Golden State, Golden Youth

The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966

Kirse Granat May

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807898963
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Seen as a land of sunshine and opportunity, the Golden State was a mecca for the post-World War II generation, and dreams of the California good life came to dominate the imagination of many Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Nowhere was this more evident than in the explosion of California youth images in popular culture. Disneyland, television shows such as The Mickey Mouse Club, Gidget and other beach movies, the music of the Beach Boys--all these broadcast nationwide a lifestyle of carefree, wholesome fun supposedly enjoyed by white, middle-class, suburban young people in California. Tracing the rise of the California teen as a national icon, Kirse May shows how idealized images of a suburban youth culture soothed the nation's postwar nerves while denying racial and urban realities. Unsettling challenges to this mass-mediated picture began to arise in the mid-1960s, however, with the Free Speech Movement's campus revolt in Berkeley and race riots in Watts. In his 1966 campaign for the governorship of California, Ronald Reagan transformed the backlash against the "dangerous" youths who fueled these actions into political triumph. As May notes, Reagan's victory presaged a rising conservatism across the nation.

Chapter One: Suburban Eden

The idea of California was born when Spanish explorers christened their discovery after a mythical island full of wonders referred to in chivalric literature. With that name, California held the promise of potential treasure and first entered the realm of fantasy.¹ The discovery of gold in 1848 and the consequent influx of settlers enhanced California’s identity, granting it a special place in American mythology and belief. The Gold Rush reinforced the vision of California as a place where dreams came true. From the beginning, the history of California was told from a white perspective, dismissive of the Native and Spanish past, using the gold discovery as the dawn of the California story. The boosters who followed, particularly those who settled in Los Angeles, continued to construct a mythology based on the dreams of white migrants.²

In 1850 California became a state, a region filled with promise for the future. When gold claims panned out, new dreams arose. To those who followed the rush to gold, California remained unique: a place to regain health, live on the frontier, build a railroad, exploit agricultural possibilities, discover oil, or make fortunes in real estate. For newcomers, it was still the land of the second chance, glowing with opportunity amidst sunshine. The dream was simple: “that because of a place called California, life might be better.”³ In the 1880s Southern California became the focus of a speculative real estate campaign, drawing tens of thousands to the paradise of a “family-size suburban lot amidst the orange groves.”⁴ This heralded opportunity for white settlers excluded those outside the booster portrait, creating the image of Los Angeles and California as “the sunny refuge of white Protestant America,” in stark contrast to the immigrant experience of the rest of the nation.⁵ Despite its exclusiveness, California’s possibilities fostered a reputation for racial progressivism, offering a clarion call to black migrants as well. After a trip to California in 1913, W. E. B. Du Bois praised Los Angeles in his paper The Crisis: “Out here in this matchless Southern California there would seem to be no limit to your opportunities, your possibilities.” Du Bois saw Los Angeles as “wonderful. Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed.”⁶

Despite gold rush lore and the claims of boosters, California did not always inspire the stuff of dreams. Counter to the golden promise ran a current of negative imagery, a recognition that all was not sunny or bright. From its earliest days, California was not a dreamland but a battleground, often marked by exploitation and tragedy, plagued by racial conflict and social strife. Many of those who looked at California were continually torn between Edenic portrayals and corrupt visions, as the California dream came into harsh contact with challenging reality.⁷ Often the reality of California, from the failures of gold seekers to the disappointments of would-be Hollywood starlets, was evoked by critics and naysayers to answer “each charming ingredient of the boosters’ arcadia” with a “sinister equivalent.”⁸

Yet, the early booster fantasies were overshadowed by the propagandists of the twentieth century, as California came to represent all that was promising about the nation’s future. At the core of the image-making machine was Hollywood, growing as a motion picture colony in the 1910s. This new industry intensified earlier ideas of fantastic opportunities, adding a new kind of riches in stardom. World War I brought growth to California, and the Great Depression attracted Dust Bowl refugees with the promise of jobs.⁹ In the darkest economic times, people continued to make the trek, strong proof of the belief in California as the special exception.¹⁰ The migration after World War II, however, dwarfed all previous periods and helped push California to center stage. For new Californians trying to create a fresh start in the golden land, there was not a difficult past, only a bright future. As Carey McWilliams put it in California: The Great Exception, the state was now a “giant adolescent,” filled with “new and shiny” suburban towns.¹¹

The explosion of interest during the postwar period created salient images, new myths of California life building on the old. National attention sponsored in-depth coverage of lifestyles and cultural changes. Magazines, television, music, and film acted as conveyors of these ideas and, while reflecting the realities of the postwar environment, mythologized life in California. The state’s growth, “the continuing inner migration to the legendary far-off land of El Dorado,” stood out in an era of broad and significant transformations in the United States.¹²

