
Secretary Udall is among those who have sensed a desire for
planning among the people of the West, at a time when they are receiving
a great migration. "I think we have the opportunity now for the big
gest push in conservation in this century," he told me. "Membership in
conservation and wildlife groups is soaring. They are becoming more
powerful, as they speak for the great mass of the people. What we save
in the next few years may be all that we save. We must preserve the
sense of spaciousness that America once implied. One source of our na
tional strength has been that we have had a big land to test ourselves
against."
About half of the land in Western states already is owned by
the federal government, and some Westerners are appalled at the
prospect that more land might go irrevocably into public domain un
der circumstances depriving the West and the nation of its natural re
sources. (Of the one hundred and fifty regions to be preserved under
the wilderness bill considered by Congress in 1962, one hundred and
thirty-nine were in the West. ) Yet one of the firmest voices in sup
port of the wilderness legislation has been that of the relatively small
but influential Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892 with
John Muir, the naturalist, as president. At the close of World War II,
the Sierra Club had about six thousand members; the number
tripled in the following fifteen years, and chapters of the club spread
across the nation. Since 1900, the Club has conducted walking trips
and pack trips into the Sierra Nevada. Many trips now are designed
for full family groups, and are reserved months in advance. Board
members of the Sierra Club include Supreme Court Justice William O.
Douglas, one of the sturdiest and most literary of conservationists, and
Ansel Adams, the nature photographer, whose magnificent book, This
is the American Earth, was sponsored by the Sierra Club.
The Sierra Club sees as its role the job of awakening the Amer
ican people from what it regards as nearly a mass oblivion of irrevoca
ble changes in the national landscape, and loss of scenic resources.
The Club fights for new parks and wilderness areas, and it urges that
the public be given a broader voice in the management of national
forest resources. In 1962, for instance, it led a fight for a protective
dam which would prevent flooding of Rainbow Bridge in Utah by the
waters of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. It works at lower
government levels toward state parks, greenbelts, and urban open
spaces.
The soaring membership of a club dedicated to such goals, and of
WESTWARD TILT
other groups like the National Wildlife Federation, the National Parks
Association, the Izaak Walton League of America, and the Wilderness
Society, suggests a healthy rise of interest in nature and conservation.
Many Sierra Club members have been active in the group since before
1920; they regard California as a state of rare beauty and wonder and
want it to remain so. But the predominant part of the new membership
is made up of younger Californians who have gone West for business
reasons, or in search of amenities. They are acutely sensitive to the
California movement and are usually aware of the hopeful contrast be
tween the California environment and the one they left behind in older
sections of the nation. They are looking for ways to prevent this bright
new land from becoming as scarred and listless as the old.
"Not until 1961," wrote Edgar Wayburn, president of the
Sierra Club in 1962, "could we talk in terms of a definitely rising tide
in the conservation movement, both as a popular idea and once again as
a political force, this time of the Sise-but-preserve school. Of greatest
import and interest to the Sierra Club is the increased and marked ac
ceptance of the wilderness idea, the park idea, and the open space
idea."
Among many Western people today such serious concern for the
future environment is commonplace. At this moment, it would appear
the Westerner has more hope of saving his wilderness than his cities.
His political pressures are seldom organized enough to cope with his
runaway world of urban growth. There is a rising tide of citizen inter
est in urban planning, but it is only now beginning to be translated into
results at the government level.
There have been only a few planned cities in the West until very
recent years; much more predominant are the cities that never meant
to be.
Not long ago a University of Southern California sociologist sug
gested a plan for staggered weekends as a means of minimizing crowd
ing of beaches and freeways. Implicit in his proposal, although not
expressed, was the suggestion that the Sabbath be observed on varying
days by varying segments of the population. Yet in the face of such
drastic proposals, and with growth problems that dwarf those of
every other state, Californians have been spending less per capita on
statewide planning than the people of any other state except In
diana. The California State Office of Planning has existed on a smaller
budget than that of many city and county planning agencies within the
state. Its funds have been so limited that California has been unable to
accept federal grants-in-aid for development of state plans funds
The Fight to Save the West
which have been exploited even by New Mexico, with a population
only about one-sixteenth as large as that of California.
California will spend fifty-five billion dollars on public works
within the next twenty years; yet because of the starvation budget of
the State Office of Planning, the state has no comprehensive develop
ment plan to guide the location of its freeways and its aqueducts, no
state land-use plan, no means of halting suburban sprawl, no plan
for moving its urban growth pattern from valley smog to foothill airi
ness, no idea of when to stop the march of subdivisions over its best
agricultural acreage, no statewide concept of air terminal locations, no
program to aid the sparsely populated counties into which many of the
coming millions of new Californians will have to settle. Instead, the
California Legislature has voted down legislation to permit formation
of metropolitan, area-wide policy agencies.
Each California county is required by law to maintain a planning
commission and develop a master plan for land use. All major Cal
ifornia cities do the same. But the plans become hopelessly ensnarled
in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles County, which has seventy-
three incorporated cities within its boundaries; or the San Francisco
Bay area, with its nine counties and eighty-five municipalities.
Citizen interest in planning has moved ahead of the state gov
ernment in California. A non-profit educational institution called Cal
ifornia Tomorrow was formed in 1962 at Sacramento. "Our whole
purpose," said Samuel E. Wood, a former official of the United States
Agriculture and Interior departments, "is to achieve a greater public
awareness of the growth problems that California faces."
In a booklet entitled California Going, Going . . . , Wood and
Alfred E. Heller wrote: "The idea that there is no popular support for
planning, and that planning has no political appeal, is outmoded.
Every day thousands of citizens face the problems of growth as they
give their time to cities and counties on planning commissions, zon
ing boards, and special citizens study committees. Every year other
hundreds of thousands attend hearings on general plans, central busi
ness district studies, zoning matters, school and park site acquisitions,
and freeway locations. The subject of planning is people s homes
and neighborhoods, their schools, their parks, their work places and
how they get to them it is where you live and how you liveit is the
very bloodstream of California."
There is state planning in California, but it is unilateral.
The Department of Water Resources developed a water plan for
California which was approved by the legislature in 1959. Voters
sanctioned the largest bond issue in the history of any state in 1960:
100) WESTWARD TILT
$1,750,000,000. With that vote, the department was in the construc
tion business; it was charged with building some of the water projects
outlined in its plan. But there is no overall state policy or state plan to
guide full development of concurrent recreational facilities at reser
voirs, to prevent highways from crossing dam sites, or to guide the
location and growth of towns which will spring up along the route of
the new waterways.
The Division of Highways, with about sixteen thousand em
ployees and an annual budget in excess of six hundred million dollars,
is sustained by a gas-tax fund set up in the state constitution. An
autocracy, it has been under fire incessantly because there is no state
policy directing the Division to work with other state agencies and
local interests in plans for freeway and highway routing, so that the
best use of the state s land for all purposes can result. The Division
has waived its authorization to buy parkland beside state highways,
and beach easements to provide public entry to state beaches. It has
evaded a stand on control of highway advertising.
A two-volume report by a special committee in 1960 produced a
California public outdoor recreation plan. But responsibility for rec
reation facilities in California is lost in a jumble of more than a score
of federal, state, and local agencies. There has been no dominant
single recreational agency. "As things happen now," wrote Wood and
Heller, ic a tourist entering the state is not urged to take advantage of
[California] recreational resources he is merely asked if he is ac
companied by insect pests!"
The emergence of the California Tomorrow agency in 1962 was
a sign of California restlessness at state inactivity in the realm of
planning. It was evidence that Californians are growing uncomforta
bly aware that each passing day places new limits on the bright tomor
row of the golden state; each day brings fifteen hundred more people
into California and swallows more than three hundred acres of open
land. Backed by a distinguished advisory board recruited largely from
the San Francisco Bay area, California Tomorrow promised to be the
first effective rallying point for Californians against urban blight or
the slurb , a word coined by the organization to describe the suburban
fringe destroyed by neon and subdivision.
Many other Western states, closely watching the effect of the
avalanche on California, have profited from its formidable example of
urban blight. Some of them are far ahead of California in terms of
state planning; they have made their moves in time to avoid some of
the worst of the stated catastrophes. Oregon virtually put its entire
coastline into a massive public beach system in 1913. Phoenix went on
The Fight to Save the West (101
a rampage of annexation in the 1950 $ which brought a huge subur
ban fringe under city planning controls. Seattle used the impetus of its
World s Fair to create a handsome new civic center complex at the
Fair site. But throughout the West, most towns and cities are grow
ing in a string pattern which has evolved because land in the
suburbs is relatively cheap and transportation is by automobile; the
major arteries tail out through a melange of neon, jumbled signs and
used car lots, into desert or fields.
There are, however, some bright spots.
One intriguing project is south of Los Angeles on the historic,
ninety-three thousand acre Irvine Ranch in Orange County. The ranch
had remained almost intact since the days of Spanish settlement until
Joan Irvine Burt, twenty-eight-year-old beauty and an heiress of the
ranch company, led a three-year battle with Irvine Company directors
for a master development plan. The ranch, which her grandfather
had founded, stood in 1961 as probably the largest undeveloped tract
in an urban area in the nation.
Now it is being developed as a complete urban complex rolling
from mountains to the Pacific including a thousand-acre campus of
the University of California, homes, hotels, golf course, beach facili
ties, business and industrial sites. The ranch includes eight miles of
coves along the coast between the resort towns of Newport Beach and
Laguna Beach.
The young heiress won a round in her battle with the directors
after making public a letter to the company president in 1960 in
which she cited the Irvine ranch as "an unparalleled and golden oppor
tunity in the creation of new and lasting standards of community de
velopment." The president stepped aside, and Charles S. Thomas,
former Secretary of the Navy, was called in to implement a master
plan. It has been developed under the supervision of architect William
Pereira; it is to be executed in three phases requiring ten years each.
The result seems likely to be a brilliant example of community plan
ning.
In some respects, Lake Tahoe is another hopeful example of
planning. It is a mountain-ringed, oval emerald, high in the Sierra
Nevada. The Cal-Neva Lodge straddles the state line; liquor cannot
be sold after two in the morning on the California side, but a bar
tender on the Nevada half will cheerfully serve you a double martini
at dawn. Despite such contrasts in the restrictive philosophies of the
two states, they are joined in an unprecedented effort to develop bi-
state park and recreation sites on both Nevada and California shores of
Lake Tahoe. Park commissions of the two states have been seeking an
102) WESTWARD TILT
interstate compact to obtain property, and a two-state authority is con
templated to administer programs. It could be a breakthrough toward
regional cooperation in planning among Western states.
There are powerful outdoor minorities.
California skiers showed their political strength when the state
was persuaded to develop Squaw Valley as the site of the 1960 Winter
Olympics at a cost to the taxpayers of sixteen million dollars.
Although naturalists shudder at his depredations, the hunter
sometimes aids conservation. Contrary to the impressions of most non-
hunters, he is often devoted to nature. The stiff licensing fees that he
pays make possible strict policing and usually sound policies of fowl
mid game conservation.
In deer season, California overflows into that portion of southern
Utah known as Dixie. In the 1961 season, by estimates of the Utah
Department of Fish and Game, one hundred and sixty-five thousand
hunters reduced the Utah deer population by one hundred and fifteen
thousand in stiffly regulated hunting. Not quite all the hunters came
from California. It is traditional in Dixie to shut down almost every
thing on the opening day of deer season. Local schools go on a three-
day holiday, and even in Salt Lake City, two hundred and sixty miles
to the northeast, a labor union contract with the Hercules Powder
Company insures employees a holiday on the first Monday of deer sea
son. In the mountains between the Dixie towns of Cedar City and
Panguitch there is every grade of hunter. Men road-hunt from motor
scooters or skin their bucks outside two-bedroom house trailers.
There are far more fishing licenses bought in California than in
any other state. The trout and salmon fishing of the Northwest is
superb, but the catches of the California fisherman are enviable too. In
coastal waters, marlin, albacore and yellowtail are prized sport
catches. The California State Department of Fish and Game stocks
fresh water streams and lakes with almost fifty million trout and
salmon each year. At dawn on opening day of the trout season, it seems
possible to walk across vast Crowley Lake, three hundred miles
northeast of Los Angeles, atop the solid mass of fishermen s boats.
More than thirteen thousand fishermen were present for the opening of
the 1961 season there. California fishermen do not mention the good
old days. A century ago, pioneers found better salmon, steelhead and
rainbow trout fishing than today, but California offered fewer striped
bass, shad, brown trout, eastern brook trout, or black bass many of
which have been introduced into California waters from other areas by
the Fish and Game Department.
From 1947 to ^foi about thirteen million dollars in state
revenue from horse-race parimutuel betting went into projects of the
General farming
Grazing
Dairy
Wheat
Cotton <
Sugar Beet T
Special crops Y
Forest
Desert
Land Use
10+) WESTWARD TILT
Wildlife Conservation Board, which develops fish hatcheries, water
fowl management areas, and provides limited recreation facilities.
California has a flair for maintaining separation of funds; some of the
revenue received from fun always stays in fun. (From 1933 to 1961,
California had received more than four hundred million dollars in
revenue from horse racing. Funds were allotted for county fairs, col
leges and universities, and to the general fund; fifty thousand dollars
of it was spent for gnat control research, and more than a million dol
lars went to a poultry improvement commission.)
Pleasure boating is big business every week of the year along the
West Coast, and marinas along the Southern California coast cannot
be built fast enough to provide moorage for the growing pleasure fleet.
Marina del Rey, on the Los Angeles County coast, is a giant among
marinas. It covers eight hundred acres and has six thousand boat
slips, separated by four-lane thoroughfares on two-thousand foot long
moles. Part of its cost was underwritten with a thirteen-million-dollar
revenue bond issue floated by Los Angeles County. There are three
hundred thousand small craft registered in California, one for every
seventeen families.
For those who cannot find escape in boating from multi-million-
dollar marinas, there is Georgie White. It is her specialty to conduct
raft trips down the rapids of Western rivers for amateur naturalists,
photographers, and any others who will risk a wetting for the wild joy
of looking up into the Grand Canyon walls from a swirling, bobbing
bit of rubber. Georgie White became enchanted with the Grand
Canyon in 1944, and has since swum one hundred and twenty-five
miles of its seething length. She runs the rapids on the Snake River,
too, and on the Green River in Utah; she will see more of them now,
because the new Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River above
Grand Canyon has blocked her favorite river route.
Georgie White is a blue-eyed brunette of immense daring, but
she is not a product of that older West in which physical courage was
commonplace; she discovered the West after working as a comptom
eter operator in New York City s Rockefeller Center. She, too, is a
part of the westward tilt.
The excitement of the land in the West is not yet destroyed by
the migration of millions and it need not be. There still is magic in
Western land and sky and air and water. It is a prime asset of the
region, and Westerners are well aware that it is worth fighting for.
The excitement grips any sensitive observer, even at his first contact
with it.
My father visited California for the first time when he was eighty-
The Fight to Save the West ( i o j
seven. His first glimpse of San Diego as his plane landed seemed to
settle a question that had long puzzled him. As we walked away from
his plane, his bright gaze roved toward the San Diego harbor and the
long sweeping arm of Point Loma. It was sunset. He said he might
forgive me for deserting North Carolina.
He sensed immediately that he was in a city unlike any to which
he was accustomed. It is part of my father s nature that before he can
accept a thing, he must understand it. In California as a visitor, he
pursued truth as vigorously as he has from Southern Baptist pulpits all
his life. Perhaps in the West, I reasoned, I could meet the test of his
probing mind; after all, it had been my home for almost twenty years.
But before our first evening had passed, he asked why it does not rain
in the summertime in Southern California. I stared at him for a long
time before confessing that I had no idea at all. (Weather men, I
learned later, do not agree on reasons why storm paths from the north
do not reach Southern California in summer. But the coastal tempera
ture inversion is a prime factor.)
As we drove along the coast, he asked why, unlike most of the
Atlantic coast, the Pacific coast has cliffs. (Later I got it straight. Half
a million years ago, the Pacific lapped inland as far as ten miles from
today s beaches. But then the earth of the always turbulent West rose
hundreds of feet, forming what geologists call terraces.)
We settled down for a quiet afternoon at a beach. At eighty-
seven, my father seemed to deserve a nap. But he was on his feet at the
sight of kelp. Wasn t Pacific kelp quite different from Atlantic kelp?
(Yes, I was told later at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It is
larger than Atlantic kelp and has floats which bring it to the surface,
mating it easier to cut for refinement into the emulsifying agents used
in ice cream, paints, and surgical styptics.)
Something was missing, he mused later, in the California land of
plenty. Why were there so few sea shells? (I had wondered for years,
myself. Sea shells are calcium carbonate, a chemist told me patiently,
and thus they dissolve more readily in cold water than in warm. The
warm Gulf Stream of the Atlantic makes East Coast beaches a haven
for shell-hunters. But even off Southern California, ocean temperatures
rarely rise above seventy-two degrees.)
Most of my answers came too tardily to interest my father. Quite
by accident, I learned that he had dropped in on an oceanographer
and got the straight of it before I could. He had recognized the futility
of embarrassing his son further.
Part II
CALIFORNIA
CENTER
OF
GRAVITY
7
SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA
The Restless Kind
<&&&&s>&$^^
In 1697 Loreto was the capital of all California. Now it is a dusty and
awesomely remote Mexican town of fourteen hundred people on the
wilderness peninsula of Baj a (Lower) California. Since 1697 not much
has happened, really, in Baj a California, which has remained a part
of Mexico. Settlement has been in what the Spanish and Mexicans
called Alta (Upper) California, which Mexico surrendered to the
United States in 1848; this is the state of California.
The contrast between the two Californias is indelibly vivid when
sensed today from Loreto, which once was the forward outpost of
California civilization; by current standards Loreto is an almost inac
cessible dot in a vast wasteland. Not far from Loreto lives an
Australian-born dentist, a little deaf, who chose to be a recluse in this
land. Recently, for the first time in thirty-six years, he drove four
hundred miles north it takes a week over these rocky, rutted trails
to visit what we know as Southern California. He was impressed by the
110) WESTWARD TILT
extent of electric lighting, the size and speed of freeways, and the bad
coffee.
"Coffee in the States is awful, eh?" he told me. "But I found the
people very polite. I was surprised, eh?"
The dentist thinks life must have been better among the primi
tive Indian tribes of Southern California, before the Spanish ex
plorers, the missionaries, and ten million white men came. "All they
did was hunt, fish, make love and sleep under the trees," he said.
"They hadn t even discovered the fig leaf. The women spent their
time picking fleas out of the men s hair, eh?"
Southern California has managed to forget its Indians, who were
not among the brighter tribes, and to remember its Spanish soldiers
and missionaries. It was the Jesuit order which established the first
California settlement of the white man at Loreto in 1696. From there,
in 1769, a crippled and aging Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra, led
an expedition north to colonize Alta California. The major difference in
the journey that the dentist took two centuries later was that he
traveled by jeep. The scenery had changed very little.
Father Serra founded a mission among the Indians to the north
at San Diego. That was the beginning of the California of today, for
better or for worse. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo had stepped ashore from
his ship in San Diego harbor in 1542, but for two more centuries be
fore the actual settlement of San Diego, California was thought by
many to be an island or group of islands. So it is Father Serra who is
the hero of Southern California history. Despite an ailing leg, he was a
great walker. He was also a dedicated Christian and a man of sturdy
principles though some of the Spanish governors protested that the
Franciscans punished the Indians excessively.
Father Serra s San Diego mission was first built on a bluff over
looking the bay; today General Dynamics-Convair sprawls beneath
the bluff. Father Serra had trouble promptly with the Indians: soldiers
fraternized with naked Indian girls, and Indian braves shot arrows at
the soldiers. To minimize friction and to be nearer water, the mission
was moved to a hillside in Mission Valley; nearby now is a hub of the
Southern California tourist industry known as Hotel Circle. There,
Father Serra s mission became the southern anchor of the chain of
twenty-one Franciscan missions, each a day s journey by horseback, all
the way to Sonoma, north of San Francisco. The missions can be seen
today in varying stages of restoration.
Most of the Indians were brought in from desert and hills to
live and work for the missions: there were more than twenty thousand
of them by 1805. The settlements prospered, just as the South was
Southern California; The Restless Kind (in
prospering in those years before the Civil War, and for the same rea
son: slave labor. The Franciscans tried to convert the Indians, but also
they used them to clear and till their fields, build their missions, dig
irrigation ditches, herd cattle, and tan hides. Some were assigned as
servants to indolent Spanish soldiers. Irked by heavy schedules of
work and prayer and by cramped housing, many Indians ran away; if
caught, they were flogged.
The San Gabriel Mission once owned seventeen ranches, three
thousand Indians, more than twenty-five thousand cattle, two thou
sand horses, and fifteen thousand sheep. The fathers held the missions
not as land grants from the Spanish Crown, but as trustees for the In
dian neophytes. In the end, it didn t work out that way.
Mexico won her independence from Spain in 1821. Four years
later, California became a territory of the Republic of Mexico. Cas-
tilian colonists had moved in on big land grants. Their names, and
those of their heirs, are prominent still: Pio Pico, Juan Bandini, Josg
Carillo. When the Mexican governor, Figueroa, began to secularize
the missions in 1834, as planned, the Franciscans began to depart.
Mexican and Spanish plunderers moved in, some with legal land
grants and some without. The Indians fled. By 1845, all the missions
had been sold or leased, and the era of the California rancho had
begun. The Indians were paid now for their work, but in glass beads
and bad booze.
The Mexican War didn t provoke much shooting in Southern
California. The Calif ornio generals on the Mexican side, Pio Pico in
Los Angeles and Jose Castro in Monterey, fought between them
selves, just as Southern Calif ornians and Northern Californians always
have done. The American forces, variously under Stockton, Keamy
and Fremont, totaled only six hundred men, but it was a force about as
large as the Mexican army, finally under a new Pico General Andres
Pico which surrendered to the United States. The terms were gentle:
Pico was invited to give up his artillery and to promise to obey the
laws of the United States. He agreed, and a boulevard in Los Angeles
today bears the name of Pico.
Mexico gave up Alta California that part of it from San Diego
northward in 1848, when the white population of California totaled
about fifteen thousand, Mexicans have never quite forgotten their loss.
A window in the national military academy at Mexico City shows a
map of Mexico as she once was, her border snug against that of Ore
gon.
Soon came the first of many waves of migration into California,
and, in 1850, statehood. That year, when San Diego became a city by
WESTWARD TILT
law, whales rolled about the harbor in such numbers that a rowboat
journey was hazardous. There were ten stores, eighty-eight houses,
2,273 Indians and 544 others of assorted breeding.
Philip Crosthwaite, the first San Diego treasurer, traveled by
stage to Sacramento with two hundred dollars in tax money payable to
the state. But he drew three hundred dollars in state funds for his
travel expenses. State officials admonished him to stay in San Diego
thereafter and embezzle the state funds.
In 1866 came Alonzo Horton, who bought one thousand acres
encompassing modern downtown San Diego for $265. In 1884, La
Jolla was advertised for sale; it was only a scattering of beach shacks.
The Indians found life little better under the rule of the United
States than under the Franciscan padre or the Spanish don. They de
clined in number from more than eighty thousand in 1850 to fewer
than twenty thousand in 1885. Their only revenge was in the heritage
of names they gave to Southern California: names like Azusa, Cuca-
monga, Malibu, Ojai, and Pismo.
^^^^^^^^^
An the high desert of Southern California, a pilot pushed forward
the afterburner throttle in his TFio6 jet interceptor and pulled up
steeply from the long runway of Edwards Air Force Base. Ahead was
nothing but blue sky. Behind us, it seemed, there was nothing but
thrust. Four minutes later, at forty thousand feet, the pilot pointed to
ward a green speck on the Mojave Desert below. It was Barstow, a
railroad and highway junction town. The trains looked like fallen
bobbypins on a buff carpet.
Over the intercom came the pilot s voice: "We ll level out and
make a speed run. We re on a west-southwest course that ll put us
over the beach at Ventura. Watch the Mach needle. At Mach two, we ll
be doing about fourteen hundred miles an hour."
Moving at twenty-three miles a minute, our plane was over the
Pacific in less than six minutes. Southern California went from flat
ocher desert to greentimbered mountains, to rich fertile valleys and
then to teeming coastal urban strip. The pilot eased back on the after
burner and we coasted up to fifty thousand feet. Now there was a hint
of the curvature of the earth. Los Angeles sparkled and glimmered;
from almost ten miles up, this sprawlingest city on earth seemed nestled
cozily between the San Gabriel Mountains and the sea. Santa Catalina
Southern California: The Restless Kind (
and the other offshore islands were brown warts on turquoise velvet.
Our visibility was clear to the horizons. We saw almost all of Southern
California: from Mexico, two hundred miles northward to the Te-
hachapi Mountains; from the Pacific to where the barren upland
Mojave becomes Arizona.
Below us, in the ten counties of this largely inhospitable, arid
desert beside an ocean, lived ten million people. Most of them old
enough to vote had settled there on purpose. Just out of sight over
the horizon to the east was the Colorado, the small, wild, desert
river which is funneled off in pipes to sustain these millions.
These ten million have built their towns and cities in a narrow,
benign strip between the coastal mountains and the ocean; ninety-four
percent of them occupy less than fifteen percent of the land area of
Southern California. They have made of that strip an American land
that is neither Eastern nor Southern nor Midwestern. It is not even
Western, in the conventional sense of easy pace, of dudes or cattle or
openness or any other sense. They have brought everything that is
here now except the land and sun and sea and air. They have brought
their own countless cultures, their own dreams, griefs, energies, in
dolences, prejudices and loves. They have shared all these with each
other how they have shared! discarding and inventing, shouting
down, raising up, experimenting endlessly, bustling about intermin
ably, riotously busy both at work and at play. They move around more
than any other people on earth; they are the restless kind. They are not
the most sophisticated of Americans, but they are among the most
vigorous. Their incomparable vitality is euphoric; it is born from an
assumption of success which exists because so far their failures are
quite dwarfed by their victories. In contrast with the mood of what
ever place they left, they revel here in a conviction that anything is
worth trying; they assume it will work, because everything else seems
to be working. Everything, that is, except the things they haven t
thought of trying, a category, unfortunately, which includes some very
vital things.
The ten million are not burdened with a sense of regional his
tory. They do not much care what happened here before they came,
because so much has been happening since. Not many of them have
stopped to look back over their shoulders to seek their bearings, and
that, of course, can be their undoing. They are more involved with
their environment than any other Americans* They sunbathe, swim,
sH, water ski, sail, picnic, ride, hike, skate, fly, sky dive, throw, catch,
race, hunt, shoot, fish, dig, plant, prune, pick, barbecue, paint and
putter. Despite all this, they are not a part of their environment.
They live on the land, but they are not of the land. This strange
WESTWARD TILT
anomaly lodges fitfully in the subconscious of many visitors to South
ern California. To them, it may imply impermanence, and it is a major
reason that this is the most blithely libeled region of America. Hardly
anyone seems to belong entirely to Southern California except the cow
boy in the foothills and the commercial fisherman in his boat offshore.
Even the Indian looks bizarre; he no longer appears at home on the
land of which he once was a part.
