Last updated on April 19, 2019
Originally published in 1946, Carey McWilliams’s Southern California: An Island on the Land is a pillar (along with Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies and Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles) of the unofficial literary trilogy of Southern California. With apologies to Kevin Starr, any understanding of the history of Southern California begins with this book. With no apologies to modern purveyors of listicles, any incisive thought on—and any legitimate criticism of—Southern California society and culture must in some way pay homage to McWilliams’s foundational text.
Its relevance today, nearly 80 years after its initial release, is threefold. First, McWilliams destroys the pervasive, popular depiction of Southern California. The sundrenched Mediterranean-meets-tropical oasis we call home is largely a concoction of Anglo-American conceit, and many of the problems we face today are a result of our own (or our ancestors) doing. This perspective has never been more essential than in an era in which we express incredulity over ever-hotter and ever-larger wildfires which engulf hillside McMansions.
Second, McWilliams’s survey of early migration to Southern California is instructive to why modern Southern Californian transplants are here today. We could have moved here for the weather and the beaches, but those are hardly anchors for enduring happiness. By explaining our inevitable personal isolation, McWilliams provides us a basis for eventually making the region a more fulfilling place.
And lastly, McWilliams suggests that a socioeconomic landscape conducive to the political ascendency of a regressive populism lies ahead. Of course, his predicting a Donald Trump presidency was impossible, but McWilliams clearly connects the dots. Importantly, he does so as a skeptical yet embracing transplant, which, no matter when we or our families migrated here, we all are on this “island on the land.”
Carey McWilliams’s path to Southern California is illuminating, if not cliché. Emigrating to Los Angeles from Denver in 1922, he arrived at a time of immense change for Southern California. That is, he arrived in Los Angeles on the Southern Pacific right on schedule with the rest of the Midwest masses.
Sid Grauman and Marcus Loew were opening their palatial theaters, giving the fledgling motion picture industry its footing within the local and national psyche; downtown had yet to become the dumping ground for the city’s poor and vagrant classes; and a handful of hallmark institutions still moved the societal and cultural needles.
Few middle-class immigrants were granted memberships to the region’s most influential institutions, but McWilliams broke the mold of the Midwestern migrant. He worked for the Los Angeles Times for five years during the 1920s and graduated from USC’s law school in 1927. These institutional associations are key to understanding the conception of An Island on the Land.
McWilliams had access to the ruling class’ ear—and its underbelly—but he did not become wholly one with the rich. The prestigious law firm of Black, Hammack and Black at which he worked predictably represented the city’s conservative interests, but McWilliams took on cases concerning civil liberties and represented many of Los Angeles’s emergent unions. He was the Newspaper Guild’s first attorney, providing an empathetic nod to his former colleagues.
McWilliams’s work both as a lawyer and a writer for various publications through the 1930s was informed almost entirely by the aftermath of Black Tuesday, 1929. No doubt he sympathized with the penniless Midwestern transplant. John Fante, a fellow Colorado native and perhaps Los Angeles’s greatest underclass writer, was a great friend and favorite drinking buddy of his. But whereas Fante would not amass popular fame and fortune until the 1960s, McWilliams remained employed throughout the Great Depression due in part to his USC-stamped golden ticket.
The decade culminated for him with the publication of his book Factories in the Field, an expose into the conditions of the migratory farm labor force and a work that can be considered a nonfiction companion to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
The release of Factories in the Field in 1939 provided McWilliams with his first bit of notoriety. His long-running “Tides West” column in the monthly publication of the Automobile Club of Southern California (another once-dominant regional institution) was pulled at the behest of a board member’s wife who took great exception to his book. So explosive to the conservative elite was McWilliams’s takedown of the image of the genteel orange grove, his representing them at one of the standard-bearing organizations could no longer be tolerated.
In an introduction included in the 1973 reprint of An Island on the Land, McWilliams provides little autobiographical insight into the years between 1939 and the publication of his seminal text in 1946. But a characteristically unapologetic statement can explain away this interstitial period: “I did not just happen to write this book: I lived it.”
