EDMUND WILSON IN IMPERIAL SAN DIEGO (1931)



"Hotel del Coronado guests watching sailors landing on the beach in front of the hotel" c. 1917. Via the San Diego History Center.

The Coronado Beach Hotel was built by the California millionaire John Spreckels and opened in 1887. Spreckels had made his money in Hawaiian sugar, and in 1887 the United States signed a treaty with the Hawaiian king—a treaty which guaranteed to the Americans exclusive use of the harbor at Honolulu.
In the same year the first vestibule train was put on the tracks by George Pullman and the revolt of the Apaches under Geronimo, the last attempt of the Indians to assert their independence, had been put down by the government and the Apaches penned up in a reservation; the American Federation of Labor had just been founded, Kansas and Nebraska were parching with a drought and Henry George had just run for mayor of New York and had been beaten only with difficulty by a coalition against him of the other parties; Grover Cleveland was in the middle of his first term and threw the capitalists into consternation by denouncing the protective tariff, and an Interstate Commerce Act designed to curb the rapacity of the railroads was being put through by the small businessmen and farmers; inquiries into the practices of the trusts were being gotten under way in Congress, and the Standard Oil Company, entering the drilling and pumping field, was embarked on the final stage of its triumph; and Edward Bellamy had amazing success with his socialist novel, "Looking Backward," which prefigured an industrial Utopia.
The Coronado Beach Hotel must represent the ultimate satisfaction of the dreams of the architects of the eighties. It is the most magnificent example extant of the American seaside hotel as it flourished in that era on both coasts; and it still has its beauty as well as its magnificence. White and ornate as a wedding-cake, clean, polished and trim as a ship, it makes a monument not unworthy to dominate the last blue concave dent in the shoreline before the United States gives way to Mexico.

"Spreckels Sugar Mill, Spreckelsville, Hawaii" 1890. Via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The bottom layer of an enormous rotunda, white and slit all around with long close windows like one of those spinning toys that make strips of figures seem to move, is surmounted, muffled and almost smothered by a sort of immense bonnet. This bonnet involves a red roof, a second layer of smaller windows and a broad red cone like an inverted pegtop; and the cone itself involves two rows of little peeping blinking dormers and an observation tower with a white railing, partly extinguished by a red cone of its own, from which on a tall white flagpole flies an American flag. Behind this, extends the main body of the hotel, a lovely delirium of superb conical red cupolas; red roofs with little white-lace crenellations; a fine white cloth-like texture of shingles; little steep flights of outside stairs and little outside galleries with pillars, white as the drip of wedding-cake icing; and a wealth of felicitous protrusive dormers like the irregular natural budding of a sea-hydra.
At the foot of the steps of the principal entrance, brass compass-points are inlaid in the pavement; and there are brass edges to the broad white stairs that lead up, between white lathe-turned banister-rungs, to white doors with polished brass handles and screens with thin brass rods.
The hotel is built around a large quadrangle, admirably planted and beautifully gardened: against grass kept tender and vivid green by slowly revolving sprays, a fine harmony of magenta begonias, vermilion salvia, crimson coxcomb, bouquet-like bushes of rose-red hibiscus and immense clumps of purple bougainvillea climbing the stems of tall trimmed palms which stand in mounds of green fern or myrtle. The trees are carefully labelled with Latin names, as in a botanical garden. In the middle is a low polygonal summerhouse, vine-embowered and covered with rough bark, inside which a boy chalks up on a blackboard the latest stockmarket quotations, while interested male guests of the hotel sit and watch them in silence.
This courtyard has real dignity and brilliance: with its five tiers of white-railinged porches like decks, its long steep flights of steps like companionways, its red ladders and brass- tipped fire-hose wound on red-wheeled carts around corners, the slight endearing list of its warped floors and the thin wood pillars that rise at the bottom from smooth flagstones level with the ground, it manages to suggest both an ocean liner and the portico of a colonial mansion. As you look out from one of the higher galleries at the green tops of the exotic tame palms and the little red ventilators spinning in the sun, you feel that you can still enjoy here the last moment before the power of American money, swollen though it was with sudden growth, had finally turned its back altogether on the more human habits and tastes of the old non-mechanical world.
In the lobby you walk as on turf in the thickest softest red carpeting ever stepped on. There are wicker chairs; soft plush couches; panels of greenish-bluish tapestries where noble ladies with round pulpy faces take their pleasance in Elysian boskage; hooks with sheets of stockmarket quotations at the top of the stairs going down to the barbershop; and a masterpiece of interior ornament, elaborate and not easily named, but combining mirrors covered with yellow curlicues, yellow- varnished rows of banister-rungs and a stained-glass window of red poinsettias.
In the spacious, round and many-windowed dining-room, where yellow-shaded candles light white tables, old respectable ladies and gentlemen eat interminable American-plan meals. After dinner, they sit on couches and talk quietly or they quietly play cards in the card-room.
You can wander through long suites of apartments—by way of darkish unlivable in-between chambers with closed- up grates, glossy mahogany mantelpieces and twin vases cold as funeral urns.
In the rotunda you come upon a convention of the California Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs. (The General Federation of Women's Clubs was organized about two years after the opening of the Coronado Beach Hotel.) The business and professional women are fussing on the outskirts of the ballroom: "I've just seen Mildred and she hasn't done anything about the corsages yet! Do you think we ought to give them to all the officers or just to the incoming ones?" And in a conclave under hanging electric lamps in the shape of enormous coroners they are solemnly reading aloud and debating proposed amendments to innumerable by-laws.
Sometimes the chambers of the vast hotel resound to a chorus of women's voices, deliberate, school-girlish, insipid. They have composed an anthem to the tune of "John Brown's Body" on the subject of a fund they are trying to raise:
Twenty thousand dollars by nineteen thirty-four!
Twenty thousand dollars by nineteen thirty-four!
Twenty thousand dollars by nineteen thirty-four!
Our fund is marching on!
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!
Our fund is marching on!
The business and professional women are not quite sure what they are going to do with the $20,000 when they have raised it; but they have arranged for a speaking contest at which a speaker from each district will be given three minutes to offer suggestions on "How can the income of $20,000 be used to the greatest advantage of the Federation?"

