“It would be easy for us to sit back and enjoy the results of the past. But we can’t do this. We can’t stop and become satisfied and content. We must live up to our heritage, go on to better and greater things for California.”

Didion quotes the contents of her speech from her 8th-grade graduation, which she titled “Our California Heritage.” In revisiting this speech, Didion identifies the naivety of her younger perspective and the irony of presenting this speech to a class full of recent migrants to the region—those with little connection or duty to California’s heritage. Didion uses this speech and its confused understanding of California as a jumping off point for her book’s investigation into The Contradictions of Californian Identity.

“Predicated as it was on this general notion of cutting loose and striking it rich, the California settlement had tended to attract drifters of loosely entrepreneurial inclination, the hunter-gatherers of the frontier rather than its cultivators, and to reward most fully those who perceived most quickly that the richest claim of all lay not in the minefields but in Washington.”

Didion describes the kinds of people who flocked to California, who bought into its promise of prosperity. She uses the metaphor of hunter-gatherers to illustrate the kind of restless activity of these settlers, especially when compared to the “cultivators” that settled elsewhere and were more patient in their endeavors. Throughout the text, Didion highlights how this restlessness for the next venture formed the very basis of Californian life.

“The names were so deeply embedded in the stories I heard as a child that when I happened at age twenty to see the Green River, through the windows of a train crossing Wyoming, I was astonished by this apparent evidence that it actually existed, a fact on the ground, there to be seen—entirely unearned—by anyone passing by.”

The crossing story is a central motif in the text that helps support Didion’s exploration of The Romanticization of History and the Land. This quotation demonstrates how engrained the story’s mythology about place is in California, to the point that Didion feels like seeing these sites without also undergoing immense struggle makes the landscape “unearned.”

“The redemptive power of the crossing was, nonetheless, the fixed idea of the California settlement, and one that raised a further question: for what, exactly, and at what cost, had one been redeemed? When you jettison others so as not to be ‘caught by the winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains,’ do you deserve not to be caught? When you survive at the cost of Miss Gilmore and her brother, do you survive at all?”

In this quotation, Didion asks a series of rhetorical questions about the hidden immorality and inhumanity in the crossing story’s celebrated elements of survival. Before this, Didion shared a story of orphans who were left in the wilderness by their party because they were afraid of losing time on the trail. These questions emphasize the precarity of California’s virtuous vision of itself, which the crossing story proves is built on disingenuous understandings of its own history.

“They had no love for their land. They were not attached to the soil. They worked their ranches as a quarter of a century before they had worked their mines…To get all there was out of the land, to squeeze it dry, to exhaust it, seemed their policy. When, at last, the land worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then, they would all have made fortunes. They did not care.”

Didion quotes Frank Norris’s The Octopus, and its description of the typical California farmer in the early settlement days. Norris’s farmer characters reflected the real attitude of men in the era who saw California’s land not as something to be revered, but something to be exploited, something that could make them rich. Didion points to such descriptions as evidence against The Romanticization of History and the Land, as the simple agrarian lifestyle so many people believed was their heritage was in reality a landscape of capitalistic competition and exploitation.

“One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.”

One consequence of The Romanticization of History and the Land that Didion here identifies is Californians’ inability to accept that their history and their continued existence has concrete effects on the land. By placing human civilization and the natural landscape on different planes of existence, Californians absolve themselves of blame for any harm they inflict on their environment.

“This conviction of entitlement was another familiar California note, and a particularly complicated one, since the idea of depending on the government of course ran counter to the preferred self-image of most Californians. Yet such dependence was, even then, almost total.”

Didion critically analyzes Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon, and its characters who feel entitled to a parcel of land because of their historic and familial connection to it. Didion extracts from this literary work the real Californian belief in their entitlement to the land while also holding firm to their distaste for government “handouts.” This passage speaks to The Contradictions of Californian Identity.

“This crowding of people into immense cities, this aggregation of wealth into large lumps, this marshalling of men into big gangs under the control of the great ‘captains of industry,’ does not tend to foster the personal independence—the basis of all virtues—nor will it tend to preserve the characteristics which particularly have made Californians proud of their state.”

This quotation comes from Henry George’s “What the Railroads Will Bring Us,” an essay Didion references throughout the text. George illuminates one of The Contradictions of Californian Identity, namely the willingness to put Californian life at the mercy of corporations and the federal government all the while espousing the state’s supposedly unique independence.

“New people, we were given to understand, remained ignorant of our special history, insensible to the hardships endured to make it, blind not only to the dangers the place still presented but to the shared responsibilities its continued habitation demanded.”

