FOREWORD
California (Southern C. at least, which, however, the real C., I believe much repudiates), has completely bowled me over—such a delicious difference from the rest of the U.S. do I find in it. (I speak of course all of nature and climate, fruits and flowers; for there is absolutely nothing else, and the sense of the shining social and human inane is utter.)
—Henry James, writing from the Hotel del Coronado, April 1905
A city is a body of fate, but unfortunately the world cannot be persuaded that San Diego is anything other than a sunny congeries of tourist attractions. Here, crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would stupefy and amaze if they were set in New York or Los Angeles do not intrigue beyond the county line. Historically, it seems San Diego cannot represent itself, and is barely represented by others. In history and literature, though America’s seventh largest city at the millennium, it scarcely registers. Beginning with Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona (1884)—on which was founded the lucrative romance of the missions—the most valuable literary properties, even if nominally set in San Diego, are sooner or later annexed to L.A. It is typical that Raymond Chandler, the master mythographer of Southern California in the twentieth century, who spent the last sad sodden decade of his life in La Jolla, writing and drinking at 6005 Camino de la Costa, denied that he got the least inspiration from his opulent surroundings, telling a friend: “I’ve lost any affinity for my background. Los Angeles is no longer my city, and La Jolla is nothing but a climate and a lot of meaningless chi-chi.” The historian Kevin Starr was asked by Neil Morgan, a Union-Tribune columnist, why San Diego got so little space in Starr’s celebrated Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915. Starr replied serenely, “From a historian’s point of view, nothing much happened in San Diego before the Second World War.”
It cannot be said that he is refuted by the dutiful “Chronology” filling four and a half closely printed pages in the 1937 Federal Writers’ Project guide to San Diego, which shows the city just before the clouds of war began darkening over Europe and Asia, guaranteeing remote Southern California its prosperity—not uninterrupted— for the next several decades. Between the 1769 founding of the first mission atop Presidio Hill and 1850, the most dramatic episode in the region—leaving aside the mission’s sacking by the ungrateful Diegueño Natives in 1775—was the bathetic Battle of San Diego Bay in 1803: “The Lelia Byrd, an American ship under command of Capt. Wm. Shaler, attempts to leave port with 1,000 smuggled otter skins. The Spanish garrison at Ballast Point opens fire; the Lelia Byrd returns it and sails out. No casualties.”
From 1850 (“With much excitement the first county election is held”) to the opening of the Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park in 1915, the tale is told as dry commercial chronicle, enlivened by occasional bizarre disasters (1882: “A snowstorm plays havoc with flocks of sheep within the city limits. Thousands die of exposure”). The growth of a “naval-industrial complex” (according to Mike Davis), commencing around 1915, unfolded in the period between the wars in a country where, as someone has nostalgically said, military affairs commanded little more public interest than the fine arts. (Those were the days.) According to Francis Fukuyama, in his famous 1989 essay “The End of History?” the past in a place like San Diego before the war, off history’s beaten path, is like the future of whatever obstinate parts of the world reject liberal democracy. Events do occur in such out-of-the-way precincts, of course, and they are of absorbing interest to those involved; but for the world (and history), they are too provincial to matter. Thus detached from the mainstream, provincial history becomes secret history—ignored by the great world; forgotten, suppressed, or bowdlerized by provincial rulers. It is not simply the adjacent Babylonish glare of Los Angeles that casts San Diego into obscurity. As Jim Miller writes, “Unlike Los Angeles, however, San Diego has largely managed to conceal [its] contradictions and market an image of itself that pushes the ‘real’ city to the margins and buries its history under a mountain of booster mythology.”