There are good reasons for this inconsistency. Southern Califor-
nians have not been there long. No matter how ardently they deny it,
a part of their nature leans toward the more familiar land of their
birth; too often, their loyalties and resources can be more quickly
drawn to a cause "back home" than to the multiple causes of their new
home. They have not learned yet to sense the subtle welcome in dry
brown hills as compared with the more obvious charms of cool green
streams. Saddest of all, they may not respect the new land on which
they live, since they are dominating it so handily. They build islands in
their bays, make their harbors deeper and their beaches higher. They
bring water from the desert through pipes which unroll like ribbon
through chaparral, over wind-blown mountain crags, and down to the
edge of the sea. They pare down mountainsides unmercifully for
towns and freeways; they use dry lake beds for military aircraft run
ways and riverbeds for golf courses.
They are fiercely proud of their region, although this trait does
not always show. When two San Franciscans pause on Union Square,
they are likely to exchange a self-satisfied word or two about their city,
but when two Los Angelenos greet each other on Pershing Square,
they will rap the traffic or the smog. Southern Californians are most
loyal to their land when they are away from it. They are more aware
of it in absence than in its presence. When they long to get back to it,
they realize often with real surprisethat it has become home.
One of the most alluring things about Southern California is the
image in the minds of its people of what this land can be. Those who
do not feel the fire of the image may resort to ridicule; it is easy to
deride the young, the eager, and the brash. Lately, Southern California
has stopped hearing the ridicule. It is busy. It is not concerned about
being accepted. It has been overwhelmingly accepted in a migration
unprecedented in volume and velocity in the history of the world. In a
sober mood, its leaders are fighting for the interest and support of the
new millions by solving the problems of bigness which their coming
has caused. Southern California is moving to offset its weaknesses and
augment its amenities. It is coming on from behind with a rush like
Silky Sullivan, the racehorse which was the darling of the area a few
years ago. The question is the same one that the horse s nerve-wracked
Il6) WESTWARD TILT
backers used to ask each other at the rail: has he made his move in
time?
The overriding fact of Southern California life is its population
growth. In 1950, California population was less than eleven million.
Today Northern California alone includes about seven million peo
ple, living in forty-eight counties comprising the northern two-thirds
of the state. Southern California lies south and east of the state s only
east-west mountain barrier, the Tehachapi range. There are ten million
people in Southern California, and almost six and a half million of
them live in Los Angeles County. Another two million are in adjacent
counties which are part of the Los Angeles Basin an unfortunate
name, but one which seems vividly accurate to the night traveler whose
jetliner from the East begins to let down over Nevada or Arizona, and
glides low across the rim of coastal mountains; with theatrical abrupt
ness, the interminable carpet of lights from the Los Angeles Basin
is below and around him.
The other Southern California metropolis is San Diego. This city
in the southwest corner of the nation is the third most populous of the
West (after Los Angeles and San Francisco) , and, in 1960, eighteenth
in size in the nation. Its metropolitan area, now far past one million in
population, has doubled in size since 1950. It is the largest city in the
nation to record that great a rate of growth. San Diego exhibits many
of the characteristics of the Southern California region; in a way it is
more typical of Southern California than is Los Angeles.
The San Diego population increase in the fifties was almost
twice as great as during the previous decade, which encompassed the
years of World War II. Thirty thousand dwelling units were built in
San Diego in 1959, ranking it fourth among metropolitan areas of the
nation that year in homebuilding, behind only New York, Los
Angeles and Chicago. Factory employment rose in 1959 to a level three
times that of 1949, just before the Korean War. But manufacturing
growth has leveled out in San Diego, and now tourism is regarded as
the richest potential for immediate economic growth.
San Diego is a classic example of the wave pattern of Southern
California growth. There were three years of particularly intensive
growth: 1942, when county population increased by about fifty-two
thousand, and 1951 and 1959, when the increase was about sixty-six
thousand each year. Outbreak of wars and subsequent war jobs ex
plain the figures for 1942 and 1951; the 1959 figure relates to an in
crease of cold-war job opportunity in San Diego.
Unbelievably, in the wake of such explosive growth, San Diego
has remained a pleasant and leisurely city. It glistens under a flood of
Southern California: The Restless Kind (7/7
sunlight, and the toasted browns of its canyoris and mesas form mount
ings for pampered green lawns, burnt-red tile roofs, and pastel stuccos.
Its bays make abstract swirls of blue, merging with the deeper,
greener hues of the Pacific. The elements seem to have been pasteur
ized in Southern California, and nature s blandness allows more time
for both play and work. Virtually anything that can be done in water is
done here. The climate and variety of surf and bay waters make
aquatic sports the dominant recreation of the young. There are sixty
miles of beaches in San Diego County alone. The fine natural San
Diego harbor is fourteen miles long. A second bay in mid-city, Mis
sion Bay, is an aquatic playground with thirty-one miles of shoreline
and about two thousand acres of navigable water. Water fun is no false
front for the visitor; it is a way of life here in a land with twelve
months of sun and warmth.
San Diego is remembered by much of the nation either as the
drab and crowded town it was in World War II, when hundreds of
thousands of Americans in uniform saw it for the only time, or imag
ined in terms of sailing, fishing, swimming and sunning the way
Southern California looks in the travel advertisements. It is neither.
Magazine photographers who are assigned to translate San Diego to
film soon find they are in for trouble. San Diego has happened so fast
and so spontaneously that no two citizens see their city alike. The
visitor receives wildly conflicting appraisals. For a frantic day or two,
photographers from out of the city are likely to race about from one to
another of the sub-cities of San Diego, along the glistening waterfront,
from great parks and old missions to Navy bases, from missile and air
craft plants to the squalor of the Mexican border. In frustration some
of them find that their best chance to contend with the vastness of the
city and its diverse personality is to shoot with their longest lenses in
every direction from any vantage point. The pictures will be fore
shortened and they will not look like anything in San Diego but they
may telescope the layers of San Diego into a perspective that suggests
something true about this strong, fresh, gangling city. Such photo
graphs may show nuclear submarines and water skiiers in the fore
ground and towering mountains behind the city, or lavish resort hotels
against a backdrop of missile gantries. But that is San Diego.
One gets the feel of the city best near sunset on a bright, warm
day, standing atop Point Loma. The boot-shaped main harbor, inky
velvet at twilight, becomes the main street of the city. It glows red,
white and blue in the lights of the sky line and those of descending
seaplanes or warships and yachts at anchor. The ocean and setting sun
are the backdrop to the west. To the east, sometimes capped with
snow, the Laguna Mountains of the coastal range stand sentinel.
Il8) WESTWARD TILT
Lights from highways and towns sparkle into infinity along the weav
ing Pacific Coast toward Los Angeles, more than a hundred miles to
the north. Southward, the bold, barren wilderness of Mexico s Baja
California fades off in a deceptively gentle azure haze past flat-topped
Table Mountain. The San Diego city limits begin at the International
Border, across from the dusty Mexican town of Tijuana. They extend
thirty miles up the Pacific coast past La Jolla, a sparkling Riviera
that has not always been prompt to identify itself as part of San Diego.
San Diego is at the end of the line. Not even that part of Mexico
which lies south of San Diego can change that: Baja California is a
savagely primitive peninsula almost as long again as California, virtu
ally unpopulated south of the border towns, and separated from the
mainland of Mexico by the storm-swept Gulf of California. Its largest
towns are at the border Mexicali and Tijuana. The staggering fact
of the dirty, vice-ridden town of Tijuana is that more Americans visit
Tijuana than all other foreign cities combined, including London,
Paris and Rome: between eight and nine million persons annually.
Americans visiting Tijuana are not always charmed by what they find
there, but they have been to a foreign country the easy way. The city
is a three-hour drive from Los Angeles, twenty minutes from down
town San Diego. At Pamplona, in the time of the bull festival, it is the
bulls which stampede through the streets. In Tijuana, on summer Sun
day afternoons, it is the gringos pushing their way to bull fights,
horse races, shops, bars, or gawking at film stars. It is possible at
Tijuana to bet on horses, dogs, cocks (illegally) , or people (jai alai is
played here).
It is remarkable that more Americans do not find themselves in
Tijuana jails. Tequila sells for less than a dollar a bottle. Standards
of law and order are relative. The booking sheet at the Tijuana jail
carries eight terms applicable to persons arrested while ebrio^ or
drunk. Ebrio impertinente is a fairly mild case. Ebrio indignado sug
gests that the prisoner talked back to the cop. Ebrio escandaloso car
ries the intimation of a full-scale spectacle. Ebrio rinas means he was
fighting, and ebrio lesiones means he won. Ebrio voltado is a pass-out
case the tequila won. Ebrio orinando en la calle means the prisoner
couldn t find his way to a men s room in time. Yet the most despicable
of all, by Mexican standards, is ebrio insultos al gobierno literally,
drunk insulting the government.
The easy availability of marijuana and heroin in Tijuana is a
grimmer menace. Narcotics are cheap and plentiful. The value in the
United States of narcotics seized at the California-Mexico border each
year is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Customs agents
concede that they are halting only a fraction of the flow at border gates.
Southern California: The Restless Kind (219
(It is easy for smugglers to fly from small airstrips in Mexico and
rendezvous in lonely areas of the Southern California desert. ) Customs
cannot halt all narcotics smuggling; it would require examination of
more than eight million persons each year at the San Diego port of
entry alone.
Southern California addicts find Tijuana wondrously accessible.
The freeway winds southward to the border like ribbon candy. The
greater tragedy is that many teenagers, taking courage from tequila
in rowdy Tijuana saloons, have been introduced to narcotics in Mex
ico. There has been honest discord over a solution. A series of Pulitzer
Prize winning articles in the Los Angeles Times in 1959, by Gene
Sherman, urged closing the border unless joint action by the govern
ments was taken. The State Department, studying the larger picture,
has offered no such drastic solutions. There have been bilateral efforts
to study and police the problem, including those of Governor Pat
Brown of California, but they have been little more than a gesture.
Open, cultivated fields of marijuana and opium poppies are not rare in
parts of Mexico. In a country so poor, law enforcement is an imperfect
instrument. In 1962, the United States Government allotted funds to
the Mexican government in a highly practical attempt to get at the
source of the narcotics flow.
At the United States Embassy in Mexico City, a student of Mexi
can affairs concluded my interview with him on border vice problems
by quoting Sister Juana Inez de la Cruz, a gentle and eloquent Mexi
can poet of the sixteenth century: "Who is to blame? She who sins for
pay, or he who pays for sin?" He did not believe closing the border
between the two nations would deprive Americans of vice, or of nar
cotics. Instead, it would be regarded by Mexico as an affront, one
which the United States cannot afford in Latin America today.
Amid all the furor over Mexican narcotics traffic, one powerful
and effective procedure has proven itself: San Diego police authorities
maintain a twenty-four hour police blockade at the border to prevent
unescorted juveniles from going into Mexico. One member of a Con
gressional investigating committee charged angrily that the blockade
was unconstitutional. Indeed it may be, but it has not been put to the
test since it went into force in 1958. In its first four years, more than
25,000 juveniles were turned back, and more than a thousand grateful
parents wrote their thanks to the San Diego police. In most cases, their
teenage children had been stopped, their credentials checked, and the
parents notified by letter that the youths had been turned back from
the Mexican border. With appalling regularity, parents respond with
shock to the news; their children, they often write, had told them they
were spending the night at friends homes nearby.
220 ) WESTWARD TILT
Prostitution flourishes openly in Tijuana, even in the saloons of
Avenida Revolucion, its main street. San Diegans are less grim about
this vice. Because of it, San Diego a city with a Navy population of
fifty to one hundred thousand men is free of organized prostitution.
The Navy seems to accept the compromise gracefully. When the Navy
operated a free prophylactic station at the border for personnel return
ing to the United States, a total of forty seven hundred men used its
services in a single weekend. In the face of paternal consternation, the
Navy abandoned this service, but there is no reason to suspect it is less
needed than before.
With its scandals tucked neatly away in another country, how
ever close, San Diego presents the image of a town of unpretentious
Midwestern tastes, now sprawling outward and shooting skyward
into the shape of a city. It is molded by an oncoming wave of sophisti
cation, and it is becoming a center of research and exotic industry.
The belligerent vigor of adolescence has taken hold in this no longer
placid city of hills and bays, but it is tempered by an innate conser
vatism that prevails against every onrush of conformity and com
mercialism.
Yet San Diego ranks as the Western city most transformed by
the newest wave of settlers. San Diego has changed even its mind. In
suddenly becoming a metropolitan area of more than a million people,
San Diego has accepted the missile, the atom, the laboratory, new
campuses, and even a casual California sophistication a commodity
which World War II visitors thought foreign to its nature. Now, giv
ing the lie to an old San Diego wheeze that you must pay dearly for
the climate, has come a renaissance of attitude.
"For half a century," explains James S. Copley, a forty-five-
year-old publisher who owns both daily newspapers, "there were op
posing factions that came to be known in local jargon as Smokestacks
versus Geraniums. The issue faded with the arrival of jets, missiles,
and nuclear reactors. Growth had come. There seemed to be no time to
discuss whether it was wanted. Our duty clearly was to help make the
growth solid and constructive."
In the pathology of Western civics, the patient has passed the
crisis when majorities begin to pile up at the polls for vital bond is
sues. That has happened in San Diego. The role of the newspapers in
guiding San Diego through its adolescence has been subtle but dra
matic. Copley has been quietly in the wings as the San Diego stage has
made room for new civic buildings, downtown redevelopment, major
league football, new theaters, multimillion-dollar additions to its
Fine Arts Gallery, development of freeways, sewers and water, and the
Southern California: The Restless Kind ( 121
new University of California campus on the Pacific cliffs overlooking
La Jolla.
Copley s position is unique: as well as the San Diego newspapers,
he owns eight dailies which surround metropolitan Los Angeles like a
horseshoe. The Copley newspapers there are five more in Illinois
are notably successful. Copley is a youthful, visionary publisher who
sensed a Western trend and concentrated on it; his newspapers call
themselves "home town newspapers." Local autonomy is stressed. His
editorial policy strives to provide Southern Californians with what they
direly need: the means to interpret, day by day, their astonishing en
vironment. At the same time, Copley looks outward. He lends
trouble-shooting executives to Latin American newspapers, produces
newspaper-trade films available in Spanish, and has launched the most
successful recent United States news syndicate, notable for thorough
Latin American coverage. The future of the West and of the United
States, he believes, is irrevocably involved with the emergence of
Latin America.
Copley exemplifies the Western phenomenon: at first glance, a
dedicated regionalist; on closer examination, a man who already has
projected the West and himself into the position of leadership that the
Westerner, by his nature, believes destiny demands.
Young men of stature are no rarity in San Diego. Bob Wilson,
at forty-five, won his sixth term as congressman in 1962. New
fortunes in electronics have been built by youngsters like Jonathan Ed
wards and Walter East, both forty, and Charles Salik, thirty-seven,
who has three electronics investment firms of international stature.
There are uncompromising but successful young architects and deco
rators in the same age bracket such as Robert Mosher, Henry Hester,
and Gerald Jerome, whose work is of national significance. None of
them is San Diego born.
The emphasis in San Diego is on youth; its overwhelming pres
ence is obvious everywhere. The birth rate has exceeded the national
average since 1940; the death rate is down to a startling 6.8 per one
thousand, against a national average of 9.3. Even if the westward tilt
were to cease, San Diego would grow sharply; the ratio of births to
deaths is 3.6, against a national rate of 2.5. A recently built commu
nity, known as Cabrillo Heights, has a street named Haveteur Way.
Its phonetic pronunciation is a bad pun, but it is related to census
findings that the women of Cabrillo Heights led the city in fertility
ratio meaning, in this case, that each one thousand women between
fifteen and forty-four had 1,325 children under five. The city is com
pleting new schools at a rate of almost one each month. Long gone are
122) WESTWARD TILT
the days when San Diego was oriented to the retired; the median age
hovers below thirty.
Not long ago San Diego was young, and not certain she wanted
to grow up. When World War II brought its wave of migrants,
many of the established San Diegans drew their shutters and hoped
that people would go away. They didn t. New waves surged over the
widespread San Diego shores, across her raw brown hills, and into her
canyons. People came from all the states of the nation. Mostly they
were young and eager. They built a fresh, clean city around the
quaint town that once found its raison d etre in Navy, tuna, tourism
and retirement.
Today San Diego is deeply involved in the scientific and indus
trial explosion of the West. She is yet too young as a city to have any
sharp-limned personality. Her old leaders are submerged by the on
rush. Her new leaders materialize slowly and painfully, as her people
discover what goals they have in common. The transplanted cultural
roots of other cities and states are being nurtured as gently as those of
the hibiscus and bougainvillaea in patios.
Nature has blessed this city with the country s most benign year-
round climate, and it is largely smog free. But climate is merely the
most obvious answer to her growth. "People who are intelligent enjoy
living in a sunny, comfortable climate just as much as those who
aren t," said J. R. Dempsey, forty, president of General Dynamics-
Astronautics. This is San Diego s largest factory, a sleek and smoke
less complex from which the Atlas missile emerged.
"Creative people come to us because of the excitement of our
project," he has said. "We need skills and brains, people who can think.
In San Diego particularly, you begin to see a concentration of this sort.
There is no raw material here. People who want to live here and
enjoy the climate must live by their wits. Hand in glove with the
California advance in technology is the development of our educational
system. The University of California at San Diego" (the new campus
on the Pacific bluffs overlooking La Jolla) "some day will be one of
the great universities. General Atomic, nearby, is one of the greatest
nuclear labs in the world today. I never mention climate when I try
to bring a man west. If there is one key regional factor, it is the sense
of freedom here."
Yet climate cannot be set aside. San Diego has even less tem
perature variation than Los Angeles, is generally free of smog, and is
equally sunny. Any city in which climate is dominant may lack the
driving vitality of cities where the living is not so easy. Those to whom
climate is all-important may be more prone to the wasteful search of
creature comforts than those who shovel snow from sidewalks. In San
Southern California: The Restless Kind ( 123
Diego, there are some who fear that the God-given balminess of the
city may condemn it to mediocrity. It is a sign of struggling maturity
that such civic self-appraisal is prevalent in board rooms and at cocktail
parties within the city from the beaches of La Jolla to the hillsides of
Mount Helix, twenty miles distant.
The in-migration of thousands of the new breed like General
Dynamics Dempsey is a catalyst in San Diego and all over Southern
California. The balance of social and economic power is passing into
the hands of the young, the daring, the eager, and the informed.
For them there are not the usual obstacles of entrenchment by older
generations.
Civic indecision plagued San Diego in the years between World
War II and 1960. There were new freeways, new shopping centers,
new restaurants, new entertainment, but the community feeling was
not present. There was nothing to make the woman in Alvarado
Estates feel any kinship to the woman in Mulrlands Village. A feeling
of vagueness was in the air, a lack of direction. It lay heavy over
Civic Center, where elected leaders seemed to be treading water.
The natives grew restive. More and more of the newcomers were
from larger cities and from university campuses, and they sought
the things to which many had been accustomed: better art and music,
better buildings, better restaurants, better city planning. At the same
time they welcomed amenities already present in San Diego to which
many of them had been less accustomed: graft-free local government,
benign climate, leisurely pace, a virtual absence of slums and blatant
poverty. It was not difficult to conceive of a union of the new values
to those already existing.
That dream is common today in San Diego, and to a notable
extent throughout Southern California. It is not without basis, but
whether it is realized depends on factors still imponderable:
How strong is the desire? Do enough of these new Southern
Calif ornians want that new world enough to demand the best schools
and universities, the finest leaders, progressive urban planning by
experts, and to pay the stiff taxes and approve the continued weighty
bond issues that these will require? Will the amenities of this favored
region be destroyed by the coming of those who seek them? The
newcomers luxuriate in the sense of space which still exists in Southern
California, but which decreases with each citrus-grove-turned-sub
division. They thrive on the unprecedented mobility which they enjoy,
but can they control the traffic jams and smog which their mobility
produces?
Some answers are being suggested daily. In the decades ahead
the newspapers of Southern California will testify to the writhings of a
WESTWARD TILT
generation which has barely sensed the deadly seriousness of its battle.
There are many who believe that if California is to realize its stature,
it will need a renaissance both in leadership and in the populace itself.
The motivations of Californians must be more cohesive. More of them
must sense some destiny. There are many who think it cannot happen;
the good, easy life of California, they reason, is anathema to any
mass sense of destiny. But the point is that California may be the
only place in the nation where such a renaissance can happen.
There is much hope, and it is in the people. Sharp individuality
and a lack of inhibition distinguish them. In San Diego a onetime
member of the Al Capone gang has become a leader in Parent-Teacher
Association work and a respected businessman. There is also a liquor
dealer who some years ago was a priest in Chicago. There are farmers
turned stock brokers, and bookkeepers turned ranchers. The mood of
rebellion is contagious. It seeps from personal lives into community
affairs and business. When it is channeled into constructive experi
mentation, it has usually been productive.
Southern California has, above all, a feeling of freedom and fu
ture. The feeling is shared by millions up and down this coastal urban
strip which planners like to call a megalopolis, because it has one more
syllable than megapolis; like Southern California, the word is bigger.
The story of San Diego is one that is echoed in many of the other,
smaller urban centers of Southern California.
Orange County is next in size after San Diego. In 1950 it was a
placid citrus suburb of Los Angeles, not even tracted by the Census
Bureau. Now eight hundred thousand people live here. The county is
the fastest growing county of more than four hundred thousand in the
nation; it is growing twice as fast even as Los Angeles County.
Anaheim, once a gag word with Jack Benny along with Azusa and
Cucamonga is the home now of more than a hundred thousand peo
ple. Some commute to Los Angeles, some work nearby in burgeoning
industrial strips, and others choose to live here because it is sunny and
warm and near the boating mecca of Balboa and Newport Bay. Some
are here because they have jobs at Orange County s most famed en
clave: Disneyland. A 1961 survey of Orange County showed that
industry had risen five times above the 1950 level, buying power
had quadrupled, and automobile ownership had almost tripled. Be
tween those years, Orange County drew eighteen of every one hundred
persons moving into Southern California: more than two hundred and
fifty each day. Since 1952, it has exceeded both Los Angeles and
San Diego in percentage of real estate sales. All that is declining in
Orange County is oranges; they were still a twenty-eight-million-
Southern California: The Restless Kind ( 125
dollar crop in 1960, but more than half of the county s acreage in
groves has been hacked out to make room for people.
On the northern side of the Los Angeles Basin, toward Santa
Barbara, there is more open country, and room still for truck farming
and lemon groves in the rich coastal valleys near Oxnard and Ventura.
Santa Barbara, near the northern outposts of Southern California,
has done its best to avoid the explosive pattern of the two hundred
miles of coast which lie between it and Mexico. It is the center of the
romanticized, pseudo-Spanish tradition, preserved in architecture, in
pace, and in its annual Old Spanish Days an August fiesta of danc
ing, parades, and music, with a heavy accent on horsemanship. The
Santa Barbara version of California s conquistador era is a close cousin
of the Southerner s image of the ante-bellum South. Here the past is
misted over in a montage of lace mantillas, flat-topped black hats,
flaring red sashes, and stomping stallions.
Except for its lack of a seaport and its clear-cut antipathy
for industry, Santa Barbara might have been invaded as decisively
as San Diego. Its climate is superb; northwesterly breezes blow Los
Angeles smog back toward its origin. The city is surrounded by great
estates. For more than forty years, its destiny seemed to be in the
hands of Pearl Chase, a woman of fanatic dedication to civic beauty
and conservation. The Santa Barbara County Courthouse, an archi
tectural masterpiece dedicated in 1929, more resembles an elaborate
Spanish palace than a public building. The temper of the city, estab
lished in large part by Miss Chase and her disciples, has lured wealthy
Midwesterners and Easterners into sumptuous retirement. For this
reason Los Angelenos once were prone to refer irreverently to Santa
Barbara as a cemetery-by-the-sea.
But of late Santa Barbara has found itself in what Bill Becker
has described in the New York Times as the 4C mission-and-missile
belt: the only section of the West where one can wind down unhurried
roads past old-world missions to watch rockets of the new world take
off for the unchartered Worlds of Tomorrow." Not far to the north are
the major West Coast missile bases of both the Navy and the Air
Force: Point Arguello and Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Lompoc, a tiny town of five thousand in 1950, lies in rolling
fields of flowers from which seeds are extracted. Lompoc expected a
placid future, until it found itself squarely between Point Arguello and
Vandenberg. Its population has tripled since 1950 and it has called in
professional planners to help solve its sudden civic crises. Its city
council, which a decade ago conducted its business in an hour, often
works until midnight.
Of deeper significance to Santa Barbara than its neighbors in
126) WESTWARD TILT
missilery are the scientific and intellectual frontiers now being ex
plored in the city. Research people have flocked to Santa Barbara
largely because of the quality which Publisher Thomas M. Storke of
the Santa Barbara News-Press emphasizes in calling his city "the
ideal home of man." There are research divisions of General Motors,
Raytheon, General Electric s TEMPO (Technical Military Planning
Operation ) , and a host of smaller companies. On a sunny hilltop estate,
Dr. Robert M. Hutchins leads the work of the Center for the Study of
Democratic Institutions. At Goleta, on the northern fringe of Santa
Barbara, a campus of the University of California has slowly been
converted from a play school to a center of serious study.
Rising sharply to the east of Santa Barbara, and running ir
regularly southward, are the coastal mountains. These are the moun
tains to which Southern Californians go for big trees, high lakes,
skiing and to fight forest fires. These are the mountains that provide
snow-capped backgrounds for tourists pictures of orange groves and
ocean swimmers. The Coast Range is a low mountain range com
pared to the Sierra Nevada, which runs parallel to it for much of the
length of California. But the Sierra Nevada, on the eastern edge of
California, turns and falters, then dies out in the furnace of the
Southern California desert. The Southern Calif ornian goes north from
his one-third of the state when he wants trout fishing, hunting, or
hiking in the Sierras. One big thing that the Southern Californian
does not have is numerous big mountains. San Gorgonio, 1 1,485 feet,
is its highest peak. Next is San Jacinto, 10,381 feet high; beneath its
precipitous escarpment huddles Palm Springs.
Once one leaves the populous coastal strip of Southern Cali
fornia, he is in a different land. Thirty million acres of inland Southern
California ninety percent of the land area of its ten counties have
fewer than six hundred thousand of its ten million residents. It has
become the vogue to refer to this vast desert area as the Inland Em
pire, a phrase long used for a somewhat similar region in the North
west. It is arid but dotted with irrigated oases. The higher desert to
the north is the Mojave. But the best known of the oases is Palm
Springs, in the area of low desert to the south known as the Colorado
Desert.
Palm Springsand the strip of resorts which tail southeastward
from it is the most conspicuous flowering of all that is vulgar and
futile in the Southern California philosophy. It is the Miami Beach
of the West. To run away from it, but to retain their desert and
their golf, other Southern Californians have concentrated their interest
more recently on Palm Desert, an area fifteen miles south. Here
Southern California: The Restless Kind ( 127
is the golfing center which, for the moment, reigns as the crown
prince of the fifteen golf clubs in the Palm Springs area: Eldorado,
among whose residents is Dwight D. Eisenhower. Some of "the vil
lage s" other favorite visitors have been Harry Truman, Konrad
Adenauer, Joseph Kennedy, David McDonald, Eleanor Roosevelt,
and an infinite list of those made wealthy by almost any means, es
pecially the entertainment business. (Mrs. Harpo Marx is a member
of the school board.) Golf has become the Palm Springs bonanza,
partly because it offers both built-in status symbols and the opportunity
of real estate speculation with homesites along the fairways.
