Joan Didion - Where I Was From

The summer encampment, then, had evolved into a special kind of enchanted circle, one in which these captains of American finance and industry could entertain, in what was to most of them an attractively remote setting, the temporary management of that political structure on which their own fortunes ultimately depended. When Dwight Eisenhower visited the Grove in 1950, eleven years before he made public his concern about the military-industrial complex, he traveled on a special train arranged by the president of the Santa Fe Railroad. Domhoff noted that both Henry Kissinger and Melvin Laird, then secretary of defense, were present at the 1970 encampment, as were David M. Kennedy, then secretary of the treasury, and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. John Erlichman, as the guest of Leonard Firestone, represented the White House. Walter J. Hickel, at the time secretary of the interior, was the guest of Fred L. Hartley, the president of Union Oil.

The rituals of the summer encampment were fixed. There were, every day at twelve-thirty, “Lakeside Talks,” informal speeches and briefings, off the record. Kissinger, Laird, and William P. Rogers, then secretary of state, gave Lakeside Talks in 1970; Colin Powell and the chairman of Dow Chemical were scheduled for 1999. Local color was measured: the fight songs sung remained those of the traditional California schools, Berkeley (or, in this venue, “Cal”) and Stanford, yet it was a rule of the Bohemian Club that no Californian, unless he was a member, could be asked as a guest during the two-week midsummer encampment. (As opposed to the May “Spring Jinks” weekend, to which California non-members could be invited.) The list for the 1985 encampment, the most recent complete roster I have seen, shows the members and their “camps,” the hundred-some self-selected groupings situated back through the hills and canyons and off the road to the Russian River. Each camp has a name, for example Stowaway, or Pink Onion, or Silverado Squatters, or Lost Angels.

For the 1985 encampment, Caspar Weinberger was due at Isle of Aves, James Baker III at Woof. “George H. W. Bush” appeared on the list for Hillbillies (his son, George W. Bush, seems not to have been present in 1985, but he was on the list, along with his father and Newt Gingrich, for 1999), as did, among others, Frank Borman, William F. Buckley, Jr., and his son Christopher, Walter Cronkite, A. W. Clausen of the Bank of America and the World Bank, and Frank A. Sprole of Bristol-Myers. George Shultz was on the list for Mandalay, along with William French Smith, Thomas Watson, Jr., Nicholas Brady, Leonard K. Firestone, Peter Flanigan, Gerald Ford, Najeeb Halaby, Philip M. Hawley, J. K. Horton, Edgar F. Kaiser, Jr., Henry Kissinger, John McCone, and two of the Bechtels. This virtual personification of Eisenhowers military-industrial complex notwithstanding, the Spirit of Bohemia, or California, could still be seen, in the traditional tableaux performed at every Grove encampment, to triumph over Mammon, God of Gold, and all his gnomes and promises and bags of treasure:

SPIRIT:

Nay, Mammon. For one thing it cannot buy.

MAMMON

:

What cannot it buy?

SPIRIT:

A happy heart!

The transformation of the Bohemian Club from a lively if frivolous gathering of local free spirits to a nexus of the nations corporate and political interests in many ways mirrored a larger transformation, that of California itself from what it had been, or from what its citizens preferred to believe that it had been, to what it is now, an entirely dependent colony of the invisible empire in which those corporate and political interests are joined. In 1868, four years before he helped to found the Bohemian Club, Henry George, twenty-nine years old and previously unpublished, wrote a piece in the Overland Monthly in which he tried to locate “the peculiar charm of California, which all who have lived here long enough feel.” He concluded that California’s charm resided in the character of its people: “… there has been a feeling of personal independence and equality, a general hopefulness and self-reliance, and a certain large-heartedness and open-handedness which were born of the comparative evenness with which property was distributed, the high standard of wages and of comfort, and the latent feeling of everyone that he might ‘make a strike.’ ” This piece, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” was intended, of course, as an antidote to the enthusiasm then general about the windfall to be realized by giving the state to the Southern Pacific:

Let us see clearly whither we are tending. Increase in population and in wealth past a certain point means simply an approximation to the condition of older countries — the eastern states and Europe…. The truth is, that the completion of the railroad and the consequent great increase of business and population, will not be a benefit to all of us, but only to a portion…. 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 personal independence — the basis of all virtues — nor will it tend to preserve the characteristics which particularly have made Californians proud of their state.

Henry George asked what the railroad would bring, but not too many other people did. Many people would later ask whether it had served the common weal to transform the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys from a seasonal shallow sea to a protected hothouse requiring the annual application on each square mile of 3.87 tons of chemical pesticides, but not too many people asked this before the dams; those who did ask, for whatever reason, were categorized as “environmentalists,” a word loosely used in this part of California to describe any perceived threat to the life of absolute personal freedom its citizens believe they lead. “California likes to be fooled,” Cedarquist, the owner in The Octopus of a failed San Francisco ironworks, advises Presley when they happen to meet at (where else?) the Bohemian Club. “Do you suppose Shelgrim [the Collis P. Huntington figure] could convert the whole San Joaquin Valley into his backyard otherwise?”

“What the Railroad Will Bring Us” remained, into my generation at least, routine assigned reading for California children, one more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen. I used to think that Henry George had overstated the role of the railroad, and in one sense he had: the railroad, of course, was merely the last stage of a process already underway, one that had its basis in the character of the settlement, in the very quality recommended by “What the Railroad Will Bring Us” as “a general hopefulness and self-reliance,” or “a feeling of personal independence or equality,” or “the latent feeling of everyone that he might ‘make a strike.’ ” This process, one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their (it now seems) entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in other words the pauperization of California, had in fact begun at the time Americans first entered the state, took what they could, and, abetted by the native weakness for boosterism, set about selling the rest.

Josiah Royce understood this negative side of the California character, but persisted in what was for him the essential conviction that the California community was so positive a force as to correct its own character. He allowed that “a general sense of social irresponsibility is, even today, the average Californian’s easiest failing.” Still, he seemed temperamentally unable to consider an “average Californian” who would not, in the end, see that his own best interests lay in cooperation, in the amelioration of differences, in a certain willingness to forego the immediate windfall for the larger or even his own long-term good. This was the same “average Californian” who, by the year Royce wrote, 1886, had already sold half the state to the Southern Pacific and was in the process of mortgaging the rest to the federal government. For most of the next hundred years, kept aloft first by oil and then by World War Two and finally by the Cold War and the largesse of the owners and managers who would arrive in Gulfstreams for the annual encampment at Bohemian Grove, that average Californian had seen his “easiest failing” yield only blue skies.