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Published: March 25, 2007

Why is California So Weird?

It's not entirely our fault.

By Christopher Zehnder

Everyone, I imagine, has heard the old joke about God picking up the United States by Maine and Florida, shaking it, and dislodging all that is not nailed down so that it fell to California. It is a tedious, because a well-worn, piece of work. Nevertheless, it conveys a good deal of truth.

That truth is, California is a weird place. This truth became apparent to me after living “abroad” (in Virginia and Connecticut) for some years. Outside California, I discovered at least the vestiges of older American things, of warm, human things; the richness of life that is the fruit of cultural rootedness. Of course, the modern brashness, characteristic of L.A., was in these places also; but one could more readily escape it. One could, as it were, retreat into a walled garden and smell the still fragrant, though decaying, scent of an older, more human time.

I think every native Californian at some time in his life should live “abroad” --- that is, outside California --- if only to realize that the world is not California (though it seems to be fast becoming it.) I also helps the Californian see that others see the state as it really is. Returning to California in 1992, and to the relatively “conservative” Antelope Valley, my changed eyes and expectations were assaulted by the clothing styles (tailored to the bizarre), the lack of clothing (appealing to other passions), and the unrestrained, “let it all hang out” public behavior. Compared to where I had lived, California seemed a creation of the moment, and that moment hardly the most civilized in American history.

It is American history, however, that gives one the clue to California weirdness. After all, one cannot blame it on Fray Junípero Serra and the Franciscan missionaries; and though the Mexican period of California history was characterized by opera buffa wars between the North and the South, it was not particularly weird. The weirdness really began to show itself in that epoch that has left its enduring mark on California culture: the Gold Rush.

Hordes of men hungry for gold descended on the sleepy Hispanic region beginning in the late 1840s. After braving considerable dangers by land and sea, they threw California into a cultural maelstrom. The population expansion was astounding. San Francisco, for instance, went from a small 500 inhabitants in 1848 to 40,000 in 1850. The rapid increase of a population gathered pell-mell into the Bay city led to a rapid increase in saloons, brothels, and crime. The last could only be put down by vigilante action. The former --- well, wasn't assailed with the same zeal.

San Francisco’s experience was repeated in hundreds of small towns (with names such as Murderer’s Gulch, Delirium Tremens, Whiskey Diggings, Hangtown, and You Bet) that mushroomed across what in only two years after the discovery of gold became the sovereign state of California. The combined effect of avarice and readily available, bought sex had macerating effects on morality. As one commentator of the period said, in California, “human character crumbled and vanished like dead leaves.”

California never settled down after the Gold Rush; instead, it has experienced a series of speculative “booms,” from silk worms to cotton, to citrus, to oil, to real estate, to whatever's next. California has been a place where people come more to “make it” than to make a home. Thus, it has suffered from a shifting, transient population, which builds only for today’s profit and, with the French king, says après moi, le déluge.

So, divine agency has never been needed to shake the rootless to California. They came of their own accord. But, it is important to remember, they came from elsewhere. They did not spring from our alkaline soil nor were they spontaneously generated in our limpid air.

The United States --- at least, the northern tier of states --- have always had their share of weird folk. Before the War Between the States, New England and upstate New York were crawling with strange sects and utopian movements that advocated everything from vegetarianism, to socialism, to anarchism, to free love, to spiritism. The revival style of Aimee Semple McPherson did not arise without precedent in Los Angeles; it had its even more lurid progenitors in the revival meetings of early nineteenth century America. And one cannot forget the cancerous proliferation of sects that has characterized U.S. Christian history. All these phenomena were prevalent enough to be the objects of comment by German Catholic writers of the late nineteenth century. In an 1889 pamphlet, The Question of Nationality, Anton H. Walburg of Cincinnati said the American society of his day was marked by sectarianism, extreme individualism, and even divorce and free love.

An example of a free-love advocate was Moses Harman of the National Liberal League. Harman published his free love and anarchist journal Lucifer, not out of San Francisco or Los Angeles, but Valley Falls, Kansas in the late nineteenth century. Free love journals were common enough at the time to induce Congress to pass the Comstock Act in 1873, prohibiting the sending of obscene mail through the mail system.

Bizarre communities, anarchists, free love advocates, cultic religious groups, and other strange manifestations of human culture found a ready home in California and still do. The reason, I think, is our historical rootlessness. California is not so much an historical phenomenon as a recurring novelty. It is a place ready made for those who want to escape tradition, religious strictures, and even natural imperatives. California is not so much a community of interconnected persons as a collection of individuals who want nothing less than to be bound in duty to anyone or anything.

Radical Individualism is at the heart of California culture. But it is precisely this that makes California a peculiarly American phenomenon. If California is individualistic, it is because the Anglo-American culture from whence it sprang is individualistic. California is the United States shorn of the culture they have inherited from Europe, from Christendom --- the culture that day by day becomes more and more irrelevant, not only in this but in all the states.

If the rest of the country thinks California weird, let them remember that she is merely their offspring. She both bears the marks of her parent and is an earnest of the nation's future. As California is, so shall all become.

Let our sister states regard this, and tremble.

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