Revisiting Eden: Los Angeles, a City of the Future, 1950–1990

Revisiting Eden: Los Angeles, A City of the Future, 1950–1990
by Martin Ridge

Consenting to present this paper was a mistake.  I see Los Angeles as a success; most historians chronicle its failures.  After I saw Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River burning and the Ohio River bubbling with detergents, a concrete riverbed looked pretty good.  Every major metropolitan region suffers congestion, crime, multicultural tension, smog, noise, trash, sewage, areas of poverty, and water shortages.  To keep matters in perspective critics of Los Angeles should remember that there are more people in Los Angeles than in the North and South Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah combined.  I agree with an editor of Look, who years ago wrote:  “California was a window on the future.”

Thus, my title:  “Revisiting Eden.”  This is not hubris.  Despite recent tabloid histories, Los Angeles is not one gladiatorial arena of contesting gangs.  I am one of 34 million Californians who does not live in a gated community, and I am neither protected by Westec’s armed response nor do I own a gun.  I do not live in fear of earthquakes, floods, fires, or tornadoes.  Nor do I fear killer bees, man-eating coyotes, or a giant squid that might rise up in Venice, demand a coffee latté, and squirt ink on the beach.  I refuse to criticize Los Angeles because the biker bars on the Pacific Coast Highway do not provide childcare.  I should add that I am neither anthropocentric nor eco-centric.

I also think that unless Angelenos are troglodytes, how can they fail to appreciate the construction of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the new Science Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty Center, the Autry, the Japanese-American Museum, and the rise and distinction of a score of colleges and universities during the past half century?  How can we think of the metropolitan area as a cultural wasteland?

I admit that I am not of the historical school that has recently arisen after some eastern pundits discovered that Los Angeles was influencing their lives and that they knew almost nothing about the city.  Most of what they did know derived from reading Wilton Barnhardt, Raymond Chandler, or Nathaniel West, attending film noir, secretly taping Baywatch, or watching national network news.  Marabile dictu, Los Angeles was no longer Hollywood: no longer a glamorous town of golden dreams but a riot ravaged, fire engulfed, flood damaged, earthquake prone, immigrant infested, environmental disaster area.  And for eastern pundits, those were Southern California’s good qualities!  Environmental activists hate Los Angeles.

Excellent local scholars have been studying Los Angeles and Southern California for decades; but they often received short shrift from colleagues who, by the by, were busy studying Blacks in Chicago rather than in Watts, the Jews in Brooklyn or Manhattan rather than in Boyle Heights or Fairfax, or yellow street cars in New England rather than red cars in Los Angeles.  Today, Los Angeles is a focal point for social scientists as they test their ideas about race relations, the melting pot, and pluralistic societies.

Experts insist that Los Angeles would not be a city, if it had not had leadership.  Shades of the ancient Greeks who challenged the Athenian statesman Themisticles: “Canst thou thread a needle?” “No,” he replied, “but I know how to raise up a great city.”  And Los Angeles is a great city.  Its leadership may have been self-serving and hobbled by corruption, but it could act.  In political science jargon Los Angeles is a city-state, influencing the lives of millions of people, and a pivotal factor in the world economy.

Aside from seeing Los Angeles as a success, there is another reason I should not have consented to write about the past fifty years.  I have lived through them.  Too often contemporary history is a list of events, whose lasting significance is dubious.  It is very difficult to make sound historical judgments about the present because we are part of it.  I am not against personal history, but lacking perspective it frequently offers a worm’s eye view at worst or an avowed memoir at best.  Both may be sources of myth as well as history.  Therefore, I offer a caveat; what I say is problematic:  part observation, part reconsideration, part memoir, but mostly prejudice.

Unlike nay-saying social critics and negative novelists I do not see Los Angeles as a city built on political, financial, and engineering conspiracies.  Planning is not conspiracy, even if it is self-serving — whether it is done in city hall, the Department of Water and Power, the California Club, the office of the Corps of Engineers, or in an ethnic studies center at a university.  Communities are physical realities.  Reality is not a linguistic or social construct; there is a there there, and there was a there there!