The weather, of course, has something to do with it. So long as
the wind is calm, Palm Springs offers superb low desert warmth
through the winter. On sizzling summer afternoons, the town drops
early into the shadow of the San Jacinto range. It does not matter;
everything is air conditioned, and there is a swimming pool for every
two and three-quarters registered voters.
City Manager Daniel Wagner protested the results of the official
United States census of Palm Springs in 1960 as low, although the
figure (13,468) almost doubled that of 1950. "It s probably the best
we can do if they insist on taking the census in April, 7 he sighed.
The community actually varies from a summer population as low
as eighty-five hundred to a bustling fifty thousand on late winter or
early spring weekends. (C Within a few years we will have two hun
dred thousand people here," said Mayor Frank Bogert, puffing on a
long cigar. He came to Palm Springs thirty-five years ago, when the
town was a dusty village and the Agua Caliente Indians who were
granted checkerboard sections of Palm Springs in 1891 did not
dream they would have per capita land assets by 1962 of about a
third of a million dollars.
Southward from Palm Springs, desert resorts tend to become
less flamboyant and often vastly more relaxing. La Quinta is favored
by aristocratic regulars from the East. So is Borrego Valley, a placid
resort community in an equally spectacular desert setting in San
Diego s back country, around a spur of the San Jacintos from Palm
Springs.
The resort business dominates this part of the Southern Califor
nia desert, from it also comes ninety percent of the nation s date
production. Date groves are common from Palm Springs south to
Indio. On the Mexican border, through Imperial Valley, there are
citrus groves, vineyards, truck gardens and cotton fields, many of
them below sea level.
Here too is the Salton Sea, thirty-four miles long and about ten
128) WESTWARD TILT
miles wide, an inland lake two hundred and thirty five feet below sea
level and surrounded by barren flat desert. It is a prehistoric sink
which was filled in 1905 by a whimsical, wandering floodtide of the
Colorado River, setting off an epic two-year battle by the Southern
Pacific Railroad to close the break and save the Imperial Valley from
flooding. This freak of nature has been regarded by sportsmen and
land speculators as a magnificent mistake. The level of the sea has
remained fairly constant in a balance between evaporation and drain
age from irrigated farmlands. The Salton Sea has been the site of
a recent real estate boom, complete with yacht clubs in the searing
desert. California authorities halted one runaway aspect of the boom.
Midsummer temperatures of 120 and higher discouraged customers,
and so they were being flown over the area on free charter flights from
cities hundreds of miles distant to choose their lots by radio commu
nication with a jeep and driver on the sites below.
In the higher desert to the north, the Mojave, only a few scat
tered, sun-parched towns break the sand-and-stone composure. From
this desert come thirty-three minerals with an annual value of close
to one hundred million dollars, including most of the nation s boron
and much of its cement, both taken from open pits. Eight major
military installations dot the Mojave, most of them involved with
aviation and missilery. To the far northeast is Death Valley, the
hottest and lowest point in the nation. But nothing except cheap dis
tillation of ocean water can trigger a population explosion in this
Inland Empire.
However, the coastal strip of Southern California shows few
signs of slowing in growth. The Southern California of 1990, widely
heralded as an urban area extending two hundred miles from the
Mexican border to Santa Barbara, is visualized easily on any Sunday
afternoon drive up Pacific Highway from San Diego. One must press
the accelerator toward the floor to keep his place in traffic. The white
lettering on a black metal sign at roadside reads El Camino Real.
The sun to the left filters through the eucalyptus trees from over the
Pacific, making their graceful trunks a blurring row of giant tooth
picks.
Unlawful To Litter Highway.
In the coastal towns, blond, tanned boys and girls pick their
way across El Camino Real it is Pacific Highway now through four
lanes of traffic, carrying surfboards, rafts and towels homeward from a
day in the sun beside the surf. Statistics prove they are taller and
healthier than the youth of regions less favored by nature.
Southern California: The Restless Kind (12$
Citrus all Kinds $3.50.
In the station wagon that has been in the next lane for five miles,
a mother calming her infant with a bottle turns and swats an older boy
in the back seat. Juvenile crime in California has been rising steadily.
The observer wonders if there is too much discipline in the back seat
and not enough at home.
Tacos. Mexican and American Food and Surfboards.
Here at Leucadia, the California Highway Department cut down
stately old eucalyptus trees from the center island because too many
drivers were ramming into them. Now, drivers along El Camino Real
have unlimited access to each other.
Visit Mission San Luis Rey Four Miles East.
Here are the world s largest poinsettia fields. The stalks are tall
and green awaiting the flood of winter scarlet. The sun sinks behind a
bank of coastal fog to the left, etching the murky gray with a silver
fringe. The fog pushes up the rolling valleys to the right and the
driver must close his car windows.
Follow the Swallows to El Adobe Capistrano.
The coastal cliff rises sharply at the right, north of San Clemente,
leaving room only for four lanes of El Camino Real, the Santa Fe Rail
way, and one row of oceanfront homes. A new subdivision clings to a
hillside; one wonders where California would be today without the
intrepid, succulent ice plant. Its thick green watery fingers are plunged
into place along the naked cliffs as fast as the earth moving machines
depart, with the reassuring certainty that they will take root and hold
back the earth from freeway and subdivisionusually.
Stay Right for Disneyland.
If the driver turns left he is in a sea of midget auto racers being
trailered northward after a day of racing. Guiding each is a mightier
chariot of the road with a young man at the wheel and a young lady
close at his side.
Cafe Frankenstein Coffee House.
The homes sweep down the cliffs to the coves of Laguna Beach
on the left. On the right, a mammoth ceramic gentleman with white
ceramic beard beckons travelers to a pottery shack. The homes on the
/JO) WESTWARD TILT
hills almost encircle the town, twinkling in the purple twilight haze,
and the sharp tang of salt air drifts into the car.
Then it is dark and the driver speeds through the bright ocean
of headlights and ruby sea of taillights, through odors of oil fields and
dairy fields, and swings into the Santa Ana Freeway. Six lanes become
eight. Cars roll like marbles into the slot of the freeway interchange
at the center of Los Angeles and out onto the Hollywood Freeway.
The white letters loom out again: El Camino Real. Less than two
centuries ago, it was a day s journey by horse between each mission,
but the traveler has spanned four of them in three leisurely hours,
driving through the heart of the new Western frontier.
LOS ANGELES
The Strong New Wave
<$>&&&$>&$>^^
"We find ourselves suddenly threatened by hordes of Yankee Immi
grants . . . whose progress we cannot arrest. . . . They are culti
vating farms, establishing vineyards, erecting mills, sawing up lum
ber, building workshops, and doing a thousand other things which
seem natural to them."
The plaintive voice is that of Governor Pio Pico, a reasonable
man (but on the Mexican side), the year is 1847, and the place is
Los Angeles.
Statehood came to California soon after Pico s words. The Census
Bureau moved into California for the first time in 1850 and found
Los Angeles to have only 1,610 inhabitants, mostly Mexican and
Indian. And the climate was better then than now. But already Los
Angeles was aiming high. Its county limits that year included
everything between San Diego and Santa Barbara: thirty-four thou
sand square miles.
The Indian village called Yang-na had disappeared, and Los
WESTWARD TILT
Angeles, a town with a bad reputation, even in infancy, was rising on
the site. Criminals banished from tough mining towns could find
refuge in Los Angeles; wine from nearby vineyards was a major
source of commerce; by 1870, there was a saloon in Los Angeles for
every fifty persons.
Two seedless orange trees from Brazil were introduced in South
ern California in 1873; ^ey ^ ave ^ a( ^ millions of descendants. The
fame of Southern California citrus spread after it took first prize at
the New Orleans International Exposition in 1884-85 and gave
Easterners a suggestion of what the new California gold might be.
Even in the mid-i88o s the city was trying to prove its sophisti
cation to outsiders. The Los Angeles Times felt obliged to announce:
"Los Angeles people do not carry arms, Indians are a curiosity, the
G-string is not a common article of apparel here, and Los Angeles has
three good hotels, twenty-seven churches, and three hundred and fifty
telephone subscribers."
The Southern Pacific extended its line southward from San
Francisco in 1876. The boom began when the Santa Fe Railway,
cross-country into Los Angeles, was finished in 1886. The rate war
which followed between the two carriers was a dinger: on March 6,
1887, the Santa Fe was selling tickets between the Missouri Valley
and Southern California for one dollar.
The first migrants to come in the wave that followed were differ
ent from those Los Angeles had known. They were family people,
usually well-to-do, such as Judge John Wesley North, a friend of
Lincoln s who founded the town of Riverside, and Albert and Alfred
Smiley, twins of some national distinction, who built a showplace at
Redlands. But close behind the solid citizens came the sharpies and
the boosters. In 1886, land speculation was as epidemic as the black
plague. Subdivisions and cities that could have accommodated ten
million people sprang up. Real estate transactions in Los Angeles
County in 1887 totaled one hundred million dollars. In 1888 the
bubble burst. Soon chaparral hid the speculators stakes, and banks
confined their loans to downtown property.
Then, with both the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe under
writing California novels, magazines, and newspaper campaigns, the
gospel of Southern California was beamed toward the Midwest. A
special train ("California on Wheels") toured for two years with dis
plays of mammoth fruits and vegetables, a brass band, and Los
Angeles hucksters armed with booster pamphlets. This brought a
wave of sober and God-fearing citizens to the area, but it also marked
the start of a gaudy, half-century era of promotion.
Now came tycoons who would dominate Southern California for
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave
decades: Chandler, Otis, Doheny, Spreckels, Huntingdon, Clark,
Sherman, Garland. In 1892, Edward L. Doheny and Charles A.
Canfield brought in the first Los Angeles oil well. That started
another boom. In the next year, citrus growers formed their first
cooperative, the forerunner of the powerful California Fruit Growers
Exchange. In 1899, Los Angeles began to build breakwaters for its
great unnatural harbor. By 1900, the population of the city, after
boom and bust and boom, passed one hundred thousand, and Los
Angeles was the most ballyhooed city in America.
But pious Midwesterners were in command. Gambling houses
were closed, saloons were hemmed in, and churches thrived. By 1922,
San Francisco was to vote against Prohibition, but Los Angeles to
approve it overwhelmingly.
Eastern capital shied away briefly from San Francisco after its
1906 earthquake and fire, but Los Angeles thrived. Abbot Kinney,
who had grown rich making Sweet Caporal cigarettes, put a fleet of
gondolas on man-made canals in a beach subdivision he called Venice,
and again a real estate boom flourished and burst.
Low wages and open shop conditions set the stage for the bloody
union war in Los Angeles from 1907 to 1910. The Los Angeles
Times, led by Harrison Gray Otis and supported by the Merchants
and Manufacturers Association, was struck virtually from 1890 to
1910. Its battle for the open shop in Los Angeles became a national
issue. On the night of October i, 1910, the Times building was
dynamited; twenty-one died.
Late in 1911, the trial began of three men: John J. McNamara,
secretary of the International Association of Bridge and Structural
Iron Workers; his brother, James B. McNamara; and Ortie McMani-
gal, a professional pro-labor saboteur. Clarence Darrow led the de
fense, assisted by a corps of lawyers which included Job Harriman,
who was on the verge of being elected mayor of Los Angeles on the
Socialist ticket. With tension high all over the world, after seven
weeks during which a jury had not even been impaneled, the Mc-
Namaras pleaded guilty to the dynamiting. Both the labor movement
and Darrow were discredited, Harriman lost the election, and Los
Angeles for three more decades kept its role as fc the Gibraltar of the
open shop." But McManigal, who had turned prosecution witness,
later became a watchman in the Los Angeles County Hall of Records.
When he retired after twelve years, county supervisors awarded him a
scroll for faithful service.
In 1913 Los Angeles reached across the desert to Owens Valley
with a two-hundred-and-thirty-three-mile aqueduct and brought water
into the nearby San Fernando Valley. The farmers of the Owens
WESTWARD TILT
Valley, now almost waterless, believed they were defrauded of their
water rights; but land speculators in San Fernando Valley, in league
with the Owens Valley Aqueduct sponsors, grew rich. San Fernando
was annexed to the city two years later.
For a few years Los Angeles had water to grow on, but by the
mid-twenties, it needed more. With adjacent cities it formed the
Metropolitan Water District and brought water from Parker Dam,
on the Colorado River below Hoover Dam, through an aqueduct sys
tem five hundred and twenty miles long. The pipes pass through
forty-four tunnels, including a thirteen-mile bore through the San
Jacinto Mountains, and require a pump lift of 1,617 f eet -
The Signal Hill oil boom began in 1921, Long Beach Harbor
opened in 1925 and Warner Brothers made Jazz Singer -, the first
all-talkie movie, in 1928. Aimee Semple McPherson s Four Square
Gospel enraptured the restless and unhappy transients of Los Angeles.
Sister Aimee was a showman, but the newspapers upstaged her after
she disappeared in 1926; she had not been kidnapped, as she insisted,
but was off on an earthly tryst.
By 1930, Los Angeles had passed the million mark and ranked
as the nation s fifth largest city. During the Great Boom of the
Twenties, more than two million moved to California over half of
them into Los Angeles County. It was the first migration of the auto
mobile age, but it was only the start for Los Angeles. There were
booms in oil and movies, but J. B. Priestly wrote: "California will be a
silent desert again. It is all as impermanent and brittle as a reel of
film."
More than a hundred lost their lives in the Long Beach earth
quake on March 10, 1933. At the nadir of the depression, 129,000
Los Angeles County families were on relief. But by 1937, Los
Angeles had come back strong; it ranked fifth among industrial
counties of the nation, and led in oil refining, aircraft manufacturing,
and secondary auto assembly. In 1942, Henry Kaiser won a hundred-
million-dollar loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation for a
steel mill at Fontana, the first major steel mill of the West.
And after Pearl Harbor, as the nation turned its attention to the
Pacific, Los Angeles began an era in which for the first time it would
become more like other American cities than different from them.
Henceforth its thronging people would be busy, as Governor Pio Pico
had said in quiet desperation a century before, doing a thousand
things which seemed natural to them.
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave ( / 3$
Ne
I ew York and Chicago each have personalities. Los Angeles,
the nation s third city, has had three or fourand none of them has
taken. The outside world has remained an image or two behind in its
concept of Los Angeles. The world should be forgiven, and so should
Los Angeles; no other city has been so transformed by successive
waves of migrants.
Not until about 1960 did the qualitative nature of the most
recent wave of migrants become reassuringly clear and the earnest
renaissance begin. It was high time; Los Angeles has become more
interested in quality than in quantity.
Since its beginning, Los Angeles has been almost at the mercy
of its migrants. From the turn of the century until after the end of
World War II, through years of inexorable growth, Los Angeles
came close to doubling in population during each of several decades.
But each surge of new settlers came from progressively lower social
and economic strata.
The great aircraft boom which began during World War II in
Los Angeles set a pattern for the establishment in Southern California
of footloose industries not bound to mineral deposits, abundant water
or highly populated centers. The aircraft industry had brought labor
ers from the South and Midwest to work as welders and riveters. But
the postwar trend toward electronics and space industries brought
highly skilled, better-educated migrants to Los Angeles. California
grew into a research center, with Los Angeles as its hub. As more of
the intellectual elite settled in Los Angeles, pressures grew to supple
ment the amenities that nature has provided.
Some Los Angelenos who migrated west years ago have the air
of zombies today. Their particular civilization lies two or three strata
below the Los Angeles surface; they are out of circulation, and of
them it can be said justly that they are vegetating in the sunshine.
Others have grown with the city and the times, and are leavening
this energetic renaissance with wisdom and a wealth of regional ex
perience. But the primary impetus for the new Los Angeles stems from
the newcomer, just as each stratum of the Los Angeles past has been
formed by its wave of newcomers. These strata are clearly visible in
the Los Angeles environment.
The farmhouse set in the cool green citrus forest of San Ber
nardino or Riverside is surrounded by subdivisions and shopping cen
ters. Commuters look down into the grove from the overpass of a
nearby freeway.
An igloo-shaped ice cream palace is toppled with one quick
136) WESTWARD TILT
shove of a bulldozer as steel girders are unloaded for a new apartment
or office building.
Cavernous film studios which once held vast sets for movie spec
taculars are partitioned into smaller stages for television film series;
in the cafeteria on the studio lot lounge cowpokes, marshals and bad
men, where once there paraded dancing girls and dapper dandies.
Along the Sunset Strip, once the glamour showplace of Western
America, the biggest names on marquees now are those of stars per
forming at Las Vegas hotels; the hotels lease spectacular signboard
marquees along the Strip to advertise current shows more than two
hundred miles away. At Schwab s, islands of toothpaste, hair sprays,
and deodorants seem about to inundate the soda fountain where, film
legend insists, stars are discovered.
In older, more central areas, there are interminable miles of dark,
musty neo-Spanish stucco homes with tiny lawns, geraniums, and an
orange tree or two. On the periphery of the city, these give way to
more interminable miles of ranch houses, with their patio barbecues
and picture windows. Dreary blocks of one-story shops are replaced
with shopping centers and their acres of cars.
All over the city, the weird nightmarish shapes of the temples of
bizarre cults are disappearing in a rash of first-rate church architecture.
A colony of chic designers studios has sprung up on Beverly Boule
vard, and the show-place offices of architects give tang to the land
scape.
Main Street, a sleazy skid row, is now giving way to a well-
designed Civic Center. Pershing Square, the mecca of the dissolute
and disenchanted, was lifted long enough for the installation of under
ground parking. Shabby depressed areas near the beach at Santa
Monica and in the Bunker Hill area of the center city are on their
way to becoming showpieces of urban renewal.
Not everything that is being done is outstanding, but it is better.
There is always much more that needs to be done.
Everything important about Los Angeles today is in some way
involved with bigness and newness. This is easily confirmed by spec
tacular statistics, of which Los Angeles always has had more than its
share. But these figures have ceased to hold any meaning. Only a
statistician senses the massiveness suggested by the word trillion;
the terms in which the growth and spread of Los Angeles have been
expressed have become trite to all but those most intimately involved.
To cope with Los Angeles in customary ways is out of the ques
tion, so the world reacts to the city by mocking its peculiarities. We
laugh at its faddists. We slander its energies. We scoff at its bigness.
We joke at its smog. We challenge its integrity. We babble away
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave ( 737
about its obvious and superficial externals and pretend that these
are the city. They are not. They are manifestations, but of what?
Sociologists and anthropologists who have made careers of studying
Los Angeles concede that they have only scratched its surface. The city
will not hold still for their kind of study.
Los Angeles is the center of gravity in the westward tilt. It is
highly urbanized, seething with change, surging with strength. It also
is capable of being utterly ridiculous but it is steadily becoming less
so. Its leaders are a responsible and mature breed these days. Its
current wave of newcomers is the most urbane and discriminating
which has ever come to the city. Los Angeles is underrated. It has
come alive with vitality. You may not care to love Los Angeles, but
if you have the temerity to know the city, you will respect it.
In population, Los Angeles is larger than the next three largest
Western cities combined, and larger than any Western state except
California. The three counties of Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego
have added more population in each recent year than the total 1960
population of Nevada, yet Nevada has ranked first or second in per
centage as the fastest-growing state in the nation. With increasing
trepidation, Los Angeles County receives more than five hundred new
residents each day.
Who are these people? Why have they come to Los Angeles?
What are they doing? Seeking answers, I have interviewed hundreds
of its citizens, pored over its newspapers, walked its streets, and
studied a wildly diverse proliferation of writings about the city
which have less coherence than any writings I have read about any
city of any era. The three primary challenges to its newspapers are
indicative of reasons one cannot "understand" Los Angeles:
Size is a problem. The land area of the city of Los Angeles is the
largest of any city in the world: about four hundred and sixty square
miles. The coverage of its metropolitan newspapers encompasses an
almost unbroken cluster of cities and towns more than seventy of
them in Los Angeles County itself. Such patterns foster the growth
of more parochial interests and smaller community dailies twenty-
three of them in Los Angeles County.
Movement is a problem. Los Angelenos not only travel more,
to work and to play, but they move their places of residence more
often than the people of any other city. Their ties to a block or a town
are not as great as those in more established regions. As their jobs
change from one side of the Los Angeles Basin to another, as their
economic status improves or as they have children ( or children grow
up and leave the home), they are likely to move.
Growth presents problems. When fifteen to twenty thousand
/ 38 ) WESTWARD TILT
people move into a city each month, an honest editor must ask himself
regularly if he knows anything about the newcomers. The old Los
Angeles Examiner began a series of interviews with new families to
find why they came to the city, but it was abandoned prematurely
because the answers became repetitive: climate, job opportunity, year-
round recreation, year-round gardening. (Some of those interviewed
mentioned good schools, the built-ins of Southern California tract
homes, and the absence of mosquitos. ) A Sunday series offered ten
dollars to readers for letters on the question: "Is there a Southern
California way of life?" That died in a hurry, too; anyone who can
answer that question deserves more than ten dollars. I asked one city
editor how he covered his churning, sprawling area of ten million
people. He pointed toward a map divided into zones and reeled off
the number of staff reporters or stringers in each area who reported
to him. (At that time this particular newspaper had only one man
assigned to cover the San Fernando Valley, an area of close to a
million people.)
The city editor spoke of pages made over to include regional news
of various zones into which papers were distributed. "All we can
hope is to keep up with running stories like water, weather, growth,
and traffic, and watch standard news sources like the courts and
police stations and public offices," he said, shaking his head. "Some
times we wonder who they all are, and if nobody knows what they re
thinking out there, or what they re doing when they re not killing each
other and going to court. We know very little of what we d like to
know about Los Angeles."
His final sentence is an apt disclaimer for any comment on Los
Angeles. But there are many canards about the city. More important,
there are vital ingredients of the new Los Angeles personality which
are not widely recognized.
Raymond Chandler called Los Angeles a "tired old whore." But
Dr. Frank Baxter calls it the only city in which one is likely to see
at one time, as he did, three Nobel Prize winners pushing their carts
through a supermarket. In The Natives Are Restless, Cynthia Lindsay
wrote that the garish Clifton s Cafeteria near Pershing Square was a
refuge of togetherness for citizens who had come from somewhere else
which includes most Los Angelenos. Days after publication of her
book, Clifton s closed for lack of enough togetherness to make the
business pay. Near the site now rise large office buildings.
Los Angeles is known for Iowa State Picnics. Long Beach has
been called "lowa-By-The-Sea." But not even at the height of the Los
Angeles effort to induce immigration from the Midwest in the early
decades of the century was Iowa the leading source of new
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave ( 139
Angelenos. The top states outside of the West, then as now, were
New York and Illinois; lowans just made more fuss about their
picnics.
The spectrum of exotic cults has faded rapidly in Los Angeles.
Once, ninety-six diverse stairways to heaven were available on the
Los Angeles cultist market. The assortment now is sharply less varied,
and the demand less. Waves of Utopia seekers, most of them elderly,
washed up on the California shores in the 1930^. But today the
median age, around thirty, conforms to the national average. Crackpot
schemes have little chance on the ballot.
Los Angeles offers convincing statistics that now its smog is
hardly thicker or more frequent than that of half a dozen other large
American cities. The city was the first to try to control smog, in a
campaign climaxed by the 1960 statewide bill requiring the gradual
but compulsory installation (by 1965) of anti-smog devices for auto
mobile exhausts. Los Angeles has spent twenty-five million dollars on
smog control in the last fifteen years, reducing by about twenty-five
percent the discharge of waste from production and consumption of
petroleum products, which cause eighty percent of the air pollution.
Los Angeles is the only city of its size to take shape after the
invention of the motor car. As a direct result, it has sprawled hori
zontally. The sprawl has had dire consequences, but some Los Angeles
miseries are being minimized by a vertical building trend. Since
1958, more apartments have been built in Los Angeles than single
dwellings. In 1952, apartment construction was only nineteen per
cent of the Los Angeles residential total; by 1961, it had soared to
sixty-seven percent. Suburbia is losing its enchantment. Long noted
for its preponderance of single dwelling homes, Los Angeles has al
most as many apartment units now as homes.
The city s battle to keep pace with its cars, the greatest concen
tration in the world, is epic. There is one motor vehicle in Los An
geles for every two persons; in New York City, there is one for every
six. Los Angeles County alone has more automobiles than any of
forty-three states. More than six million gallons of gasoline are burned
each day in the Los Angeles Basin. Since World War II began, one
and one-quarter billion dollars has been spent on freeways in the three
counties of Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura. The present peak-hour
jams, which slow traffic to a crawl, do not exist on the rosy drawing
boards of the future.
California has no rapid transit; even its bus and streetcar systems
receive declining patronage. The state s cars carry an average of only
1.7 passengers, but their role in transportation is increasing steadily.
Both San Francisco and Los Angeles have been probing rapid-
WESTWARD TILT
transit plans, but it will require increasingly staunch efforts to invoke
them. In 1959 the California legislature approved a twenty-year free
way construction program which will add twelve thousand miles of
freeway at a cost of more than ten billion dollars. The system will
swallow up almost half a million acres of California land. By 1980,
two percent of California land will be committed to the automobile.
Los Angeles is no longer a ballyhoo city. Harold Wright, its
veteran Chamber of Commerce manager, told me that "there is no
merit to any more people coming out here." The concern of Los
Angeles leaders today is not to grow, but to cope with problems of
traffic, air pollution, water and urban renewal -crises of a magnitude
faced by no other metropolis. The startling thing is that Angelenos
exude total confidence that they will solve their problems.
Men like Dr. Lee DuBridge, president of the California Institute
of Technology at Pasadena, serve attentively as members of the board
of directors of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. "Our people
in Los Angeles are of a steadily rising caliber," Dr. DuBridge said.
"Here is the pathway of the future. Here are opportunities for im
proving, for building up a better community, a better world. You com
bine that with our particular type of beauty, and you find a special
quality about the West Coast that is different from what you get in the
East or Middle West. It is not yet built. There is still a chance for
changing things. This country is young and flexible."
Los Angeles is led by men like Harold C. McClellan, whose
paint business left him time to help lure the Dodgers away from
Brooklyn, to serve as president of the National Association of Manu
facturers and as a trustee of Occidental College at Los Angeles. He is a
former Chamber of Commerce president, but his is not the voice of a
booster.
"I was born here and sold newspapers up and down Lamar
Street right outside my office door. The thing that excites me most is
that Los Angeles has begun to develop an enlightened look, not
merely one of competence or efficiency. The first thing I would talk
about is not our tremendous growth in business and industry, in
employment and research, but in education. This is the forerunner of
advance in any city or country. There is a spirit of enlightenment
springing primarily from education and from improved liaison be
tween education and industry. I foresee Los Angeles as the center in
an area of greater unity, from Arizona to the Northwest, a growing
community of spirit born out of necessity and improved communica
tions, a rapidly growing population, expanding economy and closer
trade."
Norman Chandler, president of the Los Angeles Times, talks of
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave ( 141
the city in terms of cultural maturity. The new Los Angeles Music
Center and Art Center have been promoted aggressively by Chandler
and his family and the Times.
