led in to enjoy a prosperous peacetime. The Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s dominated this period socially and politically, especially in Hollywood where the HUAC investigations into communism focused. Communists were seen as a threat to post-war prosperity and peace. As might be expected in such a conservative era, Republicans dominated the politics of the 1950s in the state and in the nation. The focus was on conservative and traditional ways of life, loyalty, prosperity, and the always lurking threat of nuclear destruction. On a socio-psychological level, considering the repression of the 1950s both on an individual and society-wide basis, the radical explosion of the 1960s cannot be seen as entirely a surprise to the far-sighted.
Although he does not write about the 1960s (his book was first published in 1946), Carey McWilliams, in Southern California: An Island on the Land, keys in on the psychology of the state, if you will, and the sense that California was and is the place where special events occur, where the genesis of the 1960s might have been expected to burst forth as it did. Residents of the state, says one artist quoted by McWilliams, eventually "are bound to start . . . new fashions of [their] own that are absolutely in keeping with [their] environment." Another observer quoted by McWilliams says that "The idea is held by everybody in Southern California . . . that some sort of destiny awaits the place" (McWilliams 369). To those who might see the 1960s as an anomaly in the evolution of the state, McWilliams presciently writes in the 1940s that
The reason the fresh growths are not more conspicuous that they are at present is that the importation-and-discarding process has been continuous. . . . "Each decade the previous residents once again are outnumbered by a new cyclonic invasion bringing its own idea of how California should be remodeled
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