I have enjoyed the myths about Los Angeles created by the American authors of the dystopian novels, by the work of European émigrés haunted by memories of foreign cafes, street scenes, and soirees, and the lamentations of authors lured to Hollywood by movie-business money.  I am impressed by science fiction writers, who created a rewarding market in film and print for Los Angeles as the scene of disaster.  There is something about the city that makes the reading and movie-going public accept it as a surreal landscape.  Consequently, they can thrill in its fictional demise and redemption.  Chicago movie critic Roger Ebert notwithstanding, Blade Runner is about popular culture, not about Los Angeles.  And Chinatown is not the history of the Los Angeles aqueduct.

The Marxist authors, who found refuge in Los Angeles during the Second World War but found it too bourgeois after the War, returned to the joys of Communist Eastern Europe.  Los Angeles was not liberating enough for them.  But it was liberating for thousands of men and women, black, brown, and white, who fled discrimination, abandoned eastern slum tenements, depleted farms, decaying southern and middle-western towns, or deplorable conditions in rural Mexico to take up a new life.  To many of these people, Los Angeles meant a tract house in a suburb, a washing machine, a refrigerator, and a range.  Or housing surrendered by others, who had moved to suburbia or followed an ethnic trail to the west side.  High-brow critics and low-brow snobs denigrated this housing — how ticky tacky the tract houses )) and demeaned the people — how hum drum the lives, and how Ozzie and Harriet their values.  Remember “Arkie,” “Okie,” and “Tex”; they were all euphemisms for lazy, dirty, and stupid.  True, they brought their political ideologies and racial fears with them, but by the end of the century, no one scoffed at the thousands of educated children and grandchildren of those same wartime and post-war migrants.

There were problems aplenty for blacks seeking housing and equality after the war.  They suffered a deficit of more than 11,000 housing units in Los Angeles County.  Tension rocked Little Tokyo, renamed Bronzeville during the war, when the Japanese-Americans returned to reclaim their housing stock.  When the blacks tried to move into white neighborhoods, they faced, restrictive covenants, red lining, and worse.  But Central Avenue-Watts and Northwest Pasadena captivated southern urban African Americans.  They saw black people living on paved streets, in single-family houses with yards and fruit trees.  They read a vibrant black press. Today, the older black areas are slow to gentrify or attract social overhead capital.  They are zones of contest between Spanish-speaking immigrants and older inhabitants.  Housing stock for minorities remains an unsolved problem.

Post-World War II life for blacks, Asians, Mexican Americans, or other Spanish-speaking migrants was no picnic.  The wartime Zoot Suit Riot cast a long shadow.  And the Chavez ravine story is shameful.  But bad as conditions were for Spanish-speaking migrants in the fields, the needle trades, the low-level factory jobs–and they were then and still are exploitative — they were also places where a person could find work with few questions asked.  Their earnings often sustained a family or even a village in Mexico.  And there was East Los Angeles, where a whole life Latin culture flourished.  By the 1980s, the Chinese, too, began to settle in the San Gabriel Valley from Monterey Park and beyond.

Los Angeles not only liberated these newcomers but also raised their expectations.  They discovered American’s middle-class-consumer culture and embraced it with a vengeance, from clothing to credit cards.  Critics decry their behavior, but the Latinos especially have achievements and expectations that they would never have dreamed of in their homeland.  As the University of California, Los Angeles, sociologist, Roger Waldinger observed, comparing two second generations of societies:  “Unlike the children of Italian and Polish immigrants who began with little, ended up with more, but never expected a lot, today’s second generation Mexican Americans experience rampant consumerism and the relentless media exposure to standards of upper-middle-class life.”  The same can be said of all the current second-generation populations.

After the Second World War, there were repeated efforts to restrict immigration and deny immigrants social-welfare benefits.  Despite efforts to close the border and the wetback scare, as late as 1979 there were fewer than 3,000 Border Patrol agents to police 6000 miles of Canadian and Mexican border.  Few worked nights.  The barrio really extended from Jalisco to Modesto and beyond.  After the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Asian community extended from beyond San Dimas to New Delhi, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Seoul.

