City of Quartz - Mike Davis

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from the Cumberland Gap to the Pacific.

      The first boom occurred a few years after Lummis’s arrival and brought one hundred thousand fortune- and health-seekers to Los Angeles County. After the collapse of this railroad-engineered land rush, Colonel Otis – representing the toughest of the new settlers – took command of the city’s business organizations on behalf of panic-stricken speculators. To revive the boom, and to launch a reckless competition with San Francisco (the most unionized city in the world), he militarized industrial relations in Los Angeles. Existing unions were locked out, picketing was virtually outlawed, and dissidents were terrorized. With sunshine and the open shop as their main assets, and allied with the great transcontinental railroads (the region’s largest landowners), a syndicate of developers, bankers and transport magnates led by Otis and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, set out to sell Los Angeles – as no city had ever been sold – to the restless but affluent babbitry of the Middle West. For more than a quarter century, an unprecedented mass migration of retired farmers, small-town dentists, wealthy spinsters, tubercular schoolteachers, petty stock speculators, Iowa lawyers, and devotees of the Chautauqua circuit transferred their savings and small fortunes into Southern California real estate. This massive flow of wealth between regions produced population, income and consumption structures seemingly out of all proportion to Los Angeles’s actual production base: the paradox of the first ‘postindustrial’ city in its preindustrial guise.

      As Kevin Starr emphasizes in his widely acclaimed account of the cultural history of Southern California in the Booster Era (1885–1925), Inventing the Dream, this transformation required the continuous inter-action of myth-making and literary invention with the crude promotion of land values and health cures. In his view, the partnership of Lummis and Otis was the prototype for the conscription of a whole generation of Eastern (usually Brahmin) intellectuals as the cultural agents of the Boom. The original cadre consisted of the journalists and errant littérateurs, led by Lummis, whom Otis brought to the Times during the Gilded Age: Robert Burdette, John Steven McGroaty (‘the Poet of the Verdugo Hills’), Harry Carr, and others.

      Through the talents of such men, Otis promoted an image of Southern California that dominated the popular imagination at the turn of the century and is alive to this day: a melange of mission myth (originating in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona), obssession with climate, political conservatism (symbolized in open shop), and a thinly veiled racialism, all put to the service of boosterism and oligarchy.10

      The mission literature depicted the history of race relations as a pastoral ritual of obedience and paternalism: ‘graceful Indians, happy as peasants in an Italian opera, knelt dutifully before the Franciscans to receive the baptism of a superior culture, while in the background the angelus tolled from a swallow-guarded campanile, and a choir of friars intoned the Te Deum’.11 Any intimation of the brutality inherent in the forced labor system of the missions and haciendas, not to speak of the racial terrorism and lynchings that made early Anglo-ruled Los Angeles the most violent town in the West during the 1860s and 1870s, was suppressed.

      If Jackson’s Ramona transformed selected elements of local history into romantic myth (still popular to this day), Lummis was the impresario who promoted the myth as the motif of an entire artifical landscape. In 1894, as federal troops occupied Los Angeles and Otis fretted that the local Pullman strikers might draw out other workers in a general strike, Lummis organized the first Los Angeles Fiesta as a public distraction. The next year, with the class war temporarily abated, he orchestrated the Fiesta around a comprehensive ‘mission’ theme, influenced by Ramona. Its electric regional impact can only be compared to the national frisson of the contemporary Columbian Exposition in Chicago: as the latter inaugurated the neo-Classical revival, the former launched an equally frenzied local ‘Mission revival’.