"Los Angeles people think now in terms of cultural horizons that
make a city great," Chandler told me. "Years ago they wanted no
part of such things. But our new cultural assets draw better people
from all over the world to make Southern California their permanent
home. The population center of California moved long ago from San
Francisco to Los Angeles. San Francisco still has the reputation of
being the outstanding cultural community in the West. It does have
more cultural assets, but that feeling is fast moving to the South as we
mature. Los Angeles is not the most beautiful city in the world.
Someday it will become more beautiful than it is today. But there is a
sense of excitement here as great as any in the world."
Even the skyline of Los Angeles is assuming character. A build
ing-height limit imposed after the Long Beach earthquake has been
relaxed. The sixteen miles of Wilshire Boulevard from downtown
to the Pacific at Santa Monica is in some ways as stirring a spectacle
of construction as is Manhattan. New York goes up; Los Angeles,
even with its new higher buildings, still goes out. At the fringe of
Beverly Hills in West Los Angeles, on what once was the back lot
at Twentieth Century Fox studios, is rising a city within a city:
Century City, an urban development which, its backers insist, will
overshadow even Pittsburgh s Golden Triangle in scope and cost as
the largest development ever undertaken by private capital. Century
City is a skyscraper city with a twelve-year construction schedule.
"There is nowhere left to go in Los Angeles but up," said one of its
architects, Welton Becket, in a statement which until very recently
would have brought only ridicule in this land of wide open spaces.
The Pacific Ocean has put a halt to the spillover of Los Angeles
to the south and west. Its most notable direction of growth in the
past decade has been to the north of the Santa Monica Mountains
part of the range is known as the Hollywood Hills into the San
Fernando Valley, still within the city limits. In the valley, about
twenty-two miles long and ten miles wide, lie more than twenty
communities, many with separate identities but hazy boundaries. It is
primarily a suburban residential area, but there are footloose-industry
plants dealing in rocket engine development, space research, elec
tronics and atomic energy. More than half of the homes and plants in
the valley have been built within the past ten years, and the population
is about six times greater than twenty years ago. The homes are
larger than the average for the city, and swimming pools are more
numerous than elsewhere; so are the homes of movie stars, and so
142) WESTWARD TILT
are horses. Most economic indices for the city of Los Angeles rank
San Fernando Valley second or third, behind Beverly Hills- Westwood
and Santa Monica. The valley has another distinction; it is the geo
graphic center of population of California a fact which suggests the
dominance of Southern California in population. San Fernando now
is the home of almost one million people; only eight cities in the
nation have larger populations than that of this valley.
More than two and a half million people live within Los Ange-
les s four hundred and sixty square miles. But street signs often are
the only warning to the stranger that he has moved from the city itself
into one of the other seventy-two cities of Los Angeles County. Within
the county are almost six and a half million people. The metropolitan
sprawl of the Los Angeles Basin encompasses Long Beach, an aircraft,
oil and shipping center with a population of more than a third of a
million. The standard metropolitan area population of Los Angeles-
Long Beach is greater than that of Chicago and second only to metro
politan New York. Also within Los Angeles County are Glendale,
Pasadena, and Torrance, each with more than one hundred thousand
residents.
The multiplicity of incorporated towns and cities within Los
Angeles County complicates government services and area planning.
Some are single-purpose cities. Dairy Valley was incorporated by
dairymen in self-defense against encroaching subdivisions. So were
two other towns in adjacent Orange County: Cypress and Dairyland.
They are not cities at all but protective societies for cows. Such
phenomena have led to drastic planning by men like Milton Breivogel,
the Los Angeles County regional planning director. He is a soft-
spoken, conciliatory man who came to Los Angeles in 1941 from
Wisconsin and is working now on the assumption that Los Angeles
County can assimilate another four million people ( raising it past the
ten million mark) without destroying the present environment.
One little corner of Breivogel s beat is the East San Gabriel
Valley, an area of two hundred square miles, about as large as
Chicago. "We have determined, on the basis of developing densities,"
Breivogel said calmly, "that this area ultimately will have a population
of about one million two hundred and fifty thousand people. We are
developing a land-use plan for the valley which sets aside enough
land for industry so that people employed there can live in the valley.
The same thing will be true of commercial centers of all types. With
rare exceptions, the needs of the million two hundred and fifty thou
sand people will be satisfied in that area. Instead of traveling ten or
twenty miles to work or to shop, they may travel two."
Will it work? Already thirteen cities in the East San Gabriel
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave
Valley are planning together with Breivogel; highway and freeway
systems are being integrated. There is support from the citizens.
As might be expected by now, downtown Los Angeles businessmen
do not protest such diversionary tactics.
Such foresight has worked before. To Breivogel, the most re
markable trait of Los Angeles citizens is their willingness to sacrifice
personal plans when they interfere with the awesome community
momentum. "They come to commission meetings all on fire," he has
said, "and they usually leave pretty much satisfied that while what
we are doing may inhibit their projects, we are doing something de
sirable for the community ."
BreivogePs worst weeks were in 1953, when Antelope Valley,
in the north desert area of Los Angeles County, began to experience a
chaotic boom; the jet test centers of Palmdale and Edwards Air Force
Base were burgeoning. County supervisors passed an emergency ordi
nance freezing valley zoning to agriculture only, Breivogel brought
on an extra staff to develop a master plan for orderly growth.
"The first reaction was violent," he recalled. "But after several
meetings, they went along. Within two years we had a plan for
twenty-two hundred square miles of land. People agree now that it
was the best thing that could have happened."
"Don t you ever view anything with alarm?" I asked.
"Oh, sure. These tremendous population increases. I wonder
what it is going to be like and if we are doing the right thing. What
we are doing today will determine the pattern of Los Angeles twenty
years from now, whether it works or not."
But this public servant, one of the many whose hand is on the
throttle of America s runaway metropolis, exudes that classic confi
dence of an honest man with, four aces, a state of euphoria which
applies today to most Angelenos.
If it were only a matter of prosperity under the sun, Los Angeles
would rank as a roaring success. Since 1947, the city has hurdled
Pittsburgh and Detroit to become the third-ranking United States
manufacturing city. It will probably move Chicago out of second
place by 1967. There are even warning signals that San Francisco
is losing some of its corporate muscle to Los Angeles. Among the
two hundred largest United States industrial corporations, as listed
in the Fortune Directory for 1962, four are in San Francisco, three in
Oakland and one in San Jose a total of eight in the Bay Area. In the
Los Angeles Basin there are twelve. Among the top five hundred,
nineteen are in the Los Angeles Basin and fifteen in the Bay Area.
Metropolitan Los Angeles accounts for forty-three percent of all
144) WESTWARD TILT
manufacturing in the eleven Western states. It is the nation s second
largest retail trade center. Industrial expansion and capital investment
in new plants average about eighteen million dollars a month. A well-
designed seventy-million dollar air terminal has enhanced Los Ange-
les s position as a gateway to the Pacific. Import-export trade through
the adjacent Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors exceeded $1.2 bil
lion in 1961; their passenger traffic and cargo tonnage surpassed that
of San Francisco, and ranked second to that of New York.
As a headquarters city, Los Angeles has an impressive roster.
Metropolitan Los Angeles has periodically led the nation in new home
construction and total volume of building construction. It ranks second
to metropolitan New York in total employment, personal income, effec
tive buying income, retail sales, and telephones in use. It follows New
York and Chicago in manufacturing employment, wholesale trade and
bank deposits. The heart of Los Angeles industry is in national de
fense, but the proportion has been declining steadily even though
as much as seventy percent of Air Force funds spent on military
space programs have gone into Southern California industry.
The pattern of Los Angeles growth was emerging clearly in
1962. Business and industry are moving into suburban locations, but
headquarters agencies are congregating in the central city. The new
stadium at Chavez Ravine is near downtown. An axis of new con
struction lies between the Civic Center and a cultural-recreational area
including the Sports Arena (site of the Democratic National Conven
tion in 1960) and the adjacent museums, the Coliseum, and the
campus of the University of Southern California.
Civic Center is a two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-acre complex in
the central city with thirteen major buildings and four more under
construction in 1962. It is the largest grouping of public buildings in
any American city except Washington. In it is a twenty-three-million-
dollar Music Center, due for completion in 1963, whose white marble
columns and glass lobby will be a rejuvenating addition both to the
architectural facade of the city and to its cultural ego. Civic Center
has been dominated by the thirty-two story City Hall, built in 1928
and long a Los Angeles landmark. Until the 1960^8 it represented
one of the few exceptions to the old one-hundred-and-fifty-f oot height
limit imposed because of past earthquakes.
Future buildings at Civic Center include a seventeen-story head
quarters for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power ($26
million), a Federal Building (with a $27 million Congressional ap
propriation), and a County Men s Detention Center ($13,630,000).
Recent buildings in the downtown area house Union Oil and Signal
Oil headquarters, and include the Tishman and Southern Counties
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave
Gas Company buildings. A California Mart center is under construc
tion, and there are scores of others.
Almost in the shadow of City Hall, private developers are in
vesting the first of an estimated quarter of a billion dollars in re
building a i36-acre slum known as Bunker Hill. Tower apartments
will rise in Bunker Hill for six to eight thousand residents in a walk-
to-work location; many of them will be employed in office buildings
and hotels which are planned for Bunker Hill.
A new freeway loop completed in 1962 around downtown Los
Angeles has helped to rejuvenate the center city as a headquarters
area. In 1953, thirty minutes driving in central Los Angeles took
one about twelve miles; by 1962, a driver s range within half an
hour had risen to about twenty miles except during the peak hours
of commuter traffic. The freeways work. Only because of them can
Los Angeles residents continue to be the most mobile people on earth.
Such movement is made necessary by Los Angeles s horizontal de
velopment as a city of one-family homes.
In a strange way, the freeways contribute to a sense of roots,
an asset assumed to be in short supply in the city. Harold Wright, who
has spent most of his life residing in South Pasadena, said: "My
roots in Los Angeles now are spread over an area forty by seventy-five
miles. People from the East don t understand it. Within that area are
my family, my clubs and other organizations I belong to, and close
personal friends who may live thirty miles away but whom I see
regularly. South Pasadena is a self-contained, self-satisfied little com
munity where a man feels he belongs to a body of people, helps raise
money for charity, and cheers the high school football team. For
those who both live and work there, such a feeling can remain. Re
cently I moved to an adjacent town, San Marino, where people eat
and sleep and leave each morning on the freeway for God knows
where. It is more impersonal than the same suburb would have been
twenty-five years ago before the freeway era. But my roots are spread
over the whole Los Angeles Basin, and I don t feel dispossessed. All
over Los Angeles, people of like background think and act together.
Even older, more cohesive cities have a hard time doing the things
Los Angeles has done as a city, despite its sprawl and its diversities
of background."
There is rising resentment throughout California of the philos
ophy of freeway development, which was facilitated by the Collier-
Burns Act passed by tie California Legislature in 1947. This act
marked the birth of the massive freeway system of California and its
powerful hierarchy in the state Division of Highways.
146) WESTWARD TILT
San Franciscans are notably anti-freeway. County supervisors
there were blocking plans in 1962 for a seven-mile freeway which
would have brought one hundred and seventy-three million dollars in
state funds to the city. There is bitter resentment of the Embarcadero
Freeway, which rims the downtown waterfront at an elevation which
impinges on the view of the bay. Sacramento was protesting in 1962
because a freeway route would destroy historic buildings.
Angelenos, by contrast, realize they have scant alternative
to freeway development. There has been organized opposition in
Glendale and Malibu, but little has come of it. San Diego is fortunate:
its excellent freeways are being built ahead of traffic congestion rather
than afterwards; they seem better planned and less destructive of
neighborhoods than those of other cities.
Several years ago a state highway engineer, Jacob Dekema, made
one of the most explicit statements of freeway philosophy: "We find
out where people are coming from and where they re going. Then we
draw a straight line, and that s where we try to build a freeway.
Of course, it s surprising how many people don t know where they re
going." Something of volatile concern is likely to lie in the path of any
straight line drawn in California, and that is where the furor usually
starts. More recently, this same engineer, Dekema, made a more cau
tious summary of freeway philosophy: "We just try to sneak these
freeways through town with as little disruption as possible." Wallace
Stegner of Stanford refers to the California Highway Commission as
"having nobody to control it, too much money, too much power, and
an engineering mentality." Some citizens are concentrating on lobby
ing for more tasteful landscaping and screening of freeways.
More pungent criticism can be leveled toward the freeway autoc
racy in California and its seeming disregard for esthetics. But the
simple truth is that the engineers have kept traffic moving in the state.
Motorists both Californians and visitors have praise for most of
the freeways being built, especially those between cities. Freeways
reduce fatality rates by two-thirds and accidents by one-half, as con
trasted to other rural state highways. They shorten distances and
conserve time. They lower maintenance costs. By 1970, there will be
twelve and a half million motor vehicles in California, and by 1980
about seventeen million. As James Mussatti, former general manager
of the California Chamber of Commerce, put it: "This is not the time
to throw monkey wrenches into the program of freeway construction."
Instead, most Californians are learning to live with freeways.
California Highway Patrol studies revealed a startling statistic: a car
in a crowded left-hand freeway lane, moving fifteen miles per hour
slower than the rest of traffic, usually will cause stop-and-go tie-ups
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave
ten minutes and five miles behind it. Warned the Los Angeles Times:
"If a slow driver does choose the freeway, his civic duty is to step on
the gas."
Freeway traffic in Los Angeles has led to a lore of its own.
Some freeways there now handle more than two hundred thousand
vehicles each day. Harrison Salisbury, the New York Times reporter,
went West some years ago to write about Los Angeles freeways. He
almost dismissed his entire series in one sentence: "I have seen the
future, and it doesn t work." This is a first impression less frequently
heard today than five years ago. Yet visiting drivers unaccustomed to
moving on and off freeways have been known to hire taxicabs not
to ride in but to lead them through the freeway maze.
A highway patrolman pulled over to a freeway shoulder once to
investigate a parked car with an Iowa license plate. In it sat a visitor,
stark sober but unnerved and seeking to regain his composure. The
patrolman nodded understandingly. "Would you mind," he asked,
"if I sat down and joined you for a while?"
A woman driver turned too sharply at an intersection in Beverly
Hills and ran over the left foot of a policeman who was directing
traffic. A shrill plea from his whistle brought her to a stop. Helpfully,
she flipped into reverse and backed toward the officer. An anguished
cry rose up. "Now you got the other one," he roared.
One loyal citizen telephoned police headquarters to report a traffic
jam. "Are you close enough to see whafs causing the trouble?" the
inspector asked. There was a moment of silence, and then the officer
got his answer in a strange, tight voice. "Automobiles," the citizen
said, and hung up.
One Los Angeles driver ran his car up on a freeway divider and
could not drive away; his wheels were off the pavement. Ignored by
thousands of passing cars, he greeted a motorcycle officer gratefully,
but later testified that the officer roared off after telling him, "Get off
the way you got on!" He finally was towed from the divider after
mounting the top of his car and making a distress flag of his shirt.
The frequent and grim desperation of the motorist in Southern
California sometimes goes out of control. Two New Jersey youths,
driving south toward San Diego in 1961 on the Pacific Highway,
felt that their car was being crowded by one driven by a Los Angeles
man in an adjacent lane. At Oceanside, they stopped, pulled out a
rifle, and shot and killed the California driver.
One issue in the balance during this present Los Angeles renais
sance is its moral reputation. The city has been indicted over the years
both as a reincarnation of the Bible Belt and as a world capital of
148 ) WESTWARD TILT
moral obfuscation and moral imbecility. Los Angeles is capable of
seeming to be blatantly anything, but it is certainly at neither of these
moral extremes. It conforms to fewer established patterns of behavior
than most cities, but there is no evidence that its median morality is
higher or lower than that of the nation as a whole.
A University of California professor at Berkeley, a San Fran
ciscan at heart, told me in vivid terms that Los Angeles is the most
licentious city in the world, despite what he referred to as "its Bible-
pounding fundamentalists." He regarded Paris, when contrasted to
Los Angeles, as staid. The evidence he cited, when challenged, was a
scene he had witnessed as he drove one afternoon at sixty miles an hour
along a Los Angeles freeway. In a car in the next lane a hot rod with
a front seat he remembered as being covered in a leopard-skin fabric
a blond girl was enthusiastically involved in a sexual ritual with the
driver which did not require his active participation, but which seemed
more than likely to divert his attention from the hazards of the free
way. The scene does radiate a certain decadence, but to draw conclu
sions of the moral fiber of six and a half million people from it is
unscientific. It reminded me of a night when I arrived at a Mexico
City party, full of the story of how my taxicab had been delayed by a
gun-battle between two natives in the streets of the city. A wise old
professor from the University of Mexico listened to my story and
shook his head sadly. "I have lived in this city for seventy-two years,"
he said softly, "and I have hoped from my youth to witness such a
spectacle."
But in crime, as in so much else, California leads the nation.
The 1960 crime index for metropolitan Los Angeles showed a higher
rate in almost every major category than that for any other American
city except Las Vegas. The crime rate in Los Angeles has increased
at a disturbingly sharp rate: by some comparisons it doubled in the
decade between 1950 and 1960. Experts tend to agree that this is
because Los Angeles attracts criminals for the same general reasons
that it attracts new residents. Its high crime rate does not prove that
it is an immoral city. Most Los Angeles people are as law-abiding
as the average. California law enforcement standards are far above
the national average, and the moral climate in which Los Angeles
police operate is more strict than that even in San Francisco, a city
with a sharply lower incidence of reported crime.
Part of the Los Angeles crime rate is blamed on the proximity
of Las Vegas, where syndicate crime may not be in control but cer
tainly is in evidence. Crimes involving narcotics are high, partly be
cause Mexico is so close. Police Chief William Parker continually
pleads for more law-enforcement officers, but already Los Angeles has
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave
a higher proportion of police in relation to its population than most
cities. Their operations are made more difficult by the same three
factors that complicate many phases of Los Angeles life: area, growth,
and mobility.
One trouble spot in the Los Angeles battle against organized
crime is Gardena, a Los Angeles suburb which has been the home of
six poker clubs grossing more than five million dollars each year.
Gardena is a city built of cards. It has stood firm for twenty-five
years despite the huffing and puffing of thousands who deplore its
major industry. To poker players, the funniest joke in California is
that stud poker is gambling, but that draw poker is not. This notion
has persisted since 1937, when a card shark discovered that draw
poker was not specifically outlawed in California statutes. That fluke
in the law, sustained that year by a state attorney general, permits the
Gardena clubs to function on a local option basis. Three times the
State Assembly has passed a bill to outlaw poker clubs, but the bills
always have died in the upper house. They have survived three chal
lenges at the polls in Gardena, although by decreasing pluralities,
and in the latest test, in the November elections of 1962, county voters
rejected a statute which would have wiped out card rooms throughout
the county, including those of Gardena.
There are back-street poker clubs in several California towns;
but in Gardena, half-million-dollar luxury clubs operate every day of
the year, except Christmas, from 10 A.M. to 4 A.M. Each Gardena
club has thirty-five to forty tables seating eight players. The stakes
range upward from a dime. Most players wait their turns for seats at
tables where the opening bet is one dollar or two dollars and the
maximum bet is two dollars or four dollars. A girl collects the house
percentage from each player every half hour. At the one-dollar-two-
dollar table, it costs two cents a minute to play. There is not much idle
banter, and a slow player soon may find himself alone at his table.
The lists of part-owners in these Gardena poker palaces include
dozens of names from many parts of the West. Las Vegas and Reno
names are prominent among them, and many Gardena citizens feel
that their low tax rate (eighty cents per $100) and their handsome
youth center are not adequate enough rewards to justify the clubs.
Police Chief Parker of Los Angeles once testified that ten ex-
convicts and underworld figures are involved in Gardena gambling.
In 1960, a bomb exploded outside the Rainbow Club. In 1950, an
attorney named Samuel Rummel was ambushed and killed outside his
Laurel Canyon home; police noted that he was a mouthpiece for
Gardena gamblers. In 1942, a police officer was shot in a holdup at
a Gardena card room, and fatally injured his attacker before dying.
WESTWARD TILT
In a club like the Normandie, the only suggestion of such sordid
shenanigans is in the careful stares of oversized security officers. To
the left of the entrance is a darkened television lounge, where players
wait their turn to be paged by initials only when a place opens at a
table. There is no bar. Signs warn that minors and liquor are equally
unwelcome. But there are bars close by, and in the men s room I saw
two players trading sips from a whisky bottle. There is a small
restaurant with good food, reasonably priced. Waitresses bring coffee
and snacks to the players at the tables.
I once took a turn at a two-dollar-limit table. A chip girl sold me
ten dollars worth of chips twenty-five-cent chips for antes, and one-
dollar chips for bets. It was the least congenial card game I ve ever
played. At my right was a pale man in his forties who had been
playing for seven hours and had lost eighty dollars. There were two
men who appeared to be in their seventies. The other players were
women in their forties or fifties, and at least half of the three hundred
players seated in the big room were older women. They took their
poker seriously. One of the women at my table, who was winning,
asked me twice if I could possibly play faster. Once, when I drew one
card to a flush and a winning hand, she called over a house man
to protest that I had turned over my hand too soon. I had, indeed.
But the house ruled that I still held the winning hand. She picked up
her chips and stalked away.
"The old bag is a grouch," muttered one of the older men as he
dealt. "But you ought to watch the game closer."
At the end of an hour I was even. I stood and picked up my chips
gratefully. No one at the table looked up as I left. A house man
signaled another player to my seat. The pale man at my right was still
losing. He yawned and ordered coffee. It was i A.M.
The Gardena poker palaces wear an affluent look, but it is not
cheering to look closely at their inhabitants. It is easy to associate with
their tense faces the images many Gardena citizens associate with this
principal civic industry: broken homes, lost jobs, and suicides.
Hollywood has its own westward tilt: television.
The movie studios, spread across Los Angeles from Culver City
to Van Nuys, are busy with television. About eighty percent of the
entertainment work in Hollywood today is for television. Far more net
work shows originate in Los Angeles than in New York; and television
budgets in Los Angeles now exceed half a billion dollars each year.
Almost all the major film studios are turning out television footage.
Paramount is renting studio space to television producers. Universal-
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave ( / j/
International sold its studio in 1959 to Music Corporation of America
and rents back a corner of the lot.
The new production aristocracy of Hollywood is led by the
Music Corporation of America, which was formed forty years ago as
a talent agency. Now it is a giant in television production, and has
announced plans for three new fourteen-story office buildings on the
old Universal-International lot, from where it proposes to "revitalize
the film industry" with a foray into movie production. Despite anti
trust action by the Justice Department, which resulted in divorce
ment of its talent agency operations, MCA prospers; in the 196263
network television season, programs produced by MCA accounted
for one-sixth of all prime evening time on the three networks.
Box-office revenue from motion pictures shown in theaters is
about $1.3 billion annually, compared with a peak of $1.5 billion
in the final years of the old Hollywood before television, and before
major studios were divorced from ownership of theaters by govern
ment decree in 1948. There were as many as seven hundred movies
made a year then; today the number is below three hundred and al
most half of these are made overseas. Runaway production, a fiscal
device to avert payment of United States taxes and to utilize frozen
overseas assets, has caused considerable unemployment among the
one-time royalty of the industry. Rome, London and Tokyo are ahead
of Hollywood in movie production.
But as the saying goes in Hollywood today, for a place that is
supposedly dead, one can find a lot of life. It is an era when salaries
are higher and movies more risqu< than ever, but stars more folksy. At
dinner in Chasen s, one night in 1962, Marlon Brando was being de
cidedly untemperamental; a calm and dispassionate colloquy on his
difficulties with the press left him strangely placid at the end of two
hours. Over on North Rexf ord Drive, Sam Marx was back from mak
ing a low-budget feature in Rome and involved again in the weekly
card games with his neighbor Ira Gershwin, who has become one of
the nation s leading art collectors. Nostalgia seems a trifle painful to
them when they talk of old times and old friends such as the pretty
twelve-year-old from around the corner, Elizabeth Taylor, who got
her first part in Lassie Come Home. But on Academy Award nights,
Hollywood still manages a flashback to the wide-eyed days of old-
even though the ceremonies are no longer in Hollywood but at Santa
Monica Civic Auditorium. Parsons and Hopper make it sound about
the same as ever, and a new host of television columnists inhabit the
Hollywood scene. Perhaps it is symbolic that one of the surest places
to catch sight of a Hollywood celebrity is on one of the non-stop jets
7J2) WESTWARD TILT
that wing between Los Angeles and New York in less than five hours.
It is only a rare film star who wins admittance to the Los Angeles
Country Club, which is old-line Los Angeles still; and old-line Los
Angeles, although it cannot look back very many generations, is
capable of a casual kind of hauteur which is as assured today as the
hauteur of Back Bay or Main Line. The Los Angeles aristocracy is
dynamic, creative, prosperous, and confident. It relishes intercourse
with the community of learned men who are bringing new stature to
Los Angeles, and with scientists, architects and industrialists who
have cast their lot with the West.
There is a surge of attention toward the arts; Los Angeles is
moving forward rapidly with its symphony, its theater, and its art
collections. The nation s greatest boom in the art market is occurring
in Los Angeles; there is more serious money in art collecting in Los
Angeles than in any other American city except New York. The city
still is refreshingly unpretentious in its approach to the arts. In this
it holds a clear advantage over the other cultural stronghold of the
West, San Francisco. It is not too soon to hope that the two cultures
of the two great Western cities one in its ascendancy and the other in
grave danger of decline can find fresh and exciting alliances of effort
which will give culture a full share in the robustness and vitality of
the westward tilt.
Perhaps the canards which have most damaged the Los Angeles
ego are those like Frank Lloyd Wright s jibe of the tilted continent,
which bore more truth three decades ago than now. Another cliche of
that era warned that those coining to Southern California should not
bring with them anything which could not be taken back on the
Santa Fe s Chief. But those days are gone. The new Los Angeles will
not be beat.
"There is a feeling now in Los Angeles," says Harold Wright,
Cf that you don t have to crash a fully-armed citadel of people, that
everybody can come out here and find his place and, by God, then he
can do it. Some of the newcomers could have done it elsewhere, but
Los Angeles gives them the psychological push. It emancipates
them."
To Henry Dreyfuss, the industrial designer, who commutes be
tween offices in Manhattan and Pasadena, there is much to be said
both for New York s "knowledgeable realm of know-how" and for
California s "zestful climate of why-not"
A lovely image designed by the Los Angeles Chamber of
Commerce, and labeled "Destination 70," expresses ten goals of
Southern Calif ornians: adequate jobs, rapid transit, clean air, adequate
water, good government, improved traffic flow, better education,
Los Angeles: The Strong New Wave ( 153
crime control, area-wide planning, and improved cultural and recrea
tional life. It is significant that the Los Angeles Chamber of Com
merce today is probably the most influential of any city in the nation,
and that it has the support of its city to a greater extent than any other.
It has an almost incredible record of having achieved its past goals.
Right or wrong, a great deal of the nation s thinking is being
done today in Los Angeles, and inevitably a larger share of it will be
done there. In science, education, business and industry, and in the
art of living, patterns are being set in Los Angeles which are being
followed elsewhere. It will be fortunate for all the nation if the new
personality of Los Angeles now emerging proves to be a brilliant one.
