Introduction

The only 1939 features not replicated as part of this reissued WPA guide to are the original cover photograph and a full-size fold-out map tucked into a pocket in the back. The first edition’s jacket carried a black and white picture of two or three immense redwoods towering well out of frame, dwarfing the couple of figures—hikers? rangers? lumber- men?—standing around beneath them. It’s a good but not a great image, capturing only one of many themes that run through the book: Califor- nia’s ambivalent response, usually either rapturous or rapacious, to nature. This is the perennial design problem of all books about California. How do you map and crop the incommensurable variety of our fraught state into a rectangle of about five by eight inches? Plus leave room for a legible title? And, if it’s not too much trouble, spare a few picas for the author’s (or editor’s) name? If you make use of the Hollywood sign, you omit Northern California. Use the Golden Gate Bridge and you make the opposite mistake. Resort to a rocky coastal view and you bypass the cultural glories of urban California. Preferring not to play favorites, some designers just throw up their hands and collage several images together, in the process creating a semiotic trainwreck. To represent California adequately in one image would require a book cover the approximate size of a barn door. Behind that cover, any book purporting to describe all of California is in for a similar challenge. How do you squeeze 160,000 square miles into a volume that readers can actually lift? During a Depression, you hire a lot of people—or, in contemporary parlance, create a lot of jobs. Then you sort out the gifted writers and editors from the hacks, give them their heads, and see what you get. If you’re very lucky, you get something like California: A Guide to the Golden State, which, under a gently updated new title, now re-emerges like a rested, refreshed bear after 70 years of hibernation. The story begins on July 27, 1935, in the depths of the Depression, when President Roosevelt signed legislation authorizing the Federal Writers Project (FWP). The project recognized that scribblers, no less than stonemasons, muralists, and bridge builders, needed work. For any reader or writer, the crowning glory of the New Deal will always be this and the other American Guides, a series of travel books to 48 states, xxxiii xxxiv california

many cities, and any number of deserts, rivers, and other wonders, books that were expressly created to “hold up a mirror to America.” navi- gated by these guides to write Travels With Charley, where he called them “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and noth- ing since has even approached it.” The American Guide Series, in turn, was but one endeavor of the FWP, which also turned out a raft of invaluable studies, including oral histories of freed slaves. The FWP itself, meanwhile, was but a single arm of Federal One, which also included the music, art, and theater projects that gave Orson Welles, among other artists, their biggest sandbox to date. And Federal One— stay with me here—was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which belonged to a whole Scrabble rack of acronyms that came out of the New Deal. The New Deal was shorthand for all the programs devised to fight the Depression under the leadership of the most effective monogram of them all: FDR. No writer or editor, however talented, was as instrumental in creat- ing these guides as he was. FDR liked California although sometimes he feared it. On a 1915 visit to as assistant secretary of the Navy, according to historian David Reid, Roosevelt “was enchanted by the city and delighted by a royal reception arranged by the Chamber of Commerce.” Yet as president, in 1934 he recog- nized Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial End Poverty in California campaign as a political menace to his own less hysterical brand of wealth redistribution, and kept his distance. More often than not, FDR was only too happy to leave Cal- ifornia to the Californians. The leash was a long one, and the state’s twin FWP offices would use it to advantage. The California WPA guide ultimately weighed in at 713 pages—a mere five fewer than the guide that, suspi- ciously, came out a year later.

I. A GUIDE TO THE WPA GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA California is bigger than its WPA guidebook, but not by much. The avalanche of facts begins well before page one, back amid the Roman numerals. It’s still going strong more than 700 pages later, with appendices devoted to a blood- spattered timeline of California history and an irresistible bibliography sure to set bibliophile completists’ fingers itching. One sentence may not seem like much to describe the town of Buckhorn, near the Trinity River, but if we reflect that Buckhorn circa 1939 apparently had a population of three, the guide starts to feel a good deal more thorough. The information set forth in California: A Guide to the Golden State is anec- dotal, opinionated, uneven, and altogether habit-forming. The guide’s authors traffic unapologetically in old-fangled narrative history, since who in 1939 knew that robust, non-ideological, linear storytelling was anything to apolo- gize for? When mighty historical forces conflict here, the perspective dollies introduction xxxv

