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Introduction Introduction The only 1939 features not replicated as part of this reissued WPA guide to California 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.” John Steinbeck 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 San Diego 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 Texas 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 Los Angeles 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 San Francisco 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.
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