FROM EAST TO WEST: California and the Making of the American Mind.<i> By Stephen Schwartz</i> . <i> The Free Press: 542 pp., $30</i>

With the exception of a few cryptic suggestions in its epilogue, “From East to West” is not what it claims to be. It is not, that is, in its primary content and intent, an investigation into how California has shaped American culture. It is, rather, a learned, eccentric, sprawling, gossipy, opinionated, frequently outrageous, even occasionally quasi-paranoid history of the far left in California by Stephen Schwartz, a longtime San Francisco Chronicle reporter and North Beach bohemian, Trotskyite in his sympathies and fiercely anti-Stalinist.

First, let us dispense with objections and qualifications to this book, for they should not obscure its eccentric vitality as a panoramic narrative tract. I have a suspicion that the packaging of “From East to West” came from either a New York-based editor or literary agent or some combination thereof in an effort to frame Schwartz’s history of the left in California so as to confer on it national significance.

Such a study of California’s influence on the national culture, however--should Schwartz have truly attempted it--could not have proceeded without consideration of, among other topics, progressivism, branch banking, the rise of the University of California, mass media politics, the defense industry, Hollywood (aside from the story of its communist infiltration, which Schwartz does tell), the human potential movement, Silicon Valley and so forth. All these, rather--together with cryptic allusions to other truly shaping forces--are huddled by Schwartz in an epilogue. The real business of “From East to West,” meanwhile, is Schwartz’s one-man crusade to show how Russian-controlled Stalinism infected and corrupted an indigenous left-utopian California tradition.

The basic ambition of the book does not become apparent until midway through the narrative. “From East to West” begins, in fact, as a more or less traditional history. Brilliantly, Schwartz anchors this American story in the utopian ambitions of the Native American, Spanish and Mexican past. For Schwartz (and this will become increasingly true of all histories of California to be written in the 21st century) has discovered that one cannot begin to decode American California without reference to its pre-1846 conquest cultures. His understanding of the vision of the good life encoded in Native American cultures--blending, as they do, sensuous physicality and spiritualism, hence establishing the DNA code of California psychology--constitutes one of the strongest parts of this book.

His discussion of the Spanish colonial era is likewise impressive. Never, even from the most accomplished of academic historians, have I read a more compelling account of how a largely Catalan utopianism pervaded the Spanish thrust northward into Alta California after 1769. A self-schooled expert in Catalan and Majorcan culture, personally connected to the leading scholars in this field, Schwartz makes a genuine contribution to the understanding of California in anchoring the commonwealth upon a foundation of Catalan utopian dreams, themselves building upon the utopian dreams of Native American California.

The center of “From East to West,” Parts 2 and 3 of this six-part book, consists of a hurried, occasionally insightful history of radicalism and class conflict in California from the American frontier period into the Great Depression. Like Louis in Casablanca, Schwartz rounds up the usual suspects--economist Henry George, the Big Four of railroad fame, anti-Chinese agitator Denis Kearney, Indian rights activist and novelist Helen Hunt Jackson, historian and philosopher Josiah Royce, writers Jack London and Frank Norris, and reform editor Fremont Older, together with such lesser-known figures from the story of unionism in this era as maritime activist Sigismund Danielewicz and conspirator Burnette Haskell--and does a competent, if rushed, history of how California in the 19th century became, in more ways than one, the Left Coast of the nation.

But it is in Part 4 of his book, “Red Years,” that Schwartz really gets down to business. If there is a thesis to “From East to West” (and one must extract this thesis on one’s own), it is this: Beginning in the 1930s and rising to incandescence through the 1940s and into the mid-1950s, the indigenous left tradition of California, which was in so many ways the prime expression of the state’s intrinsic utopianism, became increasingly controlled by pro-Stalinist communists.

Red-baiting is, of course, a passe enterprise, now that the Soviet Union has collapsed. Even Schwartz admits, in fact, that much of his story has now assumed the proportions of an archeological dig into a buried and increasingly irrelevant past. No one worries much these days that the commies are trying to take over the country. On the other hand, the question of the influence of Soviet-controlled communism in the agricultural strikes of the 1930s, the San Francisco-based General Strike of 1934, the longshoremen’s and other maritime unions through the 1950s and Hollywood remains a root canal among contemporary left-liberals. Why? First, because Soviet-controlled communism, as Schwartz and other less impassioned historians have shown, was truly a force in California in these years. Second, the left still loathes--and fears--the McCarthy era, when the documenting of this influence degenerated into fearsome demagoguery.

