Lessons to Be Drawn From a Distant Landscape

For all those convinced the Green Party or Berkeley-based MoveOn.org is full of wild-eyed radicals, it’s worth remembering what the country’s ideological landscape looked like 70 or so years ago--a span less than that of the average lifetime.

Today, more than half of U.S. households own stocks; back then, more than half of Americans said socialism was good or at least had an open mind about it. Today, it’s a book like “1776” that captures our imaginations; back then, it was “The Coming American Revolution” that did. Today, conservatives are in a lather about the leanings of a few blue states; back then, it was the specter of a wholly Red nation that aroused them.

I thought about how much things have shifted as I absorbed the images of Depression-era California that grace this week’s issue of West (“Brush Strokes for Just Plain Folks,” page 20). Many painters of this period “had once aspired to the ‘ideal’ art career--a detached life devoted to . . . pursuing beauty,” historian David P. Peeler notes in his book “Hope Among Us Yet.” Suddenly “aroused and awakened,” they began portraying “the suffering of workers and the poor and the greed of the wealthy.”

They were hardly the only ones stirring class conflict. Lincoln Steffens--who had traveled to Russia in 1919 and came back declaring, “I have seen the future and it works”--edited a lively lefty journal called the Pacific Weekly from Carmel. In San Francisco, longshoreman Harry Bridges agitated along the waterfront, while the farm fields of the Central and Imperial valleys convulsed with Communist-led strike activity.

Who in those days could have guessed that the union movement would become irrelevant in many respects? That Communism would fall and the Soviet Union shatter? That the only revolution to take place would be Ronald Reagan’s?

And yet, there are still lessons to be drawn from that restless time--about the need to safeguard our civil liberties, about the dangers of ignoring those among us who can’t make ends meet.

We don’t face a Depression today, but we do live in an age when the gap between rich and poor is growing ever wider. This is especially troublesome in California, where so many are struggling to make a go of it. A recent report by the California Budget Project found that a family with two working parents now needs an annual income of nearly $64,000 to attain even a modest standard of living in the Golden State.

I guess that, in this way, at least one thing hasn’t changed since Woody Guthrie sang out in 1937:

California is a garden of Eden, a paradise

to live in or see.

But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot

If you ain’t got the do re mi.