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CounterPunch Exclusives

A City is a Body of Fate

Vintage postcard featuring the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.

David Reid’s foreword to “Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See” by Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew, and Jim Miller

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.”

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........

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