Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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by automation or moved to segregated suburbs.
April: Game Theory
Santa Monica in 1960 was still the three-shift company town of Douglas Aircraft. The huge factory complex at the Santa Monica Airport, which at its peak in 1943 had employed 44,000 workers, was the bread and butter of the city where Route 66 met the Pacific Ocean. Douglas was also the mother (the Air Force was the father) of “Project RAND,” a secret weapons planning and strategy group that after the war moved out on its own to become the RAND Corporation. Rand’s core mission for the Air Force was to make nuclear warfare, including a possible preemptive strike on the Soviet Union, feasible. To accomplish this it was given the resources to hire the best minds in mathematics and decision theory and put them to work in an atmosphere that was casually academic rather than oppressively military or corporate. Indeed, Albert Wohlstetter, RAND’s meister of nuclear strategy, encouraged his younger colleagues, such as 29-year-old Daniel Ellsberg, to embrace the exhilaratingly Southern Californian lifestyle. RANDites surfed, sailed, listened to jazz, sent their kids to progressive private schools, collected contemporary art, and lived in modernist “Case Study” homes in the hills. At their own Laurel Canyon home, the Wohlstetters regularly entertained such stimulating company as Saul Bellow, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Mary McCarthy.
But these were just the sunny fringe benefits of a RAND job; it was the work itself that provided a unique, addictive and bizarre excitement. Sworn to the highest level of secrecy, the RAND people played Armageddon for weeks and months at a time. These Strangelovian games were organized around actual or probable crises—for instance, a Soviet blockade of Berlin or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan—with the goal of clarifying the criteria for the use of nuclear weapons. New mathematical models were used to explore the logical structure of strategic decision-making. “By the mid-1950s,” writes journalist Alex Abella in his history, “RAND became the world center for game theory.” John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, John Nash—the giants of “rational choice” and game theoretics, worked at RAND during the 1950s in the quixotic quest for a solution to the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” (a problem first formulated by RAND researchers in 1950). The essence of the dilemma was that two rational opponents might choose not to cooperate, even if doing so could avoid nuclear war. Daniel Ellsberg, one of many at RAND struggling with the grim implications of game theory, became so pessimistic about the future that he didn’t bother to subscribe to the life insurance offered by the corporation.28 The Cuban Missile Crisis was just around the corner.
Meanwhile another game, “the Game” in fact, was being played down the street from RAND in the brick three-story building that housed the Synanon Foundation. Its founder, Chuck Dederich, a former executive and recovered alcoholic, had been very active in AA, but became disillusioned by its refusal to help drug addicts as well as by what he regarded as the collusive and formulaic nature of its group sessions. Synanon in contrast was a racially integrated therapeutic commune organized around hours-long group confrontations, emotionally explosive and often terrifying to newcomers, that aimed to destroy self-deception while fostering a tough, “intimate honesty” between participants. No hint of violence was tolerated in the Game, but participants were otherwise free to use language as a sledgehammer. Dederich, who was both the autocrat and loving father inside 1351 Oceanfront Avenue, was frank about the perils of the process. “The Game is a big emotional dance and it’s like a dream. It’s random. Some dreams are nightmares.”29
In the event, Synanon seemed to work, as former addicts successfully helped newcomers through the torture of cold turkey withdrawal, and hundreds of vulnerable people, ranging from celebrities to San Quentin parolees, managed to live together in some harmony. In the later 1960s, the community would turn to activism. “Synanon residents marched with Cesar Chavez,” recalled activist-historian Frank Bardacke, “boycotted non-union table grapes, and supported a variety of leftish causes. The foundation was committed to environmentalism.”30 But whether seen as therapy or an alternative way of life, Synanon was an anathema to civic leaders who feared that Santa Monica would be deluged with addicts rather than tourists. They prosecuted, sued and then re-sued the foundation for years, with Synanon always winning a last-minute reprieve from eviction, but never exoneration from accusations of being a cult or criminal conspiracy. In contrast, the city council had no qualms about pipe-smoking RANDites sitting around a seminar table and quietly discussing how many millions of casualties would be “acceptable” in the event of a nuclear exchange.
May: The Independent Student Union
On May 2, just minutes before his long-delayed appointment in San Quentin’s gas chamber, Caryl Chessman’s lawyers made a final, desperate appeal to Federal Judge Louis Goodman in San Francisco to stay the execution. Goodman reluctantly agreed to hear their arguments and asked his secretary to quickly get Warden Fred Dickson on the phone. The secretary dialed the wrong number. By the time he reached the warden, Chessman’s face was already turning purple from cyanide fumes and Dickson refused to stop the process. The Los Angeles Times, which had earlier lauded the gas chamber as a “sanitary disposal mechanism,” termed Chessman’s execution a “breath of fresh air,” but millions around the world thought it was miscarriage of justice.31
Since his original conviction in 1948 for kidnapping (a capital crime under California’s Little Lindbergh Law), Chessman, representing himself, had won a sensational series of last-minute reprieves from the gas chamber and published a best-selling memoir, Cell 2455, Death Row which was made into a 1955 film. Although he protested his innocence to the last breath, the real issue in the case became the barbarous nature of the death penalty itself. After losing a last appeal in 1959, Chessman was supposed to die the following February, but Governor Brown, stalked by young protestors (including his own seminarian son Jerry) and inundated with clemency appeals from around the world, blinked at the last moment and stayed the execution for two months. This only unleashed fury from the Right as Republican legislators, seeing an opportunity to revenge themselves for their epic defeat in 1958, called for the governor’s impeachment. Brown, worried about collateral damage to his proposed Master Plan for the colleges and upcoming State Water System bonds, punted the issue to the legislature in the form of a bill to abolish the death penalty. He knew it had no chance of passage.
The Chessman protests in February coincided with the Southern sit-ins, while the execution in March was followed within two weeks by the so-called “HUAC riots” in San Francisco, when police used batons and fire hoses to violently disperse Berkeley students (including Albert Einstein’s granddaughter) peacefully demonstrating against hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Meanwhile, the Cuban Revolution was turning leftward (in March President Eisenhower had given permission to start training exiles for an invasion), and the international “Ban the bomb” movement was burgeoning (over Easter 100,000 Britons rallied in support of the Aldermaston peace march). Together these events catalyzed the birth of a new student activism on California campuses, with Berkeley, of course, as the nominal capital.32
In Southern California the foremost example was LA City College, where a spontaneous anti–death penalty rally in the winter, the first protest on campus in twelve years, led to the formation of a multi-issue activist group, the Independent Student Union.33 While continuing to work on the Chessman case, the LACC students quickly joined the CORE-coordinated demonstrations at local Kress and Woolworth’s stores, and by August they were sponsoring three weekly picket lines. On May 7, after extensive leafleting to unions and on campuses across L.A., the ISU led a nine-hour-long “Ban the bomb” march of 300 people from MacArthur Park to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—a distance of seventeen miles—where Nobel laureate Linus Pauling spoke. (The public that spring was skittish about the Bomb. Two weeks after the march, a Los Angeles company announced that it had stopped selling trampolines [a recent fad] and was moving instead into the more lucrative market for fallout shelters.) Meanwhile a rally of 300 sit-in supporters at Exposition Park in late May led to the formation of the Southern California Committee on Integration, with Walter Davis, who was organizing an ISU group at Cal State LA, as one of the leaders. In late October, still picketing the retails chains every Saturday, the LACC group mobilized 200 protestors outside a tribute dinner for a local member of HUAC.34
This was an impressive record of protest, especially for students