back to give us the march of years. When men and women have the infrequent chance to shape their own destinies, the narrative zooms in tightly enough to show us the kerchief around Joaquin Murrieta’s neck. A good example of this gift for close-up comes in a brief, deadpan tour through Salinas, circa the lettuce strike of 1936: “Highlight of this strike was the mobilization which followed a report to the Highway Patrol that a Com- munist advance on Salinas was under way. Red flags proving the statement were taken from the highway and rushed to Sacramento . . . [A]n indignant highway commission requested that the flags placed as markers on roadsides by its workmen be returned to serve their purpose of warning motorists.” (386) Piquant historical information abounds in all three of the California guide’s main sections. The first, unexcitingly titled “California: From Past to Present,” comprises a dozen or so thematic essays. These range from the purely histori- cal, such as “California’s Last Four Centuries,” to a series of articles on topics such as agriculture, journalism, and moviemaking. Some of the stories in them feel as fresh as that Salinas anecdote. Others have been told and retold since before statehood, both in books and around campfires—though rarely so well. The second section goes by the name of “Signposts to City Scenes,” and consists of chapters devoted to each of the state’s fourteen largest or most sig- nificant cities and towns. Several of these burgs would eventually get guides of their own. The WPA guide to San Diego even beat this one into print, and so gets only a hasty once-over here. Hollywood’s chapter isn’t actually about a city at all, as the guide readily admits, since had long since annexed it. But the editors designed this guide for readers, not sticklers. As they knew full well, their readership expected a thorough Hollywood chapter and didn’t care to flip through an index to find it. It may be unexpected to read a taxpayer-funded book that includes a street address for Greta Garbo— “A five-foot white brick wall insures [sic] privacy,” we’re told, a bit defen- sively—but it’s far from unpleasant. The third and final section is called “Up and Down the State,” but “Down and Across the State” comes nearer the mark. Almost all twenty or so of the road trips here proceed southward. This is surely a consequence of the proj- ect’s home base, but Southern Californians need not feel slighted. Seemingly every town in the entire state with at least one living resi- dent at press time made the cut, and several ghost towns are grandfathered in. The profusion of information available in the guide isn’t just verbal but visual. Unforgettably composed, regrettably uncredited photographic inter- ludes punctuate the text at regular intervals. One or two admirable woodcuts, possibly by Coit Tower muralist Harold Mallette Dean, mark the beginning and end of most chapters. To crib a line from the playwright Joe Orton, the WPA guide to California is “an experience for the retina and no mistake.” xxxvi california

II. CALIFORNIA: WHAT CAN YOU DO BUT LAUGH? One doesn’t often think of a travel guidebook as funny, or not intention- ally. Yet it’s impossible to spend much time with the WPA guide to California without noticing that—leaving aside our inevitable superior smirks at the book’s dated locutions—recurrent bouts of palpable readerly pleasure, even laughter, are hard to avoid. When we learn that the explorer Sebastián Viz- caíno christened Monterey in 1602 and “described it in such superlatives that those who came after him could not recognize it for 167 years,” the only accurate term for this rhetorical flourish is “joke,” and a pretty good one. Punch lines are not commonly thought to be part of the guidebook writer’s arsenal. But when they really work, as they do here, a reader can only bow down in gratitude. Whoever told Southern California editorial director Leon Dorais and his Northern counterpart, James Hopper, that wit was an allowable mode of imparting information is not recorded. Many other fine WPA guides, though by no means all, make do almost completely without it. If not an edict from , one can only assume that Hopper and Dorais authorized this dis- pensation themselves, made it known among their contributors and then, in time-honored editorial fashion, hoped like hell the brass wouldn’t mind—or, better yet, notice. As with almost all their writers, not much is known about either man. Dorais was said to be a novelist; about Hopper, we can’t confirm even that much. Either or both of them not only appreciated a sense of humor but had one. The sum total of bylined writing in the guide is their brief shared pref- ace, and it’s as high-spirited as what follows. There they allow that, “although the distance between the borders of and Mexico is more miles than [the editors] like to think about, they have covered every mile.” Wit like this tells us two things: that they wielded the true humorist’s trusty weapons of self- deprecation and complaint; and that they were hands-on editors who, whether from curiosity or mistrust, got out from behind their desks and saw the state firsthand. One should never, of course, make the auteurist’s mistake of conflating direction with authorship. All the editorial direction in the world wouldn’t have saved the guide from dullness—or incompletion—if Dorais and Hopper hadn’t lucked into at least a few crackerjack reporters and writers. A couple of these, one above the Tehachapis and one below, we don’t have to guess at. The San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth worked hard on multiple California guides, and the composer-writer-hobo Harry Partch did likewise from Los Angeles. Authors Tillie Olsen (Tell Me a Riddle) and Kenneth Patchen (Mem- oirs of a Shy Pornographer) pitched in too, uncredited. Who did what is a WPA maven’s neverending favorite parlor game, but real evidence is hard to come by. The only single-author WPA guides may be ’s, by Vardis Fisher (who also wrote the novel on which Jeremiah Johnson introduction xxxvii is based), and “Camping in the Western Mountains” by Rexroth, which nei- ther the project nor anyone else has ever published between covers in its entirety. Why did the project squelch Rexroth’s outdoorsman’s manual? Prob- ably for the same reason that its surviving manuscript bears his byline and no other: Team playing was never among Rexroth’s many gifts. Nature writing, however, was: “The bark is a deep purplish red; the foliage is delicate and feathery. A virgin redwood forest, with the light filtering through the treetops and the light falling in diagonal beams between the great columns, is one of the most beautiful sights in the world.” (25) Few can doubt that we owe the most resplendent scenic accounts in the California guide, at least in part, to Rexroth. For any better attribution, we may as well ask the redwoods—and perhaps expect a joke back for an answer.