Long delayed, the Angel of History, in its whirlwind, arrived in San Diego around 1940 as the huge airframe assembly plants in Southern California expanded to fulfill FDR’s demand for fifty thousand warplanes a year. A wartime visitor, the great reporter John Gunther, found that between the navy base and aircraft factories, this “shining plaque of a city,” once the final destination for so many invalids and pensioners from the Midwest, was easily the most crowded (“congested” was the bureaucratic term of art) city in the country. As he writes in Inside U.S.A. (1947), “A transient body of 125,000 soldiers, sailors, and marines was jammed into the community on top of its violently expanding population,” which desperately sought makeshift housing. Forty-eight thousand workers were employed in a single aircraft factory, Consolidated Vultee (later Convair), stretching a mile alongside the sparkling harbor and elaborately camouflaged at roof level to deceive Japanese bombers. Among those were my father and mother, Max C. Reid and Antonia Makis, who arrived from Oplin, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah, respectively, in time for Pearl Harbor. Luckier than most, they found decent quarters—my father in a boardinghouse, formerly somebody’s stately home, on Golden Hill, and my mother in the grandiose US Grant Hotel downtown, which had been converted to war housing. Working the swing shift together, they courted in movie palaces (the Fox, the Orpheum, the Spreckels) and nightclubs on Kettner Boulevard (in wartime, San Diego’s entertainment, like the plant, ran twenty-four hours a day), and married in 1943. My father did a tour in the navy, returned in February 1946, worked a shift, and joined the great Machinists’ strike.
When, in 1996, the Republicans convened in San Diego to nominate Senator Robert Dole for president—a forlorn cause—The New York Times asked me to write a column about my hometown for their op-ed page. I obliged, observing how the local Republican establishment had never admitted to itself how much of its prosperity was owed historically to decisions made by despised Democratic bureaucrats in Washington, DC, during the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War. San Diego, I noted, was recovering from the collapse of its old military-industrial order and remained devoted to moneymaking and bronzed outdoor living. It retained the feel of an “enormous village” (the phrase Louis Adamic used to describe Los Angeles in the 1920s), and the arts suffered from an insufficiency of dedicated social climbers to support them. (The symphony had just gone bankrupt.) I continued: “The nouveaux riches seem content with their gated-community privacy, their electronic games, and sports. They are socially moderate and fiscally conservative, meaning that they disdain the creationists and pro-lifers who live in the less-affluent inland valleys but disclaim responsibility for the poor and luckless who are the business of government.” The column was datelined Berkeley, where I now live.
Punctually, a letter was published in the Times denouncing my remote place of residence, my “beady eye,” and my disrespectful remarks about the yacht harbor. With heaviest irony, the writer, Alice Goldfarb Marquis of La Jolla,[1] urged readers to accept my dismal characterization of San Diego and leave its many cultural amenities for the lucky few who already enjoyed them: “Certainly, the region’s writers don’t want more alien scribblers cluttering the local literary scene.”
Certainly not, yet it occurs to me that until the last twenty or thirty years, almost all of the significant writing about Southern California has been done by “alien scribblers” rather than natives, and as a cultural region San Diego would have benefited from more rather than less of their attention.[2] Such alien scribbling as we have, from Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) to Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), sheds a fitful but necessary light on the secret and public histories that unfold in this book. To begin: Two Years Before the Mast was a decisive event in the imaginative appropriation of California by the imperial United States that preceded the actual plundering. When Dana first glimpsed California’s “remote and almost unknown coast” in January 1835, he was nineteen years old, a delicate Boston Brahmin who had dropped out of Harvard College because of eye trouble and gone to sea as a common sailor to defy his own fears of futile gentility. Now he had arrived at one of the ends of the earth—“the most outlandish place in the world,” as eighteenth-century Jesuit geographers had called the future fortunate coast—and its huge emptiness haunted him. An aristocrat himself, he admired the hospitable Californios on their vast land-grant ranches for their ease and grace, and yet—“sometimes they appeared to me to be a people on whom a curse had fallen, and stripped them of everything but their pride, their manner, and their voices.” Lacking sound Yankee or British busyness, the locals were too indolent to live up to the splendor of their natural environment.
At the same historical moment, let it be noted, less adventurous travelers from England and America were apt to find contemporary Greeks and Italians also unworthy of their ruins. As Theodore Roosevelt, the Adams brothers (Henry and Brooks), and Jack London would later assure, Anglo-America was ascendant: old (Southern) Europe was over, and its decadent descendants from Athens to Mexico were back numbers, and dubious as immigrants too. As Jim Miller suggests, self-serving contrasts between “Latins” and “Saxons” would become a staple of Anglo-California’s social mythology: “A new bourgeois utopia had arisen out of the quaint ruins of the Spanish past.”