“New people” are a motif in the text that supports Didion’s investigation of The Contradictions of Californian Identity. This quotation illustrates the popular definition of “new” people, who are set apart from “real” Californians based on their understanding of the land and their social responsibilities. Didion comes to find such disdain for new people ironic, as Californian society was built on a steady influx of migrants to the region; in fact, the migration was so steady that it prevented any solid sense of community from ever taking hold.

“‘I can look at these paintings and look back,’ Joan Irvine Smith told Art in California about the collection she bought with the proceeds of looking exclusively, and to a famous degree, forward. ‘I can see California as it was and as we will never see it again.’”

Didion quotes Joan Irvine Smith’s explanation for her art exhibition of Californian landscape oil paintings. Connecting to the theme The Romanticization of History and the Land, Joan sees in the paintings a nostalgic vision of the California of her past, one that can no longer exist in the modern, industrial world. Such nostalgia for the untouched land, Didion argues, covers up Joan’s own involvement in changing that landscape, a dissonance common in visions of “old” California.

“‘Naively, you could say that Lakewood was the American dream made affordable for a generation of industrial workers who in the preceding generation could never aspire to that kind of ownership,’ he said one morning when we were talking about the way the place was developed.”

In this quotation, Donald J. Waldie, Lakewood’s public information officer, describes the early promise of the Lakewood subdivision as a place built on the American dream of home ownership and prosperity. This description identifies what Didion sees as the major conflict in the Lakewood identity: Industrial and low-wage workers co-opting the identity of the middle class when that is not the material reality of their lives. Didion uses Lakewood as a case study for the larger state-wide issues in Californian political identity.

“Good citizens were encouraged, when partying failed, when playing ball failed, when they finally noticed that the jobs had gone to Salt Lake or St. Louis, to see their problem as one caused by ‘the media,’ or by ‘condoms in the schools,’ or by less-good citizens, or non-citizens.”

Rather than look critically at themselves and their society, Didion finds that residents of Lakewood would rather use external scapegoats to explain their woes. This quotation includes the motif of “new people” through the mention of “non-citizens,” as Lakewood primarily blames their declining economy on an influx of immigrants, since they’re unwilling to interrogate their near-exclusive dependence on the Douglas plant and the government.

“‘My psychology and philosophy is this: I’m a standup guy, I love my sons, I’m proud of their accomplishments.’ Dana, his father said, was at that time ‘looking for work,’ a quest complicated by the thirteen felony burglary and forgery charges on which he was then awaiting trial.”

Donald Belman here symbolizes the negative consequences of The Romanticization of History and the Land, as by holding onto Lakewood’s historic identity of middle-class American success, he is unable to see or accept the troubles in his family, and refuses to identify the source of these troubles. Didion highlights this dissonance by juxtaposing Donald’s praises of his sons with the reality of their unemployment and criminal charges.

“We believed in fresh starts. We believed in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode. We believed in the wildcatter who leased arid land at two and a half cents an acre and brought in Kettleman Hills, fourteen million barrels of crude in its first three years. We believed in all the ways that apparently played-out possibilities could while we slept turn green and golden.”

Didion describes her early understanding of California’s class system, which she believed wasn’t as permanent as in other areas of the country because of the luck intrinsic to the California project. She lists several famous stories about individuals suddenly striking it big and making huge fortunes, even when conditions seemed dire. This quotation expands the theme of The Role of Personal Experience in Shaping Political Understanding, as the stories of Didion’s youth shaped how she perceived Californian society.

“The language used, like the geography, had worked to encyst the problem in certain communities, enabling Los Angeles at large to see the layoffs as abstractions, the predictable if difficult detritus of geopolitical change, in no way logically connected to whether the mini-mall at the corner made it or went under.”

One consequence of California’s geographic isolation from the rest of the country, Didion argues, is its belief that the state is insulated from the political and economic events of the country at large. In this example, residents of Los Angeles don’t think they will be affected by aerospace industry layoffs in the rest of the state because they believe, even on an intrastate level, that they are separate from and unaffected by other regions.

“‘It was smart business to put a plant in Macon,’ a former McDonnell Douglas executive told Ralph Vartabedian of The Los Angeles Times. ‘There wouldn’t be a C-17 without Nunn’s support. There is nothing illegal or immoral about wanting to keep your program funded.’”

Didion quotes a McDonnell Douglas executive’s explanation for moving its production out of Lakewood and into Macon, Georgia, where a sympathetic senator lived. This quotation exemplifies the dependence of California’s economy on the federal government, as McDonnell Douglas felt it was necessary for their continued existence to court those politicians who could secure them contracts. In the process, however, the Lakewood community suffers, as they tied their prosperity so closely to this manufacturing plant.

