The Frontier of Leisure in California and the Shaping of Modern America (review)

Anaheim Public Library, Bookmobile, Interior View. Ca. 1960. Photograph. Accession #P1756. Courtesy of the Anaheim Public Library. Depicted here is the first bookmobile operated by the Anaheim Public Library, purchased in 1958. The history of the bookmobile in the United States began with a horse and wagon at the Washington County Free Library in Hagerstown, Maryland; during the 1950s and '60s, bookmobiles proliferated with an increase in literacy and a decentralization of the reading public.

"Ranch houses suit any climate," declared House Beautiful in 1947. With its rambling, casual floor plan and its sliding doors and patios blurring outdoors and in, the ranch house might epitomize sunny Southern California, but it was equally at home in Connecticut or Illinois, the author of the article insisted (House Beautiful, January 1947, 61). For the ranch, more than just a house style, was "a Way of Living," a means of "planning house and site together" to achieve comfort, privacy, and "outdoor living in any season anywhere" (House Beautiful 66, 61, 66).

This idea—that Southern California spawned not just a style but a lifestyle, premised on outdoor recreation in the privacy of one's own yard and home—is the core of Lawrence Culver's new monograph. We have long needed a history of Southern California's distinctive culture of leisure and its consequences, and now in this superb book we have it.

A richness of recent scholarship has illuminated Southern California's cultural, racial, political, and environmental histories. Culver breaks new ground by revealing the central role leisure played in all of them. Leisure drove Southern California's growth from the late nineteenth century on as boosters promised tourists and new residents alike a relaxed, pastoral retreat from the East's urban chaos. Leisure reshaped environmental attitudes when Southern Californians learned to value nature more for personal pleasure than for national greatness or resource wealth, and leisure molded architecture and planning, as houses, yards, and subdivisions were designed to give homeowners their own private recreational spaces. Key to Culver's argument, leisure helped define social difference—including the very idea of "whiteness" in a racially diverse region—as these private, backyard leisure spaces took precedence over public ones and people of color found themselves barred from both. And not least, leisure catalyzed a significant social and political shift when consumers came to value their private recreational domains over community and collective enterprise. In short, leisure forged a world of equal parts "opportunity and oppression, happiness and hardship" (3); one of this book's great strengths is that Culver refuses to cast it in simplistic black-or-white terms. Especially after World War II, this culture of leisure would spread beyond Southern California, becoming America's middle-class, suburban culture writ large.

Not a comprehensive history of Southern California leisure, Culver's book instead focuses on several pivotal people and places. Readers of this journal should especially appreciate his chapter on Charles Fletcher Lummis, the turn-ofthe-century author whose self-professed "scholarly" writings on the scenery and Native cultures of the Southwest helped make Los Angeles a major tourist destination. Here Culver links Southern California's recreational rise to the longer history of American conquest in the Southwest, as Anglo boosters like Lummis relegated indigenous Mexicans and Indians to a romantic, idyllic past while also expecting them to work in the present so whites might play. Another chapter considers the history of recreational segregation in Los Angeles. Though leisure anchored LA's civic identity, Culver shows, the city and county prioritized private over public recreation and strove to exclude nonwhites from what little public park and beach space there was. African Americans, in particular, fought back, claiming and creating recreational settings for themselves. But LA's legacy would be one of recreational reinforcing of residential segregation, a sad blueprint for suburbia in the rest of America.

Two...