For several months, Dana was a beachcomber and day laborer in San Diego, carrying and curing hides; in his free time he enjoyed sexual adventures in the canyons around Mission Valley, a detail omitted from Two Years Before the Mast. “From that book,” he wrote in his Journals, “I have studiously kept out most of my reflections & much of the wickedness I was placed in the midst of.” His shipmate Benjamin G. Stimson teased him in a March 1841 letter about “the beautiful Indian lasses, who so often frequented your humble abode in the hide house.” Thus, as Starr observes, the annals of California literature begin on the one hand with self-concealment and on the other with Dana’s tendency to project his youthful fears of failure, moral and otherwise, onto the natural and social landscape around him. The degraded Yankee drifters who had washed up in distant California fascinated and appalled him. “Here he went dead to leeward among the pulperias, gambling rooms, &c,” he writes of a Philadelphia tailor who had come to ply his trade at the Pueblo de Los Ángeles. “One of the same stamp was Russell, who was master of the hide-house in San Diego. . . . He spent his own money and nearly all the store’s among the half-bloods upon the beach, and, being turned away, went to the Presidio, where he lived the life of a desperate ‘loafer.’”
Sunburnt and longhaired, Dana returned after almost two years to Cambridge and college, graduated at the top of his class, wrote his book, became famous, and took the bar. Two Years Before the Mast was the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of abused sailors—“the first book ever written about the sea, not from the bridge or the cabin, but by one of the hands” (Van Wyck Brooks). By exposing himself to the brutality of life at sea, Dana had proved himself deserving—unlike the “cursed” Californios—of privilege.
Returning to California twenty-four years later, Dana found San Diego eerily untouched by the great events that had transformed the San Francisco Bay Area, formerly a vast solitude, into the setting for a famous metropolis of one hundred thousand—“one of the capitals of the American Republic, and the sole emporium of a new world, the awakened Pacific.” Even the drifters had drifted away from San Diego: “Where were they all?” Undoubtedly, the companions of his youth were mostly dead (“But how had they died and where?”), and he was a disappointed man, his political ambitions frustrated, his marriage to a proper Bostonian a bitter disappointment, his application to the law a dutiful grind. His hopes, his dreams! “The past was real. The present, all around me, was unreal, unnatural, repellent.”
By the time Henry James settled luxuriantly into the Hotel del Coronado in April 1905, San Diego had witnessed several cycles of real estate frenzy, and peopling and unpeopling described by Mike Davis and associated with the names of William Heath Davis and Alonzo Horton, the builder of New Town (also known as “Horton’s Folly”). John D. Spreckels, scion of the sugar fortune, had descended like a corsair to dominate the fortunes of the city for a generation. The Hotel del Coronado was his gaudiest acquisition. None of this James knew, nor would it have interested him if he did. The famous and difficult novelist—the legendary “Master” of John Singer Sargent’s portrait and Ezra Pound’s description in Canto VII (“the great head e occhi onesti e tardi”)—was sixty-one years old, overweight, and on a lecture tour. “The days have been mostly here of heavenly beauty, and the flowers, the wild flowers just now in particular, which fairly rage, with radiance, over the land, are worthy of some purer planet than this,” he wrote in a letter to his sister-in-law, Mrs. William James, which is featured as an epigraph of this essay. “I live on oranges and olives, fresh from the tree, and I lie awake nights to listen, on purpose, to the languid lisp of the Pacific.” A “purer planet” but an empty one also.
Coronado Beach was a magnificent resort, no doubt, but it was not Newport, Rhode Island, with its complex civilization. It was more like Oz (in fact, L. Frank Baum spent time in San Diego, and there are scholars who believe the end-of-the-world splendor of the del Coronado inspired him). Certainly, as far as Henry James was concerned, the locals might as well have been munchkins.
Coronado has been a lure for alien scribblers. Rudyard Kipling’s novel Captains Courageous (1897), about the spoiled son of a railroad magnate who is washed overboard while on a luxury liner and is rescued by sturdy fishermen who teach him to be a man (the affecting 1937 movie starred Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew), improbably locates the boy-hero’s father’s headquarters in Coronado, where, from a seaside palace, he commands by telegraph a transcontinental railroad empire and shipping routes extending to Yokohama.
When his supposedly lost son wires that he is alive and in Boston, the father, Harvey Cheyne, clears the railway lines of the nation so that his private car can lunge across the continent in a terrific eighty-seven hours and thirty-five minutes, derailing all other traffic, and, incidentally, terrifying his rivals who, imagining a coup, frantically announce their surrender. Kipling is a romantic—he conjures up a fleet of Chinese junks that Cheyne keeps at anchor in the harbor— but also a realist: The first command Cheyne gives is to have his private car brought down from Los Angeles.