III. THE FOLDING STATE Wake any number of Angelenos in the middle of the night and ask where they live, and very few would think to say, “California.” Ask their northern counter- parts the same question, and the answers will come back just as fast: “San Fran- cisco.” (Or, just possibly, “Not Los Angeles.”) Contemporary Californians mostly limit their environs to their region of residence, not their state. Put another way: 1. Fold along the Tehachapis. 2. Cut here. California’s internecine warfare may feel as old as the hills—which, for anybody keeping score, are geologically older in the north than in the south— but it is not. “No matter how fervent his local patriotism,” this guide informed readers in 1939, “the Californian will stop arguing the claims of rival regions when faced with the challenge of an out-of-State visitor. At once he becomes a citizen of ‘the greatest State of all,’ just as the caballeros of pre-American days haughtily set themselves up as Californios, a race apart” (6). Alas, the proud capitalization of the word “State” isn’t the only anachro- nism here. Today’s Californians are less likely to dispute external criticism than they are to parrot it, blaming the state’s faults on their immediate neigh- bors. Most pan-California alliances nowadays tend toward the governmental, and the majority of these are statutorily endowed (the California Highway Patrol, the University of California, etc.). Politically, about the only time north and south come together in Sacramento is to pit east against west, the more liberal, densely populated coast versus the comparatively conservative, lonesome interior. A few plucky statewide institutions survive beyond the gen- erosity of state subsidies—among them the California Studies Association, “The California Report,” calbuzz.com., Heyday Books, California Watch, and the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus—but even these con- tend with periodic disruptions by sectarian strife. This book’s author of record, “The Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of California,” is no exception to this friction along the Tehachapis. The California project appointed state directors xxxviii california

for both Northern and Southern California, but the north could claim sixteen credited staffers, while the south had but five. This could have been political payback under the Roosevelt administration for L.A.’s open-shop Republican- ism or, just as likely, a hangover from San Francisco’s more storied publishing tradition. Either way, in those distant days the northern and southern offices some- how managed to make common cause. They commiserated in a united front, against both meddlesome editorial nitpicking from higher-ups and occasional subliterate field reporting from a few lower-downs. An uppity whiff of Califor- nio independence pervades some of the State Project’s internal correspondence now archived at UCLA, a sense that Federal One just didn’t get why it should take 713 pages to tell the story of California in full—or why it should take a faintly puckish, anti-authoritarian sense of humor to get it right.

