Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power by Bruce Cumings

Author:Bruce Cumings [Cumings, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2010-02-27T02:09:00+00:00

White Studies: The Folks

Anglo dominance masked one of the most diverse urban populations in America. Hugely varied and energetic peoples flooded into California after 1849, as we have seen; Irish, free blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Germans, French, Filipinos, Punjabi Sikhs, Italian vintners, Basque shepherds, Armenian fig growers, Lebanese merchants-and that hardly exhausts the list. Los Angeles was less diverse than San Francisco but quickly became a major Jewish city (70,000 in 1930, 130,00o by Pearl Harbor) and a favorite mecca for blacks (30,983 by 193o and 75,209 a decade later, the majority from Texas). A generation later novelist Walter Mosely wrote in Devil in a Blue Dress that L.A. was "like heaven for the southern Negro," even if you could work all day and "still find yourself on the bottom." Los Angeles never had the Chinese population of San Francisco (4,424 in 1890, only 2,591 in 1920, and 4,736 in 1940), and Japanese were the dominant Asian group until Pearl Harbor (25,597 in 1920, 44554 in 1940); Little Tokyo in Los Angeles was the center of Japanese life on the West Coast. In the 192os, 95 percent of housing in the city was proscribed for racial minorities, a situation courts did not strike down until 1948, in spite of many lawsuits (even then, restricted covenants operated informally into the 196os); in the 19306 many restaurants posted signs reading "No Mexicans or Negroes Allowed." Here, too, the differences between San Francisco and Los Angeles recapitulated themselves. GermanJews of middle and upper classes preferred San Francisco, whereas the dominant tone in Los Angeles was "secular, socialistic, and Yiddish-Hester Street in the sunshine." As for San Diego, there weren't too many Jews, but the city had one with a special distinction: Wyatt Earp retired there to raise thoroughbred horses after a gunfighting career almost terminated at the OK Corral-and Wyatt Earp was Jewish.14

Still, no other American city of comparable size was as lily-white as Los Angeles in the r92os. Thirty thousand Asians, a similar number of blacks, and 45,000 Hispanics, nearly all of them living in ethnic enclaves, added only a little color to a population of 1.3 million, the vast majority of whom were Anglo-Saxon Protestants (the city had about 300,000 Catholics). In other words the Anglo elite had a mass base: flatlanders who made good, who prospered by the Pacific but still wanted to honor their roots. So Buckeyes flocked together while Hawkeyes held not one but two "Iowa State Picnics," the most famous in Lincoln Park on the last Saturday of every February, plus another one in the summer. Folks from Cedar Rapids would gather in one part of the park, those from Des Moines or Ames in another. Los Angeles was just Iowa minus the snow, Kansas minus the cyclones-that's the way they saw it, and all too many observers agreed. Critics, though, spoke of a loss of community in the remove to California, yielding nostalgia for an irretrievable past, and an "acute loneliness that haunted the region .1155

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