Los Angeles’s longtime white residents sound like Claude Rains in the movie Casablanca — they are “shocked, shocked,” that there are social tensions as these people struggle among themselves for space, a share of the economic pie, and cultural cohesion.  Southern California has long endured ethnic and racial tensions.  The hostile racist and ethnic mindset of the city’s law enforcement did not help matters.  True, Los Angeles has had two major race riots and many minor ones in the past fifty years, but when scholars consider the fluctuating economic conditions, the surge in diverse populations, and the rising expectations of these consumer-oriented minorities.  The remarkable thing is that it has had only two major upheavals.  Miami had four major riots in the 1980s alone, when it tried to absorb Cuba’s Mariel boat people.

Of course, not everyone found Southern California attractive.  Some writers, artists, and performers, both black and white, have fled to New York, where, living twenty stories up in Manhattan or in the Hamptons, they can ignore the abominable conditions in the Bronx, but deplore the wasteland of Los Angeles!  To them, Los Angeles is devoid of an aesthetic culture; it is too new, too laid back, too sybaritic, and oddly enough too detached from the harsh realities of life.  On the one hand they say Los Angeles is too busy inventing itself because it really has no cultured past — it is all phony like Disneyland — on the other hand, what a tragedy that most of its lovely Victorian houses are torn down, its old book stores closed, its literary hangouts gone, and its old neighborhoods abandoned.  “Ah,” some observe, after seeing a gloomy old movie, “for the good old days of Bunker Hill, which was such a good site for a film.”

They insist, moreover, that what is new is tawdry, bourgeois, consumerist, materialistic, and even, heaven forefend, a place where crackpot religious sects, religious ritual and behavior make a mockery of the First Amendment.  And even the cemeteries are tasteless.  The American way of death was born in Los Angeles and flourishes in Forest Lawn.  Critics are appalled to admit that it is emulated throughout the nation.  Meanwhile, Roger Cardinal Mahoney, over the protests of Catholic social workers, builds a mammoth new cathedral for his flock in what cynical critics think is the most secular city in America.

During the past half-century, there were many dark hours.  The House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings.  One hundred plus film writers, actors, and directors were black listed.  Some were jailed; others left the country; others worked under pseudonyms.  A new generation may forgive their colleagues, who testified against their left-leaning friends, but the stain remains; it will not be erased from Hollywood’s history.

The Hollywood community was not alone. The John Birch Society tarred members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and American Civil Liberties union in the 1960s as virtually un-American.  Recently the records of the State Assembly’s un-American investigating committee were made public.  They are an embarrassment to those who gave secret testimony, not to their victims.  The State Senate Committee’s files are still closed.

The 1950s and 1960s were troubled times.  Public colleges and universities required faculty members to sign loyalty oaths or disclaimers or face dismissal.  Several of the University of California’s distinguished faculty simply quit in disgust.  One, British-born R.B. Mowat, who had just become an American citizen, was so incensed that he accepted a position at the University of Chicago.  But young faculty members, who were just beginning their careers and had families, could only swallow hard and sign the oath.  A courageous historian, John Walton Caughey, hardly a subversive, confronted dismissal by refusing to sign, took his cast to court, and won back his professorship, his right of free speech, and free political thought.  The oath was unconstitutional.  The episode looms large in my memory.  I came to Southern California during that era; I support the American Civil Liberties Union; and I listed John Caughey among my friends.

Following hard on the heels of this “red scare” came the turbulence of Vietnam, draft-card burning, the free speech movement, and a revolution in race relations.  Los Angeles received less notoriety than Berkeley or San Francisco, until the now almost forgotten Simbianese Liberation shoot out, but the same issues reverberated here with enormous force.  There were pickets in front of the federal buildings and teach-ins on high school and college campuses.  Little wonder that the current generation of office seekers, who came of age in the 1960s, are asked:  which side were you on?

