From West to East: California and the making of the American Mind.

From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind, by Stephen Schwartz (Free Press, 542 pp., $30)

Mr. Johnson is an editorial writer for the Orange County Register.

PLATO'S Republic opens with Socrates going "down to the Piraeus," the seaport of Athens, where commerce dilutes parochialism and allows expansive speculation -- a place especially conducive to the dreaming and dissecting of utopias.

California -- or the "California Republic," as its bear flag proclaims it -- likewise sits at ocean's edge, and has imbibed through the centuries cosmopolitan influences that help make it a place apart, an island, as more than one writer has called it, in spirit and psyche, where dreams loom large.

And a place of endless fascination to cultural historians. Few have offered a more evocative chronicle than San Francisco journalist Stephen Schwartz. In this book he argues that a "borderland" dynamic is California's defining principle. From the sixteenth century onward, trade winds would carry seafarers not merely from the Spanish Empire, but also from England -- whose Francis Drake christened Upper California "New Albion" -- and later from Russia, in a foretaste of the modern West Coast's trading ties to the Orient.

Invigorating interaction with other cultures would always help make California a "Child of Modernity." It came into the Union, in the mid nineteenth century, as nothing less, Schwartz contends. Unlike the other Western states and territories, it already had a consciousness fully formed, a distillation "of Indian and European hallucinations; of Bourbon reform, Franciscan millenarianism, and the Enlightenment; of English piracy and smuggling, Mexican federalism, and American commerce."

Rather than attempt a sweeping but superficial tableau, Schwartz keeps his historical focus narrow: reformist and socialist politics, the rise of organized labor, literary and artistic iconoclasts, and Communist machinations. This focus is useful in helping us to understand a state where flux has been a fixture, and radicalism an evolutionary force. "California was radical from the beginning," Schwartz argues. He sees harbingers of a restless, striving society in the fact that the early Spanish military authorities were not Castilian nobles but outsiders themselves, Catalan and Mallorcan soldiers and mariners with entrepreneurial vitality and a will to reinvent themselves on virgin terrain.

A pioneering indulgence in utopianism -- the first of many such experiments in the Golden State -- could be found in the "planned society" of Branciforte, near the Mission of Santa Cruz, beginning in 1795. Intensively organized into orders of craftsmen, farmers, and building workers, with housing that was cleaner and more spacious than in villages more haphazardly born, it foundered for uncertain reasons -- a result that was prophetic, foretelling the limits of publicly sponsored communities.

Latter-day feminism, Schwartz suggests, can trace symbolic roots to the strong-willed Na Eulalia Callis, wife of an eighteenth-century military governor in Monterey, who broke convention by separating from her adulterous husband.

An enduring individualist ethic gained ground during the Gold Rush, when runaway sailors wielded pick and shovel alongside Easterners seeking a second chance, refugees from Midwestern farming or from European oppression, and escaped slaves.

That egalitarian ideal was tested with the rise of mass employment in the service of concentrated capital. Schwartz records the coming of the railroad and the growth of waterfront commerce in San Francisco, and the simultaneous increase of allegiance to unions and of political dominance by industrial monopolists. Socialist aspirations in organized labor would join with a Protestant "good government" impulse among the middle class, yielding the reforms of the Progressive Era -- the referendum and initiative -- that would break the railroads' political power and have shaped the state's policies through recent decades in many unforeseen ways.

The aftermath of World War I brought reversals for radicals in the labor movement, but the collectivist temptation retained a broad appeal. Socialist Upton Sinclair captured 850,000 votes as Democratic nominee for governor in 1934 -- and might have won the election had the candidate of the socialist Common Wealth ticket, who got 300,000 votes, pulled out and endorsed him (the winner, Republican Frank F. Merriam, got 1.1 million votes). Four years later Sinclair's political heir, Culbert Levy Olson, won the governorship, backed by the "Ham and Eggs" pension movement, which called for payments of "$30 Every Thursday." The movement's meetings "had a disturbingly totalitarian feel," writes Schwartz, "with giant assemblies at which participants were required to shout out the phrase 'Ham and Eggs, Everybody!' before speaking."

