City of Quartz. Mike Davis
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growth and crisis, and one of its fastest growing epicenters. In the desperate reassurance of their gated subdivisions, the new commuter population attempts to recover the lost Eden of 1950s-style suburbia. Older Valley residents, on the other hand, are frantically trying to raise the gangplanks against this ex-urban exodus sponsored by their own pro-growth business and political elites. In their increasingly angry view, the landrush since 1984 has only brought traffic jams, smog, rising crime, job competition, noise, soil erosion, a water shortage and the attrition of a distinctively countrified lifestyle.
For the first time since the Socialists left the desert (in 1918 for their New Llano colony in Louisiana) there is wild talk of a ‘total rural revolution’. The announcement of several new mega-projects – instant cities ranging from 8,500 to 35,000 units, designed to be plugged into the Valley’s waiting grid – have aroused unprecedented populist ire. On one recent occasion, the representative of the Ritter Ranch project in rustic Leone Valley was ‘ambushed by an angry mob . . . screaming and bitching and threatening to kill [him]’. In the Valley’s two incorporated municipalities of Lancaster (the international headquarters of the Flat Earth Society) and Palmdale (the fastest growing city in California for most of the 1980s), more than sixty different homeowners’ associations have joined together to slow down urbanization, as well as to contest the state’s plan for a new 2,200-bed prison for Los Angeles drug and gang offenders in the Mira Loma area.6
Meanwhile the myth of a desert sanctuary was shattered shortly after New Year’s Eve 1990 when a stray bullet from a gang member’s gun killed a popular high-school athlete. Shortly afterwards, the trendy Quartz Hill area, advertised as the emergent ‘Beverly Hills’ of the desert, was wracked by a gun-battle between the local 5 Deuce Posse and some out-of-town Crips. The grand peur of L.A. street gangs suddenly swept the high desert. While sheriffs hunted fugitive teenagers with dogs – like escapees from a Georgia chain-gang – local businessmen formed the semi-vigilante Gangs Out Now (GON). Intimidated by official warnings that there were six hundred and fifty ‘identified gang members’ in the Valley, the local high school attempted to impose a draconian dress code banning ‘gang colors’ (blue and red). Outraged students, in turn, protested in the streets.7
While the kids were ‘doin’ the right thing’, the local NAACP was demanding an investigation of three suspicious killings of non-whites by sheriffs’ deputies. In one case the deputies gunned down an unarmed Asian college student while in another a Black man accused of wielding a three-pronged garden tool was shot eight times. The most egregious incident, however, was the slaying of Betty Jean Aborn, a homeless middle-aged Black woman with a history of mental illness. Confronted by seven burly sheriffs after stealing an ice-cream from a convenience store, she supposedly brandished a butcher’s knife. The response was an incredible volley of twenty-eight rounds, eighteen of which perforated her body.8
As the desert thus announced the arrival of the fin de siècle with a staggering overture of bulldozers and gunfire, some old-timers – contemplating the rapidly diminishing distance between the solitude of the Mojave and the gridlock of suburban life – began to wonder out loud whether there was any alternative to Los Angeles after all.
THE MAY POLE
Class war and repression are said to have driven the Los Angeles Socialists into the desert. But they also came eagerly, wanting to taste the sweet fruit of cooperative labor in their own lifetimes. As Job Harriman, who came within a hair’s-breadth of being Los Angeles’s first Socialist mayor in 1911, explained: ‘It became apparent to me that a people would never abandon their means of livelihood, good or bad, capitalistic or otherwise, until other methods were developed which would promise advantages at least as good as those by which they were living.’ What Llano promised was a guaranteed $4 per day wage and a chance to ‘show the world a trick they do not know, which is how to live without war or interest on money or rent on land or profiteering in any manner’.9
With the sponsorship not only of Harriman and the Socialist Party, but also of Chairman W.A. Engle of the Central Labor Council and Frank McMahon of the Bricklayers’ Union, hundreds of landless farmers, unemployed laborers, blacklisted machinists, adventurous clerks, persecuted IWW soapbox orators, restless shopkeepers, and bright-eyed bohemians followed the YPSLs to where the snow-fed Rio del Llano (now Big Rock Creek) met the edge of the desert. Although they were ‘democracy with the lid off . . . democracy rampant, belligerent, unrestricted’, their enthusiastic labor transformed several thousand acres of the Mojave into a small Socialist civilization.10 By 1916 their alfalfa fields and modern dairy, their pear orchards and vegetable gardens – all watered by a complex and efficient irrigation system – supplied the colony with 90 per cent of its own food (and fresh flowers as well). Meanwhile, dozens of small workshops cobbled shoes, canned fruit, laundered clothes, cut hair, repaired autos, and published the Western Comrade. There was even a Llano motion picture company and an illfated experiment in aviation (the homemade plane crashed).
