City of Quartz. Mike Davis
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comprehensive elite group of the era in Southern California.
In his role as Cal Tech’s chief booster, Millikan increasingly became an ideologue for a specific vision of science in Southern California. Speaking typically to luncheon meetings at the elite California Club in Downtown Los Angeles, or to banquets for the Associates at the Huntington mansion, Millikan adumbrated two fundamental points. First, Southern California was a unique scientific frontier where industry and academic research were joining hands to solve such fundamental challenges as the long-distance transmission of power and the generation of energy from sunlight. Secondly, and even more importantly, Southern California ‘is today, as was England two hundred years ago, the westernmost outpost of Nordic civilization’, with the ‘exceptional opportunity’ of having ‘a population which is twice as Anglo-Saxon as that existing in New York, Chicago or any of the great cities of this country’.102
Millikan’s image of science and business reproducing Aryan supremacy on the shores of the Pacific undoubtedly warmed the hearts of his listeners, who like himself were conservative Taft–Hoover Republicans. An orthodox Social Darwinist, Millikan frequently invoked Herbert Spencer (the ‘great thinker’) in his fulminations against socialism (‘the coming slavery’), the New Deal (‘political royalists’), Franklin Roosevelt (‘Tammanyizing the United States’), and ‘statism’ in general. In the face of breadlines, he boasted ‘the common man . . . is vastly better off here today in depressed America than he has ever been at any other epoch in society’. Yet, as private support for scientific research collapsed during the Depression years, Millikan reconciled his anti-statism with Cal Tech’s financial needs by advocating military research as the one permissible arena where science and industry could accept federal partnership – an $80 million windfall to Cal Tech in the war years.103
In an important sense, this utter reactionary, who was totally out of step with younger, more progressive scientific leaderships in places like Berkeley and Chicago, defined the parameters – illiberal, militarized and profit-driven – for the incorporation of science into the economy and culture of Southern California. Nowhere else in the country did there develop such a seamless continuum between the corporation, laboratory and classroom as in Los Angeles, where Cal Tech via continuous cloning and spinoff became the hub of a vast wheel of public-private research and development that eventually included the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hughes Aircraft (the world center of airborne electronics), the Air Force’s Space Technology Laboratory, Aerojet General (a spinoff of the latter), TRW, the Rand Institute, and so on.
But the rise of science in Southern California had stranger resonances as well. Just like Hollywood, that other exotic enclave, Cal Tech struck sparks as it scraped against the local bedrock of Midwestern fundamentalism. It was not unusual for Albert Einstein to be lecturing at Cal Tech on his photoelectric equation, while a few blocks away Aimée Semple McPherson was casting out the devil before her Pasadena congregation. At the height of the Scopes Trial controversy, and amid the efforts of the Bryan Bible League of California to make the King James Bible a required textbook in schools, Millikan – ‘to a great many people in Southern California (Babbitts and quacks included) the greatest man in the world’ – intervened to reconcile God and Science. Millikan went on the stump as a ‘Christian scientist’ proclaiming, via radio, a national lecture tour and a book, that there was ‘no contradiction between real science and real religion’. The ‘debunker’ Morrow Mayo, disgusted by the capitulation of America’s leading scientist to the fundamentalist backlash of the 1920s, described his performance as follows:
When he got through with science and religion, they were so wrapped up in each other that a Philadelphia lawyer could never untangle them. The closest this great scientist ever came to a definite stand was a full gallop on a supernatural race-track running from Fundamentalism to theism, but his powers of occult observation would have done credit to any crystal-gazer in Los Angeles. . . . The whole thing was a conglomeration of metaphysical aphorisms and theological sophistry, suffused in a weird and ghostly atmosphere of obscurantism, with occasional and literal references to Santa Claus.104