Physically, as Davis notes (and the canny Kipling realized), San Diego—with its hem of forbidding eastern mountains—is a “cul-de-sac.” Its “intractable geography” frustrated generations of promoters who longed for the direct railroad connection to the east that might have made it a great entrepôt. Rather than becoming the hub of a railroad empire, however, San Diego was doomed to be a sideshow for remote capitalist deities like E. H. Harriman, master of “The Octopus” and Kipling’s model for Cheyne. Rapacious even by the standards of his fellow robber barons, Harriman, who controlled the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads, was the first to envision and almost to accomplish a global transportation network. According to Davis, the development of North County in San Diego was “retarded” for a generation as a remote consequence of Harriman’s duel with the overmastered Henry Huntington.
Twenty-six years after Henry James checked out, Edmund Wilson, America’s most brilliant literary journalist, checked into the Hotel del Coronado. It was the bottom of the Depression. Again, the interval had been eventful for San Diego, and perhaps now some of the world noticed. In 1915 the Panama-California Exposition at Balboa Park had been overshadowed by the Panama-Pacific Exposition in imperial San Francisco, which had looted the federal money originally intended for San Diego, but—unlike in San Francisco—San Diego’s romantic churrigueresque exhibition halls, intended to be temporary, were left standing, to become the architectural focus of a great fourteen-hundred-acre urban park. San Diego had also survived an invasion by the Wobblies and Emma Goldman and acquired a civic religion—not being Los Angeles.
In the Progressive Era, the political class divided into “geraniums” and “smokestacks,” giving birth to a perennial quarrel that John Gunther summarized a generation later: “The smokestacks want to bring in more industry, and the geranium folk resist this at all costs. They say, ‘Let San Diego live as it always did, on tourists, on retired Navy pensionnaires, on celery, asparagus, and climate.’” The geraniums, led by the merchant George Marston, had prevailed, more or less, but in 1931 the old industrial order everywhere seemed to be dying, and many of those who had retired to San Diego on small pensions faced ruin in their tidy bungalows and garden apartments. The suicide rate was the highest in the country. Edmund Wilson commented on it:
You seem to see the last futile effervescence of the burst of the American adventure. Here our people, so long told to go “West” to escape from ill health and poverty, maladjustment and industrial oppression, are discovering that, having come West, their problems and diseases remain and that the ocean bars further flight. Among the sand-colored hotels and power plants, the naval outfitters and waterside cafés, the old spread-roofed California houses . . . they come to the end of their resources in the empty California sun.
In this amazing dispatch from the depths of the Depression, the city of San Diego is a sunlit necropolis and the grand old hotel a symbol of imperialism. San Diego is a double “jumping-off place”: the “placid bay” in which the defeated “folks” drown themselves is a point of departure for Manifest Destiny’s next chapter in the Pacific and beyond—in Hawaii, China, and Japan, in the Pacific War and Vietnam.
In Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s panoptic historical eye lights on “the brief but legendary Trasero County coast, where the waves were so high you could lie on the beach and watch the sun through them.” Although fictitious Trasero County is “bracketed by the two ultraconservative counties of Orange and San Diego,” it is recognizably North San Diego County, where “the madrone of wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf ” rises, with “the military blankness at its back.” Here, as of 1990, is the landscape shaped by seventy-five years of the naval-industrial complex, including an academic annex. (It is generally forgotten that Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell warning of a “military-industrial complex” included a pointed reference to complicitous and ambitious universities. As a former university president himself—at Columbia—Ike knew whereof he spoke.)