In the spirit of Chautauqua as much as Marx, Llano was also one big Red School House. While babies (including Bella Lewitzky, the future modern dancer) played in the nursery, children (among them Gregory Ain, the future modern architect) attended Southern California’s first Montessori school. The teenagers, meanwhile, had their own Kid Kolony (a model industrial school), and adults attended night classes or enjoyed the Mojave’s largest library. One of the favorite evening pastimes, apart from dancing to the colony’s notorious ragtime orchestra, was debating Alice Constance Austin’s design for the Socialist City that Llano was to become.
Although influenced by contemporary City Beautiful and Garden City ideologies, Austin’s drawings and models, as architectural historian Dolores Hayden has emphasized, were ‘distinctively feminist and California’. Like Llano kid Gregory Ain’s more modest 1940s plans for cooperative housing, Austin attempted to translate the specific cultural values and popular enthusiasms of Southern California into a planned and egalitarian social landscape. In the model that she presented to colonists on May Day 1916, Llano was depicted as a garden city of ten thousand people housed in graceful Craftsman apartments with private gardens but communal kitchens and laundries to liberate women from drudgery. The civic center, as befitted a ‘city of light’, was composed of ‘eight rectangular halls, like factories, with sides almost wholly of glass, leading to a glass-domed assembly hall’. She crowned this aesthetic of individual choice within a fabric of social solidarity with a quintessentially Southern California gesture: giving every household an automobile and constructing a ring road around the city that would double ‘as a drag strip with stands for spectators on both sides’.11
If Austin’s vision of thousands of patio apartments radiating from the Bonaventure Hotel-style Assembly Hall, surrounded by socially owned orchards, factories and a monumental dragstrip sounds a bit far-fetched today, imagine what Llanoites would have made of a future composed of Kaufman and Broad chateaux ringed by mini-malls, prisons and Stealth Bomber plants. In any event, the nine hundred pioneers of the Socialist City would enjoy only one more triumphant May Day in the Mojave.
The May Day festivities of 1917 commenced at nine o’clock in the morning with intra-community athletic events, including a Fat Women’s Race. The entire group of colonists then formed a Grand Parade and marched to the hotel where the Literary Program followed. The band played from a bunting-draped grandstand, the choral society sang appropriate revolutionary anthems like the ‘Marseillaise’, then moved into the Almond Grove for a barbecue dinner. After supper a group of young girls injected the English into the radical tradition by dancing about the May Pole. At 7:30 the dramatic club presented ‘Mishaps of Minerva’ with newly decorated scenery in the assembly hall. Dancing consumed the remainder of the evening.12
Despite an evident sense of humor, Llano began to fall apart in the later half of 1917. Plagued by internal feuding between the General Assembly and the so-called ‘brush gang’, the colony was assailed from the outside by creditors, draft boards, jealous neighbors, and the Los Angeles Times. After the loss of Llano’s water rights in a lawsuit – a devastating blow to its irrigation infrastructure – Harriman and a minority of colonists relocated in 1918 to Louisiana, where a hard-scrabble New Llano (a pale shadow of the original) hung on until 1939. Within twenty-four hours of the colonists’