“But no world of make-believe [the early movie industry] could long engage the attention of Southern Californians of that period [1921] in competition with the genuine and authentic freaks who helped to make up the lists of their fellow-citizens. I once compiled a list of the subjects which it was well to avoid, lest the toes of any chance acquaintance might be stepped on. They included astrology, numerology, vegetarianism, the single tax, prohibition, vivisection, celibacy, free verse, and many more. All these isms, of course, had and have their advocates everywhere; but in southern California they seized their victims in more virulent form. I have had a strange lady kneel publicly on my doorstop in Los Angeles and implore her God aloud to make me vote dry and thus “save the precinct" from the contamination of my solitary wet ballot. Even Kansas would have to hunt hard to tie that.

Swamis, Rosicrucians, Theosophists, and other organized mystics abounded, together with disciples of every known variety of the Newer Thought from Koreshan to Baha'i. The present crop of social panaceas which in recent years [1940] has sprung up in this territory - Synchrotax, Epic, the Townsend Plan, Utopians Incorporated, $30 Every Thursday, and the rest - is merely the lineal descendant, diverted by the depression into the economic field, of the religio-philosophical blossoming of two decades ago. And a lot of these sects were rent by schisms and divided into factions at bitter enmity with one another.”

- The Santa Fean, March-April 1941