The demographic and economic changes spurred by World War II accelerated development in California, which was a major part of the “New” West’s emergence. In 1945, Life magazine predicted that the “California way of life . . . may in time radically influence the pattern of life in America as a whole,” as it offered “the most glowing example” of postwar “modern living.”¹³ The United States experienced a “westward tilt,” the result of “a nation so prosperous and so mobile that its people are free to go in search of a more luxurious way of life.” Wallace Stegner described the space from Seattle to San Diego as “the national culture at its most energetic end . . . not a region, but the mainstream, America only more so.”¹⁴ Irving Stone wrote in late 1954 that California was a land “where life achieves a vibrancy man never knew before.” The special nature of this golden land, while “not yet utopia” meant that humanity was on the cusp of “creating an anxiety free people.”¹⁵ “There is a general agreement that California . . . is a land apart” a 1955 article argued. As a “land of promise,” the state had a “uniqueness” that provided a “melting pot where old ways and traditions are most easily discarded and where innovation and experimentation have their freest rein.”¹⁶ In his best-selling book on class behavior, The Status Seekers, Vance Packard wrote that California enjoyed a “yeasty social climate” in a “violently expanding economy”; as a result of the “free-and-easy frontier spirit,” its residents were “the least status-conscious people . . . in the nation.”¹⁷

World War II drastically altered the entire West with its influx of defense spending and people, but Los Angeles experienced a singular transformation. The war brought 340,000 blacks to Los Angeles for industrial work and armed forces service, enormously increasing Southern California’s diversity.¹⁸ City officials responded with the formation of a Human Relations Commission in 1943, one of the first cities in the nation to sponsor such a program. The African American population continued to grow after the war, from 97,000 in 1945 to 460,000 in 1960.¹⁹ More blacks migrated to California than to any other state, mirroring the tremendous white flood during those same years.²⁰

Los Angeles quickly surpassed San Francisco, the boomtown of the first gold rush in the previous century, as the state’s new center. Glowing reports of opportunities replaced wartime stories of racial tensions, insufficient housing, and crowded streets. The Los Angeles Times reported in December 1945 that news of western job growth was spreading “like the story of the discovery of gold . . . luring hopeful men whose dreams are spun of golden opportunity.”²¹ Officials estimated in 1959 that 567 people arrived in Los Angeles County daily, and that a population of 6 million was within sight.²² Fifteen years after predicting the boom in Los Angeles, the Times reported in 1960 that the city appeared “more fresh and full of promise today than she ever did in her boisterous youth.”²³

By 1965, the population growth of Los Angeles had “eclipsed every other metropole in the nation,” with all of Southern California part of its nexus.²⁴ This journey ranked among the largest migrations in American history.²⁵ The lure of “sunshine and opportunities” continued to draw people westward, with the “station wagon” replacing the “covered wagon” of an earlier time.²⁶ National Van Lines, a moving company, tapped into this symbolism with its 1950s brochure. It showed a moving van heading across the desert. In the ghostlike shadows above, an ox-drawn covered wagon hovered, explicitly making the connection between the two great migrations.²⁷

Most Americans made the trek by car. The Californian and the automobile were inseparable, despite the pollution the mobility habit created. The car was bred naturally for California, with its favorable climate, attractive scenery, and abundant good roads.²⁸ Before the war, Los Angeles began constructing urban expressways more ambitiously than anywhere else in the country. This system was essential, as residents favored private transportation for 86 percent of their travels in the 1950s.²⁹ The 1954–55 highway budget was the largest of the fifty states, yet planners could only say, “at the moment we are no longer losing ground.”³⁰ Freeways supported the vision of Los Angeles as the “ultramodern metropolis,” creating a fragmented suburban sprawl that appeared to make the good life universally accessible. In reality, criss-crossing freeways destroyed ethnic neighborhoods and obscured from view troubled neighborhoods like Watts. From the freeway, Los Angeles and other California communities could mask their appearance, truly looking to the mobile observer “like White City West.”³¹

Los Angeles, due to its size and suburban sprawl, stood at the apex of car culture, offering vast freeways and the economic prosperity that guaranteed car ownership. Only six states had more cars than Los Angeles County.³² By 1960, approximately two-thirds of the land in metropolitan Southern California supported car-related needs: highways, roads, driveways, freeways, parking lots, service stations, and car lots.³³ The urban freeways of California were objects of wonder as well as concern. Life presented a foldout cover of traffic in Los Angeles, describing it as “seemingly boundless in size and energy.”³⁴ Others looked at the monstrous freeways of California and said, “I’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work.”³⁵

Commentators agreed that trends in California were a forecast for the future of the United States. World War II had “integrated” the state into the nation, but California was now “the America to come.”³⁶ Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown declared in 1963, “What we want the whole country to be, California already is.”³⁷ For Cosmopolitan’s cover story “The Rush for Gold and Happiness,” one author argued that in California “the enormous potential pleasures and problems of our machine-powered civilization have come into startling focus.”³⁸ In 1962, Look magazine chronicled the growth of the state in an issue that was headlined, “Tomorrow’s hopes and tomorrow’s headaches are here today in our soon-to-be largest state.”³⁹ To study California was to examine the “best place in the world for facing the problems of the future,” since it was a place where “the fu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Golden State, Golden Youth
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter one: Suburban Eden
• Chapter Two:California Disneying
• Chapter Three: Come Along and Sing Our Song
• Chapter Four: Gidget Without a Cause
• Chapter Five: Wish They All Could Be California
• Chapter Six: Beach Blanket California
• Chapter Seven: Berkeley and Watts
• Chapter Eight: Reagan’s Conservative Wave
• Chapter Nine: Endless Summer
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index