SAN FRANCISCO
Narcissus of the West
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The name of the town was changed from Yerba Buena to San
Francisco in 1847, when eight hundred people lived beside the
Golden Gate. Twenty years later, much of the nation had come to
regard the town as a cultural rival of Boston, and a center of financial
manipulation second only to New York. It was gold that did it.
In 1848 a thousand-ton sidewheeler, California, sailed from New
York for the Pacific Coast. There were cabins for one hundred
passengers, but none was aboard. Yet when the California anchored
at Panama in January, 1849, hundreds fought frenziedly for passage
to San Francisco. While the ship rounded Cape Horn, gold had been
discovered at Sutter s Mill.
Between 1850 and 1854, one hundred and sixty fast clipper
ships were built in the East for Pacific Coast commerce. Yet in those
same years, San Francisco Bay became a graveyard of abandoned
ships. Their crews had deserted to hunt gold.
Samuel Brannan, a renegade Mormon elder, had arrived in the
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West ( i jj
Bay area in 1846 and taken charge. He set up ttie first San Francisco
newspaper, California Star, and led the first gold rush from the town
to the American River in the spring of 1848. Only seven persons
were left behind in San Francisco. But by the beginning of 1849, s *%
thousand miners had appeared to join the hunt, and San Francisco
was a tent town of about two thousand transients. Prices soared,
gambling thrived, and violence erupted.
General W. T. Sherman, who later knew war to be hell, felt
much the same way about San Francisco in 1853. He wrote: "Mont
gomery Street had been filled up with brush and clay and I always
dreaded to ride on horseback along it. ... The rider was likely to
be thrown and drowned in the mud."
Fire leveled the shacks and tents of San Francisco six times in
eighteen months. The fires were finally blamed on incendiaries. To
halt them, Samuel Brannan became president of the first Vigilance
Committee, which meted out a kind of justice of its own against
lawless mobs known as Hounds (they hounded non-whites) and
Sydney Ducks (ex-convicts from Australia). California had been
a part of the United States since 1850, but Washington was busy
with the slavery issue, and not even the slaying in San Francisco of
United States Marshal William H. Richardson by a gambler brought
much attention from the federal government. But when a city super
visor shot down a newspaper editor, a second Vigilance Committee was
formed which eventually grew to nine thousand armed men with de
tachments of infantry, artillery and cavalry. It executed four men and
banished thirty others from the state.
A new kind of panic swept the town in 1854 when the placer
mines began to run out. Shipping dropped away, firms went bankrupt,
and almost half the people of the town now close to fifty thousand
were unemployed. Many left in 1858 to work the new Frazier River
mines in British Columbia. But farming began to prosper. Sawmills
thrived. Machine shops, set up to build mining equipment, were
converted to construct flour mills, steamships and soon even railway
locomotives. The treaty between the United States and the Hawaiian
Islands permitted free entry of raw sugar, and a refinery was built in
San Francisco. An immigrant German youth, Claus Spreckels, ma
neuvered his way from a small grocery business into a sugar fortune;
his rise was helped when he won sugar plantations on the island of
Maui in a poker game with Kalakaua, the island king. Soon, as the
prime Pacific Coast port, San Francisco began to build conservative
foundations in world commerce.
The role of the city as the financial capital of the West had be
gun with gold, but it was reinforced in 1859 when riches in silver
WESTWARD TILT
from the Comstock Lode of Nevada began to flow through the city.
Frenzied speculation in mining stocks centered in San Francisco. In
1862, forty men organized the San Francisco Stock and Exchange
Board, and soon women brokers were peddling mining stocks on
street curbs. William C. Ralston, who had grown rich on the Com
stock Lode, loaned much of the money through his Bank of California
for the building of the Central Pacific (later the Southern Pacific)
Railroad. Two young miners, Mackay and Fair, teamed with two
San Francisco saloon keepers, Flood and O Brien, won control of the
richest vein in all the Comstock, and then opened their own bank.
Ralston, plunging to buy stock in a worthless mine, fell victim to a
falling stock market. On an August day in 1875, his bank closed its
doors. On the next day he went swimming off North Beach, as was his
habitbut this time he drowned. From that day on, the financial
capital of the West grew more orderly. Today, the descendants of
those whose fortunes survived those heady days of silver speculation
are among the most powerful Calif ornians.
The first transcontinental railroad was built eastward by Union
Pacific and westward by Central Pacific to meet in 1869 in Utah.
Central Pacific was begun by four Sacramento merchants Charles
Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Collis P. Huntington
who started with only fifty thousand dollars among them. To build
their roadbed, they brought more than sixty thousand laborers from
China. That was the start of San Francisco s Chinatown, and the start
too of a long era of political domination of California by the Southern
Pacific. Its rich holdings of California land grew to 1,349,000 acres,
and its grip was not broken until the rise of Hiram Johnson in
1910. The success of the Central Pacific also led to Stanford Univer
sity; Leland Stanford, who had come to California penniless in 1852,
bequeathed eighty-three thousand acres of rich farmland and twenty-
one million dollars for a private university.
San Francisco measures its modern era from April 18, 1906. At
5:13 A.M. the earthquake began; it ended forty-eight seconds later.
The city was built almost completely of wood, more so than any other
city of the nation. Yet it was not ruined by the quake; destruction
seemed nominal at first. Then the fires spread, aided by explosion and
by the collapse of the fire-alarm system. The fires raged for three days,
until the mansions of Van Ness were sacrificed to dynamite and to
back fires. The center of the city was destroyed; the loss in property
was half a billion dollars, three hundred and fifteen bodies were re
covered, three hundred and fifty-two persons were unaccounted for,
and a quarter of a million homeless citizens camped in parks and empty
lots.
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West ( 757
As San Francisco was rebuilt, the natives distracted themselves
with one of their liveliest graft probes. Abraham Ruef , most infamous
of a long line of political bosses, was convicted but not before his
chief prosecutor, Francis J. Heney, was shot in the courtroom
by a juryman. In his prison stripes at San Quentin, Ruef announced:
"The zebra is one of the most beautiful and graceful of animals. Why,
therefore, should I cavil at my attire?"
In the Atherton police graft probe of 1933, a defense lawyer
gave what some San Franciscans still regard as a definitive statement
of the laissez-faire attitude which has characterized the city. He told
the jury that he was about to defend policemen who had been ac
cused of taking bribes. He said he would show during the trial that
not only the defendants, but the jurors themselves bore the same glory
that he bore as a San Franciscan they all were descended from the
fun-loving Spanish.
The long labor strife of the city began to attract the attention of
the world in 1916, soon after a longshoremen s strike, when a bomb
killed ten persons during a Preparedness Day parade. Thomas Mooney
and Warren Billings, arrested and convicted, became to American
labor martyrs to injustice. In 1939, Mooney was pardoned and Billings
released.
In 1934, longshoremen walked off the docks and shipping came
to a halt. On July 5 of that year, a date still recalled by waterfront
unions as "Bloody Thursday," two strikers were killed. On July i7th,
in a general city strike, one hundred and twenty-seven thousand San
Francisco workers left their jobs. The strike lasted three days, and
from its settlement emerged the power of one of the city s three
famous Bridges: Harry. (The other two were under construction. The
San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was opened to traffic in 1936, and
the Golden Gate in 1937.)
<&&Z><$>&2><$>$>< ^^
the cities of the Western United States, only San Fran
cisco has the poise to laugh at itself. But self-ridicule comes seldom
these days and is drowned by the sybaritic laughter from the city s
Babylonian ghettos. Judged as the capital of the West, a role thrust
on it a century ago by gold, contemporary San Francisco is an in
gratiating failure.
There is small place in the image of San Francisco for the human
WESTWARD TILT
miseries that increasingly haunt its majestic hills, for San Francisco
is untroubled by conscience. It is narcissistic. It has had every right to
be in love with itself, but because of complacency its beauty has been
seeping away. In San Francisco and among its lovers all over the
world, there is a wistful conspiracy to maintain the illusions of the
San Francisco that has been fading: a virile, astute, cultured, fun-
loving city, the city that knows how.
On its face, this is the most enchanting of all American cities.
Its devotees ring the earth; its newcomers join the chorus in blithe
paeans or quietly move away, or stay and view the gathering storm
with troubled eyes. If they leave, it is assumed that they couldn t make
the grade. If they stay and fail to join the claque, they are "not San
Francisco."
It is easy to be swept along in the conspiracy of self-devotion; the
illusion has had talented creators. There are a host of them conveying
the illusion in word and picture for an insatiable audience. There is
a market almost anywhere for words about San Francisco, so long as
they fulfill the image. It becomes unrewarding to remain objective
about the city.
I asked a learned San Francisco cleric if he detected any dis
turbing note of narcissism in his city. He folded his hands and
looked away for a long moment. When his eyes met mine again, they
twinkled, as though his wit and honesty had been grappling with
more theologic impulses, and had won. What he said came close to a
revelation of pure San Franciscana:
"I make addresses and preach sermons in which I point out that
San Francisco leads the cities of the nation in the end products of
frustration and despair. From time to time we are ahead in alcoholism,
in suicide, in drug addiction, in divorce, in homosexuality. I cite these
statistics, and I listen to myself, and sometimes I have to say to my
self: *You sounded proud! "
An advertising man remarked, "San Francisco is sort of a vertical
Texas. San Franciscans assume you re going to think their city is the
greatest place in the world, and they aren t interested in your com
pliments because they have all the oblivious confidence of a ten-year-
old boy."
A former madame told me one night at a party on Telegraph
Hill: "San Francisco is a town to ball in, baby!" And to paraphrase a
comment which is currently popular among a handful of San Fran
cisco cognoscenti, "San Francisco is the only city that can make love
to itself."
San Francisco Bay, four hundred and fifty square miles of
sheltered water, unites a metropolitan area as large as New Jersey.
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West ( 159
The Bay extends forty-two miles north and south. The Bay area
population is 3.5 million, but only one in five lives in San Francisco.
Of these, only a handful are San Franciscans participating actively in
the legend of their city. But thousands more are consciously, some
times pridefully, enacting roles as supernumeraries.
In the custody of these hard-core San Franciscans, and their
sycophants, is the urbanity of San Francisco. It is unique in the West.
The compact center of San Francisco is as non-Western as midtown
Manhattan. It is inhabited by those who are conscious of being a part
of the scene, whether they are residents or tourists. "We all go to the
same places at lunch," Stan Delaplane, the Pulitzer Prize winner and
columnist, said. "The places are mostly within walking distance. I
walk four or five blocks to the Palace or to the St. Francis I hardly
ever take a cab. We see each other all the time, which causes a certain
unanimity of thought."
This urban center of San Francisco is set in an aquatic wilderness
of contrasts.
From the Civic Center of San Francisco with its sumptuous,
municipally-owned Opera House, the Bayshore Freeway unravels
southward through a forest of signs and subdivisions, down the
peninsula beside San Francisco Bay. In moments, the traveler is in
South San Francisco, a glum industrial town, out of the seven-mile
square enclave of San Francisco proper and the first of a long suc
cession of sub-cities. Within an hour, he reaches San Jose, a vast new
subdivision at the site of California s oldest incorporated town. The
most intensive recent settlement of people and industry in the Bay area
has been here. San Franciscans like to say that Southern California
begins at San Jose. What they mean is that this new city of two
hundred and twenty-five thousand has grown with the sudden ex
plosive force associated with Los Angeles; what they are admitting is
that proximity to San Francisco was not enough to endow the San
Jose explosion of the 1950*8 with San Franciscan charm or grace.
Across the Bay to the east is another world, which includes in
dustrial Oakland, seat of the world-wide Kaiser empire and the West
ern city most heavily settled by Negroes, and Berkeley, the home base
of the wide-flung University of California. In population, East Bay
rivals the peninsula across the Bay; some of its settlements are bedroom
cities for San Francisco, and in the hills and flatlands east of the Bay
lie other bedroom towns from which Oakland businessmen com
mute. Yet East Bay is detached inviolably from the San Francisco
image. It is appropriate in San Francisco to dismiss the area loftily as
"the mysterious East Bay."
To the north, past the restaurants and shops and galleries of
Sausalito, lie the hilly residential and commuter towns of Marin
l6o) WESTWARD TILT
County, less thickly settled than those of East Bay; not until the
Golden Gate Bridge was finished in 1937 did this area fall within
commuter range. In Marin, the new breed of urban planner is trying
to blend rugged parkland with subdivision while there is time.
To the west is the Pacific.
In the center of all this lies a visually captivating city of only
forty-five square miles. Its hills and peaks, its ghettos and its sky
scrapers bask in luminous color reflected on three sides by sky and
water. It has nowhere to go but up. The last of the sand dunes in the
far southwest corner of the city has been subdivided. This city of
seven hundred and forty-two thousand, and not the metropolitan Bay
area of 3.5 million, is the capital of the West. But it is no longer the
great city of the West; Los Angeles has overtaken it. Even the role of
San Francisco as the Western capital implying influence, not size-
is under serious challenge. So many have fought so hard to keep San
Francisco the same that their effect has been felt. In many ways the
city is the exception that proves the rule in the theory of the westward
tilt.
San Francisco is blessed indisputably with savoir vivre; yet,
Samson-like, it seems ready to pull in its temple atop itself.
Its spires and towers rise indomitably from the edge of its great
bay and over its hills, haughty but enticing; yet half of downtown al
ready is at the mercy of the automobile a quarter of it in streets and
freeways, and another quarter in parking facilities. Its bay-windowed
streets beckon to the wanderer in search of a home; yet on closer look,
they are strangely ugly, and many are verging on slums.
While fifteen million dollars was spent on Candlestick Park for
the Giants, San Francisco s General Hospital was on probation for its
antiquated facilities and its two legitimate theaters tottered in seedy
obsolescence.
The city s reputation for tolerance is world-wide; yet as its
Negro population has risen from five thousand to eighty thousand in
twenty years, it has developed ghettos in the Fillmore and Mission
districts which are the worst breeding grounds of crime in the West.
Its two great bridges brought the city a dynamism and a visual
focus; but its freeways, its new office buildings and pending water
front apartment developments threaten its historic vistas, even though
they are symbolic of progress.
Like its opera, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra has been
a soothing source of smugness through the years, but in 1962, George
Szell canceled the second week of a series of concerts in which he
served as guest conductor. Baited by a San Francisco music critic
to explain, he finally exploded with a criticism of orchestra personnel
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West (161
and policy. "I found the saddest state of musical affairs in any Ameri
can or European city during the almost fifty years of my active con
ducting career," he said.
Because a 1948 civic bond issue failed, San Francisco has lagged
in convention facilities. Its people always have assumed happily
that conventioners would continue to gravitate toward their city, but
they were jolted in 1962 by a warning that San Francisco now is
forced to compete for conventions with Los Angeles, Denver, Port
land, and Las Vegas.
The city grasps at the new to avoid self -strangulation yet in
the new it loses the charm of its past and begins to wonder who it is.
It is a city with its finger in the dike, which must hold on and risk the
ravages of drought, or let go and brave the flood.
Three factions are the heirs to San Francisco, and at the moment
none of them seems likely to keep alive the flame. At dead center are
the unimaginative descendants of the city s pioneers, largely bent on
maintaining family fortunes. Slightly more attractive are the energetic
newcomers who have learned to capitalize on the illusion of San Fran
cisco. Most hollow of all is a voluble segment of intellectuals, who
gloat in the sensual serenity of the city and enjoy it as a forum for
their innocuous but highly glossed ideas. This group largely ignores
or idly deplores the waste of the robust and peculiar strengths of the
city.
But there are San Franciscans who are concerned. Wallace
Stegner, the novelist, returned to his accustomed haunts on the
Stanford campus after a sabbatical year in Florence and Rome and was
stunned by the architectural dreariness that greeted him. "San Fran
cisco has wealth, prestige, and the power to swing things," he told me.
"Instead of a good city, it should be an absolutely spectacular city. It
is a failure in zoning. The opera and symphony are fine, but why
shouldn t they be among the best in the world? The theater in San
Francisco as yet amounts to little. With the greatest opportunity of
any city in the world, San Francisco has muffed it. Our cultural
agencies are too self -contented."
A blindness among San Franciscans toward "what is really
wrong here" is sensed by the Right Reverend James Albert Pike,
Episcopal Bishop of California. He is a churchman of extraordinary
intellectual brilliance, who embraced a clerical career after serving
as an attorney for the United States Securities and Exchange Com
mission in Washington.
"Nobody bothers much about the San Francisco statistics of
divorce or suicide or alcoholism," he told me in his chancery beside
Grace Cathedral. "The beatnik philosophy is a counsel of despair, that
l62 ) WESTWARD TILT
the moment is all there is. I am not totally critical of it; it is a fact of
our culture. It goes beyond the old beatnik haunts here in North
Beach, permeating even the Pacific Union Club here on Nob Hill.
San Francisco has the largest proportion of single persons of any
major city. This leads to a great deal of loneliness. The friendliness of
the San Franciscan is sometimes not so vividly and continuously ex
pressed as in other areas. There is often a lack of involvement with
one s neighbors. They don t care much who s around, which results in
less participation in community affairs.
"There is less basic religious affiliation. There is a fresh new
feeling that there are worlds to conquer, but the church was back there ^
and the need for it is felt less after the move to the West. San Francisco
is the image of the last chance the last place out and it is a hub of
anxieties and restlessness. It has the lowest degree of religious affilia
tion: twenty-eight percent as against thirty-two percent in Seattle and
sixty-seven percent on the national average. With this low affiliation,
it is not a coincidence that San Francisco is at the top of almost any
thing you name that shows unsolved personal anxiety.
"In growing areas of the West, our clergy are busy with financ
ing and designing churches and in all kinds of activity involved with
bringing in new people. The clergy in the San Francisco Bay area are
so busy as promoters that sometimes they fail as ministers; they do not
have enough time to read, or there may be no second priest in many
parishes because of the expense of a high mortgage and the need to
keep building.
"Yet the life, culture and gaiety of San Francisco are tremendous.
The feel is different from the East. Back there, people say, *We never
did this before; why should we do it now? In the West, at the sug
gestion of a new idea, laymen or officers of a parish usually say, Let s
go! The result is much creativity."
Scott Newhall, the dynamic executive editor of the San Francisco
Chronicle, is one of the most outspoken and least complacent citi
zens. He is a fourth-generation San Franciscan, but he is certainly not
typical of the city. He says, "The thing that frightens me is the world
myth of San Francisco, and how our present generation and most of
the people who have come here in the last generation are doing nothing
to deserve it. They are sitting on a reputation. I don t want this to
explode. This is a wonderful city. There is vitality here, but it must
be put back to work. I think San Francisco is basically inactive. It is
in the hands generally of cultural idiots. The civic approach to plan
ning and architecture is completely distasteful. We keep demolishing
things. There hasn t been a piece of statuary to be commissioned, of
any size or scope, for a generation. City Hall is more or less popu-
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West ( 163
lated by ignorance, conformity and mediocrity. It is the spirit of our
city not to bother too much. What City Hall needs is a Lorenzo de
Medici, and not just another cost accountant in an executive position.
I have yet to see any Lorenzo on the horizon."
Instead, City Hall has been led by a Greek-American dairyman,
Mayor George Christopher, who lacks the polish of the prototype San
Franciscan but brims with the raw vigor of earlier eras. (In 1962, he
was the losing Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Cali
fornia.) He often seems to feel he is not a San Franciscan: he refers
to its citizens in the third person. My first visit with him at City Hall
was soon after a national magazine had devoted an issue to a hope
lessly romanticized interpretation of San Francisco.
"Somehow," I told Christopher, "you and the San Francisco I
read about don t add up."
He laughed, unconcerned. "Like many presentations of San
Francisco," he said, "that one tended to glamorize the city in a way that
reminded everybody of the glorious past. I suppose that s fine. I m
not going to quarrel with anybody who wants to glorify San Francisco.
But the future of this city lies in energy and guts. It s good for these
people to have sentiment. It gives them something to be proud of, and
when people are proud and have sentiment, they usually try to better
themselves."
City Hall towers higher than the Capitol in Washington, but like
too much of San Francisco, what happens inside has failed to live up
to the promise of the outside. The city planning department has been
cited as one of the best in the nation; yet little of its long-range plan
ning has been implemented. Its master plan includes subways, trees
and small parks downtown,, larger neighborhood parks, Civic Center
additions, and the renewal of blighted areas in a traditional style
which would blend with the rest of the city. The plan reposed, almost
unnoticed, as civic officials overrode planning-department recommen
dations for the regulation of skyscraper heights to prevent blocking of
views, and ignored the pleas of planners for the acquisition of federal
land to make more parks.
Urban redevelopment bogged down for years in indecision and
scandal including the resignation of a mayor s aide who owned stock
in a slum properties combine. The stalemate was broken in part after
the Chronicle angrily labeled the civic redevelopment team "Dawdle,
Dawdle, Bumbling & Pokery, specialists in deceleration." Soon, under
a new director, the redevelopment agency began to stir itself.
Mayor Christopher was thrust abruptly into the planning vac
uum soon after he took office. Since 1910, mayors who had tried to
redevelop the blighted produce area adjacent to the Montgomery
164) WESTWARD TILT
Street financial district had been threatened with recall and even
bodily harm. Every mayor backed down until Christopher. He gained
courage with the support of the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee, whose
businessman members volunteered five thousand dollars each for an
engineering survey which led to the planning of the Golden Gateway
Project. The latter became the nucleus for what Christopher has
referred to as a "five-hundred-million-dollar redevelopment project
all over the city," and what the Chamber of Commerce calls "The
Big Build." But all of this is still nebulous. The Golden Gateway
Project is far from completion.
Faced with massive, citywide obsolescence, San Francisco is
moving toward rebuilding itself, but its feet are made heavy for the
task by nostalgia and by the grim knowledge that it can never be the
same again. It may be that nothing ever again will be quite like San
Francisco.
The city was born in the ebullience of an incomparably exciting
era of American development. Much of the zest and fervor which have
impressed its admirers in years past were built into the city. As its
fagade begins to crumble and change, only calculated shrewdness
can keep San Francisco from taking on the neuter trademarks of
cities across the land.
In his recent book, The Face of San Francisco, Harold Gilliam,
a former San Francisco art commission member, observed: "In the
past, the city s uniqueness, its individuality, its incomparable variety
and diversity developed spontaneously, with very little planning of
any kind; in the future it is probable that these qualities can be
maintained only by planning on a scale far greater than any now
officially under consideration. . . . Sometimes, San Francisco s in
comparable natural advantages seem to be matched only by its deter
mination to destroy them."
Sober warnings like Gilliam s have not made much impression
on most San Franciscans. After all, they can pick up books and
magazines by the score which reassure them that theirs is the finest of
all possible cities. A Paul Revere in San Francisco today must cope
not only with the complacency of the San Franciscan but with the
flattery of the outsider.
Most of the dissension these days seems to be generated in the
warring between San Francisco newspapers, and especially in the
pages of the Chronicle -, but even here it is sugar-coated with a trace of
narcissistic bemusement. ("With something akin to admiration for the
magnitude of the blundering that has marked the cable-car program
of alterations and repairs," read a Chronicle editorial, "we have at
tempted to discover just how the trick was done.") The formula is
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West
working; the Chronicle has pulled ahead in its circulation war with
the rival Hearst Examiner. In the process, San Francisco newspaper
readers have embraced an extraordinary era of personal essayism
and almost conscienceless sensationalism (VANDERBILT DIED
DRUNK, screamed a page-one banner headline in the Chronicle.)
The newspaper war in San Francisco, like the breeze that whips
through the city, keeps San Franciscans edgy. The opinion of Dr.
Chilton Bush, a close student of the San Francisco newspaper war
when he was head of the journalism department at Stanford Univer
sity and dean of Western journalism professors, was that the pri
mary interest of both San Francisco morning dailies was not in the
news but in the extinction of the other.
Whether or not this is true, Editor Newhall of the Chronicle is
the pivot man in the city s newspaper war; he is captain of the winning
team. While many Western editors are thinking in terms of what they
did in Omaha or Pittsburgh, or remembering that a lost kid story
always is good for page one, Newhall is exploring restlessly what
makes his San Francisco audience different. He improvises constantly.
He decided, for instance, that there was a place in his newspaper for
a male scold like Count Marco, a one-time hairdresser who proceeded
to chide woman readers of the Chronicle for not taking baths with
their husbands.
The Chronicle fought the Embarcadero Freeway, which is like a
thimble on the shimmering fingertip of downtown San Francisco,
rising high to shut out sea and sky. Losing the fight, Newhall called
editorially for demolition of the freeway. It still is there, but Newhall
made his point.
The success of the Newhall pattern of journalism is eloquently
revealing about the contemporary San Franciscan, who is sophisti
cated, more confident of the past than the future, possessed of a wide-
spectrum sense of humor and a somewhat narrower-spectrum toler
ance, smug but facile in avoiding the embarrassment of being caught
at it, hyperactive, glib in the patois of the intellectual but less dedi
cated to his truths than to his technique.
It is a favorite pastime in San Francisco to speculate on the
nature of the new San Franciscan, He is often pictured as a crew-cut
young man on Montgomery Street an apprentice financier, perhaps,
or an advertising man. He is certainly a martini man, and a ladies
man. He has come from Chicago or New York or some other city of
more modest size and has read a few chapters of San Francisco history
or at least Sunday supplement features. He is pleasantly titillated
about the contemporary city, and he finds it in vogue to be alarmed by
the new freeways which obstruct some views of the bay and disgorge
166) WESTWARD TILT
great traffic jams into downtown. He is knowledgeable about restau
rants and a bit of a jazz buff. He is interested vaguely in urban re
newal because such projects sound upbeat. He has heard something
about the crime problems created by the heavy influx of Negroes and
their crowded housing. Probably he participated in a vehement city-
wide protest against junking the last of the cable cars. Before mar
riage, he shares an apartment in the city; after marriage, he buys a
home in a new subdivision on the peninsula to the south or, if better-
heeled, across the bay in Marin County.
Can the city expect leadership from this kind of picaresque bon
vi-vant? There is always the chance that he will mature, but the
newer generations, both native and in-migrant, are deficient in two
essentials: strength of character and indifference to public opinion.
Instead, they are eager to conform to an image of San Francisco
created by prior generations, and they lack the heart and the flair to
live up to the myth. One wonders if they can create a new myth of their
own.
It is a facet of the new San Franciscan that he has decided Los
Angeles is not, after all, the very worst place on earth. Artists find a
far readier market of collectors in Los Angeles than in San Francisco.
Three or four restaurants in the southern city are comparable to the
best of San Francisco. In the business world of the West, long
dominated by San Francisco, Los Angeles is pulling ahead by the brute
force of volume. The rapid population growth of the southern city is
scoffed at by San Francisco which lost population between 1950 and
1960. But some canny San Franciscans sense that, while growth itself
is no virtue, a kind of virility is emerging in Los Angeles which is
more aptly compared with their city of half a century ago than that of
today.
"San Francisco has the greatest harbor in the world," says
James D. Zellerbach, chairman of the board of the Crown Zellerbach
Corporation in San Francisco. "But we have sat on our harbor and let
Los Angeles and Long Beach and San Diego grow and develop what
were not harbors into harbors. We have let Los Angeles become I
won t say a metropolis, because it isn t the largest city in the West.
That may be good or bad; for me, if I lived in Los Angeles, it would
be bad."
