Carey Mcwilliams Quotes

To own an orange grove in Southern California is to live on the real gold coast of American agriculture.

A preoccupation with power - black power, student power, flower power, poor power, 'the power structure' - is the striking aspect of the American political scene at the moment. Oddly enough, obsession with power goes hand in hand with a fear of power. Some of the New Left groups that talk the toughest about power are extremely reluctant to see power operate in any institutional form; within their own organizations, they shun 'hierarchies' and formally structured relations of authority. What the preoccupation with power reflects, essentially, is a deep=seated, pervasive feeling of powerlessness.

I think of the view from a favorite arroyo in the late afternoon, the east slope still bathed in sunlight, the far slope already full of dark shade and lengthening shadows. A cool breeze, as one can look across the plains, out over miles of homes and trees, and hear the faraway hum of traffic on the high-ways and see the golden light filtering through the mist-laden air.

By the twentieth century, it was becoming a center for immigrant Italian anarchists, Wobblies and union organizers—“not only the most tightly organized city in America but … the stronghold of trade unionism in the United States,” asserted Carey McWilliams.14 Conscientious objectors flocked here after World War II, and the poets who would later be celebrated as beats and as the San Francisco Renaissance started coming in the 1940s and 1950s; African-American emigration to the wartime jobs of San Francisco produced another postwar cultural

All of these cities and towns are, in a sense, suburbs of Los Angeles. . . . dominated by Los Angeles.

At Redlands, in the heart of the citrus belt, night raiders broke into the Chinese camps. Chinese were robbed in the streets of Redlands, driven from their Chinatown, and unmercifully harassed. A mass meeting was called to protest further lawlessness. . . . On September 3 [1893] anti-Chinese raiders converged on the Chinatown in Redlands, broke into the houses, set fire to several buildings, and looted the tills of Chinese merchants. By the turn of the century, virtually all of the Chinese had been driven from the citrus belt.

Some seem to regard existence here as camping out, and never make a real home, living in their trunks for years. Even those that have homes are making changes all the time, trading one for another, or building afresh. yes, really, it's almost like living in a big tent, with houses instead of tents.

Los Angeles has always been a boom town, chronically unable to . . . integrate its new population.

By some chemistry of her own, California was triumphantly blending the races in to a single type.

Successful agricultural colonies existed in San Bernardino, colonized by the Mormons.

There is something disturbing about this corner of America, a sinister suggestion of transience. There is a quality, hostile to men in the very earth and air here.

On entering Southern California, the excursion trains made special stops to permit the tourists to visit Smiley Heights in Redlands, to lunch at the Mission Inn.

Still higher, and usually in the form of a dark-green horseshoe curve around the rim of the valley, is the orange belt.

Nearly every special emigrant train carried a clergyman who conducted Sunday services.

Wherever citrus production dominates, a rather distinctive social life has long existed. This citrus belt complex of peoples, institutions, and relationships has no parallel in rural life in America. It is neither town nor country, neither rural nor urban. It is a world of its own.

The typical orange-grove owner is a gentleman farmer who has purchased a suburban estate as a means of acquiring status.

The children of the grove owners, oppressed by the placidity of . . . Redlands, have begun to leave the area.

The citrus belt . . . has three dominant symbols: the church, the orange, and the 'no-trespass' signs.

In all the citrus-belt towns . . . orthodox Protestantism is deeply rooted among the older residents, a pious and conservative lot.

The idea, so current in our time, that Southern California is peopled by idlers, oldsters, playboys, and crackpots.

Who was it that said the life of an irrigated civilization was about 400 years?

Imagination," writes Frank Fenton, 'had run around this city like an artistic child. Somewhere it showed a pure and lovely talent. Somewhere it was crude and humorously grotesque.

Towns do not develop here,' wrote Sarah Comstock, 'they are instantly created, synthetic communities of a strangely artificial world.

The citrus-belt communities are also made up of outsiders, but, not having been periodically inundated by new migrants, they have managed to retain a degree of homogeneity and compactness.

It is worth noting that the writers who have most vividly captured the feel of the California landscape have been native sons, like John Steinbeck, or long residents like Robinson Jeffers.

A Terrestrial Paradise, an Amazon Island, abounding in gold and certainly 'infested with many griffins.