| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965. By Becky M. Nicolaides. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xviii, 412 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-226-58300-7. Paper, $24.00, ISBN 0-226-58301-5.)

This richly researched book traces the history of South Gate, Los Angeles, from its development as a semi-rural, gritty, working-class community in the 1920s into a prosperous residential suburb forty years later. Becky M. Nicolaides provides a rare portrait of the everyday life and politics of a group of working people, breaking historiographical ground by uncovering the community settings and beliefs that eventually spurred blue-collar conservatism. The white Protestant migrants who came to South Gate in the 1920s (often from the Great Plains, Midwest, and border South) strongly valued self-reliance, individualism, and family security. Scraping together enough cash to purchase parcels of land, they built their own homes and provisioned themselves with gardens and livestock. Home ownership was a means of building an economic safety net and became a core source of their identity, helping them forge an ideology of "plain folk Americanism" (p. 81). Those men and women often expressed distrust for unions and embraced personal salvation (evangelical churches were influential in the region), anti-communism, and economic populism. Significantly, this identity did not preclude a pragmatic attachment to the New Deal, when the largely Democratic women and men supported Upton Sinclair's EPIC (End Poverty in California) and voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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