James Zellerbach, a small, brisk man, was United States am
bassador to Italy from 1957 to 1961. His grandfather came to Cali
fornia seeking gold. Zellerbach was born in San Francisco in 1892,
graduated from the University of California, and rose to head the
second largest company in the pulp and paper industry. He is a tradi
tional San Franciscan who looks at his city in his senior years with
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West (167
conservative pride and considerable trepidation, but he has made the
most effective salute to the present on the whole San Francisco skyline:
the Crown Zellerbach Building, the first glass tower in San Francisco.
He regards its construction as a step toward his vision of San Fran
cisco as not larger, but more beautiful.
"San Francisco is now almost like New York in that it s hard to
find a native San Franciscan," he said. "I don t like it. That s probably
being conservative. Probably for the good of the whole community it
is better that the West does grow. The old blood is running out."
I said that in traveling about the West, I had found a regional
syndrome that approaches hysteria in some cities: an absorption in
growth, sometimes at almost any cost.
"You don t find that in San Francisco," he snapped. "That is why
San Francisco still has a spirit and feeling that is different from the
average American city. This isn t a chamber-of-commerce city. We
have lived here, and planted our branches in Los Angeles and in a lot
of other cities where we wouldn t want to live. We took advantage of
the growth of other areas, and also advantage of continuing to live
in this kind of community. People in San Francisco aren t keen about
growth of the city itself. They have mixed feelings about it."
Zellerbach has led the push for San Francisco redevelopment. He
has been president of the San Francisco Symphony Association and a
director of the Opera Association.
"I want San Francisco to continue to be the cultural and educa
tional center of the West. If we are alert to our responsibilities, it will
if we don t let it go by default. There always is a risk of losing
things that you don t put a high enough value on. This is what has
disturbed me. I got stirred up in connection with designing this build
ing and trying to find a site for it. I waited to see what was going to
happen on redevelopment, and found that nothing was going to hap
pen. Nobody was taking an active leadership in supporting the mayor
or trying to get anything done in San Francisco. All the special
pleaders were at work preventing things. That disturbed me that,
and seeing the apathy of people with their hands in their pockets when
their support was needed for cultural things. But it has taken a turn in
very recent years. People are getting stirred up in San Francisco
again."
Indeed, there are hopeful bellwethers. Self-appraisal, too long
absent from the temperament of the city, has set in, with several en
couraging results: San Franciscans finally have decided that their
slums must go, and the blast of dynamite echoes through the Fillmore
that preposterous reminder of what passed for opulence in 1875.
This is progress, but still needed are housing developments which are
168) WESTWARD TILT
priced at rents the dispossessed residents could pay. San Franciscans
also are wrestling with the tremendous problem of devising a rapid-
transit system; almost eight hundred million dollars was voted in
November, 1962, for a transit district which is scheduled to set fast
trains in operation by 1966. San Franciscans have been guided toward
more awareness of what is good and bad in architecture by contro
versy over a smattering of new downtown buildings and a spate of
freeways.
Herb Caen, the Chronicle columnist, has a stake in the San
Francisco legend, and he is more thoughtful about it than most of
his readers suspect. Not long ago, he interrupted his panegyrics to his
city to inquire: "Can delayed maturity follow the premature senility
that came on the heels of an extended adolescence?" Could this be
Caen s Baghdad-by-the-Bay of which he wrote so coolly? It could, in
deed. "This atmosphere of self-doubt rises from the hills," he con
tinued, "like a mist."
Caen senses a change of mood in San Francisco. "There is more
concern among older people over tradition, as though they were gird
ing for the battle," he said. "The newer people are out to move ahead
meaning up with tall buildings, and to hell with the view, like New
York. We re on the way to sacrificing a heritage of broad visions. The
old-timers are dying off, and the new ones don t have the same feeling
for the city. All of the city that escaped the fire and earthquake is
going to go. Glass and concrete things keep popping up. This will be
the city of the future, I guess. The natural attributes will live on the
hills and the water and the bridges but I don t know if we can sus
tain the myth of San Francisco much longer."
Such cries have been heard since Josiah Royce, in The Cali-
fornian^ at the turn of the century, deplored the exploitation by ugli
ness of what he called the most beautiful city site on earth. Sporadic
self-criticism like that of Royce s is a form of flagellation, indulged
in only by those obsessed with beauty, perhaps, but there is a challenge
today, both from without and within, to the San Francisco of tradition.
Many factors work in favor of San Francisco s attempts at
rejuvenation. It is a young city in a beautiful setting; unlike many,
it was born to wealth. If urban renewal can succeed anywhere, it
should succeed in an enviroment like this. San Francisco can meet the
challenge, as it has met earthquake and fire, if it cares enough.
Wallace Stegner says, "You cannot live here a week without
thinking, How much energy! How much talent! How much good
will, and good intentions and most of it undirected! "
With awareness of its need and direction of its energies, San
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West (169
Francisco must give up basking in its image and go in search of its
Medici. There is not much time.
"Throughout the country," said J. D. Zellerbach, "we are wash
ing our islands of individuality into sameness. I think we are losing
something. Here in San Francisco, I suspect we will resist that trend
for the next ten years. How much longer, I don t know."
If San Francisco cannot resist conformity, then the threat of
sameness is grave throughout the West. The trends that move
through the West often have originated in the urban core of San
Francisco. If the city cannot manage to maintain itself as a city
different, with all its brilliance and its wealth, one of the great hopes
of the West is dying. If the West is America tomorrow, the warning
shadow of a national resignation from individuality may be passing
over San Francisco.
Indeed, recent newcomers to the Bay Area have not provided
much flamboyancy. Before World War II, Henry Kaiser took on
some of the old, accepted families; he broke up a Western combine by
manufacturing his own product when he couldn t buy at a satisfac
tory price. He went on to build an empire, but he never has been
accepted in San Francisco by San Franciscans; he has never con
formed. But today it is difficult to point to men of Kaiser s individual
istic stature in San Francisco.
One sanctum of non-conformity in San Francisco is a twenty-
five-foot-wide building on Pacific Street the old Barbary Coast
which served for years as Fire Station No. i . When it went up for pub
lic auction in 1959, two advertising men in their forties bought it as the
unlikely site for their agency and remodeled it. The ground floor
serves now as an art gallery with a courtyard and fountain in the
rear. Above, there is a series of stairways and ever-narrowing offices.
Howard Gossage, one of the owners, has his office in a tiny room at the
foot of a steep stairway leading into the old hose tower, which itself is
almost totally occupied now by a large bed, where he occasionally
sleeps. Gossage s mind does not travel in the usual paths; he has been
involved in such abstract schemes as a move to repeal women s suf
frage (somehow vitally connected with the advertising of a Western
ale), and a five-year plan for a chain of service stations dispensing
pink air for automobile tires. He once urged Americans to be the
first in their block to win a kangaroo, as a gift from an Australian
airline. He was quoted in San Francisco newspapers as proposing to
solve traffic problems by building a forty-mile bridge lengthwise down
San Francisco Bay from the Golden Gate to San Jose; he still treasures
/70) WESTWARD TILT
a letter from a University of California professor, proclaiming interest,
offering encouragement, and requesting further information. Any af
fectionate writing in the public prints about Irish whisky within re
cent years probably was scrawled by Gossage at this desk below the
hose tower or on one of his jaunts to Ireland to absorb color, and
Irish whisky.
Gossage was the author of the advertisements for a California
champagne which read: "You know the feeling. The married break
fast is an uneasy time, no matter how much in love the participants
. . , Face up with champagne." This brought an explosion from
Evanston, Illinois, the site of the office of the president of the Woman s
Christian Temperance Union, who countered with the words of Isaiah:
"Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may
follow strong drink . . ."
Unabashed, Gossage moved on into the fine arts. Sales of the
Western ale he represents soared after the Gossage agency introduced
sweat shirts emblazoned with portraits of Bach, Beethoven, and
Brahms. As an afterthought, Gossage added Mozart, because his
first name was Wolfgang a splendid name, Gossage sensed, for the
sweat-shirt set.
Irreverent but idealistic, intuitive and a facile writer, Gossage
at work or at play is at home in the non-conformist environment of
San Francisco s bohemian North Beach. Graying and handsome, he
shares the presidency of the agency with Joseph Weiner, a bearded
family man who commutes from Marin County. It was Weiner who
won one of the firm s accounts after a Western brewery executive
had decided to question advertising agencies on their corporate goals.
A New Yorker answered frankly: "We want to become one of the
ten largest agencies in the country." Weiner answered just as frankly:
"Our ambition is to get out of the advertising business."
I attended a meeting with Weiner and Gossage and executives
of this same company. One of the brewery men was protesting a
forthcoming ad which puckishly warned women against drinking
the company s ale. The Gossage ad copy was based on the premise
that women have no business drinking ale or doing anything else
whatever that men do. The brewery man pleaded that the ad be some
what less explicit.
Gossage threw up his hands. "Gentlemen, if you re going into a
campaign as ridiculous as this one," he said, "go aU the way or throw
it over." The ad ran, and Western women dutifully took the bait.
Gossage describes the advertising industry as "a twelve-billion-
dollar sledge hammer driving an economy-size thumb tack. We don t
really disapprove of trivia, but we don t sell whisky like it s holy
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West
water, either. We sell it with the idea that you are going to get drunk
if you drink enough of it." All their work is on fee, not commission.
They have fought to keep their personnel down to nine people; it is a
small agency in every sense of the word, but Gossage and Weiner
and their heretical attitudes toward the business are notorious.
Gossage is in demand as a speaker, even before national ad
vertising agency groups which are not known for their ability to jest
at their profession. He has not been called on by the restaurant as
sociation for his irreverent comments on San Francisco food, however.
"The chief thing in favor of San Francisco restaurants is that they
are sort of homogenous. You lose the address and stumble into the
wrong restaurant, but you get the same meal."
Another of the West s noted non-conformists lives and works
not far from the Weiner and Gossage fire station. He is Melvin Belli,
one of the most controversial attorney of recent years. San Francisco s
North Beach is an appropriate setting for Belli a man of soaring
ebullience and satin-voiced restraint, worldly, dedicated to the dra
matic, with total disregard for precedent and tradition.
After he had focused international attention on his innovations in
trial procedures of personal injury cases forcing monetary awards
up to new highs in many states, and incurring the wrath of insurance
and medical men Belli chose a relic of San Francisco s past and
transformed it into an architectural showplace. The two-story Belli
Building on the edge of Telegraph Hill, converted from an ancient
overalls factory operated by Chinese, suggests like Bellia para
doxical blend of the Old Bailey and a Gold Rush bordello.
Belli s certificate of membership in the American Bar Associa
tion hangs in a basement bathroom, hard by a steam room with sym
bols of Bellian contempt worked into the design of the floor tile. He
thus displays his scorn for organized law, which has not always con
doned his courtroom spectaculars. On one occasion, he introduced
Mickey Cohen under an alias to his fellow lawyers, and they listened
intently to the gangster as he lectured on provisions of federal in
come-tax law.
Between the law books in the vast shelves of Belli s main office
which more resembles a prosperous madame s parlor are emptied
whisky bottles and apothecary jars filled with embalming fluid.
At the crest of Telegraph Hill is a three-storied Victorian man
sion which Belli owns and at the top of which he lives. The slanting
rays of sunset on his roof garden seem to bring the Bay Bridge
into fingertip reach. In patchy fog, the apartment becomes an island
above the city. At sunrise, the kaleidoscoping spectrum of San Fran-
WESTWARD TILT
cisco light is introduced by a golden bomb which shatters slumber.
In this setting. Belli rises at four A.M. to prepare cases, dictate his
books, and keep in contact with offices and associates in almost every
state and several countries. Trials and lecturing take Belli away from
San Francisco on increasingly lengthy stays. A great part of his prac
tice is now in Los Angeles; he has another home there and an adobe
law-office building in Beverly Hills which is as appropriate to the
environment of the South of California as his other is to the North.
But Belli is the kind of San Franciscan who will remain, even
if his practice forces a move to another city. I asked him if he could
explain what instills that spirit.
"San Francisco is a venal city," he said. "It has to be sophisti-
catedly so. If only one could psychoanalyze the San Franciscan to find
out what makes him want to get back to the nostalgia of the street
car, the earthquake, the lunch pail, the steamed beer, the ferries! Why
do we have flocked wallpaper? Gaslight clubs? San Francisco still
has the stamp of that era. They re trying now to scrub and perform
surgery on San Francisco. Sometimes you see the skyline changing
and think it s been scrubbed already and the surgeons are standing
around ready to put in their scalpels, to take the cable cars away, put
up something in that goddamned plastic, or strip off the virgin
breast ornaments from fine old buildings. With so many new peo
ple coming in, they re trying to standardize us. They want us to do
more business around the cocktail hour, for instance. They are trying
to departmentalize us.
"We ve had two mayors Robinson and Christopher who
have been real squares, with no appreciation for the background of
this city. To show you its vitality, we have resisted their regimes in
every way but our conforming skyline of glass and steel, which I
think is criminal. We maintain San Francisco individuality not by any
civic plans or programs or committees but through a sort of infor
mal striving of every individual. You can t get anywhere with a uni
fied civic drive; but things get done. Some of our civic efforts are
atrocious. The Coit Tower is hideous; it looks like a thing ready to
ejaculate. But look at the individual gardens, the individual old-time
buildings!
"You can t organize the San Franciscan. No matter how thickly
you disguise a group effort, he ll sniff it like bait in a bear trap and
circle it and walk away. If it takes a card or a key, to hell with it.
Key clubs don t last here, but at the cocktail hour San Francisco
has a one-place feeling. Take a circle of eight blocks from Grant and
Post Street, and you can drop into almost any place at five o clock and
think the city is just one big party: Paoli s, El Prado, St. Francis,
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West ( 775
the Palace. The maitres cFhotels treat you as though you re tired
out and they want to put you in front of the fire and make you com
fortable. They re not averse to taking a tip, but they don t stand in
front of the door like the horse guards at Buckingham Palace. It s a
big city with roots all around the world; yet the confines of the cock
tail circuit are small. The San Franciscan is more a member of a
group than any other society in the United States."
At lunch time, Belli strode into Doro s restaurant next to his
offices and introduced a luncheon guest as the Chief Justice of New
Hampshire. Belli s friends and associates seemed properly awed and
the guest fell to talking law with them. The guest was, in fact,
Fred Demara, the accomplished poseur, whom Belli was considering
using as a legal investigator. (He decided against it, but not without
regrets; he was sure it would have provoked fresh storms of pro
test from his colleagues.) Belli later introduced Demara to Mayor
Christopher as Derf Aramed, Commissioner of Corruption from
Abyssinia. Belli insists that the mayor shook hands and inquired,
"What county was that?"
It is no coincidence that men like Gossage and Belli have cho
sen the same neighborhood of the West as their base of work. On the
shoulders of such honest and inborn non-conformists lies the awkward
burden of keeping San Francisco different. They are the inheritors
of the tradition which built the city in the raucous Gold Rush era.
There are a few such men around, men of vast energy and keen mind
and good, though often bizarre taste, whose egos and whimsies are
strong, who play as hard as they work and have time for everything
except fretting over the censure of others. The more flamboyant of
these Westerners are to be found in San Francisco, and some of them,
like Gossage and Belli, in North Beach.
North Beach is a swirling eddy in the changing capital of the
West. To the tourist, It is a lively center of night life. It is the Man
hattan of the West for night club music and comedy, a f ountainhead
for Mort Sahls and Kingston Trios. To the old San Franciscan, It is
the home of Vanessi s and New Joe s and a dozen other unpreten
tious Italian restaurants which remind him of how it used to be,
when San Francisco was Intimate. To the Italian, who once dominated
North Beach, It Is less and less home and more and more an area in
which to profit from the visitor.
The most interesting aspect of North Beach Is its appeal to the
homeless youth, the runaway from his own world, the rebel who as
sumes that he must write or paint, but more likely finds his place as
an extra in the North Beach scene. It is a place with vague ante-
WESTWARD TILT
cedents in the Paris of the 1 920*8, in the Greenwich Village inhab
ited by the lean and wistful on the eve of World War II, and in the
beatnik movement which had its genesis near North Beach on upper
Grant Avenue, flourished grotesquely for a time, and died a listless
death without a funeral.
Once the waters of Yerba Buena Cove lapped at its feet, but
there is no beach at North Beach these days. It lies in the narrow
valley between Telegraph and Russian Hills, a bustling area of
apartment houses two and three stories high, their bay windows
projecting over sidewalks in their search for light and air. Columbus
Avenue slashes across its streets at a diagonal, dividing North
Beach into a geometric irregularity which shapes its blocks and
buildings and even the lives of its residents and its visitors.
The irregularity of life has helped to make North Beach the bo-
hemia of the West. It has been a lure for youth from all over the
West searching for tolerance, excitement and cosmopolitanism in
the age-old hope of finding themselves or at least having a hell of
a good time trying. They live with one foot in surrealism, in a never-
never land far from reality, and nothing much seems to be coming
from this group. It seems dated for young people to try to shock
each other, but if they must, North Beach is as good a place as any
for them to try.
The decline of the beatnik movement in North Beach began
with explosive newspaper stories about violent deaths of several beat
niks in 1958. Police moved in on the Co-Existence Bagel Shop and
the Coffee Gallery. The beatniks Bread-and-Wine Mission now is
an automated laundry, and the Cassandra, which featured Zen soup
at twenty cents, is a record store. The Co-Existence Bagel Shop has
most recently been a jewelry store. Gone are the beatnik aristocracy:
Reverend Bob, Dr. Fric-Frac, Linda Lovely, Barbara Nookie, Mad
Marie, Lady Joan, Big Rose, Groover Wailin , Taylor Maid and The
Wig. Most of them went to New York; some moved south to Big
Sur or Monterey, or farther down the coast to Santa Monica or Venice
(near Los Angeles) . Ralph Gleason, a jazz writer and observer of the
North Beach scene, explains it this way: "They attracted too much
publicity and too many amateurs, and the cops closed them down.
The weekend commuters to bohemia and the tourists increased in
strength until the police reacted." Toward the end, sophisticated col
lege youths from as far away as San Diego, five hundred miles to the
south, mocked the beatniks on weekends by invading North Beach
wearing leotards and stage beards, and faking it for gawking
tourists.
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West
Some of the basic factors which made the beatnik movement
are still present in North Beach. Four-fifths of the beatniks were
from outside San Francisco. Most were from middle-class back
grounds. Most were in their twenties. They had better than average
educational backgrounds; many had dropped out of college for emo
tional or financial reasons. They were their own worst enemies,
given to drunkenness, drug addiction and sexual deviations. They
worked little. They were lonely, depressed and anxious. Their sex
life was traumatic. They were idle, thriftless and often dirty.
Though the beatnik is a name of the past, the bohemian with re
lated traits is still in North Beach today. I met a talented archi
tect who had left his wife and job in Los Angeles to frequent the
North Beach haunts. He sought a job which would not require of
fice hours, and finally found drafting work he could do in his room.
On my next visit to San Francisco, I learned he had thrown that
over and gone westward to Hawaii on some illusory search.
A restless and beautiful young woman whom I met in North
Beach had left a housekeeper with her husband and children in a dis
tant Western city and come to North Beach to open her own night
club. She had more experience with women s social committees and
the Parent-Teacher Association than in night-club management. In
her mink and diamonds, she was as much a rebel as the runaway
architect, and she stubbornly made her place in North Beach. When
she felt the urge, she would return home to visit her family. She had
an air of forecoming doom, but for the moment she seemed almost
happy.
Across San Francisco Bay at Sausalito, but in a setting similar
to North Beach, lives Marsha Owen. Under the name of Sally Stan
ford, she earned her reputation as the last of San Francisco s fabled
madames. She still is successful but now as a restaurateur. At her
Valhalla, on the shore of the bay, she converses raucously with her
parrot Loretta amid gaudy Victorian trappings calculatedly sugges
tive of an earlier era. She recalls that era warmly. "San Francisco
isn t as much fun any more," she sighed. <c We don t have the big
spenders we used to. There are too many strangers." When I last
saw her, she was seeking election as a city councilwoman in Sausalito,
implying the endorsement of the California governor. "Pat Brown
paid me a high compliment," she said. "He said I ve accomplished by
myself what it usually costs the state a lot of money to do complete
rehabilitation." But she ran third.
Also in North Beach is the City Lights Book Store, operated by
resident author Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He is associated with the
l*]6) WESTWARD TILT
beatnik movement, but in City Lights he has provided himself with
some capitalistic insurance against artistic blight. The three floors of
City Lights offer the most obscure and peripheral of periodicals and
paperbacks. Among them are:
The Ladder, a pathetic little monthly pamphlet published for
lesbians by the Daughters of Bilitis, Inc., a San Francisco-based wom
en s organization which cites as its purpose the "integration of the
homosexual into society"; a male homosexual periodical called the
Mattachme Review, published in San Francisco by the Mattachine
Society, Inc., an organization chartered in Los Angeles in 1950 "in
the public interest for the purpose of providing true and accurate
information leading to solution of sex behavior problems, particu
larly those of the homosexual adult"; a slim volume, The Gospel
According to Thomas, described as a collection of the "sayings of
Jesus of particular interest to homosexuals."
Of slightly less specialized interest are some of the paperback
booklets published by Ferlinghetti under his City Lights Books im
print, most of them the work of the beatnik school: Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and their followers.
Ferlinghetti is listed as one of the editors of an occasional jour
nal which made its first appearance in the fall of 1961, Journal For
the Protection of All Beings; a Visionary ? Revolutionary Review.
The first number was listed on the masthead as the "Love-Shot Is
sue." This note followed: "Due to the transitory nature of life on
earth, this Journal is not sold on a subscription basis. . . Issue
No. 2 may appear in 1962." The editors statement is a credo equally
appropriate for North Beach itself: "We hope we have here an open
place where normally apolitical men may speak uncensored upon any
subject they feel most hotly and coolly about in a world which poli
tics has made. We are not interested in protecting beings from them
selves, we cannot help the deaths people give themselves, we are more
concerned with the lives they do not allow themselves to live and the
deaths other people would give us, both of the body and spirit."
Considerably more polished, and certainly in more conventional
balance, are two San Francisco quarterlies: San Francisco Review,
which is printed in England but edited and distributed from San
Francisco; and Contact, a sleek review with a modicum of advertising
and a smell of success. To Ferlinghetti, although he sells them, such
quarterlies are "an advertising man s idea of what a quarterly
should be."
Whatever other merit he may have, Ferlinghetti offers the
highly functional professional courtesy of a bulletin board and mail
San Francisco: Narcissus of the West ( 777
service at City Lights. Transient writers and artists and who in
North Beach cannot pretend? are invited to use City Lights as a
mailing address. In the pigeonholes can be found a distressing array
of manila envelopes which bear every earmark of rejected manu
scripts.
North Beach is not all phony. Sitting over coffee late at night be
side the sidewalk at Enrico s, one suspects that here remains an arena
for the curious and the open-minded, a liberal expression of civic
tolerance in a city with a liberal past. This spirit of freedom helped
make the city great as well as raucous. Yet North Beach seems basi
cally touristy today, not nearly so ingenuous in this period of relative
financial success as when club proprietors were struggling to pay
new talent five hundred dollars a week instead of five thousand.
Possibly no one can discuss North Beach adequately unless he
has been a part of its past. If so, Walter Straley, more recently of
Seattle, and president of Pacific Northwest Bell, is qualified. He is
saddened: "I m a little tired of the San Francisco cult. I m an old
San Franciscan, and I still go there once or twice a month as part of
my job. Of all the interesting things I ve observed in cities as I ve
moved around the country, the growth of the San Francisco phobia
has been one of the most interesting.
"I now get the full treatment there. The only place I can go
and feel as though I am back home again is Vanessi s in North
Beach. I sit up at the counter. Every place else, I have the feeling I m
being taken quite willfully and not too damn skillfully. When I get
taken in New York, it s worth the money. But they feel kind of sorry
for me in most places in San Francisco now because they re sure I m
just one of the tourists. They haven t developed the generations of
skill that the waiter cult and barber cult and all the rest of the pros in
New York have in giving you a show for your money."
Outside the tourist haunts, and beyond the confines of North
Beach, jole de -vrore still reigns sometimes in San Francisco. After a
superb sole marguery with friends upstairs at Jack s, it became my
responsibility to see a vacationing physician into a cab for his hotel.
We walked outside together, but his attention was diverted by a hook
and ladder truck and its sweaty, begrimed crew preparing to leave
the scene of a fire. He rushed over and with unerring aim settled his
hand on the fire captain s shoulder.
What s been going on here?" he asked, much in the tone he
might use to demand a scalpel.
The captain looked him over calmly, welcoming the chance to
catch his breath. "We had a little fire," he said finally.
WESTWARD TILT
"Set it again," my friend demanded. "I missed it."
I have seen men led away and booked for less. I tried to inter
cede. The captain waved me off.
"My boys are tired," he said. "If you could just as well wait until
tomorrow night, we ll promise you a good time."
The suggestion seemed acceptable to my friend, and we got the
hell out of there.
No dialogue quite like that ever reached my ears outside of San
Francisco. It was the kind of moment that the city understands. San
Francisco was born in a spirit of fun, and often a twinkle still can be
detected. In such a moment, Enrico Banducci, the noted entrepreneur
of the hungry i, was the victim of foul play. The assault was led by
Joe Rosenthal, the San Francisco newspaper photographer and Pul
itzer Prize winner, and three tourists happily collaborated. The four
of us felt a need to meditate with Mort Sahl, and there simply was
no room to squeeze more chairs into the club. Rosenthal withdrew
into a dark depression, and Banducci asked if he were ill.
"No," said Rosenthal, "it s nothing."
Banducci pressed a glass of cognac on him, but Rosenthal
pushed it away. With that, Banducci showed real alarm. Rosenthal
consented to explain. "It was simply a promise I made. These
three men," he said, waving his arm grandly toward us, cc these men
are the only survivors of the group I photographed, raising the flag
on Iwo Jima."
It was an inspired plan of attack. I was emaciated from a siege
of hepatitis, one of my companions was taped and hunched from back
surgery, and the third had worn a hearing aid since childhood. We
were not conscious of our pathetic appearance, but Rosenthal obvi
ously had been, and after one look for himself Banducci had no
doubts. A party was ejected from the club and a table was placed for
us at Sahl s feet. Sahl paid us a stirring patriotic tribute, and there
was no check.
In the face of such nostalgia, it would be patently unrealistic to
disclaim a personal affection for San Francisco.
North Beach is only a tiny backwash of the city. San Francisco
is afflicted with a dulling conformity and with the conservative
quiescence of middle-age. But the shadow of its dashing, spirited
past has not entirely faded. Even tainted as it is with narcissism, the
conformity of San Francisco is more interesting than are the wilder
sprees of most cities.
NORTHERN
CALIFORNIA
A Vast and Virile World
<fr&&&&$><$><$>^^
When Sebastian Vizcaino sailed into Monterey Bay in 1602, he em
bellished its scenic beauty so much in his log that the next white
man on the scene, Gaspar de Portola, marched by in 1769 without
recognizing it.
