In April 1922, to celebrate the inauguration of Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid as President of the University of Southern California, USC hosted the academic delegates from the PanAmerican Congress then being held in Los Angeles.  Eight honorary doctorates were awarded to the PanAmerican scholars and, in his inaugural address, A World View of Education von KleinSmid stressed the intrinsic internationalism of Los Angeles.  Here then is an interesting paradox.  In the very decade in which Los Angeles would become predominantly Anglo-American-Midwestern in its population and culture the newly-inaugurated president who would transform USC was keying this small Methodist institution serving a predominantly Anglo-Protestant clientele to internationalism, with special attention being paid to Hispanic America. 

Of course, USC had been international from its foundation in 1880, with a Japanese student in its first graduating class.  But von KleinSmid was striking a deeper core, a more persistent pattern, than the mere history of one institution.  He was intuiting directly and immediately the fundamental formula of Los Angeles, although a formula that was frequently lost, especially in the first three decades of the 20^th century.  Its “DNA code,” if you will, goes back to its foundation in September 1781 as a pueblo, which is to say a full-fledged city, the only such settlement of its kind in Alta California.  Hispanic civilization, which was bringing Los Angeles into being, was, by definition, internationalist.  To this day I find it astonishing to contemplate the fact that the Philippines came under Spanish influence in the late 17^th century, not from Spain itself, but from New Spain, which is to say from Mexico.  I find it breathtaking to think that New Spain—Mexico—projected itself across the vast Pacific at a time when such a voyage would take more than 200 days and would involve the constant risk of death from ship wrecks and/or disease.

There has been a lot of theorizing in the 20^th century; Octavio Paz's great The Labyrinth of Solitude comes immediately to mind.  As to the intrinsic internationalism and/or anti-internationalism of Mexico: from one perspective Mexico looks within to its interior soul and its own solitary plane of being where only Mexico exists.  Then you have the other side of the Mexican imagination: the viceroyalty of New Spain, which spent the  1500s and 1600s projecting itself into the vast Pacific, the Jesuits of New Spain who projected themselves north of Mexico into Arizona, into Baja California, a century and a half ahead of subsequent settlement, the Mexico of Archduke Maximillian's daydream, a royalist euro-Mexico, dreams that came to naught on the battlefield of Cinco de Mayo; and, of course, the establishment of Los Angeles itself in September 1781 as a projection of strategic urbanism. 

To colonize this vast region of Southern California, New Spain invoked the inevitability of a civic secular culture with the granting of full pueblo status to Los Angeles.  Los Angeles would not be a mission, a fort, or presidio; it would be a city, the only such city of its kind in Alta, California gathering unto itself the peoples of the world.  Indeed, they were already there among the founders whose bloodlines incorporated Spain, Africa and Meso-America.  Walk down the streets of Los Angeles, such as they were in the 1820s, and you would even encounter people from the Philippines — “Manila men,” they were called, or Luzon.  Indians, Hawaiians would be there as well.  By the 1830s Southern California had emerged at the very epicenter of trade routes that began in Boston, rounded Cape Horn, continued up the coast of South and Central America, traded manufactured goods for hides and beaver skins acquired from mountain men of the interior, then pushed across the Pacific to Hong Kong.

History at its most basic is an interaction between people and geography, and both the peoples and the geography of Southern California and its capital city were internationalist despite the scarcity of settlements in that era, and the relatively undeveloped pastoral nature of its material culture. 

Between World War I and World War II the City of Angels was in many ways an Anglo-American enclave.  Indeed the refounders of the city in the early 20^th century, the oligarchy that built the aqueduct, brought in the water, crisscrossed the Los Angeles plains with big Red Cars, and got rich as more than 3 million immigrants poured into the region, were fond of saying, that Los Angeles would most likely be the last major English speaking city to be established on the planet.  They were wrong, of course.  They could not have foreseen Las Vegas, Phoenix and Houston, but those cities are, in a fundamental way, projections of the Los Angeles model onto other Southwestern landscapes.  The point is, even as Los Angeles was being trumpeted as the whitest city in the nation, to the point that only Caucasians were allowed to work on the aqueduct, a more persistent identity was asserting and reasserting itself in terms of the people of the city.  Boyle Heights, was among the international urban settlements in the country, a sort of Lower Eastside for the City of the Angels.  There was never a time when Angelenos ceased enjoying Mexican food, as if the very act of digging into an enchilada contained within itself some form of historical memory, some ritual connection through cuisine with an impending future.  From this perspective the ethnically monolithic decades of Los Angeles, beginning just before World War I and ending after World War II ending just about 50 years ago, I think, at the time the foundation of [the World Affairs Council] distinguished body, will be seen as a mirror interval in the larger historic identity of the city as an international settlement. 

