From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind

From its beginnings, California has embodied the new, maintains Schwartz in this ambitious, unorthodox history. By the time the U.S. annexed the state in 1848 after the war with Mexico, California already had a cosmopolitan identity utterly different from that of other West Coast states, he further argues. The era after the 1848-50 Gold Rush saw a waning of Hispanic traditions and Native cultures, and conflicts between farms and railroads, whites and nonwhite immigrants, as well as the rise of a bohemian subculture by the 1890s. Schwartz, a San Francisco Chronicle correspondent, aims to write a ""hidden"" or ""secret"" history of Californians' forging of a nonconformist cultural identity. He sometimes overstates his case, but his entertaining narrative offers new vistas on the Golden Gate State as a crucible of American experience. Along with thumbnails of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Ambrose Bierce, Lincoln Steffens and avant-garde composers Harry Partch and Henry Cowell, he peoples his saga with social activists, utopians, cranks, artists, anarchists, Wobblies and Hollywood communists. Although Schwartz extols a postwar California mindset shaped by Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan and the Beats, he opines that the post-1965 California scene has ""produced little of lasting value in the literary and artistic fields."" His iconoclastic chronicle deserves a place alongside Kevin Starr's standard histories. (Mar.)