While Vietnam divided the community, the region’s growth continued unabated.  Los Angeles proved a powerful magnet for a large and talented group of writers, musicians, artists, and engineers, and scientists, both native and foreign born.  They established themselves in universities, colleges, art galleries, institutes, and think tanks.  Southern California became both an economic powerhouse and a vibrant cultural and scientific center.  The scientific community–places like Scripps, Children’s Hospital, RAND, Caltech, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Mudd–enjoyed support from industry, the federal government, and private philanthropy.

What has taken place during the past fifty years in the Santa Barbara-San Diego corridor, of which Los Angeles is the heart, is nothing short of miraculous — a continuing revolution in aerospace technology, biotechnology, information science, computer science, and environmental science.  Even as military expenditures declined after the Cold War, and jobs were lost — more than 200,000 in airframe construction, design, and engineering alone — the amount of scientific work steadily increased.  In fact, the out-migration of professional and skilled labor, primarily white and black, that occurred with the Reagan recession, was reversed, although downsizing continued.  Today, when knowledge is a vital commodity, the Los Angeles scientific/industrial community competes the world over for people with technical skills.  Angelenos are cell-phoned, lap-topped, cyber spaced, interconnected Pacific rimmers.

Today, more than ever, Los Angeles is a white-collar town, and its future is linked to its best and brightest.  Ford, General Motors, and Honda have moved their design centers to Southern California to take advantage of advanced design technology and the quality of creative talent.  This also applies to the film industry as much as to scientific enterprises.  Ironically, this is occurring as locally based corporations are being either sold off or merged with global giants headquartered elsewhere.

Globalization’s impact on local philanthropy remains uncertain.  Fortunately, Southern California is blessed with large philanthropic foundations:  the Weingart, Ahmanson, Haynes, Burns, and Irvine to name only a few.  There are also socially responsible corporations of which Parsons and Wells Fargo are examples.  And equally important there are many individuals of modest wealth who support the educational, health, welfare, and cultural needs of the community.

Although the public and private colleges, institutes, and universities of Southern California always need money, they are among the best and wealthiest in the nation.  From the desert to the sea, there are more than a score of schools to fit any interest or economy.  A youngster with ability and ambition can receive an unrivaled education in a secular or religious institution in the Southern California area.  From Santa Barbara to San Diego and from San Bernardino to San Pedro, there is a public university, the legacy of Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, within one hour of every citizen.  All of this has occurred during the past fifty years–the results of a master plan.  Californians have invested billions in higher education.

Some people in our intellectual and cultural community, whether native born or immigrant, continue to thrive on self-criticism, angst, and on their dismal vision of the city’s past and the region’s future.  They simply deny that Los Angeles is a great city.  They lament population growth and economic development, and they bemoan pollution, urban tension, and potential water problems.  I could be unkind and say that they lack faith in their own abilities or imagination.  Perhaps the rate and nature of change and its complexity is such that it is beyond their compass.  I could be cynical and surmise that Los Angeles bashing is popular.  There is a national and local audience for tales of disorder, dysfunctionality, and disaster that exceeds stories of success.  Clean water and clean air are not newsworthy; a polluted beach and smog are.  There are fewer boosters these days, unless one writes about the lives of the rich and the famous in Hollywood, but that is trading on the movies, or Southern California’s real estate billionaires.

I could also surmise that the cultural movers and shakers in Los Angeles are simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of the city’s ethnic, racial, and economic diversity.  They are no better off than many of the region’s political leaders, regardless of race or ethnicity, who are trying to do the right thing.  But to critics, they are the problem not the solution:  “they just don’t get it.”

Perhaps the time is not yet, when Southern California’s cultural community will find a voice, or perhaps it is destined to have many voices and to find magnificence in cacophony.  Is there a genre of the theater that will appeal to a whole regional audience or will our theater always produce a multiple of plays that reflect the current and perhaps future segmented racial and ethnic dimensions of Southern California?  I know that what occurs will not be a return to parochialism.  Los Angeles is at the center of the compass, and it cannot escape from its destiny.  Los Angeles is in the midst of a great cultural experiment.