IV. THE SHAPE WE’RE IN Italy has its boot, its mitten, but California has always defied easy isomorphism. It looks a bit like a pair of brass knuckles stood on end, but only a bit. What it really looks like is a pair of overlapping Yale keys, jagged on the coast, smooth and straight along the and borders, and meeting right around Lake Tahoe. This even makes a certain amount of sense, since crossed keys have always symbolized St. Peter’s keys to heaven. That, and pubs. And there you have California. Half heaven, half public house, it’s an earthly paradise where people nevertheless overindulge and get violent. From the state’s inception, malice and majesty have intercoiled like California king snakes. This was true in 1939, when the guide first saw print, and it hasn’t changed much since. The California writers project enjoyed no immunity from these excesses, according to Jere Mangione’s invaluable history of the entire project, The Dream and the Deal. To the contrary, the San Francisco office sounds like a hotbed of political argument, supply-closet romance, and the avoidance of water as either cleaning agent or beverage. Politics made itself known in the guide in subtle ways, yielding an underly- ing historical narrative beyond the book’s unrivalled readability and style. The WPA guide to California is, for all its frequent prescience, a document of its time. In describing those Salinas nativists’ misinterpretation of roadside red flags, cited earlier, one of the office’s many progressives plainly couldn’t resist sticking it to the cops and growers. It’s 1939, remember, and apologists for unfettered capitalism aren’t exactly thick on the ground, especially among project workers. Regardless of whether you think capitalism deserved it, pas- sages like these failed to endear FWP chief Henry Alsberg to the congressional anti-communists, who would ultimately red-bait the New Deal into oblivion. The California guide is also the first of the state’s WPA guides written not just for tourists, but by them. The office’s later guidebooks for Los Angeles and San Francisco—and probably every other California WPA guide except introduction xxxix

Death Valley’s—feel as if they were written primarily by locals, or at least by long-resident transplants. Painstaking research improved their detail and accu- racy, but the critically tempered affection wafting off their pages could only have come from the immersive, sidelong absorption of a native. The tone of the California guide is different. Maybe its city sections were drafted by locals, but it seems unlikely that WPA staffers had an equally inti- mate knowledge of every wide spot in the road from Aberdeen to Yucca Grove. To read this book, though, you might actually think they did. The guide chronicles all these delightful jerkwater towns with loving if perforce sparing detail, and almost all emerge as unfailingly interesting, and well worth pulling over to explore. In fact, let’s.

V. A CALIFORNIA SCHEHERAZADE The two shunpike speed traps of Aberdeen and Yucca Grove are the municipal alpha and omega—okay, the alpha and psi —of this guidebook’s index. Apparently even California wasn’t big enough to have a Z in 1937. Today it’s got Zenia, in Trinity County—all the reason needed, for some of us, to commission a brand- new guide. At first glance, Aberdeen must have looked like any other one-horse town on highway 395 through Inyo County, with most of its 25 souls surely either reclusive or related. But take a closer look. Thanks to the guide entry, 1939 readers could know it as “the starting point of the Los Angeles Aqueduct”— whose length, years of construction, cost, pipe width, and half a dozen other statistics are then promptly enumerated. Far from being just another hamlet, full of rusting flyblown cafes, swaybacked barns, and mythically bountiful trout streams, Aberdeen was the staging ground for the water grab that created modern Los Angeles. Those eateries once fed the army of sandhogs who helped William Mulholland siphon off most of the Owens River Valley. With- out Aberdeen, I’m not here, and just maybe neither are you. Not bad for a place you never heard of—or for some citified guide writers who only discov- ered it yesterday. On to Yucca Grove. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Altitude 4,000 feet. A population that diminishes by half when the coffeeshop closes. It’s the only point of interest worth mentioning between Paso Alto and Soda Lake, neither of which sound exactly spellbinding either. But again, look more closely. Just what is a yucca, anyway? Only the botanical family that embraces, in the case of this particular grove, yucca brevifolia, otherwise known as the Joshua tree. Until awarded federal protection, this tree —named by Mormon pilgrims, once represented by Sonny Bono, immortalized by still another musical Bono— was once Hollywood’s principal source of breakaway bar fight furniture. Now the land once known as Yucca Grove goes by the name of Joshua Tree National Park, and surpasses the Salton Sea and the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm as Southern California’s preferred desert repository of cosmic significance. “In the xl california daytime the fantastic posturing of yucca limbs seems to mock the traveler,” marvels the guide. “At night the dusky shadows of the contorted arms, backed by the star-crowded Mojave skies and the looming black bulks of hills, lend an air of deeper mystery to the desert.”(603) As such passages make plain, the WPA guide to California stands as some of the best anonymous literature since that other deathless filibuster, One Thou- sand and One Nights. These Depression-era Scheherazades of the California project, storytelling as if their lives depended on it, threatened by a Congress just itching to kill their program—based in, but never captive of, San Fran- cisco and Los Angeles—gave every unsung corner of the state its moment. Would that the scribes’ names shared the immortality of their words. Good enough for government work, and then some.

David Kipen California, 2012 FPO FPO