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| "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.
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| "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.
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