      The romanticized and idyllic theme was quickly picked up and exploited by a gallery of entrepreneurs who knew a good thing when they saw it. Everything from furniture suites and candied fruit to commercial and residential architecture stressed the mission motif.12

      Some of the missions themselves were restored as pioneer theme-parks, especially San Gabriel Arcangel where a specially constructed theater next to the old church housed McGroarty’s Mission Play – ‘the American Oberammergau’ – which was eventually seen by tens of thousands. At a New York advertising convention in the early 1930s, the mission aura of ‘history and romance’ was rated as an even more important attraction in selling Southern California than weather or movie-industry glamor.13 Of course, as Starr notes, this capitalization of Los Angeles’s fictional ‘Spanish’ past not only sublimated contemporary class struggle, but also censored, and repressed from view, the actual plight of Alta California’s descendants. Pio Pico, the last governor of Mexican California and once the richest man in the city, was buried in a pauper’s grave virtually as Lummis’s floral floats were passing down Broadway.14

      From the middle nineties, Lummis edited the influential magazine Out West (Land of Sunshine), ‘whose masthead . . . reads like a Who’s Who . . . of California letters’,15 and oversaw a full-fledged salon that gathered around his famous bungalow, El Alisal, along the rocky Arroyo Seco, between Los Angeles and Pasadena (the famed winter retreat of Eastern millionaires). Lummis’s ‘Arroyo Set’ regrouped Henry James’s Yankee intelligentsia in an altogether more libidinal setting: indeed one of the Set’s major credos, best expressed in Grace Ellery Channings’s evocations of an Italianized Southern California, was the power of sunshine to reinvigorate the racial energies of the Anglo-Saxons (Los Angeles as the ‘new Rome’ and so on).

      Lummis’s passions for Southwest archeology (he founded the famed Southwest Museum a few blocks from El Alisal), mission preservation, physical culture (emulating the imagined knightly lifestyle of the dons), and racial metaphysics were recapitulated by other Arroyans. Thus the retired tobacco manufacturer and essayist Abbot Kinney crusaded simultaneously for the Mission Indians, the mass planting of eucalpytus, citrus culture, the conservation of Yosemite Valley, and Anglo-Saxon racial purity through eugenics. As a speculator and developer, he also realized the supreme incarnation of the Mediterranean metaphor: Venice, California, with its canals and imported gondoliers. In a similarly polymathic vein, Joseph Widney was an early president of the University of Southern California, a fervent booster (California of the South, 1888), and author of the epic Race Life of the Aryan Peoples (1907), which argued that Los Angeles was destined to become the world capital of Aryan supremacy. Meanwhile, with the avid support of Otis, the doctrines of Nietzsche were being Southern-Californized by the Times’s literary editor and Arroyan child prodigy, Willard Huntington Wright. (Wright would later, as editor of the Smart Set, metamorphose from booster to debunker, repudiating Los Angeles’s ‘provincialism’ at every opportunity, while celebrating the invigorations of sexual promiscuity.)

      The Arroyo Set also defined the visual arts and architecture of turn-of-the-century Los Angeles. George Wharton James, a desert health faddist like Lummis, organized the Arroyo Guild, a shortlived but seminal point of intersection between the mission-myth romantics and the Pasadena franchise of the Arts-and-Crafts movement dominated by the celebrated Greene brothers. A synthesis of the two currents, of course, was the typical Craftsman bungalow with its Navajo and ‘Mission Oak’ interior decoration.16 If the ultimate bungalow was really a ‘cathedral in wood’ (like the Greene Brothers’ incredible Gamble House) affordable only by the very rich, the masses could buy small but still stylish imitations in ‘do-it-yourself’ kits that could be thrown up on any vacant lot. For an entire generation these ‘democratic bungalows’, with their domestic miniaturization of the Arroyo aesthetic, were praised not only for making Los Angeles a city of single-family homes (a staggering 94 per cent of all dwellings by 1930) but also for assuring ‘industrial freedom’. Thus when the United States Commission on Industrial Relations visited Los Angeles in 1914 it heard F.J. Zeehandelaar of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association brag that working-class home ownership was the keystone of the Open Shop and a ‘contented’ labor-force. Bitter union leaders, on the other hand, denounced the mortgage payments on the little bungalows as a ‘new serfdom’ that made Los Angeles workers timid in face of their bosses.17

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