California: The Great Exception

By Carey McWilliams

Book Overview

In 1949, lawyer, historian, and journalist Carey McWilliams stepped back to assess the state of California at the end of its first one hundred years-its history, population, politics, agriculture, and social concerns. As he examined the reasons for the prodigious growth and productivity that have characterized California since the Gold Rush, he praised the vitality of the new citizens who had come from all over the world to populate the state in a very short time. But he also made clear how brutally the new Californians dealt with "the Indian problem," the water problem, and the need for migrant labor to facilitate California's massive and highly profitable agricultural industry. As we look back now on 150 years of statehood, it is particularly useful to place the events of the past fifty years in the context of McWilliams's assessment in California: The Great Exception. Lewis Lapham has written a new foreword for this edition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520218930
• ISBN13: 9780520218932
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 391 Pages
• Weight: 1.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

an emergence from "the myth of Golconda"

That is how California's emergence is described by the exemplary Carey McWilliams, journalist, social critic, and keen observer of all things Californian. The book is dated: it was written in '49 and lightly updated in '74 and centers primarily on San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is a measure of McWilliams' penetrating and witty grasp of the state and its foibles, follies, and fandangos that most of what he wrote is still so relevant and even indispensable. McWilliams' central premise is that the discovery of gold catapulted California through what took other regions of the planet centuries to go through--hence our individualism, do-it-yourself lifestyles, and general motion and mayhem. We've been doing reenactments of the Gold Rush ever since. As he puts it: "Essentially California developed 'outside' the framework, the continuum, of the American frontier. The difference is that between a child raised in the home of his parents, with relatives and familiar surroundings, and the child taken from his home at an early age and brought up in a remote and different environment." Quite so. In a nation of wandering pioneers we are largely, even now, somehow a state of orphans.California as "the great exception," then, not in terms of snobbery or entitlement, but of being the place where so many Americans--and men from other countries--rushed in to pan for gold, and stayed, and established a tradition of messy but vital cultural infusions. Tip the continent sideways, someone once said, and what falls down lands in California, land of wonder and many griffins. You might also want to check out McWilliams' SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: AN ISLAND ON THE LAND.