Portola returned the next year and built a fort. Father
Junipero Serra built another of his missions at Monterey, and com
pleted the chain of twenty-one with one in Sonoma Valley. Padres
still make good wine in this area. Everyone tries to cooperate; in
1961, the Internal Revenue Department made a compromise settle
ment on a multi-million dollar income tax case against a religious or
der involving profits from the Christian Brothers winery in nearby
Napa Valley.
The Franciscans left their missions soon after Mexico won its
7#O) WESTWARD TILT
independence from Spain in 1821 and California became a Mexican
outpost. There followed an era in which the rich got particularly
richer, and the poor -mostly Indians grew unbelievably poorer.
England and France had their eyes on California, but it was being
settled primarily by American pioneers. The American settlers were
welcomed by the gracious Calif ornios, and so were the New England
clipper ships which brought cloth and plows, pots and needles. Yan
kee trappers roamed the Sierra Nevada and found their way into the
Great Central Valley.
President Andrew Jackson offered to buy Northern California
from the Mexicans in 1835, but got nowhere. In 1842, Commodore
T.A.C. Jones received a message that war had broken out between
the United States and Mexico and that a British naval force was
standing offshore to seize California. Hastily he raised the American
flag above Monterey. Within hours he learned there was no war and
no British fleet; promptly he lowered the flag, apologizing profusely
to the polite Mexicans for the little misunderstanding. Everyone had
a drink.
It may not have been a misunderstanding, four years later,
when Captain J. C. Fremont, on a surveying expedition for the
United States, precipitated a skirmish with Mexican forces and
raised the flag over Sonoma. Within weeks, the Mexican War had
indeed begun; the American flag was raised over Monterey again,
and California was claimed for the United States. Finally, in 1848,
Mexico ceded California to the United States in the treaty of Guada-
lupe Hidalgo.
The bragging about California got under way in earnest. In 1846
a New York newspaper called the state "a perfect paradise, a per
petual spring"; it was the same year that members of the Donner
party, trying to cross the Sierra Nevada, escaped starvation only by
eating others who had frozen to death.
In January, 1 848, James Wilson Marshall, a wagon builder from
New Jersey, picked up a nugget half the size of a pea from the tail
race of a saw mill on the south fork of the American River. That nug
get set off a movement which has become the greatest migration of
people in the history of the world. There were fewer than ten thou
sand white persons in all of California before the Gold Rush at a
time when New York State numbered close to three million. It was
the first chapter of the westward tilt; by 1860, there were 379,994
persons in California. But the Gold Rush has never ended.
Much of California s wealth has been agricultural. The pattern
for its big farms was set by the Spanish-Mexican rancho. John Sutter,
a Swiss-born farmer, was the first American to settle the Great Cen-
Northern California: A Vast and Virile World (181
tral Valley, and he prospered with crops and cattle until gold was
discovered at his mill. "My best days," he later wrote, "were just be
fore the discovery of gold." As miners began to disappear, farmers
appeared. Cattlemen were almost destroyed by a drought in 1862,
and then land speculators moved in and hit pay dirt with California
land promotions that brought speculative money from the East.
Wheat boomed for an interval in the i88o s. In 1875, forty-five men
owned four million acres of California, and the Grange was organ
ized to protect the interests of the small family farmer. The saga of
the Great Central Valley really began toward the end of the nine
teenth century with the development of irrigation projects.
In 1861, the new California legislature formed a commission to
improve the new state s wine industry. Soon Colonel Agoston Ha-
raszthy sailed for Europe, and returned with more than one hundred
thousand cuttings of vines. They became the foundation of the Cali
fornia wine industry, which grew smartly until the almost fatal
hiatus of Prohibition.
Labor unions found strength in Northern California while
Southern California was still a stronghold of the union shop. But la
bor s strength was concentrated in San Francisco, and not in the
towns or on the farms. In 1933 and 1934, there was a wave of ag
ricultural strikes up and down the state, and vigilante methods were
used to put them down. The American Federation of Labor and the
Congress of Industrial Organizations united in 1938 to lead in the
defeat of a statewide anti-picketing proposition.
But life was improving too slowly for the refugees from the
Dust Bowl, who made up much of that first great wave of migrant
workers in the Great Central Valley. In the classic, Grapes of Wrath,
John Steinbeck wrote of their misery. To the grower in the Great
Central Valley, the plight of the migrants never was as bad as Stein
beck portrayed it; to labor-union organizers, it is still just as bad to
day as Steinbeck portrayed it. When it comes to the migrant worker,
for once California s troubles have not been because people were brag
ging about the state.
<&$><&&lt;&&lt;b$>$><$>^^
^hatever comes within its tight confines, San Francisco will re
main the economic hub of Northern California, a vast and virile world
of redwood and rain forest, volcano and glacier, fog-cloaked seacliff
182) WESTWARD TILT
and searing desert. Its irrigated farmlands stretch flat to the horizon;
its vineyards roll gently over purple hills; its teeming subdivisions
abut the wilderness. It is a wildly incongruous land, encompassing
the noblest of nature and the most pitiful of human squalor. Almost
anything that can be said of any part of the nation can be said of
some part of Northern California. It is a region which has known
everything but doubt.
Even Californians forget that one-third of their state lies north
of San Francisco. It is an area that understands solitude, one foreign
to any image of contemporary California that the stranger may hold,
primarily because it is sparsely settled. It is the country of huge brown
trout and mule deer, of sequoia and buckthorn, of dove and wild
turkey.
To be precise, San Francisco is not in Northern California but
in Central California. But Northern California, in its accepted sense,
includes the forty-eight counties that lie between the Tehachapi
Mountains in the south, and the Oregon border in the north. North
ern California has grown vigorously hi the postwar years of the west
ward tilt. The population of San Francisco declined by 32,502
between 1950 and 1960. In those years, the whole of Northern Cali
fornia, including the Bay Area, grew from 4,654,248 to 6,560,512,
an increase of forty-one percent. During several years of the
1950*5, the rate of population growth in Northern California ex
ceeded that of Southern California.
The power lines of one of the largest utilities in the world form
a seventy-five-thousand-mile web of wires serving seven million peo
ple in forty-eight Northern California counties. Pacific Gas & Elec
tric Company, the behemoth of Western private power, is a scarred
but unbowed warrior of the Western battle between public and pri
vate power. The regional divisions by which PG&E has shaped its
operations provide a convenient route to glimpse the Northern Cali
fornia country and its people. There are thirteen divisions, and each
can be seen by driving an elongated oval route beginning and ending
at San Francisco. Such a tour easily could be a two-week affair, and
its contrasts would be rapid. Across the Golden Gate Bridge from
San Francisco are bayside commuter towns like Sausalito, Belve
dere, and Tiburon. Northward lie the coastal redwoods of the Hum-
boldt. Moving on to the far north of California, dominated by
snow-capped Mount Shasta, the oval crosses the mountains east
ward to the high desert and volcanic country of Lassen, on the edge
of the Great Basin. Southward, the route swings into the heart of the
Sierra Nevada, awesome in the high mountain grandeur of the Don-
ner Pass, and nostalgic in the ghost towns of the Gold Rush era. Still
o
G
SCALE: 72 MILES TO THE INCH
Northern California
184) WESTWARD TILT
southward is Sacramento, near the heart of the gold country and the
center of the turbulent California political world. The Stockton divi
sion, still farther south, extends from the delta tidelands east of San
Francisco to the snowy summits of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. At
the south bend of the oval is San Joaquin, the agricultural heart
land of California. Westward, at the Pacific Coast, are Santa Maria
and the missile belt surrounding Vandenberg Air Force Base and the
Pacific Missile Range headquarters at Point Mugu. The hills are
smaller now, the oak trees sparser. Northward again are oil and cattle
fields, sugar-beet farms, the precipitous wildness of the Big Sur,
and then the Monterey peninsula. Finally there is San Jose, the fast
est growing city of Northern California, at the foot of the San Fran
cisco Bay peninsula. The oval is complete.
This is the shell of Northern California. What lies inside?
Where there is water and industry, rural areas and small towns
have burgeoned as rapidly as any of the great Western cities.
Where tourists come, mountain and coastal hideaways have become
thriving resorts. But within this oval are regions almost as unspoiled
as at the turn of the century; their residents scorn boom talk and
make it plain they want to be left alone. Sometimes they are; with in
creasing frequency, they are not. Their isolation is pierced by en
croaching subdivisions, new highways, and most frequently by sci
ence and industry, hand-in-hand on the prowl for settings which
capitalize on climate, scenic beauty, water and power and that com
modity which is becoming dearest even in gargantuan California:
space. Retracing the oval more slowly, it is possible to see a rural
kaleidoscope of the westward tilt, a sort of frenetic pastorale.
The mountains of Marin County thrust down into the Pacific
and into San Francisco Bay like jagged brown fingers. The skyline
of the city lies behind, to the south; ahead, along the Pacific shore
line for more than six hundred miles, is country. Portland is the next
city, almost a state-and-a-third distant.
In Marin the impact of the metropolis appears in commuter
towns of such varying elegance as Mill Valley, Kentfield, and Ross.
Cows and chickens are giving way to subdivisions. For the tourist,
such towns are a base for exploration of the southernmost grove of
two thousand-year-old coastal redwoods, Muir Woods. From San
Rafael, a bridge second in length only to the Oakland San Francisco
Bridge spans an arm of the San Francisco Bay for more than five
miles to industrial Richmond, making San Rafael a commuter town
both for San Francisco and for the East Bay. Twenty miles north is a
town with a name which is the standard reference for rurality among
Northern California: A Vast and Virile World (18$
North Beach comedians: Petaluma. It shamelessly calls itself "the
egg basket of the world," and its poultrymen are fighting economic
extinction with automation, so that seven million hens may keep on
laying fifty million eggs a year.
Inland from the coast lie the fabled valleys of Sonoma and Napa,
from which come some of the finest of all table wines. Autumn is the
time to be there, during the crush of grapes, when the vineyards are
bronzed and golden and the aroma of the grape lies heavy in the lazy
sunshine. The massive redwood and white-oak aging tanks; the cool,
deep caves where bottles of champagne are turned each day by hand
to push the sediment into the bottle neck; the ivy-grown stone build-
Ings In the European style; the bottling rooms and cellars all these
are little changed from fifty or seventy years ago, steeped In a New
World tradition. In a new land like California, tradition is a luxury;
It Is a land where oldness is simulated often because it is novel and
desired. But the wine valleys were born old. The California vintner
Is set apart from the big industrial farmer of the Central Valley by
his leisurely, loving dedication to his work.
The finest New York City restaurants stock only second-rate
California wines. The explanations of California vintners (not enough
of the best wines) and of New York restaurateurs (California
wines have no snob value) make equally little sense. The best varietal
wines from California are on a par with all but the most exceptional
European wines, but they are not abundant. The urban Westerner
has grown conscious of California wines; and unlike California fruits,
the best California wines are consumed near at hand and are readily
available in the West.
(In Rutherford, a tiny Napa Valley town, El Real restaurant has
a wine list of sixty-seven varieties, all from the nearby coastal valleys.
That is almost as many people as live in Rutherford.) Only a few
classic European wines exceed the Cabernet Sauvignon, a robust but
satiny claret produced primarily In the Napa, Sonoma and Santa
Clara valleys; or white wines like Johannisberg Riesling and PInot
Chardonnay, grown primarily In the LIvermore Valley of Northern
California.
The finest California wines come from these four valleys, all
within a hundred-mile radius of San Francisco. Napa and Sonoma
are separated only by a range of purplish, oak-studded hills. The
Santa Clara Valley is south of San Francisco. To the east Is Liver-
more, most famed for the white wines which evolve from its gravelly
soil.
LIvermore presents the most vivid contrasts. Until the nuclear
age, it was a placid rural center for ranches and vineyards. The
l86) WESTWARD TILT
wineries are there still, but Livermore has become a hub of scientific
sophistication. In Livermore now is the University of California s
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, its cyclotron, its Bevatron and its
corps of nuclear scientists. The Sandia Corporation, the work horse of
the Atomic Energy Commission, is here too.
The environment is more fitting at the Cresta Blanca winery
five miles south of Livermore. A young vintner led me on a tour of
this classic old winery. As we nibbled quail and sipped his premium
dry sherry, he told me that he had graduated from an Ivy League
university as a chemist, and had gone into the wine industry at a
lesser salary than he would have commanded in many others. It was
obvious that he loved his business. Not long before we talked, chem
ists had announced some success with an instant-mix coffee which
is almost indistinguishable from brewed coffee in both taste and
aroma. Fresh from an unsettling look at the nuclear laboratories of
Livermore, I asked my guide if it were not likely that some day the
same thing would be done with wine, and that the caves and kegs
and cellars of Cresta Blanca would give way to stainless steel and
tile laboratories.
He nodded thoughtfully. "I could do it myself," he said. "We
could perfect a process which would enable us to sell a powdered wine
concentrate and the alcohol separately. The customer could mix them
with water in whatever proportion seemed to fit the occasion. But
when that day comes, I m getting out of the wine business."
There has been change in California winemaking, of course,
since the California legislature formed a commission in 1861 to im
prove the new state s wine industry. Since vineyards were revived
after Prohibition, they have set consistently higher marks for quality
and quantity. Close to a hundred and thirty-five million gallons of
California wine were shipped in 1961. California grows ninety per
cent of all grapes and produces eighty-five percent of all wines and
one hundred percent of all raisins consumed in the United States.
The states vineyards and winery properties are valued at almost
three-quarters of a billion dollars. There are two hundred and forty-
nine bonded wineries and wine cellars. Annual returns to farmers
from vineyards are nearly one hundred and fifty million dollars and
the annual retail value of wine production is more than half a billion
dollars. Though such figures are dwarfed by the statistics of Cali
fornia citrus or cotton or sugar beet, they bear witness to the revival
of an amenity closely associated with Western life.
Some California winegrowers, like James D. Zellerbach, are
gentleman farmers intrigued with the insidious charm of the vineyard.
Frank Bartholomew, chairman of the board of United Press Interna-
Northern California: A Vast and Virile World (i8j
tional, for years owned Buena Vista, one of California s oldest
wineries, in the Sonoma Valley.
The wine industry is by now so accepted on the California scene
that citizens may write the University of California Department of
Viticulture on the Davis campus and receive state-researched instruc
tions on how to make wine in gallon jugs at home. It is done, espe
cially by European immigrants who need no instruction, but the pro
cedure is not recommended by Fred Lang, a veteran vintner of
German descent who showed me through the Charles Krug winery at
St. Helena, the largest of the Napa Valley wineries.
"We do not have the barefoot any more," he said, pointing to
the Garolla crusher which swallows the boxes of grapes as they come
from the trucks, spits out the stems, and passes the juice, pulp, seeds
and skins on to the fermenting tanks. In the weeks of the autumn
crush, the increasing scientific concentration on winemaMng is obvi
ous. Karl Wente, a crew-cut young man who is a third-generation
winegrower, said, "Europeans think of us as young people in a
hurry. But to get good wines, you must sit with them. From the first
crush, usually in September, until the first of November, I seldom get
home. I crawl in the car and sleep for an hour; then I get up and
change the cooling unit to another tank of wine."
The University of California recognizes the role of wine in the
state with a full professorship for Dr. Maynard A. Amerine, chair
man of its Department of Viticulture and Enology, and a member
of its faculty on the Davis campus since 1921. Amerine is no ordinary
cow-college man; he holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley, and one of his
years of studying European winemaking was on a Guggenheim fel
lowship in 1954. His published writings number more than one hun
dred and twenty-five books and articles. His department offers nine
scholarships each year to youths studying to be vintners, and the com
petition is keen.
North of the Napa Valley lies the apple country of Sebastopol
and Guerneville, and the Russian River, a noted fishing stream.
Nearby is Bohemian Grove, a 2,437-acre grove of redwoods owned
by the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, the site since 1878 of the
club s High Jinks, when only men gather for two-week summer en
campments. Bark-covered logs are the seats in a large outdoor
theater where many of the world s distinguished men have been both
cast and critic. Founded by a cadre of artists and writers, the Bo
hemian Club draws a select membership from all over California. It
was at Bohemian Grove that the Republican move to Bominate
Eisenhower for the Presidency took shape. Year after year, respect-
l88) WESTWARD TILT
ful attention has been given to Herbert Hoover s annual discussion of
world affairs. The summer encampment, attended by about fifteen
hundred men, is the most sought-after retreat in the West. It is a
despotic operation. A captain is appointed by the club board; he is
judge, jury and hangman. If any member or guest invites discipline,
the captain has full power to throw the offender out of Bohemian
Grove. It has happened, and it usually causes a flurry in the San
Francisco columns.
Northward, the redwood groves thicken, the sun breaks through
infrequently, the highways narrow and darken in the awesome still
ness of the towering forests; and the northwest corner of California is
at hand. The coastal cliffs face huge offshore rocks battered by waves,
and through them roar the Trinity, the Klamath, the Mad, and the
Eel Rivers, after their descent through deep wooded valleys from the
coastal mountains. This is a California rarity: rain country. As much
as one hundred and twenty inches may fall each winter in the iso
lated Mattole Valley on the coast. Rain forests of redwood and fir
stretch into infinity. In this untroubled land of the lumberman, the
dairyman and the fisherman, the air hangs heavy with wood smoke
from burning waste at log mills.
The tourist sees his redwoods, is impressed, but presses on. The
trees are aged, they are immense, they dwarf the soul and mind; the
tourist finds himself restless, somehow disturbed, and he drives south
ward to San Francisco night life, or northward toward Portland,
Seattle, and the Canadian border. Like rich food and rare wine, the
big tree country is not for everyone; one must be ready to make peace
with oneself before he can be at home with the redwoods.
Here in this corner of California is the Cape Mendocino Light
house, the westernmost point in the continental United States; the
town of Petrolia, the site of the first oil discovery in California;
Arcata, which calls itself the lumber center of the world; and the
twin lumbering towns of Rio Dell and Scotia, which claim the
world s largest redwood mill. It is a region isolated by distance, by
mountainous terrain, and often by heavy winter rains. Some of the
region is in economic limbo. Big lumber firms are buying out small
loggers for their timber holdings. They are seldom in such a hurry
to cut trees as the small logger.
Moving eastward across Northern California, the traveler can
not escape from Mount Shasta, which dominates the landscape for a
hundred miles. It is solitary, symmetric, ghostly white in winter and
summer, reigning over wooded, tumbled mountains and valleys. A
former volcano rising 14,162 feet, it ranks only fifth highest among
California peaks, but it is perhaps the loveliest. The Coastal and the
Northern California: A Vast and Virile World ( 189
Cascade mountain ranges meet in its shadow, sealing the north end
of the Great Central Valley of California. To the south is Shasta
Dam, second highest and second largest dam in the United States,
the chief unit of the federal Central Valley Irrigation Project, which
cost more than one hundred and seventy million dollars. The dam
is five hundred and sixty feet high and thirty-five hundred feet long;
behind it, Shasta Lake backs up fifty miles from end to end. The
towns of Shasta country are bleak: lumber towns with weather-beaten
houses and battered fences, grimy business districts, great lumber
mills with stacks of pine and fir boards. There are hamlets named
Hayfork, Peanut, and Big Bar.
In tiny Weaverville, where James Hilton visited before writing
Lost Horizon, there has been agitation by the local newspaper edi
tor that the town be renamed Shangri-La. The Western individualist
has his stronghold in country like this. Weaverville was enraged in
1961 when it was designated a depressed area clearly entitled to fed
eral aid. The Weaverville Journal greeted this news with an irate
editorial entitled, "Lie Down and Be Depressed, Damn You." Bank
deposits were at an all-time high in Weaverville, a new supermarket
was about to open, and the Journal insisted that Weaverville wanted
no help. The background of this anomaly was significant: Pacific
Gas & Electric had fought for, and lost, the construction of the nearby
Trinity River Dam. It became a federal project and Weaverville en
joyed a modest boom. In anticipation of the completion of dam con
struction, and subsequent recession in Weaverville, the depressed-
area classification was applied to the little town. Weaverville wanted
none of it. "Big Brother is watching us, all right," concluded the edi
torial, "but he s myopic."
The Trinity River people are not lacking in ingenuity: one
plant has been experimenting with using the oils of the graceful, red-
barked manzanita trees to make rocket fuel; another company uses
manzanita as a base for cattle and hog food. In these towns around
Shasta Lake, the family cars sit at the curb, and nearly every garage
holds a boat. PG&E workmen know this area well: they must dyna
mite in lava beds for pole holes, cross rivers in a bosVs chair to read
meters on snowy peaks, maintain flumes and canals. One PG&E em
ployee is a cowboy whose sole job is to patrol company-owned graz
ing land. Linemen are flown by helicopter in winter to clear ice from
the power lines of the Redding television transmitter atop a spur of
Mount Shasta. Yet in the thirty-five hundred square miles of its
Shasta division, the utility averages only one customer per square
mile.
In the northeast corner of California are harsh lava beds, for-
WESTWARD TILT
ested mountain wilderness with undisturbed game, and high desert
country. Lumber and hydroelectric power are the major resources,
although there are scattered ranches and orchards. Fishing, hunt
ing and skiing bring seasonal tourism. But people are the scarcest
commodity of all. Some of these counties have shown sharp popula
tion drops since World War II. Nothing much seems to be happen
ing. This country is a long way from anything, and the young people
head for the cities. Lassen County showed a twenty-six percent drop
in population between 1950 and 1960. Almost as large as Connecti
cut, it is inhabited by fewer than fifteen thousand people; at that, it
is a relatively populous county. Along the eastern border of Califor
nia, Plumas County has fewer than twelve thousand; Sierra County
has twenty-three hundred, and in the last census Alpine County had
three hundred and sixty residents.
With seven hundred and seventy-six square miles of area, most
of it up and down the crest of the Sierra Nevada, Alpine is a county
of lakes and mountains, no railroad, only ninety-three miles of sur
faced road, and no incorporated city. So subordinated to nature are
affairs of state in Alpine that county court sessions are scheduled to
coincide with the fishing season. Alpine is not alarmed. It would
welcome a modest share of the population explosion, but it does not
aim for the stars. Its board of supervisors advised its representative
on the California-Nevada Compact Commission to reserve enough wa
ter for an ultimate population of ten thousand in Alpine County. That,
the board agreed, would be quite enough. Members ridiculed a report
that the California Department of Water Resources had projected a
population figure upward of fifty thousand for Alpine. "If that ever
happens, I tell you, Til leave," said Frank Sasselli, the Alpine board
chairman, Alpine intends to go on doing what it has been doing:
preserving wide open spaces for fishing, hunting, and skiing. But
the county has not buried its head. A subdivision of twenty-five lots
was approved at the same session at which the water-planning matter
exploded; furthermore, the board moved toward a uniform county
building code.
Moving southward on the eastern side of Northern California,
there appear some of the highest, most scenic and forbidding moun
tains of the West. At Donner Summit, Highway 40 and the Southern
Pacific Railroad snake over the Sierra Nevada at 7,135 feet. In the
lower hills west of Donner is the Mother Lode country: it is here, in
the gravel bed of the American River at Sutter Mill, that gold was
discovered in 1848. To power company men, winters here mean
snowshoes and skis; maintenance men stake warning flags for skiiers
Northern California: A Vast and Virile World ( 191
over high-tension transmission lines buried in snow which may drift
to four hundred inches in depth.
The transition of the gold country is another dramatic example
of the changing West. For almost a century the region thrived on
gold, until inflation made the flagging ore more costly to mine than
it was worth. Like others, the North Star mine, once the deepest and
richest gold mine in the world, is idle today, its yards in Grass Val
ley filled with weeds and rusting machinery. (It yielded more than
eighty million dollars in gold, with one producing shaft ninety-eight
hundred feet below ground.)
The Mother Lode country is not scenically spectacular. There
are stands of old oats in the foothills; higher ranges lie dirty-green
with pine and manzanita. Orchards of plums and pears are watered
by ancient miners ditches. Beside every road lie the black scars left
by the miners, surrounded by weed-grown, barren acres of tailings.
The small towns of the Mother Lode are dependent today on the
tourist who makes nostalgic explorations of the ghost villages:
Poker Flat, Slumgullion, Bedbug, Chinese Camp, Rough and Ready,
Angels Camp, Rawhide, Port Wine, Grizzly Flats, Poverty Hill,
Shingle Springs, Dutch Flat, Fiddletown, Copperopolis. In most of
these are valid remnants of the Gold Rush plank sidewalks and
colonnaded balconies and less valid plaques and inscriptions boast
ing about Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Wells Fargo, and any number of
vast gold strikes. But little gold is being mined today, and most of
the miners have moved on to other work, like Aerojet-General s
rocket-fuel plant down the slopes of the Mother Lode at Sacramento.
Sacramento is the largest of the towns along the four-hundred-
and-fifty-mile length of the Great Central Valley, the oblong
trough of California which lies between the Sierra Nevada to the
east and the Coastal Range to the west. The new world of California
has hit this area broadside. Nowhere else in the West is the colli
sion of old and new more vivid.
As the gold nearby petered out, Sacramento began to perceive
its destiny as an administrative capital city and a traffic hub of rail,
highway and river for the agricultural riches of the Great Central
Valley. Promptly it felt the impact of the new Western industrial
revolution. Its elm-shaded streets became snarled with traffic; and the
impressive golden dome of its capitol rose above old iron-front and
brick buildings which were no longer the nostalgic mementos of the
Gold Rush but had become a festering scab of cheap hotels, saloons,
rooming houses, and warehouses. Emblazoned on the pediment of the
State Office Building was the poet s plea, "Bring me men to match
WESTWARD TILT
my mountains." Instead, there was Artie Samish, soon to be exposed
and imprisoned as a boastful and over-industrious lobbyist, entertain
ing and wheedling in the shadow of the capitol while downtown
businessmen pondered the population drift to the suburbs which was
leaving them stranded. While a nine-hundred-man staff muddled in
the state architect s office, grinding out banal, cheerless public
buildings up and down the booming state, Sacramento civic leaders
called in Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander to chart a course for
the redevelopment of their capital city. The voluble and courageous
Sacramento Bee awoke to the threat of freeways and slums, and threw
its considerable weight behind redevelopment.
Today the change is in full swing. Much of central Sacramento
has been pulverized to make way for a capitol mall which will be a
green-fringed approach to the capitol; for Capitol Towers, a garden-
apartment center for government workers; and for new business build
ings aimed at eventually replacing the blight of sixty-two blocks be
tween the Sacramento River and the capitol. Adjacent to Capitol
Park, an airy brick executive mansion, designed in an architectural
competition, will replace the eighty-five-year-old Victorian home of
past governors. Many citizens are fighting to preserve historic struc
tures of Old Sacramento near the river front such as the hardware
store on K Street over which Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker,
Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins met to plan the first transconti
nental railroad; and the B. F. Hastings Building, at which a horse
back rider arrived in 1860 to finish the first cross-country trip by
Pony Express.
Sacramento is placed second in the population-growth projec
tions for 1960-70 by Stanford Research Institute; with its strategic
location and natural resources, it has been discovered by industry.
It also faces heavy increases in state-government employment to cope
with the swelling population of the state. Sacramento receives its
share of the soaring California state budget (close to three billion dol
lars), which has become the largest state budget in the nation.