According to Mike Davis, the “militarization of the San Diego economy after 1915, the epochal event in its twentieth-century history,” began with the wiles of Democratic congressman William Kettner, master “seducer of admirals and generals,” whose greatest catch was the young and vain assistant secretary of the navy in Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Unlike his chief, Josephus Daniels, a landlubber from North Carolina who had first to be persuaded to move the navy into San Diego, FDR loved ships and the sea; he was enchanted by the city and delighted by a royal reception arranged by the Chamber of Commerce in 1915. As the New Deal president and commander in chief during World War II, FDR continued the patronage of San Diego that began when he was a junior warlord, disregarding the stupid anti-New Deal prejudices of the local oligarchs, including the transplanted Reuben E. Fleet. On his occasional visits to the city, FDR entertained in Balboa Park, like an absolute monarch visiting one of his remote hunting lodges.[3] The navy’s presence permitted San Diego to industrialize without prejudice to its geraniums, but as a socially conservative force, “it reinforced San Diego’s tendency to become an ideological cul-de-sac,” paralleling its unhappy geographical status. San Diego would become one of the anchors of the Sunbelt, whose creation was the great geopolitical project of the New Deal. (FDR’s ghost was repaid with generations of thankless industrialists—none more thankless than San Diego’s, save Houston’s—not to mention the presidencies of the apostate New Dealer Ronald Reagan and two Texas-based Bushes, one actually elected.)
Dictionary authority reminds me that cul-de-sac also means, finally and most poignantly, “a situation in which further progress is impossible.” As such, the term appears as the title of Garrett Scott’s masterful documentary film, Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story (2002), which Scott describes in the Harvard Film Review as his attempt to reveal a particular terminal suburban tract of San Diego (Clairemont–Linda Vista) “as a geopolitical event continuously unfolding.”[4] The same, it seems to me, is an ambition of this book: San Diego might even be developing its own unillusioned historical sociology.
In his great novel Nostromo (1904), Joseph Conrad imagines a Central American republic, Costaguana, whose affairs are manipulated as a hobby by a financier, the great Holroyd, in distant San Francisco. A busy man, Holroyd spares little time to this diversion, which involves backing the local oligarch, the deluded idealist Charles Gould. So, too, have San Diego’s destinies been shaped, for much of its history, by a little pantheon of remote, mostly absent gods—Harriman, FDR, and, in more recent years, Jimmy Hoffa and subsequent masters of that enormous body of money known as the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund, in association with mobsters resident in Chicago and Las Vegas, to name the greatest—acting through and sometimes frustrating their local agents. As in imaginary Costaguana, politicians, realtors, mobbed-up developers, visionaries, criminals, reactionary publishers, and technocrats—read Spreckels, Marston, Ed Fletcher, Irvin Kahn, Glenn Rick, Roger Revelle, Pete Wilson, and Roger Hedgecock, a mixed bag!—have accommodated themselves to the realities defined by such world-historical forces as these, or have pursued increasingly irrelevant careers. The resulting combinazione show exactly the unfolding of San Diego, from Horton’s New Town to the “Golden Triangle,” as a geopolitical event. In Vineland, again, the College of the Surf was intended by Southern California’s monied classes (“oil, construction, pictures”) “to have been their own private polytechnic for training the sorts of people who would work for them.” So, too, the actual University of California at San Diego (UCSD) was originally envisioned “as a captive graduate school” for the military and the aerospace industry, and just as in Pynchon’s novel, the undergraduate division that was reluctantly added turned surly and rebellious in the sixties: “A sudden lust for information swept the campus, and soon research—somebody’s, into something—was going on twenty-four hours a day. It came to light that College of the Surf was no institution of learning at all, but had been an elaborate land developers’ deal from the beginning, only disguised as a gift to the people.”
Jim Miller’s extraordinary “episodic history” of rebellion and resistance is counterpoint to the circulation of elites, the real estate deals, and the buying and selling of politicians pursued by San Diego’s “private governments.” This history from below has amazed even a reader who imagined himself reasonably informed about events aboveground. The range and corresponding documentation is enormous, unburying tracts of history encrypted beneath the official version, from unromantic mission days to the rise of the “Globalphobics,” surveying along the way such episodes in dissidence and reaction as the vicious hounding of Emma Goldman and violent persecution of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the 1910s; the 1934 lettuce strike; the efforts of Communist organizers such as Lee Gregovich of the Cooks and Waitresses Union and Luisa Moreno in the canneries; the Red-baiting of Harry Steinmetz at San Diego State College in the ’40s that anticipated the similar pursuit by irritable authority and local prejudice of Herbert Marcuse at UCSD in the ’60s; the battle for “Lumumba-Zapata College” at UCSD; the growth of the underground press (the Door of fond memory); Black Power; and generations of organizing on the waterfront.
