City of Quartz. Mike Davis
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AN ARROYO CATHEDRAL
Gamble House (1908), Pasadena
The preeminence of the Arroyo Set in defining the cultural parameters of Los Angeles’s development, and in investing real-estate speculation and class warfare with an aura of romantic myth, began to come to an end after World War One. Lummis’s special relationship with Otis was not part of the inheritance that Harry Chandler took over in 1917. The Times’s subsidy to Lummis was cut, the movies arrived as more effective promoters of immigration than The Land of Sunshine, and, in any case, the Mission Romantics became older and more disenchanted in rapidly urbanizing and auto-congested Southern California. Taos and Carmel began to usurp the Arroyo’s role as elite culture center of the Southwest. By the early 1920s, bungalows and rugged outdoor living were passing out of vogue; the upper middle classes, enriched by oil speculations or Hollywood, were preferring servants and massive ‘Spanish Colonial Revival’ homes. Yet the upscale popularity of the Spanish Colonial style testified to one of the two most durable legacies of the Arroyans: the creation of an ersatz history which, through its comprehensive incorporation into landscape and consumption, became an actual historical stratum in the culture of Los Angeles.18 (Contemporary mini-malls and fastfood franchises, with their Franciscan arches and red-tiled roofs, are still quoting chapter and verse from the Mission Myth – not to mention the Mission-style design of the new Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.) The other major legacy, of course, was the ideology of Los Angeles as the utopia of Aryan supremacism – the sunny refuge of White Protestant America in an age of labor upheaval and the mass immigration of the Catholic and Jewish poor from Eastern and Southern Europe.
THE DEBUNKERS
It seems somehow absurd, but it is nevertheless a fact, that for forty years, the smiling, booming, sunshine City of the Angels has been the bloodiest arena in the Western world for Capital and Labor. Morrow Mayo19
‘The weather is beautiful . . .’
The only words spoken by a Wobblie before his arrest in the 1921 San Pedro free speech fight
One of these immigrants, and the first (at least among the non-Jews) to become a major American writer, was Louis Adamic. His personal odyssey carried him from Carniola in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the milltowns of Pennsylvania, then with the American Expeditionary Force to the trenches of the Somme. Like so many other demobilized veterans, he decided to try his luck in Los Angeles, ending up broke and homeless in Pershing Square (as old Central Park had just been renamed). What the Times would later call the ‘Forty Year War’ of capital and labor was drawing to its bitter close. The city’s once powerful Socialist movement (they came within a hair’s-breadth of the mayoralty in 1911) had retreated to Llano in the Mojave, while one AFL union after another had been broken in a succession of violent metal trades strikes and street transport lockouts. Only IWW seamen and longshoremen defied the Merchants and Manufacturers Association crusade to make the open shop complete. Adamic was swept up in this final battle of the local class war, befriending the IWW organizers, relishing their gallows humor and indiscipline, and ultimately recording their suicidal bravery in his Laughing in the Jungle (1932) – an ‘autobiography of an immigrant in America’ that was also an extraordinary documentary of Los Angeles in the 1920s from the standpoint of its radical outcasts and defeated idealists.