It is hard to blame both new and old elites for not being up to speed.  The changes in the region are mind-boggling.  From the day I came to California, almost half a century ago, I have heard that the public schools were failing.  This despite the fact that under Governor Edmund G. Brown the state was building more than a classroom a day, and the legislature raised the subject matter requirements for teachers.  The high school drop out rate among minorities was and is fierce.  In 1990 among Spanish surname youths the drop out rate for the native born was 40 percent but for the foreign born it was 70 percent.  This was roughly twice that of non-Spanish surname whites.  This, obviously, is unacceptable, but scholars note that before the Second World War, many non-whites and second-generation white children quit school when they were sixteen.  They were not considered dropouts.  In fact, nationally, for many people, a high school diploma was a terminal degree.

Wartime and post war non-white and immigrant populations took jobs in the oil, construction, tire, automobile, electrical, and aircraft industries.  The de-industrialization of Los Angeles in the 1980s hit those workers.  Today, large numbers of low-paying jobs still exist, but the real skills needed for high-grade or unionized employment leading to a middle-class life are harder to come by.  Immigrants with skills have an easier time.  Put brutally, an immigrant with little education cost a negative of $13,000 in 1997; one with more than a high school education is a plus $198,000.  The average income in the county, according to the Los Angeles Times is about $40,000.  In Huntington Park, with successful recent immigrants it is $28,000.  Los Angeles, despite its industrial development in the twentieth century, is not a blue-collar town.  Manufacturing rarely constituted more than 26 percent of the county’s economy.  Modernization and education have been the touchstone of its success.  For the last two decades Southern California has been draining Korea, Taiwan, India, and Australia of their best and brightest.  Moreover, white-collar Los Angeles has always put a premium on highly educated non-Hispanic white men and women.  That has been changing.

For the past half century education has been critical.  In the past youngsters could opt out of schooling at age sixteen and yet stay in the decent-wage pool.  True, small business has always thrived in Los Angeles, where minority entrepreneurs engaged in lines of work, such as the needle trades, auto repair, and machine shops, food service, local sales, or shop keeping that did not require a highly educated work force.  In 1990 about 22 percent of Asian and 8 percent of Hispanic men were self-employed.  This means that the new second-generation minority population, today’s drop outs, will have a much harder time finding entrée into the mainstream middle-class world.  They may suffer “downward assimilation.”  Moreover, competition and xenophobia are inseparable.  The repatriation of Mexicans during the Great Depression differs only in degree from former Governor Pete Wilson’s anti-immigrant ballot measures.

Los Angeles has the most diverse population of any city in the United States.  More than eighty languages and countless dialects are spoken in the schools.  The task of teaching the children, who come from diverse households, is formidable.  Certainly cutting the funding for schools whose students do not fare well on tests is not a solution; it is comparable to blaming the victim for the crime.  The task of returning the city’s schools to where they were in the “Pat” Brown era begins with increasing the per capita student funding to where it was, from 46th in the nation to 8th.  The argument that throwing money at the problem does not work is a failed cliché.  Recently Sacramento realized that money worked in the 1950s and it will work again.  If legislators can rebuild the schools and adjust the per-pupil dollar ration for inflation, the scores will rise.

Educating the second-generation children of Los Angeles so they can function in a global economy, rather than in their ethnic community of small business, is one of the city’s great challenges.  We must succeed not only for our prosperity but also because our domestic tranquility may depend on whether we can avoid becoming a polarized society of the educated few enjoying the benefits of the new technological age and the undereducated many living on its margin.

Morever, without educational success, we cannot reverse a trend started two decades ago and accelerated with the three strikes law that filled a growing number of prisons with half-educated minority youth.  It cost more per year to incarcerate a man in a California prison than to send him to Harvard.  California needs a return to the values of the “Pat” Brown era.  Without this, it faces a ticking time bomb by creating a perpetual underclass.

On the positive side the self-imposed pressure to learn to read at a minimal level is enormous.  You cannot play with a computer if you cannot read.  Shrewd ethnic– and race-based political leaders realize that for their constituents to capitalize on the benefits of political power requires language skills and technical knowledge.  The old political adage: to the victor belong the spoils, must be changed to read: to the educated belong the spoils of victory.

