Quotes from Carey McWilliams

To own an orange grove in Southern California is to live on the real gold coast of American agriculture.

All of these cities and towns are, in a sense, suburbs of Los Angeles. . . . dominated by Los Angeles.

Some seem to regard existence here as camping out, and never make a real home, living in their trunks for years. Even those that have homes are making changes all the time, trading one for another, or building afresh. yes, really, it's almost like living in a big tent, with houses instead of tents.

Los Angeles has always been a boom town, chronically unable to . . . integrate its new population.

Successful agricultural colonies existed in San Bernardino, colonized by the Mormons.

On entering Southern California, the excursion trains made special stops to permit the tourists to visit Smiley Heights in Redlands, to lunch at the Mission Inn.

Nearly every special emigrant train carried a clergyman who conducted Sunday services.

By some chemistry of her own, California was triumphantly blending the races in to a single type.

There is something disturbing about this corner of America, a sinister suggestion of transience. There is a quality, hostile to men in the very earth and air here.

Still higher, and usually in the form of a dark-green horseshoe curve around the rim of the valley, is the orange belt.

Wherever citrus production dominates, a rather distinctive social life has long existed. This citrus belt complex of peoples, institutions, and relationships has no parallel in rural life in America. It is neither town nor country, neither rural nor urban. It is a world of its own.

The typical orange-grove owner is a gentleman farmer who has purchased a suburban estate as a means of acquiring status.

The children of the grove owners, oppressed by the placidity of . . . Redlands, have begun to leave the area.

The citrus belt . . . has three dominant symbols: the church, the orange, and the 'no-trespass' signs.

In all the citrus-belt towns . . . orthodox Protestantism is deeply rooted among the older residents, a pious and conservative lot.

The idea, so current in our time, that Southern California is peopled by idlers, oldsters, playboys, and crackpots.

Imagination, writes Frank Fenton, 'had run around this city like an artistic child. Somewhere it showed a pure and lovely talent. Somewhere it was crude and humorously grotesque.

Towns do not develop here,' wrote Sarah Comstock, 'they are instantly created, synthetic communities of a strangely artificial world.

The citrus-belt communities are also made up of outsiders, but, not having been periodically inundated by new migrants, they have managed to retain a degree of homogeneity and compactness.

It is worth noting that the writers who have most vividly captured the feel of the California landscape have been native sons, like John Steinbeck, or long residents like Robinson Jeffers.

A Terrestrial Paradise, an Amazon Island, abounding in gold and certainly 'infested with many griffins.