The Californiacs | Page 6

Francisco."

Now I am by no means a rabid New Englander. I love the New England
scene and I have the feeling for it that we all have for the place in
which we played as children. Most New Englanders have a kind of
temperamental shyness. They are still like the English from whom they
are descended. It is difficult for them to talk about the things on which
they feel most deeply. The typical New Englander would discuss his
native place with no more ease than he would discuss his father and
mother. In California I often had the impulse to break through that
inhibiting silence - to talk about Massachusetts; the lovely, tender,
tamed, domesticated country; its rolling, softly-contoured,
maternal-looking hills; its forests like great green cathedral chapels; its
broad, placid rivers, its little turbulent ones; its springs and runnels and
waterfalls and rivulets all silver-shining and silver-sounding; the
myriads of lakes and countless ponds that make the world look as
though the blue sky had broken and fallen in pieces over the landscape;
the spring when first the arbutus comes up pink and delicate through
the snow and later the fields begin to glimmer with the white of white
violets, to flash with the purple of purple ones, and the children hang
May baskets at your door; the summer when the fields are buried
knee-deep under a white drift of daisies or sealed by the gold planes of
buttercups, and the old lichened stone walls are smothered in
blackberry vines; the autumn with the goldenrod and blue asters; the
woods like conflagrations burning gold and orange, flaming crimson
and scarlet; and especially that fifth season, the Indian summer, when
the vistas are tunnels of blue haze and the air tastes of honey and wine;
then winter and the first snow (does anybody, brought up in snow
country, ever outgrow the thrill of the first fluttering flakes?) the
marvel of the fairy frost world into which the whole country turns.
Do you suppose I ever talked about Massachusetts? Not once. And so I
have one criticism to bring against the Californiac. He is a person to
whom you cannot talk about home. He grows restive the instant you get
off the subject of California. Praise of any other place to his mind
implies a criticism of California.
On the other hand, that frenzied patriotism has its wonderful and its
beautiful side. It is a result partly of the startling beauty and fecundity
of California and partly of a geographical remoteness and sequestration
which turned the Californians in on themselves for everything. To it is

due much of the extraordinary development of California. For to the
average Californian, the best is not only none too good for California,
but she can have nothing else. Californians even those not suffering
from an offensive case of Californoia - speak of their State in
reverential terms. To hear Maud Younger - known everywhere as the
"millionaire waitress" and the most devoted labor-fan in the country -
pronounce the word California, should be a lesson to any actor in
emotional sound values. The thing that struck me most on my first visit
to California was that boosting instinct. In store windows everywhere, I
saw signs begging the passer-by to root for this development project or
that. Several years ago, passing down Market street, I ran into a huge
crowd gathered at the Lotta Fountain. I stopped to investigate. Moving
steadily from a top to a lower window of one of the newspaper offices,
as though unwound from a reel, ran a long strip of paper covered with a
list of figures. To this list, new figures were constantly added. They
were the sums of money being subscribed at that very moment for the
Exposition. Applause and cheers greeted each additional sum. That was
the financial germ from which grew the wonderful Arabian Nights city
by the bay. It was typically Californian - that scene - and typically
Californian the spirit back of it. And four years later, when the outbreak
of the war brought temporary panic, there was no diminution in that
spirit. Whether it was a "Buying-Day," a "Beach Day," an
"Automomobile Parade," a "Prosperity Dinner," San Francisco was
always ready to insist that everything was going well. It was the same
spirit which inspired a whole city, the day the Exposition opened, to
rise early to walk to the grounds, and to stand, an avalanche of
humanity, waiting for the gates to part. It was the same spirit which
inspired the whole city, the night the Exposition ended, to stay for the
closing ceremonies until midnight, and then, without even picking a
flower from the abundance they were abandoning, silently and
sorrowfully to walk home.
Let's look into the claims of these Californiacs.