Today, of course, that internationalism has been compounded and recompounded through immigration, and projected and reprojected through technology.  Among other identities, Los Angeles is a ranking Mexican, Korean, Armenian, Iranian, Ethiopian, Chinese and Native American city.  Yes, Native American.  Metropolitan Los Angeles has the largest population in the nation — more than 300,000 —of urbanized Americans of Native American descent.  It is also an epicenter of Jewish civilization, made that way by both the German-Jewish founders of Los Angeles in the 1850s, the eastern European immigrants of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, and the refugees, the talented elite of émigrés, who fled to this city in the 1930s, escaping Nazi Europe, enlivening this city with the best of Vienna and Berlin. 

I'm reminded of the antidote of Otto Preminger playing cards at the Hillcrest Country Club about 1944.  Preminger had escaped the Nazis and reestablished himself as a director.  He was playing cards and two of the people at the card table started to talk in Hungarian.  Otto Preminger said, “Wait a minute!  This is Los Angeles.  This is the United States.  We've come here from Europe, we've found physical safety here, this country has welcomed us to itself, this great city has welcomed us, we've found work in the motion picture industries and the universities and you're sitting there speaking Hungarian.  This is Los Angeles.  Speak German!” 

This story reinforces an important point about the émigrés of the 1930s and 1940s.  You could come to Los Angeles and sustain multiple states of consciousness.  Thomas Mann, for example, could settle in Pacific Palisades and still write Dr. Faustus, arguably the greatest German language novel of the 20^th century. 

Freddy Kohner, by contrast, could arrive in Los Angeles not speaking a word of English and within a few short years be writing the novel Gidget filled with the special argot of teenage surfers, which he absorbed from his Los Angeles-born surfing daughter. 

It was part of the formula of Los Angeles and, by extension, most of Southern California, that you did not have to shed your identity when you came here.  You made contact with a common culture based on the English language, based on the legal, political and cultural framework of the region.  But you could also sustain simultaneously who you were, and where you had come from.  From this perspective, the internationalism of Los Angeles helped pioneer a new model, a new process, whereby the peoples of the world could become American, full citizens of the republic and the state of California, while also residing in other cultural traditions. 

In times past, identities had to be left behind when you came to the United States and assimilated to a predominantly Anglo-American cultural point of view.  In Los Angeles, by contrast, you became a good American by connecting with the common culture while also remaining who you were.  British historian Arnold Toynbee uses the word “ecumenapolis” to describe this phenomenon — the ability of a high-urban civilization to bring into ecumenical interface various cultural traditions within the matrix of a shared urban culture. 

Obviously Los Angeles is not alone in doing this.  New York and Chicago have done it quite successfully as well, but that is precisely the point.  Los Angeles is not an exception to American cities nor is Southern California an exception to American civilization.  Here I respectfully disagree with the great Cary McWilliams, who sees Southern California as the great exception.  I see these phenomena better on the cutting edge of the American experiment.  It is the destiny of the United States, most of us agree, to become an integrated ecumenical world culture within the constitutional framework conferred on us by the Founding Fathers and within the cultural matrix created by more than two centuries of American life.  When this recognition first dawned, there were many who reacted in fear, who claimed that the forces of irridentism were being unleashed in the republic.  The death in action recently in Iraq of Thailand-born, Guatemalan-born and Mexican-born United States soldiers and Marines would seem to dispel that notion. 

At his April 1922 inauguration, Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid also advanced the notion that not only was Los Angeles internationalism in its geo-political identity; it would also eventually play a role in the shaping of American foreign policy.  How it would have pleased President von KleinSmid to have witnessed the distinguished career of Ralph Bunche, which he did, and Warren Christopher, which he did not, as Secretary of State, together with the flourishing World Affairs Council founded some 50 years ago in which he participated.

Other forms of diplomacy of international relations that are even more conspicuously being driven by Los Angeles are the diplomacy of culture through the entertainment industry, and the diplomacy of commerce through the trading partners of Los Angeles.  The subliminal internationalism of the great world's religions is flourishing here.  Finally, a kind of social diplomacy is being exercised by a society whose every dimension — business, law, entertainment, education, trade, travel — is multinational in content and extent.  From this perspective, merely to be in Los Angeles, merely to do business here, is by definition to enter the international community.  Perhaps that is why the Los Angeles Times pours so much of its resources into foreign affairs.  Perhaps that is why the study of international relations is so conspicuously flourishing at our local colleges and universities.  Perhaps that is why Los Angeles produced Ralph Bunche and Warren Christopher.  The very formula, the very DNA code of Los Angeles has been internationalist in one way or another, even when suppressed in those years between World War I and II, since September 1781.

Now, cities have roles to play.  These roles derive in part from their founding eras when their basic patterns, their DNA codes, were established.  Boston, for example, has been an academic center since the 17^th century.  New York [has been] the center of trade and commerce for an equally long time.  As a consumer and broker of commodities, historian William Cronin tells us Chicago drove the development of the advancing western frontier and became by the 1890s, as so beautifully depicted in not just the Columbian Exposition of 1893, but the wonderful novels of Willa Cather set in Chicago during this period, the city through which this newly-consolidated Midwestern empire defined itself. 

