American Arcadia ─ California and the Classical Tradition

Discussing the influence of the classics on America is nothing new; indeed, classical antiquity could be considered second only to Christianity as a force in modeling America's national identity. What has never been explored until now, however, is how, from the very first, Californians--a community with enough clout to dictate their own boundaries and admit themselves to the Union without going through the required territorial stages--actively chose to visually and culturally craft their new world using the rhetoric of classical antiquity.

Through a vivid exploration of material culture, literature, and architecture, American Arcadia offers a tour of California's development as a Mediterranean haven from the late nineteenth century to the present. In its earliest days, California was touted as the last opportunity for disenfranchised Yankees to establish the refined gentleman-farmer culture envisioned by Jefferson and build new cities free of the filth and corruption of those they left "back East." Through architecture and landscape design Californians fashioned an Arcadian setting evocative of ancient Greece and Rome. Later, as Arcadia gave way to urban sprawl, rather than see the influence of classicism dissipate, entire city plans were drafted to conjure classical antiquity, self-styled villas began to dot the hills, and utopian communities began to shape the state's social atmosphere. The author traces the classical influence primarily through the evidence of material culture, yet the book emphasizes the stories and people, famous and forgotten, behind the works, such as Florence Yoch, the renowned landscape designer and set designer for Gone with the Wind, and Sister Aimee, the most publicized Christian evangelist of her day, whose sermons filled the Pantheon-like Angelus Temple, the largest construction of its time in North America. Telling stories as wide-ranging as the creation of the famed aqueducts that turned the semi-arid landscape to a cornucopia of almonds, alfalfa, and oranges to the birth of the body-sculpting movement, American Arcadia ultimately offers its audience a new way of seeing our past and ourselves as well as a means to appreciate an idea that was familiar--for a time even vital--to our ancestors.

Peter J. Holliday is Professor of the History of Art and Classical Archaeology, California State University, Long Beach.