Adamic’s ‘epistemological position’ was curious. Although in his guts he sided with the IWW’s doomed struggle, he remained intellectually aloof from their ‘naive belief’ in revolution and One Big Union. As he put it, ‘I was not a regular Socialist, but a “Menckenite”.’ He soon became part of a like-minded salon of Los Angeles bohemians, gravitating around bookdealer Jack Zeitlin’s home in Echo Park, that included architect Lloyd Wright, photographer Edward Weston, critic-librarian Lawrence Clark Powell, artist Rockwell Kent and a dozen others.20 Yet Adamic was also uncomfortable with these genteel rebels; as Carey McWilliams (a young member of the circle) would later observe, he had an ‘instinctive hostility to typically middle-class concepts’. Eventually he withdrew to a Slavic neighborhood in San Pedro, Los Angeles’s bustling port (‘It was a normal seaport town . . . there were no tourists and sick old people from Iowa and Missouri’).21
From this base in the harbor – with one foot in the literati camp (Mencken had begun to publish Adamic in the American Mercury) and the other in the proletariat – Adamic chronicled Los Angeles of the oil-and-God-crazy 1920s. To him it was an incredible burlesque mirror of the philistinism and larceny of Coolidge America (‘additional proof of the accuracy of Marx’s generalization that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce’).22 As McWilliams recalled:
He thrived on Los Angeles. He reveled in its freaks, fakirs, and frauds. He became the magazine biographer of such eccentrics as Otoman Bar-Azusht Ra’nish and Aimée Semple McPherson. Lost in the files of the strange assortment of magazines published by R. Haldeman-Julius will be found a long list of Adamic’s contributions to Los Angeles. He was its prophet, sociologist and historian.23
Adamic’s most original contribution to the debunking of the Booster myth was his emphasis on the centrality of class violence to the construction of the city. Others had already attacked Los Angeles’s philistinism and skewered its apologists with Mencken-like sarcasm. (Indeed as early as 1913, Willard Huntington Wright was complaining in The Smart Set about the ‘hypocrisy, like a vast fungus, [that] has spread over the city’s surface’.)24 In his historically interesting but vapidly written 1927 novel, Oil!, Upton Sinclair (who had been a leading participant in the IWW free speech fight at the Harbor) debunked the oil boom and evoked the oppression of labor in Los Angeles. But Adamic was the first to carefully chart the sordid, bloody history of the Forty Year War and attempt a muckraking reconstruction of its central events: the bombing of the Times in 1910 and the subsequent trial of the labor conspiracy led by the McNamara brothers. Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (1931), although scarcely flattering to the California labor bureaucracy, painted a demonic portrait of General Otis and the ruling-class brutality that had driven labor to desperation. Equally it warned readers in the early Depression years that until employers bargained with unions in good faith, outbreaks of violent class warfare were inevitable.
Shortly after publishing the first version of Dynamite, Adamic synthesized his various Haldeman-Julius ephemera and pages from his diary in a famous essay, ‘Los Angeles! There She Blows!’ (The Outlook, 13 August 1930), later quoted in ‘The Enormous Village’ chapter of Laughing in the Jungle. This essay was widely noticed by the critical literati, exerting a seminal influence on McWilliams, as well as upon Nathanael West, who in The Day of the Locust (1939), would further develop Adamic’s image of Los Angeles’s ‘spiritually and mentally starving’ little people, the ‘Folks’. Also impressed was writer and satirist Morrow Mayo, who ‘paraphrased’ and amalgamated Adamic’s Outlook and McNamara pieces in his own Los Angeles (1933). Although Laughing in the Jungle was the incomparably more powerful work, Mayo’s lurid, vignette-style history (for example, from ‘Hell-Hole of the West’ to ‘The Hickman Horror’) scored its own points against the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Mayo was particularly effective in reworking Adamic’s ‘enormous village’ theme:
Here is an artificial city which has been pumped up under forced draught, inflated like a balloon, stuffed with rural humanity like a goose with corn . . . endeavoring to eat up this too rapid avalanche of anthropoids, the sunshine metropolis heaves and strains, sweats and becomes pop-eyed, like a young boa constrictor trying to swallow a goat. It has never imparted an urban character to its incoming population for the simple reason that it has never had any urban character to impart. On the other hand, the place has retained the manners, culture, and general outlook of a huge country village.25
Not all debunking of the ‘enormous village’ was merely literary. The Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles, who held their first exhibition in 1923, represented an analogous, even earlier, critical current in local art. A united front for the ‘New Form’, including Cubism, Dynamism, and Expressionism, they attacked the landscape romantics – the Eucalyptus painters,