City of Quartz. Mike Davis
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brooms in Disney’s Fantasia, while Schoenberg, otherwise invisible, tutored studio composers who made musical suspense for noir thrillers and monster movies.90 Marxists, who earlier in Germany had praised the advent of collectivized intellectual production and the disappearance of the author, now bitterly denounced Taylorized ‘breadwork’, as Brecht called it, and the futility of ‘writing for nobody’.91 For Adorno, Hollywood was nothing less than the mechanized cataclysm that was abolishing Culture in the classical sense. (‘In America, one will . . . not be able to dodge the question, whether the term culture, in which one grew up, has become obsolete. . . .’)92
Secondly, whatever their material situation, secluded (Adorno) or integrated (Billy Wilder), forgotten (Heinrich Mann and Man Ray) or celebrated (Thomas Mann), dependent on charity (Döblin) or housed in the Palisades (Feuchtwanger), the exiles were all vulnerable to changes in the political climate. Concentrated in the movie colony under an increasingly hostile public eye, they played out their final role in Los Angeles as scape-goats of the Hollywood Inquisition. With the entire industry increasingly held hostage by cold war brainwashing, and ten of their American colleagues on the road to prison (with hundreds more blacklisted for a generation), many of the exiles chose to take the first boat back to the Old World. Others hung on, as best they could, writing or directing the occasional noir film that intimated the cancer of political and cultural repression.
Later, back in Modell Deutschland (which he had chosen over Brecht’s DDR), Horkheimer reorganized the Frankfurt School and began to publish the rest of his and Adorno’s notes from the mid twentieth century’s ‘most advanced point of observation’. The Frankfurters briefed the new European intelligentsia about the coming order for which the Marshall Plan was laying the foundation. Bittersweet memories of ‘exile in paradise’ (New York and Los Angeles) were sublimated into a preemptive critique of cultural Americanization and the consumer society. Southern California, mean-while, might have forgotten that it had ever housed the Institute for Social Research, except for the unexpected arrival of Frankfurt’s most famous prodigal son, Herbert Marcuse, in the early 1960s – the last of the exile generation to arrive on the West Coast.
Recruited from Brandeis to anchor the philosophy program at the spectacular new sea-cliff campus of the University of California at San Diego, Marcuse willingly walked back into the same storm of rabid anti-radicalism and anti-intellectualism from which Brecht, Eisler and scores of others had fled in the late 1940s. During what Barry Katz has called his ’years of cheerful pessimism’, Marcuse took Adorno’s ‘collapse of culture’ thesis a step further, positing a ‘democratic totalitarianism’ undermining the very possibility of critical subjectivity. Undoubtedly he found plentiful confirmation for this claim in surrounding San Diego County, with its eerie landscape conjugation of seaside resorts and Marine Corps bases.
But even in this ‘one-dimensional society’, Marcuse welcomed emergent ‘forces of liberation’: praising soul music and jazz (which Adorno excoriated), supporting Angela Davis and the Panthers, and urging his students to spread the gospel of classical Marxism across California.93 He was able to make the organic connection to indigenous radicalism that had eluded a majority of his exile comrades in the 1940s. Unfortunately the Last Dialectician in Lotusland fell afoul not only of rising Nixonian hysteria (every day brought fresh death threats from San Diego’s fascist fringe), but, fatally, of the fickle attention of the Culture Industry. Unwonted media celebrity first ‘gurufied’ Marcuse (Time magazine’s ‘Pied Piper of Insurgent Youth’), then stamped his thoughts with the killing censorship of a fad whose time has passed.
Yet the spectre of Frankfurt Marxism (Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse) still haunts Southern California, even if their once ironic observations have been reduced to guidepost clichés for the benefit of Postmodernism’s Club Med. If the Weimar exiles appeared in Los Angeles as tragedy, then today’s Fifth Republic tourists come strictly as farce. What was once anguish seems to have become fun. As a local critic has observed with regard to a recent visit of the current Parisian philosopher king:
Baudrillard seems to enjoy himself. He loves to observe the liquidation of culture, to experience the delivery from depth. . . . He goes home to France and finds it a quaint, nineteenth-century country. He returns to Los Angeles and feels perverse exhilaration. ‘There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. Only Hieronymous Bosch’s Hell can match the inferno effect.’94
THE SORCERERS
If Southern California is to continue to meet the challenge of her environment . . . her supreme need . . . is for able, creative, highly endowed, highly trained men in science and its appplications. Robert Millikan95
In the South of California has gathered the largest and most miscellaneous assortment of Messiahs, Sorcerers, Saints and Seers known to the history of aberrations. Farnsworth Crowder96
Not every Los Angeles intellectual of renown ended up behind a studio gate in the 1940s. Even adjusting for the relative exchange values of literary and scientific prestiges, the famed writers’ stable at MGM was small cheese compared to the extraordinary concentration of Nobel laureates gathered around the recently founded California Institute of Technology in Pasadena from the mid 1920s onward. With a permanent or visiting faculty that included Einstein, Millikan, Michelson, von Karman, Oppenheimer, Dobzhansky, Pauling and Noyes, Cal Tech was the first institution in the West to claim national preeminence in a major science, physics.97 More importantly, Cal Tech was no mere ivory tower, but the dynamic nucleus of an emergent technostructure that held one of the keys to Southern California’s future. While its aeronautics engineers tested airframe designs for Donald Douglas’s DC-3 in their wind tunnel and its geologists solved technical problems for the California oil industry, other Cal Tech scientists were in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco, above Devil’s Gate Dam (where NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory stands today), helping launch the space age with their pathbreaking rocket experiments. Cal Tech, together with the Department of Defense, substantially invented Southern California’s postwar, science-based economy.
But Cal Tech itself was largely the invention of George Ellery Hale, pioneering astrophysicist and founder of the Mount Wilson Observatory. Smitten with Pasadena and its extraordinary concentration of retired, ‘surplus’ wealth, Hale envisioned a vast scientific-cultural triangle around the Observatory (‘already the greatest asset possessed by Southern California, not excluding the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce’), the Institute, and the Huntington Library (whose creation he also influenced).98 The indefatigable Hale (closely associated with the Carnegie interests) was also the chief catalyst in organizing the National Research Council in 1917 to support Woodrow Wilson’s war mobilization. The NRC was the scientific-military-industrial complex in embryo, bringing together the nation’s leading physical scientists, the military’s chief engineers, and the heads of science-based corporations like AT&T and GE. Moreover it was the model for the triangular regional collaboration that Hale wanted to establish around Cal Tech, and whose ultimate offshoot was the Los Angeles aerospace industry.99
In order to realize this dream, Hale convinced one of his NRC colleagues, and America’s leading physicist, Robert A. Millikan, to forsake his beloved University of Chicago for the presidency of Cal Tech. A key factor in Millikan’s recruitment was apparently a promise by Southern California Edison to provide him with a high-voltage laboratory for experiments in atomic physics. Hale and Millikan shared an almost fanatical belief in the partnership of science and big business. It was their policy that Cal Tech be allied to ‘aristocracy and patronage’ and shielded ‘from meddling congressmen and other representatives of the people’.100
Their chief apostle in mobilizing the local aristocracy was Edison director Henry M. Robinson, also president of the First National Bank and intimate of Herbert Hoover (‘his Colonel House’). Robinson had personally advanced science in Southern California by applying Einstein’s theories to capitalism in a little book entitled Relativity in Business Morals. (Critics suggested that Robinson had acquired experimental evidence for his treatise while participating in the great Julian Petroleum swindle of the 1920s.)101 With un-bounded enthusiasm for alloying physics and plutocracy, Robinson