I remain optimistic because of recent trends.  The educational establishment that was criticized in the 1950s produced the parents and grandparents of our college-bound generation, a generation that reads, buys books, participates in the city’s cultural life, and complains about an easy curriculum.  Los Angeles is the largest book-buying market in the nation, and it hosts the world’s second largest book fair.  There are newspapers too.  Young people read more than “Chickweed” and “Zits”; they also read “Doonesbury” and “Boondocks.”  Alas, how I long for “Gordo”, the great self-deprecating Mexican comic strip.  It was in the newspaper what “Viva Max” was in film.

When I came to California, television sets were rare and computers were science fiction.  Since then television has revolutionized our lives.  From the tabloid journalism of the O. J. Simpson case to the audience for the Public Broadcasting System, there is something for everyone.  Foreign language television news is also a daily staple.  It both reinforces and threatens the insularity of immigrants, while making Los Angeles part of a global village.  What is true for television is also true of the movies.  Once a foreign film was a novelty, today the best and worst films made abroad are shown.  The computer is virtually essential in industry and ubiquitous in middle-class households.  Children use cell phones.

Los Angeles is and will continue to be a cultural Mecca.  Unlike New York, local politicians keep their hands off the arts.  In fact, the law requires developers to finance local art.  It may not always produce great stuff but it shows that the community’s heart is in the right place.  While many of our walls are scarred with gang graffiti–the poor guys have no other way to assert their manhood–many public and private spaces display spectacular murals by folk artists.  Little of that existed fifty years ago.  I have not mentioned museums reorganized or revitalized during the past half century.  Two examples are the Huntington and the Fowler.  In the past the Huntington displayed only its eighteenth-century Anglo-American treasures.  Today at the Huntington there are multicultural exhibits and modern American art.  Today the Fowler has shed its finery and displays sculpture made of auto parts.  It may not be Rodin but it is a joy.  Los Angeles is art.

Los Angeles has always supported popular music but never of the variety that exists today–from reggae to jazz to new syncretism.  There has also been an explosion of classical music:  orchestras, choral groups, chamber music societies, remarkable creative work in colleges and universities, and especially the Los Angeles Opera.  Only a handful among the city’s cultural elite in the 1950s dreamed of this flowering.  The same is true for the theater.

Politics is not my enthusiasm.  I know that Governor “Pat” Brown was the last governor who wanted to do great things.  Beginning with Ronald Reagan and ending with Pete Wilson, each governor hoped to limit virtually every state agency other than law enforcement.  For decades, local politicians have played the race or ethnic “card.”  I am not surprised.  Perhaps I lived in Chicago too long, where ethnic and racial politics is the rule.  People say that Chicago is a city that works.  I am not surprised that Los Angeles, even with its remarkable infrastructure–the port authority, the airport authority, DWP, Caltrans, the AQMD–struggles to work.  Our governors did little to help Southern California confront the enormous economic and social changes of the last fifty years.  They so mismanaged the tax code that the result was Proposition 13 and a host of other propositions resulting in an unprecedented erosion of public services.  It was the direct cause of Orange County’s bankruptcy, and only a quiet federal bailout saved Los Angeles from the same fate.  Moreover, prison building — the result of the so-called “three strikes” — consumed much of the state’s discretionary spending.  In retrospect Prop 13 and “three strikes” proved the most class-based and racist measures in the state’s history.  If you are a political enthusiast, read Peter Schrag’s book, Paradise Lost.  He thinks democracy has failed.  I do not!  Considering the dysfunctional nature of recent state government, often ballot-initiative driven, that Los Angeles works at all is remarkable.