At the same time that Millikan was trying to soothe evangelical ire with reassurances about Jesus, the electron and Santa Claus, Los Angeles’s powerful ‘New Thought’ movement was avidly assimilating Einstein and Millikan to Nostradamus and Annie Besant as ‘Masters of the Ages’. Contemporary ‘science’, in the guise of astounding powers and arcane revelations, became the progenitor of an entire Southern California cult stratum. As Farnsworth Crowder explains the origin of ‘good vibrations’ in his ‘Little Blue Book’ classic, ‘Los Angeles – The Heaven of Bunk-Shooters’:
Science is the first-assistant Messiah inspiring many a sect. . . . What psychology will not suppply can be lifted from the physical sciences. Einstein, Michaelson, Millikan and company are unwitting contributors. . . . Whatever waves, oscillates, vibrates, pulses or surges contributes, by analogy, to the explanations of harmony, absent treatment, telepathy, magnetic healing, vibratory equilibirum, spiritualism or any other cloudy wonder. Surpassing are the powers of these scientific sects. One awed citizen referring to a busy group of vibrators cloistered in the hills, whispered, ‘My lord, man! – they wouldn’t dare release their secrets. The race isn’t ready – not advanced enough. The world would go to pieces. It would be like giving everybody a handful of radium. Ignorant people would have too much power.’105
In Southern California physics and metaphysics continued to rub shoulders in a variety of weird circumstances. Crowder specifically had in mind those ‘superscientists’, the Rosicrucians and Theosophists, as well as more ephemeral sects (the Church of Psychic Science, the Metaphysical Science Association, and so on), who exploited the public’s simultaneous awe and mystification in the face of strange new disciplines like quantum mechanics and psychoanalysis. Before the emergence of a full-fledged, alternative ‘science fiction’ milieu in the 1940s, and in the absence of any truly popular culture of science, they filled in the cracks between ignorance and invention, and mediated between science and theology. A more bizarre liaison, however, directly connected the oldest metaphysic, the Luciferian Magick or Black Art, to Cal Tech and the founders of the American Rocket State, and then, through an extraordinary ménage à trois, to the first world religion created by a science-fiction writer.
Cal Tech’s connection with the emergence of Scientology can be briefly retold here (relying heavily on Russell Miller’s account). Sometime during the 1930s one Wilfred Smith founded a Pasadena branch (‘the Agape Lodge’) of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) – a German-origin brotherhood of magicians (and spies) that had come under the spell of Aleister Crowley, the notorious Edwardian sorcerer and ‘most hated man in England’.106 For several years the Agape Lodge quietly succored Satan and his ‘Great Beast’ (Crowley) with contributions, while secretly diverting Pasadenans with the amusements of sexual necromancy. Then, sometime in 1939, the Lodge fell under the patronage and leadership of John Parsons, a young L.A. aristocrat and pioneer of Cal Tech rocketry (later a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory). During the day, Parsons worked at the Cal Tech labs or the Devil’s Gate test range with the great Theodore von Karman, perfecting propellant systems for liquid-fuel rockets; at night, he returned to his mansion on Pasadena’s ‘millionaires row’ (South Orange Grove Avenue) to perform blasphemous rituals (with, for example, naked pregnant women leaping through fire circles) in his secret OTO ‘temple’ under the long-distance direction of Crowley.107
Aside from being a world-famous rocket pioneer and a secret wizard, Parsons was also a devoted science fiction fan who attended meetings of the Los Angeles Fantasy and Science Fiction Society to hear writers talk about their books. One day in August 1945, to Parsons’s delight, a LAFSFS acquaintance showed up at the Orange Grove mansion with a young naval officer, Lt. Commander L. Ron Hubbard, who had already established a reputation as a master of sci-fi pulp. Captivated by Hubbard’s ‘charm’ and expressed desire to become a practitioner of Magick, Parsons welcomed him as house guest and sorcerer’s apprentice. Hubbard reciprocated by sleeping with Parsons’s mistress. Perturbed by this development, but not wishing to show open jealousy, Parsons instead embarked on a vast diabolical experiment, under Crowley’s reluctant supervision, to call up a true ‘whore of Babylon’ so that she and Parsons might procreate