After establishing the boundaries of his Southern California—the area south of the Tehachapi range to the Mexican border, and anything “west of the mountains”—McWilliams picks up the history of the region in An Island on the Land at pre-Columbian times and simply does not relent. Like a locomotive gaining steam, he first picks out easy targets—the weather and climate, the geography—and then barrels down on nearly every aspect of life in Southern California up to the early-1940s.
In this regard, it is easy to cast An Island on the Land as a historical survey or a more personable encyclopedia. There is a narrative embedded in the text, though—however stilted it may be due to the anthological nature of the chapters—because he grounds his analysis in a single main character: the people of Southern California. Be it the indigenous tribes, the Spaniards, the conquering Anglos, or the various foreign immigrants, those who were subject to the events and forces he writes about are always the focus.
Never does McWilliams devolve into a rote history. Unlike the standardized textbooks fed to us as children, An Island on the Land never boils down events into a few key players, errs to the side of the victor, or allows the reputation of eras to define its subjects. If it is not the first people’s history of Southern California, An Island on the Land is undoubtedly the most important.
Most significantly, it eviscerates the romantic, popular image of Southern California. “The symbol of [the] synthetic past are three in number,” McWilliams writes, setting the scene for the next 350 pages, “the Franciscan padre praying at sundown in the Mission garden, lovely Ramona and brave Alessandro fleeting through the foothills of Mt. San Jacinto, and the Old Spanish Don sunning himself in the courtyard of his rancho.”
While the bucolic countryside is now paved over—or had never existed to begin with—we nonetheless recreate these images today. Instagram filters applied to sunset photos make the smog (and people) disappear. Trips are made to Anza Borrego or Joshua Tree, with our phones as companions, to reengage with “nature”. The demand for the romantic, single-family bungalow far outstrips the supply passed on to us by our early-20th century ancestors.
McWilliams quickly interrupts those daydreams. He reminds—or more likely informs—the reader that the indigenous tribes came first: the Azusa, the Cuyamaca, the Malibu, the Otay, and so on. Of all the past versions of Southern California, it should be theirs that is fetishized. The indigenous peoples’ relationship with the topography was symbiotic, and not at all like the totalitarianism imposed on the land by Anglos.
Alas, these people and their land are as extinct today as they were in 1946, and McWilliams refuses to let his narrative continue until that point is excruciatingly delivered.
“While not a living influence, the dead hand of the Indian is everywhere upon the land,” McWilliams serves up as an opening salvo. “Indian forced-labor is the key to the explanation of the rapid agricultural development … Indians furnished the labor power for the far-flung Mission enterprises. They cleared the ground, planted the first vineyards, constructed the irrigation ditches and canals, and built the Missions.”
He continues the thrashing: “With the best theological intentions of the world, the Franciscan padres eliminated Indians with the effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps.” If this seems particularly harsh, he is merely countervailing over 150 years of an Anglo production “with its improvised traditions and manufactured legends, [that] has been a huge success.”
Pivoting from the Spanish Mission-oriented domination from the south, McWilliams looks east from whence the Anglos came to conquer. Interbreeding upon the white man’s arrival in the 1840’s resulted in a new class structure: landless Mexicans—“cholos, greasers”—existed at the bottom; Californios, former land-owning Spaniards who married into Anglo families, followed; and then newly-arrived white men crowned the pyramid. Of course, the dwindling Indian was an afterthought.
Anglo-Americans ascended fully into power in part through fortunate genetics—the scrawny Spanish steer couldn’t withstand the drought between 1862 and 1864. Unfamiliar with the Americans’ imported system of land taxation, and staring modern bankruptcy in the face, the Spanish Dons were forced to sell off their legendary ranchos.
From here, the American Southern California is born. But again, McWilliams refuses to let us off the hook: “The brutal treatment of Indians in Southern California in large part explains the persistence of an ugly racial arrogance in the mores of the region of which, alas, more than a vestige remains.” Textbooks and our magnetic, glorious sun may allow us to partition off our pre-1870’s history, but McWilliams shows us that something ugly—and persistently influential—will always exist behind that historical ignorance, no matter how hard we turn our gaze toward the Pacific.
Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 book Ramona is ground zero for Southern California’s romantic, sun-drenched image that, in some form or another, still predominates today. It was what “rediscovered” the falsity of the idyllic Spanish Mission. Jackson was the inventor, “Southern California” the invention. By the time McWilliams gets to deconstructing it in An Island on the Land, we know Jackson’s Ramona stands no chance. Through his introductory history of the early Southern Californians, the reader intuitively identifies Jackson’s text as a sham, albeit a hugely influential, paradigm-shifting sham.
“The newcomer in Southern California is not really an exile for he and his kind have always constituted a dominant majority of the population. In such a unique situation, the newcomer is generally able to find, somewhere in the vast recesses of Los Angeles, others of his kind. Association with them enables him to keep alive his memory of home.”
McWilliams’s greatest contribution to understanding today’s Southern California is his persistent analysis of the region’s migratory patterns. Literally every chapter is presented through the eyes of some immigrant population. Especially applicable to the 21st century transplant class of which I am a part is his riff on the exile psychology of stateside immigrants.
A part of Southern California’s reputation is being a beautiful yet vapid landscape. It is a place where everybody wants to be your buddy, but no one wants to be your friend. The blame for this is often placed on the self-absorbed aestheticians the region seemingly attracts and produces. The superficial beauty pulls in a self-centered people, and the latter projects the former into the national psyche, drawing in ever more soon-to-be waiters: a vicious cycle.
McWilliams debunks this perception. It is not the type of people that are drawn here, but the isolating nature of migration that fosters an icy social environment. He observes, “Emigrants turn into detached individuals … Human adaptability, astounding as it is, has its limits; there is a kind of inertia in the mind. The difficulty of taking root again is not to be underestimated.” American immigrants to Southern California all share a common tongue yet they feel like “strangers in a foreign city whose language was mysteriously [their] own.” This accounts for the plethora of state societies formed in the early-20th century in Southern California.
C.H. Parsons, an Iowan with an “uncanny insight into the acute loneliness that haunted the region”, was the leader of both the Iowa Society and the Federation of State Societies. All 50 states and every province of Canada were represented in the latter organization. By the 1920s it boasted a membership of over 500,000 Southern Californians. Parson’s home state was so well-represented in Southern California that Long Beach was said to be Iowa’s sea port and Southern California “the Iowa Coast”.
The popularity of state societies had waned by the time of An Island on the Land’s publication, but their influence today is by no means irrelevant. At Pacific Beach in San Diego, the PB Ale House proudly displays the flags of the Iowa Hawkeyes, Oregon Ducks, and Buffalo Bills. At Society, Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys flags somehow fly together. Miller’s was once a New York sports bar. Fans of the Denver Broncos congregate at Backyard. Arizona Sun Devil fans and Seattle Seahawk fans coexist at the Local.
These fan clubs lack an official organization, but they are obvious descendants of the bygone state societies. No longer do Back East transplants need to congregate at Bixby Park in Long Beach to snap out of a “nostalgia for an America that no longer exists, for an America that former Kansans, Missourians, and Iowans literally gaze back upon …” Modern technology transmits geographic association directly to the lonesome transplant at the bar.
As incisive as McWilliams is into this exile psychology, he fails to provide a solution. He expertly diagnoses the ills of internal migration, but walks out of the office before writing the prescription. But he does hint at the remedy: “The first loyalty of many residents of Southern California has always been to their state of origin about which they know far more than they do about the region in which they live.”
Contemporary Southern Californian immigrants would undoubtedly feel more societally attached if they participate in their new land rather than merely use it. That is not to say we must stop Instagramming the sunset or pledge alliance to the Chargers (their recent move to Los Angeles notwithstanding). But it would ultimately be fulfilling if we learned that, say, the Gaslamp District in San Diego is an entirely invented neighborhood to appease land and business owners; or, how the Pacific Electric network of streetcars shaped the modern Los Angeles streetscape.
The land that the Indians respected, understood and thrived on is long gone. So too are the pastoral ranches on which the Southern California myth is based. That does not preclude us from learning about what’s under our feet today.