Considering the demographics:  fifty years ago few could have imagined a demographic revolution.  Southern California has faced and, for the foreseeable future, will confront a demographic nightmare.  Perhaps five million more people by 2020.  Today there are more than 250,000 Central Americans in Los Angeles.  The self-identified group of Mexican extraction is about 80 percent of the Spanish surname population.  Moreover, these groups are far from monolithic.  In 1990, 50 percent of the Mexican-Americans were born in the United States.  Deep conflicts exist between the native and foreign born, citizens and non-citizens, documented and undocumented because of competition for jobs and living space.  The Asian Pacific population is just as diverse.  The 1990 census showed 245,000 Chinese, 220,000 Filipinos, 145,000 Koreans, 130,000 Japanese, 63,000 Vietnamese, and 28,000 Cambodians.  There are 20 Asian nationalities in Los Angeles.  Many brought their old ethnic hatreds with them.  In 1990, Los Angeles County had about 50 percent of the state’s Spanish surname population and almost a third of its Asians.  Although the percentage of African Americans and non-Spanish surname whites may be declining, their numbers are not.  Even more interesting, the intermarriage rate for all groups is increasing.  The next census will allow individuals multiple race and ethnicity choices.

This city is an ethnic and racial crossroads.  Some Angelenos fear that Los Angeles is becoming a hyphenated society.  In 1992 historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., worried: “A cult of ethnicity has arisen among non-Anglo whites and among nonwhite minorities to denounce the idea of the melting pot, to challenge the concept of ‘one people,’ and to promote, protect separate ethnic and racial communities.”

Despite this trend, I am far less concerned than Schlesinger because exogamous marriage is too widespread and increasing.  Moreover, evidence indicates that race, ethnicity, and religion are only important among the dispossessed or segregated.  Ethnic and racial enclaves are the result not the cause of segregation.  The more economically successful a group, the more widely geographically dispersed and less cohesive it becomes; and the more it responds to issues that transcend its former ethnic or racial concerns.   Little wonder that today’s minorities resent the residential flight of their wealthiest members.  Irvin “Magic” Johnson’s highly visible role as an investor in the black community is unique as were the activities of the Chinese banker Fred Hsia in Monterey Park.

What has taken place in Southern California during the past century is large-scale cultural diffusion and syncretism.  Incoming groups brought cultural traits, attitudes, and behaviors that encountered an already dynamic society.  Interaction demands accommodation, abandonment, or fusion in multicultural societies.  To the extent that language is the key to culture, immigrants always struggle to retain their native languages.  English, however, will remain the dominant language because it is the language of world commerce and technology and because syncretism works very slowly in law.

Having lived through the past half century, I think that Los Angeles is a city of the future.  That does not mean that I am not concerned about environmental problems, quality of life, and inter-racial-inter-ethnic human relations.  These are all genuine concerns.  But as a realist, I do not despair; I have patience.  There is no instant gratification.  Perhaps because I taught at Caltech I believe the next generation of scientists will solve many of our environmental problems.  I trust, too, that higher education can teach us to live smarter and maintain and extend our quality of life, despite population and economic growth.  I do not believe we will become a community of squabbling nationalities with enclaves, ghettoes, or tribes.  I share the hope of Rodney King, who, with simple eloquence, said: “Can’t we just learn to get along?”

I cannot close without confessing that some of the city’s critics are really entertaining.   Who but a pessimist would call Los Angeles “topless, bottomless, shapeless and endless…random, frenzied, rootless, unplanned…a violent aggressive organism.”  I simply roared with laughter when I read Mary Dowd’s column in the New York Times:  the women in Los Angeles had so much collagen that the city is the jiggle capital of the world.  I don’t know whether this is scandalous or envious on her part.  Where else in the world could I live that would attract such inane critics.

Revisiting Eden after the half century, I do not think paradise was lost.  I do not think pre-World War II booster driven, provincial, ethnocentric, and middle-class Los Angeles, which ignored its minorities, its inequalities, and boasted of its restrictive covenants, was a paradise.  I prefer the city of the recent past, an Eden, because of its challenges, diversity, and dynamism; all of which I think speaks well for an exciting and creative future.

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MARTIN RIDGE, Senior Research Associate in the Henry E. Huntington Library, has enjoyed a distinguished career as teacher, scholar, author, and editor of American history with a special emphasis on the American West.  Past president of the Western Historical Association and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, he also has served as president of the Historical Society of Southern California. This essay was given as the keynote address to the Society’s annual history conference at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage on February 26, 2000.