Carey McWilliams
"The Mustang Colt"
California: The Great Exception
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"California was 'distinctly a peripheral state with the usual tendencies toward defection." (40)
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"We have here in our midst a mixed mass of human beings from every part of the wide earth, of different habits, manners, customs, and opinions, all, however, impelled onward by the same feverish desire of fortune-making." (42)
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"The debate against admission of free Negroes was no without race prejudice, but the opposition did not rest so much upon that as it was grounded upon economic fears and deep-seated philosophical objections to a rigidly stratifies society." (47)
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California's "political development, like its economic development, represents a telescoping of processes; a foreshortening of events." (49)
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"This isolation naturally fostered a spirit of independence and self-reliance; a feeling that California had interests distinct from those of any other part of the Union, and a destiny of her own." (55)
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"Thrown back upon their own resources for two decades, the Californians created, out of the wealth they possessed, a culture of their own." (58)
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"Great significance attaches to the circumstance that, unlike other frontier societies, California learned to talk while it was still young." (59)
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"The fact that California was the first of the eleven western states to be admitted to the Union largely accounts for the fact that it has always been a laboratory in which government has experimented with the various solutions and approaches to the peculiar problems of the West." (49)
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"The intrusive alien influences which invaded the State after 1869 made serious inroads on the Californians' sense of an exceptional destiny". (61)
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"The Californian gambles because he has confidence and he has confidence because his wagers have generally paid off." (62)
Kevin Starr
"Carey McWilliams's California: The Light and the Dark
Reading California. Art Image, and Identity, 1900-2000
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Oligarchical Hegemony- A government or nation ruled by a small group of people using ideological ideas to dominate and rule with an indefinable power used to control or repress certain cultural groups.
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Assimilative Encounters - Cultures blending in, conforming to the dominating "model" culture or cultural expectations.
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Separatism - A process by which cultural groups oppose assimilation and definitely reject conforming, holding onto traditional cultural values and tradition.
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Pluralism - Cultural groups holding onto a cultural identity within family and community groups while also assimilating with the "model" culture and society.
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Tabula rasa - "Blank Slate": A new beginning: a place where a process of self-invention can be lived and "the peoples of the world could project their aspirations and longings". (17)
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Ramona myth - Californians' romanticizing of the Native American and Hispanic past of dispossession and displacement.
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Utopia - A man-made paradise, a place to create an idealized vision.
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Resort Hotel Culture - California's "Tourist Culture": its own brand of utopianism intensifying expectation for a better life by ordinary people and thereby boosting Californians' consumerism, setting its path as a materialistic society.
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"For this strip of coast, this tiny region, seems to be looking westward across the Pacific, waiting for the future that one can somehow sense and feel and see." (20)
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Carey McWilliams "brought to his effort to chronicle and define California, to correct its faults and orient it toward a better future, a belief that to be a Californian was to be on the cutting edge of the American experience." (29)
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