Dates and locations have changed – from January to February to August 15 and from Bixby Park along Ocean Boulevard to a sprawling grove of eucalyptus trees at Long Beach Recreation Park to – this year – the lawn bowling clubhouse not far away. And, inevitably, the attendance is different, too.
The annual Iowa Picnic in Long Beach in the 1920s gathered an estimated 150,000 attendees (according to Carey McWilliams). So many, that immigrants from the 99 Iowa counties gathered in large clusters under county-specific signs pinned to the palms and elms of Bixby Park. The transplanted Hawkeyes shared potluck and met the friends of friends back home and their shirttail relatives who had joined them. Politicians elbowed their way to get to so many potential and contented voters – it was better than radio, even. And not just candidates for governor of California, but Iowa hopefuls came too, since thousands of well-off Iowans vacationed in Long Beach each year just to come to the vast Iowa Picnic.
But Iowans were only the biggest, and not even the first, of the state associations that gave solace to anxious, new-made Californians. Eventually there were associations based in Southern California for every US state and Canadian province, with Illinois and Indiana among the largest. By the end of the 1930s, the associations had a combined membership of more than 500,000, with monthly meetings of sub-associations that collected residents of individual counties and alumni of colleges and universities.
Professor Kevin Starr – author of eight books on the making of Californians – remembers these men and women as “the folks” who filled the unpopulated outskirts of the state’s nascent cities between 1900 and 1950. Parodied and joked about from the beginning, “the folks” were largely the makers of the California that we have inherited.
Crowds at Bixby Park had another side. In the 1920s, thousands of members of the KKK met at the park and marched from there to city hall and up American Avenue. Many of the marchers were former Midwesterners.
There will be about 150 former Iowans – or their grandchildren – in attendance at this year’s Iowa Picnic.
The image on this page was made by Flickr user riptheskull. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
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