By Wilfrid Sheed. Penguin reprint,
1980. 300 pp. $3.95
One morning in 1962, commuters crossing San Francisco's Bay Bridge were greeted by a billboard emblazoned with the number 17,341,416, the projected population of New York State on January 1, 1963. Alongside this number was a running elec- tronic tally of the estimated increase in California's population, then growing at a rate of one person every 54 seconds.
By New Year's Day, 1963, California had surged ahead to become, by official estimate, the most populous state in the
The Wilson Quarterl>~/S~;i?1i7zer
57
Union....
history was not the Gold Rush or the coming of the railroad. It was World War 11. In 1940, the federal government spent a mere $728 million in California, much of it simply to relieve economic hardship caused by the lingering Great Depression. But after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, California became a vast staging area for the Pacific war zone, with San Diego and San Francisco as ports of embarkation. The climate proved ideal for testing airplanes and training troops. The...
If Adam and Eve and their descendents had continued to occupy the Garden of Eden, what kinds of houses would they have built? How would they have designed their dwellings to take advantage of a lush natural setting where the climate was ever temperate and healthful, and where all time was leisure time?
These questions are not entirely fanciful. As portrayed by sincere apostles and hired evangelists, California Living had be- come, by the end of the 19th century, synonymous with the American vision...
American standards, Cali- fornia's recorded history is relatively brief. It was not until 1769 that the first Spanish mission in California was founded-150 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, 250 years after Hernando Cortes invaded Mexico.
For a chronicle of California from the era of the Spanish friars and sol-dados to that of today's Governor Jerry Brown, there is Berkeley histo- rian Walton Bean's reflective Cali-fornia: An Interpretive History
(McGraw-Hill, 1968; 3rd ed., 1978). Bean...
a "Red Sea."
The Wilson Quarterly/Summer 1980 5 6
Writing in 1889, Britain's James Bryce found California to be "the most striking state in the Union . . . capable of standing alone in the world." Lord Bryce was neither the first nor last commentator to accept the state on its own mythic terms. In- deed, scholars have lately begun to study California as if it were a separate country, one on which the neighboring United States has come to rely for sophisticated technology, specialty...
Americans have great difficulty understanding the domi- nant world faith of our time: the belief in revolution.
The plain fact is that the militant revolutionaries we see in so many places are believers, no less committed and intense than the Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from the vio- lent overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently im- plausible idea gave political dynamism to Europe during the 19th century...
, as even readers of Popular Mechanics must know now, is in what Sean O'Casey would have called "a terrible state of chassis." Yet, there are certain ironies about the much-publicized crisis that give one pause.
True, the statistics seem alarming. The U.S. divorce rate, though it has reached something of a plateau in recent years, remains the highest in American history. The number of births out-of-wedlock among all races and ethnic groups continues to climb. The plight of many elderly...
The American Family, as even readers of Popular Mechanics must know by now, is in what Sean O'Casey would have called "a terrible state of chassis." Yet, there are certain ironies about the much-publicized crisis that give one pause.
True, the statistics seem alarming. The U.S. divorce rate, though it has reached something of a plateau in recent years, remains the highest in American history. The number of births out-of-wedlock among all races and ethnic groups continues to climb. The...
As with all of the social sciences, the study of marriage and the family began long before it was distilled into an academic specialty. Socrates mused about the family, and Plato, in what was perhaps man's first venture into "family policy," argued that the family would have to disappear as the price for estab- lishing his Republic. Plutarch, Chaucer, Milton, Marx, and Freud each spoke his piece on the subject.
It was not until the 1920s, however, that, thanks largely to the pioneering...