***

The new hotel at Agua Caliente across the border, where people go to see the Mexican races, has taken a good deal of the trade away from the Coronado Beach Hotel; but people still come from all over the country to San Diego across the bay.
The Americans still tend to move westward and many drift southward toward the sun. San Diego is the extreme southwest town of the United States; and since our real west-ward expansion has come to a standstill, it has become a veritable jumping-off place. On the West coast to-day the suicide rate is twice that of the Middle Atlantic coast, and since 1911 the suicide rate of San Diego has been the highest in the United States. Between January, 1911, and January, 1927, over five hundred people killed themselves here. The population in 1930 was only about 148,000, having doubled since 1920.
For one thing, a great many sick people come here. The rate of sickness in San Diego is 24 percent of the population whereas for the population of the whole country the sick-rate is only 6 per cent. The climate of Southern California, so widely advertised by Chambers of Commerce and Southern California Clubs but probably rather unhealthy with its tepid and enervating days and its nights that get suddenly cold, brings invalids to San Diego by the thousand. If they have money to move about and have failed to improve in the other health centres, the doctors send them to San Diego as a last resort, and it is not uncommon for patients to expire immediately on being unloaded from the train. Furthermore, the victims of "ideational" diseases like asthma—diseases which are partly psychological—have a tendency to keep moving away from places under the illusion that they are leaving the disease behind. And when they finally get to San Diego, they find that they are cornered, there is nowhere else to go. According to the psychoanalysts, the idea of the setting sun suggests to them the idea of death. At any rate, of the five- hundred-odd suicides during the period of fifteen years mentioned above, 70 percent were put down to "despondency and depression over chronic ill health."
Then there are the people who do not fit in, in the conventional American communities from which they come, and who have heard that life is freer and more relaxed in San Diego. There at last their special psychological bents or their eccentric sexual tastes, will be recognized, allowed latitude. It is certain that many such people in San Diego find the company they are looking for; but if they fail to, if they still seem different from other people and unable to accept life on the same terms, they may get discouraged and decide to resign. And then there are the people who have done something they are ashamed of or something which would disgrace them in the eyes of their friends in the places where they previously lived: San Diego is not quite large enough so that the people of any of the better-off or middle-class social groups don't all know each other and follow each other's doings with the attentive interest of people in a small town. If your scandal overtakes you and breaks, your whole circle hears about it; and if you are sensitive, you may prefer death. And then there are the people who are actually wanted by the police. This September, the city is being searched for a gangster from New York who in a beer-war turned a machine-gun on some children. California has been a hide-away for gangsters in trouble in other parts of the country ever since Al Capone came here.
Then there are the people who haven't much money and who have been told that San Diego is cheap, but who find that it is not so cheap as they had supposed. Then there are the girls (married young in this part of the world), deserted by husbands or lovers, and the sailors and naval officers who have had enough of the service.
Since the depression, the rate seems to have increased. In 1926 there were fifty-seven suicides in San Diego. During nine months of 1930, there were seventy-one, and between the beginning of the January and the end of the July of 1931 there have already been thirty-six. Three of these latter are set down in the coroner's record as due to "no work or money"; two to "no work"; one to "ill health, family troubles and no work"; two to "despondency over financial worries"; one to "financial worry and illness"; one to "health and failure to collect"; and one to "rent due him from tenants." The doctors say that some of the old people who have been sent out here by their relations but whose source of income has recently been cut off, kill themselves from pride rather than go to the poorhouse.
These coroner's records in San Diego are melancholy reading. You seem to see the last blind feeble futile effervescence of the great burst of the American adventure. Here this people, so long told to "go West" to escape from poverty, ill health, maladjustment, industrialism and oppression, discover that, having come West, their problems and diseases still remain and that there is no further to go. Among the sand-colored power plants and hotels, the naval outfitters and waterside cafes, the old spread-roofed California houses with their fine close grain of gray or yellow clapboards—they come to the end of their resources in the empty California sun. Brokers and bankers, architects and citrus ranchers, farmers, housewives, building contractors, salesmen of groceries and real estate, proprietors of poolrooms, music stores and hotels, marines and supply-corps lieutenants, molders, machinists, oil-well drillers, auto mechanics, carpenters, tailors, soft-drink merchants, cooks and barbers, teamsters, stage drivers, longshoremen, laborers—mostly Anglo-Saxon whites, though with a certain number of Danes, Swedes and Germans and a sprinkling of Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Negroes, Indians and Filipinos—ill, retired or down on their luck—they stuff up the cracks of their doors in the little boarding-houses that take in invalids, and turn on the gas; they go into their back sheds or back kitchens and swallow Lysol or eat ant-paste; they drive their cars into dark alleys and shoot themselves in the back seat; they hang themselves in hotel bedrooms, take overdoses of sulphonal or barbital, stab themselves with carving-knives on the municipal golf- course; or they throw themselves into the placid blue bay, where the gray battleships and cruisers of the government guard the limits of their enormous nation—already reaching out in the eighties for the sugar plantations of Honolulu.


Edmund Wilson, American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 253-260. The essay was originally published in The New Republic (December 23, 1931), 156-157. For an excellent reading of this text that places it in the context of Wilson’s career and American modernism, see: Benjamin Balthaser,  Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 18-20.