Is it generally known that Henry Miller on his way to a whorehouse in Tijuana, stopped to hear Emma Goldman lecture downtown as a riot impended, and was converted to radicalism and free love.
This may be the only curious happening from the tumultuous 1910s that Jim Miller omits. Otherwise, no episode is less familiar or more vivid—or Pynchonesque—than the anarcho-syndicalist Magonista revolt (“Red Flag Over Tijuana”) led by the Los Angeles–based Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón and which coincided crucially with the Panama-California Exposition. The revolt encompassed the “battle” of Mexicali, the brief seizure of Tijuana, and the Magonistas’ betrayal by the absurd booster Daredevil Dick Ferris. Quite rightly, Miller calls this affair both “the most bizarre series of events in the history” of San Diego and the birth of the liberal revolution in Mexico. Needless to say, no other episode has been more deeply occulted by the official version.
More than Los Angeles, San Diego was a kind of Anglo-crusader kingdom; such at least was the conceit of the political class and most of the polity. In a great demographic movement that began with World War II, the “mixed multitudes” that Lord Bryce found so distinctive in San Francisco in the nineteenth century are at last emerging as the commanding reality of San Diego in the twenty-first. The extraordinary portfolio of interviews by Kelly Mayhew includes self-portraits of veteran activists (labor, environmental, academic) and of the region’s most recent arrivals; it contains retrospectives and conclusions, first impressions, fresh appraisals, political resolves. Emphatically and eloquently, San Diego begins to represent itself.
—David Reid
**Portions of the above draw on my essay “Under Eastern Eyes,” in University Publishing 12 (Winter 1984), in which I discuss Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (Oxford University Press, 1972) and Imagining America by Peter Conrad (Oxford University Press, 1980)
FOOTNOTES
1. I commend Alice Goldfarb Marquis as the author of an excellent biography, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern (Contemporary Books, 1989).
2. Consider the following names, all taken from David L. Ulin’s splendid Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, 2002): Vachel Lindsay, Louis Adamic, Aldous Huxley in the 1920s, H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Cedric Belfrage, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bertolt Brecht, Chester Himes, Rayner Banham, Cees Noteboom, Jan Morris, Simone de Beauvoir, Truman Capote, Evelyn Waugh, Octavio Paz, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Tom Wolfe; all literary vagabonds, journalists on assignment, passing debunkers, scholars on grants, professional travel writers, exiles and internal émigrés, and as a group more numerous and on the whole more distinguished than the occasional native or more common born-again Californians until about 1980, although the latter groups include such notable figures as MFK Fisher, Christopher Isherwood, Budd Schulberg, Joan Didion (out of Sacramento and New York), and John Gregory Dunne (out of Providence, Rhode Island, and New York), both now returned to New York, somewhat blur the distinction I am trying to make. After 1980 the natives and the born agains predominate: Carolyn See, Robert Towne, Wanda Coleman, Rubén Martínez, Walter Mosley, Mike Davis, Lynell George, and James Ellroy (alas); Another fine collection, L.A. Exile: A Guide to Los Angeles Writing, 1932–1998 (Marsilio Pub, 1999), edited by Paul Vangelisti and Evan Calbi, whose thesis is announced in its title, adds among other unassimilable aliens Theodor W. Adorno, Robert Craft, Edward Dahlberg, Malcolm Lowry, Thomas Pynchon, and Dorothy Parker. Only Wilson and Pynchon wrote substantially about San Diego.
3. In 1944, FDR accepted his fourth presidential nomination by radio from an “undisclosed location,” in fact a railroad siding in Camp Pendleton, where he paused on his way to a conference in Hawaii with General Douglas MacArthur, to settle strategy for the rest of the Pacific war.
4. San Diegans will remember the bizarre episode of May 1995 on which the film is based, in which, as described by Scott, “an army veteran stole a sixty-ton tank and ran amok over surface streets and freeways until police shot him.” Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story, directed by Garrett Scott (Icarus Films, 2002) sets Shawn Nelson’s “rampage” against the background of suburban decay and the drug-addled, second-generation suburbanites he interviewed in the Clairemont–Linda Vista area.
DAVID REID is the author of The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire, the editor of Sex, Death and God in L.A., and coeditor of West of the West: Imagining California. His essays, articles, reviews, and inter- views have appeared in Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and in several anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize XII. He lives in Berkeley, California.