The major cities of the United States each encapsulate in separate ways the total meaning of the nation.  If we had only Chicago, for example, only New York, only Los Angeles, we could still glimpse the textured meaning of the entire national experiment, yet each city also offers a distinct prism, its own angle of vision into the larger American identity.  Miami, for example, explores the United States as a Caribbean nation; Honolulu explores the United States as an Asian-Pacific basin commonwealth. 

It is perhaps the special role of Los Angeles, its angle of insight, to probe the global nature of the American republic and its people.  Is it not the responsibility of Los Angeles, an ecumenopolis, to anticipate and to pace the emergence of the United States as an ecumenical nation?  If so, then that's a great responsibility, one that magnifies the failures of Los Angeles when Los Angeles fails to live up to its identity.  When things go badly in Los Angeles as far as ethnic strife is concerned, the effects are magnified because Los Angeles is a prism, a case-study city, and its failures, when they occur, could bring the entire experiment, the American ecumenical experiment, into question.  That's why the good behavior of Los Angeles, which is most often the case, is so crucial and that is why an informed and continuing dialogue with world affairs such as that carried out with such distinction by this organization is equally necessary. 

There is a tendency these days for many American cities to be downgraded to second-tier provincial status — Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, have suffered especially from this provincializing tendency which comes in part from the centralizing of American life through one or two dominant newspapers and dominant television programs.  [This] coalescing texture, the sameness if you will, is characteristic of a society of mass manufacture, uniform consumer goods and universalized franchise retail outlets.

When a city succumbs to provincialization it becomes a franchise itself — a branch office.  From this perspective the World Affairs Council sustains and projects Los Angeles as a nonprovincial place, a world city, connected to the world by the very nature of its people and the connection to world affairs of its sub-intelligentsia.  Even a city as diverse as Los Angeles can collapse on itself and grow provincial if it ceases to look outward, to project its thought and imagination globally, to care for the larger world.  It's almost incomprehensible to think of Los Angeles doing that, but it can be imagined.  Such a temptation I think is ever recurrent because of that persistent isolationism that is so much of our American character, arising as it does in almost a mystical, certainly in a psychological way.  Arising in the 19^th century from the very vastness of our continental, indeed, our hemispheric nation, so complete in so many ways unto itself, at least through its first one hundred years of existence. 

Southern California compounds the temptation by its very diversity of peoples, cultures and terrains.  Why think of the world, a Southern Californian can be tempted to ask, when the world is already here?  The fact is, however, the world that is already here is an American world, a distinctively internationalized American world, true, but an American world nevertheless.  The nations of the world may have sent us their peoples but they did not relinquish to us their sovereignties.  The world is replete with nations and societies that are also themselves, probing as we are probing here, different but equally compelling ways of being human, of living in time and history.  From this perspective an interest in world affairs keeps us connected to the full range of the human experiment, and that connection in turn keeps us from becoming provincial. 

Besides, we have much to learn from the world, even as the world has much to learn from us, thanks to technology, travel, the Internet, the sheer interconnectiveness of contemporary life.  It is far easier for us to live and think globally locally, locally-globally, than it was for previous generations.  In my age group getting to Europe during college was considered a very major achievement.  Today, high school students can enjoy years abroad.  So then, in the global-local formula, Los Angeles is privileged to have the global and local and the local and global.  Such a city, such a world community, can never be provincialized, or should never be provincialized.

One last point — voluntariness.  Not volunteerism, but voluntariness.  Los Angeles is a city enlivened by choice.  The majority of its population has chosen to come here or to remain here if born in this City of Angels.  Of course, such choices are not unconditional.  A succession of disasters and upheavals have brought much of our population to us.  But they could have gone elsewhere, even amidst necessity.  This vast presence of choice, this voluntariness, underlies the internationalism of Los Angeles and helps to structure the fundamental and pervasive hope of the City.  Los Angeles has refugees, but it is not a refugee camp; Los Angeles has émigrés and immigrants, but not exiles; disasters of various sorts — wars, political upheavals, drought, famine, tyrannies of every kind — have brought people here, but did not destroy them in the process.  This is a population of hard-working and very sturdy survivors.

In ancient times, a city was recognized to be of importance if it held the plenum mundi, the “fullness of the world.”  Certainly the City of Angels has that.  That “fullness” represents the world's gift to Los Angeles.  “Take our people,” the world has told Los Angeles, “and make of them an American people” of every culture and color, but an American people nevertheless.  And, so Los Angeles has received this gift of people from the world and lo and behold, over the years, especially in the past 20 years the happiest parts of the urban world are in their own way looking more and more like the City of Angels.  What a compliment! 

Thank you so much.