On the one hand, left-liberals are ambivalent, even fearful, of admitting, as Schwartz seeks to demonstrate, just how pervasive Soviet-directed communism was in California through the 1940s. Such an association, after all, tends to weaken a belief in the continuities of an indigenous American left devoid of foreign influences. Tom Paine is one thing, even the slave-holder Thomas Jefferson, but no one these days wishes to be associated with Joseph Stalin, whom continuing research has revealed to be among the great mass murderers of world history.

It is not a pretty story that Schwartz tells. It involves spying, perjury, union thuggery, even murder. Icons such as Harry Bridges and Robert Oppenheimer are the recipients of shocking charges. The Hollywood Ten are qualified in their martyrs’ status. In the course of making charge after charge of Stalinist influence or outright control, Schwartz will be criticized for being paranoid. But as another Schwartz--Delmore--has pointed out, even paranoids have enemies. However mistaken in one or another instance, Stephen Schwartz must also be presumed to be more than occasionally correct in his evaluations, however disturbing.

Any such discussion of communist influences on the California left, moreover, raises the specter of a Red-baiting era that swept the innocent along with the guilty into its dragnet. If Joseph Stalin is no longer in favor, then neither is state Sen. Jack Tenney, composer of “Mexicali Rose” and, locally, the most furious Red-baiter of them all, whose investigations literally drove Thomas Mann to slip quietly out of Pacific Palisades and spend the rest of his life in Switzerland.

Left-liberals, then, reading Schwartz’s account, will be doubly furious. On the one hand, they will be angry at being reminded of just how pervasive and effective various Soviet-directed overt and covert operations were in California in the era under discussion. On the other hand, they will fear, perhaps justifiably, a recurrence of Red-baiting on Schwartz’s part. Even I, an old-fashioned non-commie Democrat, grew prickly when Schwartz described longtime congressman and former San Francisco Mayor John F. Shelley, a lifelong Irish Catholic from the Mission district, as “a Communist-leaning labor leader.” Who would be next on Schwartz’s hit list, I asked myself, San Francisco Archbishop Edward Hanna?

Schwartz can be expected to take in stride such knocks, some of them justifiable. Having long maintained a highly personal quarrel with what he considers the Stalinist hijacking of the California left, Schwartz has developed a rhinoceros-like imperviousness to political correctness, which he might very well consider the latest manifestation of Stalinism in American life. And besides, deep within this book resides another thesis, semi-coherent, never fully released: Art is superior to politics. Art endures long after the sound and fury of politics have passed.

The real heroes of “From East to West” or, at least, the figures who release in Schwartz an otherwise blocked capacity for approval, are the avant-garde artists of California, such as composers Henry Cowell, Harry Partch and John Cage; poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth (the one unambiguous hero Schwartz allows himself); poet Robert Duncan; painters Clyfford Still and Elmer Bischoff; and the sui generis Jaime de Angulo, the Big Sur-based psychoanalyst, folklorist, anthropologist and cross-dresser. Schwartz shows a special affinity for such aesthetic personalities who, in both their life and their work, act out the yearnings, complications and unresolved conflicts of their time.

In an era of tidy and highly conceptualized academic studies, “From East to West” runs counter to the current. However highly researched, it should not be compared to formal history, at least history as it is today practiced in the academy. It is, rather, like Whittaker Chambers’ “Witness,” an effort by a wounded protagonist to set the record straight. Born and raised in the old California left, with its imaginative and intellectual linkages to Henry George and the radicals of turn-of-the-century San Francisco, Schwartz is determined to document what happened to this naive but compelling tradition when the Soviet Union, one way or another, co-opted its program. Like Chambers, Schwartz has his faults. He can be arbitrary and opinionated. (It is most difficult, for example, to see John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” as Stalinist cinema.) In his heart of hearts, moreover, he still yearns for approval from those he would castigate, as his constant citations of Mike Davis so poignantly bear out. Yet Schwartz has written a book that is as tumultuous, conflicted, idiosyncratic, autodidactic and relevant as the California tradition it seeks to rescue and restore.