“Such was the power of the story on which I had grown up that this thought came to me as a kind of revelation: the settlement of the west, however inevitable, had not uniformly tended to the greater good, nor had it on every level benefitted even those who reaped its most obvious rewards.”

While Didion worked in Oregon on a story about a community’s refusal to give up a nerve gas storage facility, she suddenly understood the belief at the very heart of the confused Californian identity, namely that of selfish opportunism. This basic facet of the California experiment underpins many of The Contradictions of Californian Identity and goes unacknowledged in favor of more virtuous stories.

“The importance of recording these memories was unquestioned: the flood and the levees and the two-story house on the Grape Vine Ranch had become, like the potato masher that crossed the plains, like the books that did not get jettisoned on the Umpqua River, evidence of family endurance, proof of our worth, indistinguishable from the crossing story itself.”

Didion alludes back to the Cornwall potato masher to illustrate the kind of significance imbued into the stories her ancestors felt compelled to record on random scraps of paper or paper-like substances. These stories were heirlooms in themselves, meant to be passed down and preserved by later generations, and to be revered for their showings of resilience. This passage also speaks to The Role of Personal Experience in Shaping Political Understanding in once again highlighting how family history and personal circumstances shaped young Didion’s view of California.

“All this was true, and yet there was in Run River something that was not true, a warp, a persistent suggestion that these changes brought about by World War Two had in some way been resisted by ‘true’ Californians. Had not any such resistance been confined to the retrospect? Were not ‘changes’ and ‘boom years’ what the California experience had been about since the first American settlements?”

Didion performs a close reading of her own work, Run River, to explore how she uncritically absorbed and believed all of the lies California told about itself. Didion admits that she once saw herself as a “true” Californian and promoted this idea in her book, but in retrospect, she sees how this belief was built on a misunderstanding of the Californian identity.

“Discussion of how California has ‘changed,’ then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s and Gilroy as it was fifteen years ago and Gilroy as it was when my father and I ate short ribs at the Milias Hotel are three pictures with virtually no overlap, a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it.”

This quotation explores the theme The Romanticization of History and the Land and explains Didion’s conclusion that every resident’s vision of “old” California is entirely subjective. No matter how long a resident has lived in the state—whether they were born there or moved there later in life—they will always long for California as they first saw it, and they will always see any changes to their neighborhoods as a movement farther and farther away from this historic ideal.

“Then I remembered, then I realized.

We were seeing nothing ‘new’ here.

We were seeing one more version of making our deal with the Southern Pacific.

We were seeing one more version of making our bed with the federal government.

We were seeing one more enthusiastic fall into a familiar California error, that of selling the future of the place we lived to the highest bidder, which was in this instance the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.”

Connecting to the theme The Contradictions of Californian Identity, Didion explains that the modern, enthusiastic acceptance of the prison industry in Californian cities fits neatly into California’s history of selling itself out to whatever business was booming at the time. Didion uses a repetitive anaphoric structure in this quotation to at once emphasize her discovery, while also mimicking the discovery’s natural position in California’s historical pattern.

“Which of us in that sunroom could not have abandoned Miss Gilmore and her brother on the Little Sandy? Which of us in that sunroom did not at some level share in the shameful but entrenched conviction that to be bothersome was to warrant abandonment? Which of us in that sunroom would not see the rattlesnake and fail to kill it? Which of us in that sunroom would not sell the cemetery?”

In this latter chapter, Didion asks a string of rhetorical questions that allude back to discussions from previous chapters about Californian identity. Didion mentions the abandonment of the orphaned Miss Gilmore, her not killing a rattlesnake, and her family’s selling of their ancestral cemetery. In all of these examples, Didion sees an unbroken tradition of self-preservation at the cost of one’s neighbors, which she identifies as the very core of The Contradictions of Californian Identity.

“The office was crowded, women and children leaning against the plate glass windows and spilling outside. When our mother came back out onto the sidewalk she was crying: it seemed to be the end of some rope, one day too many on which there would be no place for us to stay.

The blank dreariness, Sarah Royce wrote.

Without house or home.”

Didion describes the scene at the military housing office where her mother tried and failed to secure housing for the family while Didion’s father was stationed in the Midwest during the war. Didion explicitly compares this period of her life to the motif of the crossing story when she alludes to Sarah Royce’s account of her crossing to the West. Didion uses this genre to understand her own experience, drawing out the feelings of hopelessness and fear of confronting the unknown.