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infamous Sleepy Lagoon case of 1943, and reporting in the Nation and New Republic on the successful struggle to end the Open Shop. In 1946, as the culmination of nearly twenty years of literary and political engagement in the region, McWilliams published his magisterial Southern California Country: Island on the Land, as a volume in the American Folkway Series edited by Erskine Caldwell. A self-described labor of love, Southern California Country completed the debunking project initiated by Adamic in his Los Angeles! There She Blows! piece almost a generation before.30 It was a devastating deconstruction of the Mission Myth and its makers, beginning with a recovery of the Mexican roots of Southern California and the seldom-told story of genocide and native resistance during the 1850s and 1860s. But McWilliams went far beyond L.A.-bashing polemic or Menckenesque condescension. Picking up where Adamic had left off in his narratives of Los Angeles labor, McWilliams sought to integrate historical narrative with economic and cultural analysis. Southern California Country adumbrates a full-fledged theory of the singular historical conditions ranging from militarized class organization to super-boosterism - that made possible the breakneck urbanization of Los Angeles without the concomitant development of a large manufacturing base or commercial hinterland. McWilliams carefully explained how this sociology of the boom was responsible for the citys anti-urban bias and sprawling form (it reflects a spectacle of a large metropolitan city without an industrial base). Three years later, California: The Great Exception placed the rise of Southern California within the larger framework of Californias unique evolution as a civilization and social system. The year 1949 also saw the publication of his groundbreaking history of Mexican immigration, North from Mexico, which restated, now on epic scale, the fundamental con tribution of Mexican labor and craft to the emergence of the modern Southwest. This magnificent quartet of books, together with earlier studies of California writers (Ambrose Bierce and Adamic), constitutes one of the major achievements within the American regional tradition, making McWilliams the Walter Prescott Webb of California, if not its Fernand Braudel. In his oeuvre, in other words, debunkery transcended itself to establish a commanding regional interpretation. But no McWilliams School followed. Southern California Country was falsely assimilated into the guidebook genre, and, despite continuing

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