The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940

7. Popular Amusements and the Fight for Moral Authority in Southern California

Chapter Seven Popular Amusements and the Fight for Moral Authority in Southern California In June 1965, San Diego Magazine published the 1935 San Diego fair memories of Sam Erwine, the great-grandson to a San Diego mayor. As a teenager during the uncertain 1930s, Erwine remembered little about the “official fair,” the efforts of the federal government and American business to deliver the culture of abundance to Southern California. He explained how the exposition defined his generation but escaped local memory. Erwine complained, “when you try to discuss it [the 1935 Exposition] with people who have come to San Diego in recent years, they generally look at you in disbelief.”1 With 75 percent of the county workforce employed in high-wage aerospace jobs, Erwine lamented that few remembered how the event promoted the American Dream in Southern California and brought demographic growth to the region. He believed the recent arrivals to San Diego in the 1960s “cannot conceive the tremendous impact with which the Exposition hit and dispelled the town’s depression doldrums.”2 Ed Fletcher Jr. and Oscar Cotton were old-timers who remembered the exposition from the “inside,” when Cotton recalled the fair “gave San Diegans an excuse to remodel and paint and refurbish old homes and other buildings all over the city.” “It spurred property owners and the city to pave the downtown streets,” he said, “and do many other things to give us a ‘modern ’ city.”3 Point of view and generations determined the legacy of the 1935 exposition for the present generation. Despite fond memories of modern progress, the old-timers forgot how the 1935 exposition had shaped public morality about mass culture and anti-Mexican stereotypes from competition by Tijuana’s declining, yet still popular, tourist economy. Erwine did remember the working-class entertainments of the fair. He described the scintillating amusements of the Zócalo, the popular —195— 196 Chapter Seven amusement Midway that was so much a part of world’s fairs. Erwine’s teenage experiences of the sexuality and larger-than-life qualities of the exposition dominate. “At several places in the Exposition,” Erwine remembered, “there were bazaars where fast-talking ‘Arabs’ conducted complicated ‘auctions’ of Oriental rugs and bric-a-brac.”4 The moral economy of Southern California emerged from Erwine’s recollection of the 1930s. He recalled the adult amusement concessions on the Zócalo such as burlesque shows, female nude dancing, and rough male entertainments . Erwine described Zorro’s Gardens, the Gold Gulch, and Sally Rand’s 1936 performances of her infamous “fan dance” and admitted , “I was much too young to get in legally, but I found several convenient knotholes in the fence [to Zorro’s Garden] that adjoined the road leading down into Gold Gulch.”5 Smitten of his youthful indiscretions, he assured “reports of these goings-on held only desultory interest for a kid in his early teens.” The editor of San Diego Magazine related his youthful impulses in a note to Erwine’s mea culpa. He candidly explained how he had “climbed over the Zorro Garden wall, sat through three Sally Rand performances, and paid the additional 25 cents to see the real Gold Gulch Gertie.”6 The fair encouraged carnival-like revelry. The honky-tonk and burlesque shows threatened the moral economy of the Southland’s conservative and evangelical Protestant residents.7 Throughout the 1935 and 1936 exposition seasons, public outcries about the moral appropriateness of such amusements raged in San Diego, especially the content of cultural pageants and the decisively urban working-class character of the bawdy and tawdry entertainments.8 The exposition managers encouraged rowdy and exciting entertainment since many were Los Angeles advertising executives and show men. In October 1934, Frank Drugan recommended his salesmen promote exotic popular entertainments, highlighting why Erwine and the magazine editor remembered these amusements. Drugan perceived audiences and consumers created their own meanings from what they would see at the exposition. He advised his staff, “What do people choose to see at an Exposition? Everyone makes a choice.” He argued a “successful exhibition” should make “inanimate things live,” whereby the “operating demonstrations [will] fascinate and instruct” the minds 197 Popular Amusements and Moral Authority and imaginations of the audiences. He concluded a carnival-like atmosphere and exciting exhibitions were most appropriate for the Zócalo. Drugan believed entertainment should rise above the claims of artistic and historical merit. He reminded...