SU N SH IN E

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Columbian Exposition in Chicago: as the latter inaugurated the neo classical revival, the former launched an equally frenzied local Mission revival. The romanticized and idyllic theme was quickly picked up and exploited by a gallery of entrepreneurs who knew a good thing when they saw it. Everything from furniture suites and candied fruit to commercial and residential architecture stressed the mission motif.1 2 Some of the missions themselves were restored as pioneer theme-parks, especially San Gabriel Arcangel where a specially constructed theater next to the old church housed McGroartys Mission Play - the American Oberammergau - which was eventually seen by tens of thousands. At a New York advertising convention in the early 1930s, the mission aura o f history and romance was rated as an even more important attraction in selling Southern California than weather or movie-industry glamor.1 3 Of course, as Starr notes, this capitalization of Los Angeless fictional Spanish past not only sublimated contemporary class struggle, but also censored, and repressed from view, the actual plight of Alta Californias descendants. Pio Pico, the last governor of Mexican California and once the richest man in the city, was buried in a paupers grave virtually as Lummiss floral floats were passing down Broadway.1 4 From the middle nineties, Lummis edited the influential magazine Out West (Land of Sunshine), whose masthead . . . reads like a Whos Who . . . of California letters,1 5 and oversaw a full-fledged salon that gathered around his famous bungalow, El Alisal, along the rocky Arroyo Seco, between Los Angeles and Pasadena (the famed winter retreat of Eastern millionaires). Lummiss Arroyo Set regrouped Henry Jamess Yankee intelligentsia in an altogether more libidinal setting: indeed one of the Sets major credos, best expressed in Grace Ellery Channingss evocations of an Italianized Southern California, was the power of sunshine to reinvigorate the racial energies of the Anglo-Saxons (Los Angeles as the new Rome and so on). Lummiss passions for Southwest archeology (he founded the famed Southwest Museum a few blocks from El Alisal), mission preservation, physical culture (emulating the imagined knightly lifestyle of the dons), and racial metaphysics were recapitulated by other Arroyans. Thus the retired

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