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Reviews in American History 33.4 (2005) 561-565



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California Dreaming

Douglas Cazaux Sackman. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 386 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00.

June 2005 was an unsettling month for residents of California. First came a huge landslide in Laguna Beach that damaged or destroyed nearly thirty homes and generated a fresh round of anxiety among residents and scientists about soil instability in the state's coastal areas.1 Less than three weeks later, the region experienced four significant earthquakes in just five days, leading to the inevitable speculation about whether the long-rumored Big One was close at hand. To some observers in the (much less geologically volatile) heartland, such events—coupled with recent reports of rolling brownouts and soaring real estate prices—served to confirm the notion that California is merely a string of miseries fronting as a state. And one can hardly blame its detractors for wondering why anyone would want to live there; after all, the leading exponent of the Golden State apocalypse is Mike Davis, whose books proudly identify him as a native son of Southern California.2

Orange Empire, Douglas C. Sackman's expansive and challenging new book, reminds us that there was indeed a time—and not so long ago—when many Americans considered California nothing less than Eden, a dreamscape characterized by sunny skies, fertile land, and infinite financial opportunity. This image of California was inscribed into the state's very name, which supposedly derived from a popular sixteenth-century Spanish romance about a golden island in the East Indies. That book fired the imaginations of the conquistadors, thus serving in a way as an early example of the promotional literature that would later lure Anglos—and capital—to the Golden State. Orange Empire reveals the overwhelming importance of such boosterism to the rapid development of California between the 1870s and 1940s, as growers and advertisers invested huge sums in selling the state's mythic bounty to the larger American public. At the same time, Sackman uncovers the enormous costs of this imperial expansion borne by the land and the people who worked it, thus exposing the roots of the dystopian vision that defines California for so many people today. [End Page 561]

Readers might approach the book with a hint of skepticism after reading the first line of the jacket copy, which heralds Orange Empire as an "innovative history of California." This raises a pair of doubts. First, although the role of citriculture in California's early history will be familiar to many readers, oranges likely seem more fixed in the mind as a Florida phenomenon (think Tropicana Field and the Orange Bowl, for instance). This association is itself the product of aggressive advertising by growers in the Sunshine State, as well as the fact that Florida is easily the leading domestic producer of orange juice, which is replacing the consumption of fresh oranges in the United States as the preferred source of Vitamin C. Second, if choosing a single symbol through which to tell the story of California, one might wonder if a railroad line, a reel of celluloid, or perhaps even a surfboard captures the modern economic and cultural significance of the state as well or even better than a piece of fruit.

Sackman closes the door on any such questions right from the outset of his book, demonstrating that the orange industry is indeed a wonderful frame through which to view the transformation of California from the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. The ascent of citriculture starting in the last quarter of the nineteenth century richly illustrates a handful of major themes in the state's history while helping to explain California's powerful hold on the American (and international) imagination. Orange Empire opens with the most important of these notions: the image of the Golden State as a garden of limitless possibility. This vision, of course, had a basis in fact; as Sackman explains in chapter one, Southern California was endowed with...

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