The Great Central Valley is larger than Denmark; the Ap
palachian mountain range of the East would fit into it easily. The up
per valley is called the Sacramento and the lower the San Joaquin
after the rivers which traverse each area; topographically, the valleys
merge indistinguishably into the Great Central Valley. It is the
home of about two million people, who are notably open, relaxed and
industrious. More than eight million acres are under cultivation. They
are irrigated by wells, and also through twenty thousand miles of
man-made canals that make up the Central Valley Water Project,
Northern California: A Vast and Virile World
which redistributes the waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquln
over a three-hundred-mile distance. The Great Central Valley is an
agricultural wonderland; with water and rich soil, the California sun
is free to work its miracles. This is the heartland of California s three-
billion-dollar agricultural industry, which provides one-third of the
nation s canned and frozen fruits and vegetables. Virtually every can
of fruit cocktail and every canned peach in America comes from
California. The major crops in the valley are cotton, grapes (table,
wine, and raisin), peaches, apricots, plums, olives and melons. The
towns of the valley break the monotony of high-speed, north-south
Highway 99, from Redding at the north, through Chico, Sacra
mento, Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Madera, Fresno, to Bakersield at
the south.
Somewhere between Fresno and Bakersfield, at the southerly
end of the valley, San Francisco newspapers give way on newsstands
to Los Angeles newspapers. Most of the valley is tied closer to the
northern city than the southern, largely because the south of the val
ley is closed off by California s only east-west mountain range, the
Tehachapis, which marks the northern boundary of Southern Cali
fornia. But valley residents seem content to see the vast valley in
terms of their own fifty-mile radius, within which most of their
needs are filled. The loyalty that counts in the Great Central Valley
is loyalty to the soil. It is found among owners as well as foremen,
although owners spend more time in urban offices, supervising vast
holdings and relaying orders. In Kem County, airplanes and heli
copters outnumber draft animals.
Today most crops are machine harvested, but until a few years
ago, mechanized harvesting in the Great Central Valley was limited
primarily to cotton and sugar beets. Recently machines have been
used to harvest almonds, filberts, and walnuts. Booms shake the
nuts from the trees and pickup devices gather them from the ground.
A tomato harvester now cuts off the entire vine, separates the to
matoes, sorts them and conveys them into bins. Experimental equip
ment is being tested for the automatic harvesting of peaches at the
speed of two minutes per tree, of prunes at one minute per tree, and
of lettuce at three hundred and twenty cartons per hour.
Such harvesting procedures are the current chapter in the saga
of labor in the Great Central Valley. In 1939, Carey McWilliams
wrote angrily of labor exploitation in his book, Factories in the Field.
This same valley is the locale of Steinbeck s Grapes of Wrath and
of human misery not yet absent. In the summer of 1961 the Ameri
can Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organiza
tions abandoned another drive to unionize farm labor; it had failed in
WESTWARD TILT
the Great Central Valley after a two-year organizational effort. At
about the same time, farm-labor camp inspectors of the California
Housing Division padlocked a Fresno County camp. Many other sub
standard labor camps were protected by retroactivity clauses in new
county and state housing and sanitation codes. One of these, still
operating in 1962, was the Three Rocks camp in the melon and cot
ton country forty miles west of Fresno. Three Rocks has fifty shacks
of frame and tarpaper, with electricity and bottled gas, but without
sewerage or running water. Water is carried by bucket from a service
station several hundred yards away. The rent for these shacks rose in
1961 from $3 to $15 a month, after Fresno health authorities urged
the camp operator to install water lines; with this additional income,
he hoped to install lines before the 1962 harvest. Most of the tenants
were Mexican-American. They seemed generally undisturbed at their
surroundings; their men had work in nearby fields, and they saw no
prospect of cheaper quarters. Eleven members of two families were
occupying a one-room shack at Three Rocks in the summer of 1961,
yet above many shacks in farm labor camps all over the valley, tele
vision antennas rise, and outside, late-model cars are parked.
Most of the camps have running water. Tightening provisions
of the law in the late 1950*3 led many farmers to clean up labor
camps on their property; some were closed. Many farmers have be
gun to understand that better housing attracts better migrant work
ers. Some workers, sensing prospects of steady employment, settle
down and buy their shacks and begin to impove them. One happy
example of improved conditions is the ten-thousand-acre farm of
Frank Coit, a Fresno cantaloupe-and-grain grower. His farm has a
hundred and fifty permanent employees and a million-dollar payroll.
In melon harvest season, eight hundred and fifty temporary em
ployees and their dependents congregate to occupy two dormitories
and seventy-five family cabins on his ranch. There are showers and
toilets; such facilities are not uncommon today in the Great Central
Valley.
The migrant worker is becoming less of a social problem; with
California industrialization, he is moving slowly toward becoming a
city dweller. In Fresno County, about sixty-five thousand farm work
ers are permanent residents. Another twenty thousand migrant
workers appear at the peak of the grape harvest in late August and
early September; about three thousand of them are braceros from
Mexico, most of them melon-pickers, present in the United States
under a bilateral agreement which has been furiously contested by
organized labor.
Despite their repeated failures during recent years, labor or-
Northern California: A Vast and Virile World
ganizers claim credit for forcing valley employers to install sanitary
facilities in the camps. Undoubtedly they have been a factor in rais
ing wages. To the north in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, seven
hundred growers in May, 1961, headed off a Teamsters 1 Union at
tempt to organize laborers in lettuce and celery fields by granting a
minimum $i hourly wage, a demand which they had fought hard in
Washington and Sacramento. But the migrant laborer can expect to
earn these wages for little more than half the year. His annual income
is likely to be around one thousand dollars, the lowest wage in the
American economy. Increasing focus on bringing the migrant worker
under social and labor legislation is having a profound effect on prac
tices throughout the Great Central Valley. There was strong opposi
tion to the extension by Congress in 1961 of the pact to import Mexi
can laborers, yet the bracero is favored by growers over many
American migrants; he is often a harder worker. His presence under
federal sanction has been a staggering blow at union drives to or
ganize American farm laborers. Union organizers attributed their
failure in the 196061 effort to a lack of education among farm
workers. Noting that migratory workers show little interest in unions,
employers are confident that they will avert unionization. Moreover,
their continued trend to automation in the fields works on their side.
The migrant moves on from the Great Central Valley in mid
winter to pick oranges in Arizona, and thence to Oregon and Wash
ington. Throughout the winter, migrant children pick up bits of
schooling here and there, but their challenge to educators is enormous.
At Westside Elementary School in Fresno County, Principal Nor
man Jaco has learned that Ms pupils, most of them migrant children,
cannot be taught until they are fed. If they are embarrassed by in
adequate clothing, they first must be clothed. The cafeteria luncheon
is the only adequate meal of the day for many of his pupils. But it
is not always enough; the children, loyal to sisters, brothers and par
ents, slip food in their pockets to take home. At Westside, a parents 1
club maintains a clothes warehouse and dispenses surplus oatmeal
or rice with honey and milk. Schooling is more basic than elsewhere.
Children learn to repair shoes and clothing, to make mouse-proof
chests from cardboard boxes and chairs from tree branches. They
develop an interest in cleanliness by washing school buses.
The historic labor scandals of the Great Central Valley, in
terms of numbers and overall importance, are past. The greed of the
grower has teen tempered by social and union pressures, by law, by
prosperity, and by the enlightenment of newer generations. Those
who seek causes can find them anywhere. But it is difficult to
any combination of circumstances in the Great Central Valley
7 $6) WESTWARD TILT
could become the setting again for the sorry tragedy of the Depres
sion era. Abuses exist in sufficient quantity to support the production
of an occasional film documentary or the lament of a magazine arti
cle. But I have traveled the valley in and out of harvest season, on the
byroads and back roads, and I have talked to scores of workers and
been inside their shacks. The fact is that it is hard to find villains
among the industrial agriculturists who dominate the valley today.
The novel of the great-grandchildren of Steinbeck s Joads should be
written. Not infrequently, they may be found today in their Thun-
derbirds and Triumphs on the campuses of Berkeley or even Stan
ford. But such a novel would be poor reading. It is not the same
stuff of drama as the offering of a milk-laden young breast to a starv
ing stranger in a barn.
It was not merely for a better job that a once-powerful regional
voice like that of Carey McWilliams, the most effective modem
spokesman of the California oppressed, moved on to an editorship in
New York City. His years in California as a gadfly to the oppressor
were not wasted. But in this golden land of plenty, the gadfly must
search ever deeper to find his vulture.
The long narrow oval which takes in Northern California turns
northward and back toward San Francisco through the coastal
counties of Central California. The missile boom has struck Santa
Maria: seventeen miles to its west begins the one-hundred-and-three-
thousand-acre Vandenberg Air Force Base, and Point Mugu, head
quarters of the Pacific Missile Range. The highest rate of population
growth in any part of California between 1960 and 1970 is predicted
for this area. Eight of the old Franciscan missions lie within these
coastal counties. There is also the lush Salinas Valley, center of let
tuce and artichoke production; Hearst s famed castle at San Simeon;
plants for sugar-beet and magnesium production; the artists colony
of Carmel; the savage grandeur of Big Sur, the cliffside artists
retreat where the Santa Lucia Mountains fall off precipitously to the
Pacific and bold redwood homes are poised like pygmies on the cliffs,
hundreds of feet above the surf; and the majestic Monterey penin
sula, one of the most compelling juxtapositions of sea and land in the
world. South of Monterey is mostly rural territory and parkland,
sparsely settled but traversed heavily by Los AngelesSan Francisco
traffic on the fast freeways of Highway 101 and the tortuous, pre
cipitous coastal road, Highway i, which follows the dizzying heights
of the coastline. North of Monterey are agricultural valleys, larger and
more frequent towns, and finally San Jose, the epicenter of Northern
California s population explosion.
Northern California: A Vast and Virile World ( zyj
The total population of San Jose in 1950 was only 95,280.
By 1960 it had moved past the two-hundred-thousand mark and was
soaring steadily. The population of Santa Clara County, of which
San Jose is the seat, has quadrupled in twenty years and is expected
to pass the two million mark before 1985, giving San Jose a popu
lation in excess of San Francisco. Already metropolitan San Jose con
tains more people than San Francisco.
PG&E has been adding customers at the equivalent rate of sixty-
five thousand people each year in Santa Clara County. The whole
county gives the impression of a giant construction camp. San Jose
payrolls have been swelled by electronic plants. Lockheed employs
fifteen to twenty thousand workers at Sunnyvale, producing the
Polaris missile. Nearby are Ford, IBM (which Khrushchev visited),
General Electric s atomic power equipment department, FMC Cor
poration (iz9th-ranked United States corporation in 1961), Ames
Laboratories, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
wind tunnel at Moffett Field. There is even a cement plant which uses
oyster shells dredged from the San Francisco Bay.
Why did all this happen to San Jose? The cry is heard plain
tively all through the Santa Clara Valley from those who remember
it as a quaint agricultural community, a distribution point for prune
and apricot, a dried-fruit packing center; or from those who knew
that San Jose had been California s first Spanish pueblo and first in
corporated town; or from those whose parents and grandparents re
member that the willow trees along the Alameda, a main thorough
fare, were planted for protection against wild cattle. It was not long
ago that its Municipal Rose Garden was the pride of San Jose, and a
visit to it in May was an event to be talked of for days. The roses
have escaped the bulldozers, but all the wild cattle in the West could
not so thoroughly have uprooted the life that was dear to a lost gen
eration of San Jose residents.
Building-permit statistics for 1959 help to place the San Jose
story in focus. Among United States cities issuing permits that year
in excess of fifty million dollars, Los Angeles, with two and a half
million persons, ranked first by far over Manhattan and Chicago.
San Jose, with two hundred thousand residents, ranked tenth far
ahead of Milwaukee, Atlanta, San Francisco, Washington, and De
troit.
More startling even are per capita building-permit values. San
Jose led the nation with a staggering $639. Next were San Diego
with $358, Manhattan with $266, and Los Angeles with $265.
Until 1955, when it became abundantly clear in San Jose
what was happening, the citizenry had gotten along quite well with
WESTWARD TILT
an antiquated city hall for which the cornerstone had been laid in
1878. With the authorization of a bond issue for a new city hall in
that year, San Joseans turned their backs on the prane-and-roses cul
ture of the past and underwent a profound change in attitude. They
began approving bond issues for municipal improvements, and
with minor exceptions, they haven t stopped yet. The city has voted
close to one hundred million dollars in street and highway improve
ments, a sewage-treatment plant, parks and playgrounds, fire stations,
libraries, public-works yards, central police facilities, health depart
ment facilities, a communications center and a municipal airport. The
county has joined the fun with a new jail, hospital, juvenile hall, and
a complete new complex of administrative office buildings.
San Jose has not exploded by chance. Every typical factor of the
westward tilt is in play here. This combination of elements has
brought what more conservative cities would regard as an overwhelm
ing avalanche that could only result in chaos. Astonishingly, San
Jose is not chaotic, though its last decade has been hectic. Its schools
are not on double sessions, and space has been made for its graduates
in nearby colleges and universities, including San Jose State Col
lege, Santa Clara University, and Stanford University. Some smog is
developing, but Santa Clara County is a strong participant in the Bay
Area Air Pollution Control District, which is making some progress;
in the absence of smog, the climate is superb. San Jose has been a
perpetual construction camp, yes, but not a barren one. Much of the
orchard acreage has been preserved by green-belt zoning. Charm
ing homes nestle in the foothills above the subdivisions of the valley
floor. There are rather more bowling alleys than some would prefer,
and certainly there is still a deficiency of good music and theater,
but San Francisco lies at the other end of the Bayshore Freeway and
the Monterey Jazz Festival and Carmel Bach Festival are over the
hills to the south. The ocean is less than an hour to the west.
San Jose has not had time to develop great restaurants, but
again, San Francisco is not far distant. Yosemite is due east, a four-
or five-hour drive. And at home in San Jose, so close to such ameni
ties, is a proliferation of sophisticated employment opportunity:
glamour jobs in new smokeless factories and in offices which look out
to the white clouds that dance over the green, oak-studded foothills.
San Jose is no masterwork of a city. Perhaps it will never have as
much either to lose or to gain as a city like San Francisco. But most
San Joseans would far rather live in their city than in San Francisco.
It is a compromise of many things: largeness and smallness, ur
banity and rurality, big business and casual business practices, con
servatism and informality, traditionalism and modernity. In these
Northern California: A Vast and Virile World
ways, San Jose may be the prototype of the new city, and its people
the prototypes of the new city dwellers. This is not a city that will
become great, but big business is being done here, its people seem
a little more serene and compatible than most, and they are here be
cause they wanted to come here. That is more than can be said of
most cities. But it will take a longer test to find whether San Jose
represents the good life, or merely a novena to mediocrity.
The potentiality of life in San Jose was not overlooked by the
thousands of men in uniform who discovered the town during
World War II. This was the first of the classic factors which has
made San Jose a microcosm in the westward tilt. The war caught
this prune town, with its proud heritage, fiat-footed. San Jose State
College, the oldest and largest school of its kind in the California sys
tem, had a handsome campus in the Spanish-California architectural
tradition. Natives pointed out the home of Edwin Markham, the
poet, as the birthplace of Man With the Hoe. But soon San Jose was
a crossroads for servicemen from Fort Ord, Monterey, and Moffett
Field. Its gracious people, never subjected to city pressures and un
trained in the defenses of the more urbane, were hospitable and open-
handed. San Jose developed a reputation as a good liberty town, and
thousands of men of all services vowed to settle here after the war.
As though divining the future need for jobs, the San Jose
Chamber of Commerce set up a realistic program in 1943 * attract
industry. It was a fateful decision, made several years before indus
trial wooing became as chronic to the West as a hotelman s smile.
This commitment, pursued diligently, was the second factor in re
shaping San Jose.
Sometimes in cities of the New West, the confrontation of es
tablished residents and their traditions with the incoming thousands
has been as turbulent as the meeting of the massive warm and cold
currents of the Pacific the Kuroshio and the Oyashio, described so
vividly in Eugene Burdick s The Blue of Capricorn. At that point in
the Pacific, Burdick wrote, the ocean "coldly smokes" with the con
densation of the conflict. San Jose was fortunate; the smoke cleared
rapidly from initial skirmishes between old and new. Most San
Joseans did not show deep prejudice against infiltration, and the new
breed turned out to be not bean pickers and welfare-hunters, but
electronics technicians and nuclear physicists, young Harvard Busi
ness School graduates and wives who rushed out to join the Parent-
Teacher Association or to organize a neighborhood chamber-music
quartet.
A San Jose executive who has lived there since 1939, and has
a considerable understanding of both old and new factions, described
200 ) WESTWARD TILT
the coming of the new: "We realized they were city folk. They set
right in to bring the amenities of city living to a suburb whose lawns
and shade trees had helped to attract them here initially. Some of
the old corporation hands from GE, IBM, and Lockheed came from
Schenectady, Poughkeepsie, or Los Angeles. Maybe the professional
scientists and engineers would stay out of community affairs, but then-
wives made up for their lack of participation. Corporation executives
are active now in proportion to the stress their firms place on com
munity relations. In general, newcomers of all social and economic
strata have turned out to be active in civic affairs. Very soon after
their arrival they acquire the feeling that this is their community. It
doesn t take long these days to become an old San Josean anywhere
from three to five years will do. You can find people who have been
here that long complaining more loudly than any others about San
Jose being overrun by strangers ! There really isn t any conflict be
tween old-timers and newcomers that justifies so strong a word. Of
course, higher tax rates rankle the retired old-timer particularly, and
no wonder. Everybody else is making enough not to mind the bite."
In San Jose there was no moneyed, entrenched old guard in
clined to oppose the inevitable urbanization of the valley. There was,
instead, a cadre which wisely sensed that growth was inevitable, and
that it should take a paternal hand in directing that growth intelli
gently. The guidance was not always motivated by sheer states
manship; usually the orchard owners who have been forced out by
subdivisions are leaving San Jose rich, or investing profits in ren
tal property, the San Jose equivalent of coupon clipping. Thus San
Jose was spared the trauma of one classic pattern in the westward
tilt: it was not becalmed by indecision resulting from a stalemate of
power between old and new. By 1955, enough of the new people
had arrived to overcome the remaining inertia and opposition to
change of the more rural-oriented population. They brought a new
enthusiasm to San Jose and they brought votes. When they were
numerous enough simply to outvote old San Jose, the city began to
change in earnest. In 1955, bond issues for civic improvements be
gan to pass.
San Jose is a classic example of the quick-change from Old West
to New. That is the third factor in its effective explosion, along with
its initial exposure in wartime to thousands of young men at the
start of adult life, and the realistic solicitation of jobs by community
leaders.
Industry would not have come to San Jose if adequate water,
power, and land had not been available. It would not have come ex
cept that San Jose offered extraordinary attractions to business and
Northern California: A Vast and Virile World (201
industrial people as a place to live: climate, schools, universities, rec
reational and cultural proximities, and the nebulous feeling of future.
All of these forces combined in San Jose, and that is why it has
been the fastest-growing city in California.
The job is far from done. San Jose has always drawn its maim
supply of water from wells, and now the water table, quite naturally,
is dropping. Water importation, an established fact of life in South
ern California and in San Francisco, is at hand; the mechanics of im
portation are a source of dissension. San Francisco, with surplus
water in its Hetch Hetchy reservoir system from the Sierra Nevada,
would like to sell water to San Jose and use the proceeds to refurbish
its own crumbling domestic distribution system. Transit is another
problem. San Jose is not allergic to freeways, like San Francisco; it
cannot get them built fast enough. Traffic problems are immense, and
rapid transit is needed. Proliferating local government units are be
coming an overlapping maze, and advocates of metropolitan govern
ment are gaining support. But everywhere at hand is the same con
fidence that prevails in all the areas most massively involved in the
westward tilt: San Jose has no doubt that she will get the job done,
that the super-city and the super-life are within her reach,
Some of the intellectuals are less sanguine. At Stanford Univer
sity, eighteen miles northwest, Dr. John Wendell Dodds sighed and
told me, "People want to come to a place that is different. When
they get there, they make it a place that is not different. The glow
on the horizon becomes factitious." Down the hall, in Stanford s
English department, Wallace Stegner said, "Periodically, I ask my
self, Where is the least attractive place in the world? -because I
want to go there after another five years or so of this. I want to go
where people have a little of the dignity of rareness. I live out in the
horse pastures. They ve been kind of slow to develop. But even they
will be gone in five years." At work on a book of monumental length,
living almost in seclusion at Stanford, Bruce Bliven said, "The prob
lems we have here are the problems that confront all America, exag
gerated in size because of our rapid growth. No matter what the
quality of these in-migrants may be, their sheer numbers make an
almost impossible problem. But probably we are moving toward a so
lution in that we are becoming conscious of the problem."
Back in San Francisco, at the start and the end of the northern
California oval, James B. Black, board chairman of the Pacific Gas
& Electric Company, stood looking from his fourteenth-floor window.
Traffic was pouring from freeways and bridges into the congested
streets of the city. A look of regret clouded his face, but it passed
quickly.
2O2 ) WESTWARD TILT
"We are destroying what we had," he said. "Or at least some of
what we had. But there is room for many, many more people out
here, who all will be able to live better than they have ever lived be
fore in their lives."
Buried deep in the prognostications of his research department
is a clue to what is happening in the rural areas of Northern Cali
fornia. They have been growing at a somewhat faster rate than the
cities of Northern California, and the predictions are that this trend
will increase, in defiance of the national trend.
In the sparse commuter valleys of North Bay, among the red
woods of Humboldt, beneath the glacial cone of Shasta, in the moun
tain fastness of the Sierra Nevada, along the flat monotonous rich
ness of the Great Central Valley, there is yet space. To expect that it
will remain is like betting into a straight flush.
Part III
THE
QUIETER
WEST
yy
OREGON
Green and Gangly
0<X*c>O<X><^><X^
Indians called the big bold river Ouragon. There was no one around
to argue about it until a United States sea captain named Robert
Gray appeared in 1792 aboard his ship Columbia. He eased cau
tiously through the pounding breakers, sailed upriver to anchor, and
named the river for his ship. At that time the Columbia River was
part of a territory just as foreign, and considerably more hazardous,
than Siberia today.
When Lewis and Clark explored the area in 1805, after their
overland journey from St. Louis, they found a stretch of the Co
lumbia that was flowing southeast, away from the Pacific. This gave
them pause, but soon they realized that such perfidy is typical of this
mightiest river of the West; it also flows northward in Canada on its
way to the United States.
Lewis and Clark followed the Columbia to its mouth. They
were on the Indians freeway; the Columbia was a trade artery for
fifty to sixty thousand Indians all over the Northwest. Their favorite
2O6) WESTWARD TILT
spa was Celilo Falls, where they made canoe portages and built sal
mon-fishing stands out on the rocks over the falls. The Indian mer
chants of this turnpike were the Wishram tribe, who lived at Celilo.
They peddled to the Chinooks, who lived westward at the mouth of
the Columbia, to the Yakimas of the north, and to the Umatillas and
other plains Indians in eastern Oregon.
Lewis and Clark spoke enthusiastically about the Columbia,
and John Jacob Astor was a man who knew a good thing when he
heard about It, From New York, he arranged for a cadre to set up
a fur-trading post named Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia. It
was the first commercial settlement by Americans on the Pacific
Coast, and it had its troubles. Soon a British sloop brought news of
the War of 1812. Astor s man at Astoria sold out to the British
in a hurry at a good price. In a few years the Hudson s Bay Company
held a grip of iron on the Oregon Territory. Its man in Oregon was
Dr. John McLoughlin, a wise agent who dominated Oregon for
twenty years by being reasonable with his enemies. Today he is called
the King of the Columbia, and the Father of Oregon.
Though the fur trade was at its peak at this period, in 1839,
there were only one hundred and fifty-one Americans in all the Ore
gon country which included the present states of Oregon, Washing
ton, and Idaho, and parts of Montana, Wyoming, and British Co
lumbia. There were only slightly more British citizens, and the two
countries skittishly held joint control of the territory. Tension grew.
James K. Polk was elected president of the United States on the crest
of the c Tifty-four~forty or fight!" hysteria. But for once, reason pre
vailed. The two nations compromised on the forty-ninth parallel, thus
fixing the northern boundary of the Western United States. The only
tip of Canadian land jutting south of that latitude is Vancouver Island.
Thafs been compromised, too; Victoria is its main city, and Ameri
can tourists take that over each summer, to the considerable satis
faction of the people of both countries.
Just as anyone else who comes unglued when the road is over
crowded, the Indians were angry at the white men who were trapping
their beavers and catching their salmon and running back and forth
along their freeway. One Indian massacre followed a deadly epidemic
of measles which had decimated their tribes. The Cayuse, who had
never had measles before, quite reasonably blamed it on the white
man. Eventually the Army Cavalry rode up, and in 1859 m ost
Northwest Indians signed a peace treaty.
A barmaid on Applegate Creek near the Rogue River country
wrote in 1854 to her niece back East: "Em, I should like to have you
here, but a young lady is so seldom seen here that you would be in
Oregon: Green and Gangly (207
danger of being taken by force." History does not note whether the
promise of violence brought the young lady out by return stage, but
we do have Daniel Webster s remarks, made in Congress about the
Columbia River Country: What do we want of this vast, worthless
area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of shifting sands and
whirlpools of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we
ever hope to put these great deserts or these great mountain ranges,
impenetrable and covered to their base with eternal snow? Mr. Presi
dent, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the
Pacific Coast one inch nearer Boston than it is now."
Despite Webster, Oregon territory gave way to Oregon State
in 1859. Portland, founded before its rival, Seattle, was a healthy
town, but it also was already apathetic. Wrote Harvey Scott: "A few
persons talked about (statehood) with languid interest, and wondered
when the government of the state would be set in motion."" There
was no boozing, no run on gunpowder, no dancing in the streets.
In 1877 a brave Nez Perce Indian, young Chief Joseph, made a
monumental retreat of a thousand miles before United States troops
rather than surrender the beautiful Wallowa Valley. He and his
people lost the valley, but when he died in 1904, he was buried be
side Wallowa Lake in the valley for which he had fought. There is a
white man s town there now named Joseph.
Oregon s east-west railroad, the Union Pacific, arrived in the
early i88o s. Homesteading reached a peak. The wheat fields of
eastern Oregon turned green and gold.
A reform leader, William S. UTRen, campaigned across Oregon
in the early days of the century for what came to be known as the Ore
gon System: the initiative, referendum, and recall.
In the midst of an unhappy revival of the Ku Klux Klan about
1930, Oregonians calmly elected a Jewish governor, Julius Meier.
Because the Bonneville Dam had been built on the Columbia
River in the middle Thirties, Oregon was ready for its boom in
World War II. To Portland shipyards and aluminum plants came
war workers from every state; Portland grew by ninety thousand
persons in three years. A war town named Vanport, at Portland s
northern edge, held forty thousand of them and ranked for a while as
Oregon s second largest city. The town disappeared on Memorial Day
in 1948 when the dikes of the flooded Columbia River gave way;
eight lives were lost.
But Portland did not disappear when the war boom burst. There
were plenty of Pordanders left to enjoy the Vicecapades of 1956-59,
which produced sound, fury and Pulitzer Prizes, but despite the
solicitous attentions of Bobby Kennedy led to tie conviction and
208) WESTWARD TILT
sentencing of only three of the one hundred and seventeen indicted
men: Big Jim Elkins, the star witness for the prosecution; one of his
henchmen; and the district attorney, who was found guilty of failing
to make an arrest 