In the shadows were the genuine Communists, who garnered adherents and forged alliances throughout the Depression years. They were a force to be reckoned with in California in labor, politics, and the arts until midway through the 1950s, with the final exposure of Stalin's crimes by his own heirs in the Kremlin.

Schwartz recounts compelling anecdotes illustrating the Communists' brutality in fighting to capture unions, and their nimble switch, when the Hitler - Stalin pact collapsed, from campaigning for "peace" to loud support of war against Germany. There is a chilling profile of the Russian intelligence agent whose code name was Kharon -- or Charon, the boatman of mythology who ferried the dead into Hades. From the KGB's San Francisco base office, he coordinated West Coast Soviet intelligence activity during the war -- particularly aimed at atomic research at Berkeley -- and oversaw the kidnapping, for return to the homeland, of Soviet sailors who jumped ship in American ports.

The book's preface promises a "hidden" story of California, and it delivers with a wealth of information ignored or underreported in conventional histories. We are reminded, for instance, that the Left was largely silent during the Japanese internment episode -- and that Governor Earl Warren was loud in warning about the wartime threat posed by American-born Japanese.

While at the Office of War Information in the early 1940s, the young Alan Cranston worked to distort news about the mass grave of Polish military officers discovered at Katyn, in German-occupied Russia. Forensic evidence suggested that the Soviets had murdered these captured officers, but Cranston muzzled a Polish-speaking Detroit commentator who so reported; according to Schwartz, Cranston suggested to the CIA's forerunner, the OSS, that the officers were not missing at all.

The existence of a Stalinist element in Hollywood is indicated in a manifesto defending the Moscow Purge trials. The 1937 statement asked: "Should not a country recognized as engaged in improving conditions for all its people . . . be permitted to decide for itself what measures of protection are necessary against treasonable plots . . . ?" Signers included screenwriters Nathanael West, Ring Lardner Jr., Samuel Ornitz, and Donald Ogden Stewart.

Schwartz notes widely overlooked testimony at the 1947 Hollywood hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee, in which evidence was given suggesting that the really ominous threat to free thought did not lie with the anti-Communists. Ex-Communist author Oliver Carlson told the panel about the strange disappearance of one Eli Jacobson, who, Carlson said, had been sent from New York to Hollywood in 1936 to build up the Party "among the film folk." In 1938, Jacobson had told Carlson he was breaking with the Party. "He was terribly agitated and afraid he was going to be killed," the witness said. Jacobson was still alive at that time -- but in 1952 he drowned in a slough in Marin County, under sinister circumstances.

Schwartz is at his most lyrical when he celebrates successive movements of California writers and artists who challenged convention and who exerted an influence beyond California's, and indeed the United States', borders -- such people as San Francisco bohemian Philip Duncan, novelist Henry Miller, composer John Cage, and poet Kenneth Rexroth and the Beats he inspired.

To the degree they symbolize freedom, a refusal to be deadened by custom, such men embody the California spirit in its highest form, even if the value of some of their work can be debated. If there is a rambling quality to much of Schwartz's book, it is reflective of the creative energies he describes, which at their best and most positive are the antithesis of the totalitarian cultural strains that he labors to expose.

Of course, there is another variety of California revolutionary instinct that has exerted its own transforming power on the nation and the world. Rooted in the same individualism that Schwartz traces to California's founding, its most noted standard-bearer is a Californian no less quintessential in his way, but wiser in his vision, than any artist or politician seduced by collectivism. Although there are a couple of passing references here to Ronald Reagan -- whose own experiences with adherents of totalitarianism in Hollywood fitted him to stare down the Soviets in the 1980s -- it will remain for another book to chart how the fortieth President brought his own California consciousness from West to East and back again.