McWilliams leaves ideological treatise to future Southern Californian writers. He’s interested in the effect, not the cause; the injustices inflicted on the middle and lower classes, not the socioeconomic headwinds that brought them about. But An Island on the Land is not apolitical or merely historical context. In his penultimate chapter, McWilliams predicts the rise of modern neoliberalism (or at least its symptoms) that very directly influences economics as we know them today.
Entitled “The Island of Hollywood”, the chapter discusses how the movie industry walls itself off to its host city, both psychologically and physically. Hollywood is a physical neighborhood, a distinct geographic entity, but, as McWilliams notes, it lost its spatial relevance at a precise moment: in 1925, when sound was introduced to film.
The movie business moved indoors to sound studios and quickly became the monumental industry that usurped the Hollywood moniker. “The main studio lots are walled towns”, he notes, “occupying from thirty to forty acres of land, each lot has its own office buildings; its factories; its theaters and projection rooms; its laboratories, dressmaking shops, blacksmith shops, machine shops, wardrobes, restaurants, dressing rooms, lumber sheds; greenhouses; scene docks; electrical plant; garages; and planning mills.”
Each studio lot was a community unto itself, “a beehive … a fairy-land on a production line.” Inevitably, these “island[s] within an island” formed an ideology and a sociology entirely detached from its city of origin. “Living over wide areas of Los Angeles, ‘picture people,’ and the phrase indicates their group-identity, constitute their own community, separate and distinct from the neighborhoods in which they reside and quite apart from Los Angeles proper.”
McWilliams’s Hollywood critique to this point is no more than astute observation. Industries mature and company towns sprout up all the time. But the reader knows by now that a signature gut punch lurks around the corner. After his tidy history of Hollywood, McWilliams delivers his blow by first offering generalities: “On and off lots, picture people associate with picture people: the elite with the elite, the junior elite with the junior elite, the craftsmen with the craftsmen, and even the office employees with other office employees in the same industry.”
He follows up with a case study: “A friend of mine, a writer, boasts that he has not been east of Western Avenue for fifteen years except to catch a train.” McWilliams doesn’t comment further on his friend’s glib admission. He doesn’t have to. His implicit indictment of the insular psychology of the movie colony is clear. Under the guise of professional interest, the movie business segregated itself, which paradoxically led to Hollywood both magnifying and transcending the increasingly stratified, homogenous society from which it was divorced, but could not entirely escape.
Perhaps in the infancy of Hollywood it was not a privatization of public goods and services, or a revanchist ideology that led to such professional insularity, but the characteristics of the movie colony as McWilliams describes them in 1946 are sociological hallmarks of today’s neoliberal landscape. There is ignorance—or outright disdain—toward those not of the same ilk; a self-fulfilling prophecy of exclusivity; and, most malignantly, an unapologetic accrual of wealth at the expense of lower or simply other classes.
McWilliams makes obvious the colony’s enduring goal: “Having the industry sequestered from the rest of the community has made possible the worldwide exploitation of the name Hollywood, which, in turn, has drawn thousands of people and vast sums of money to the region.” The preceding chapters of An Island on the Land make it clear that most of the public interest and wealth generated by the movie industry will never find its way to the flatland proletariat.
In making this final point, McWilliams is a clairvoyant. On the eve of the United States’ post-war boom, he recognizes the divisive socioeconomic forces that laid ahead; he further hints at them in the book’s epilogue. No matter his insight, he could not have possibly envisioned the almost complete recession of the public sphere and the rise of a pseudo-populism that brought about the presidency of a psychologically flawed, comically incompetent businessman.
That businessman, a television star, epitomizes McWilliams’s Hollywood construct and represents its ultimate social triumph. Ninety years after sound was put to film, “Hollywood”—as always, buoyed by a reverential people, but by no means accountable to them—has finally ascended to the highest possible heights: into the most powerful office in the world.
Having died in 1980, Carey McWilliams was spared the personal experience of Reaganomics and now Trumpian politics. His skeptical and lucid outlook would be quite welcomed in our modern age, but what could McWilliams say today that’s not already in Southern California: An Island on the Land? It’s a generational baton that must continue to be passed along.
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