Macdonald-Wright, who had caroused with the Cubists in Paris before World War One, and the radical Lithuanian exile Boris Deutsch, the Group of Independents were transformed by their encounter with revolutionary Mexican muralism in the late 1920s.26 David Siquieros, who passed through Los Angeles in the early Depression, contributed a famous ‘lost work’ that was roughly the equivalent of Adamic’s Dynamite in its Marxist view of Los Angeles history. Commissioned in 1930 to decorate Olvera Street – the contrived ‘Mexican’ tourist precinct next to the old Plaza – with a ‘gay mural’, Siquieros instead painted Tropical America: a crucified peon under a snarling eagle evokes the imperial savagery at the origin of the Anglo occupation. Although quickly white-washed by his shocked patroness, Siquieros’s great mural survived long enough to impress the young Jackson Pollock; reportedly ‘echoes of its imagery enter[ed] his later work’.27
Adamic’s and Mayo’s indictment of Los Angeles’s ‘fake urbanity’, as well as the attack of the Group of Independents on landscape romanticism, simultaneously unearthed a truism and gave birth to a lasting stereotype. The anti-urban, Garden City ethos celebrated by the Arroyans was turned over to expose its malignant aspect. Intellectual emigrés, beginning to arrive in numbers from Europe in the early 1930s, were particularly disturbed by the absence of urban culture in a city-region of two million inhabitants. Alfred Döblin – the famed literary portraitist of Berlin – would actually denounce Hollywood as a ‘murderous desert of houses . . . a horrible garden city’. (When asked to comment on the suburban lifestyle, he added: ‘Indeed, one is much and extensively in the open here – yet, am I a cow?’)28
Unfortunately Adamic was not around to add his voice to the dis-enchantment of the exiles, or, alternatively, to guide them to the ‘saner’ working-class areas of the city which he knew so intimately. Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue his writing on the new immigrants, he moved to New York at the beginning of the Depression. After his departure, the mantle of Los Angeles Debunker passed to his friend, the lawyer, writer and journalist Carey McWilliams. Adamic’s profound influence upon McWilliams’s view of Los Angeles was acknowledged in a small volume of essays, Louis Adamic and Shadow-America, which the latter circulated in 1935. McWilliams reflected at length on Adamic’s Menckenesque critique of Los Angeles as America, as well as upon the margin of class consciousness and ‘peasant sense’ that distinguished Adamic from other L.A. bohemians of the 1920s. (McWilliams also registered some of his own, surprisingly left-wing opinions, including a reference to ‘the daintily eclectic fascism of Mr Roosevelt’.)29 A few years later, coincident with the sensation of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), McWilliams published his brilliant exposé of California agribusiness, Factories in the Field, that led to his appointment as Commissioner of Immigration and Housing by California’s newly-elected Democratic governor, Culbert Olson. Through the war years McWilliams also kept up his leading role in the progressive politics of Los Angeles, organizing the defense for the Eastside Chicanos framed in the infamous ‘Sleepy Lagoon’ case of 1943, and reporting in the Nation and New Republic on the successful struggle to end the Open Shop.
In 1946, as the culmination of nearly twenty years of literary and political engagement in the region, McWilliams published his magisterial Southern California Country: Island on the Land, as a volume in the ‘American Folkway Series’ edited by Erskine Caldwell. A self-described ‘labor of love’, Southern California Country completed the debunking project initiated by Adamic in his ‘Los Angeles! There She Blows!’ piece almost a generation before.30 It was a devastating deconstruction of the Mission Myth and its makers, beginning with a recovery of the Mexican roots of Southern California and the seldom-told story of genocide and native resistance during the 1850s and 1860s. But McWilliams went far beyond L.A.-bashing polemic or Menckenesque condescension. Picking up where Adamic had left off in his narratives of Los Angeles labor, McWilliams sought to integrate historical narrative with economic and cultural analysis. Southern California Country adumbrates a full-fledged theory of the singular historical conditions – ranging from militarized class organization to ‘super-boosterism’ – that made possible the breakneck urbanization of Los Angeles without the concomitant development of a large manufacturing base or commercial hinterland. McWilliams carefully explained how this ‘sociology of the boom’ was responsible for the city’s anti-urban bias and sprawling form (‘it reflects a spectacle of a large metropolitan city without an industrial base’).
Three years later, California: The Great Exception placed the rise of Southern California within the larger framework of California’s unique evolution as a civilization and social system. The year 1949 also saw the publication of his groundbreaking history of Mexican immigration, North from Mexico, which restated, now on epic scale, the fundamental contribution of Mexican labor and craft to the emergence of the modern Southwest. This magnificent quartet of books, together with earlier studies of California writers (Ambrose Bierce and Adamic), constitutes one of the major achievements within the American regional tradition, making McWilliams the Walter Prescott Webb of California, if not its Fernand Braudel. In his oeuvre, in other words, debunkery transcended itself to establish a commanding regional interpretation.
But no ‘McWilliams School’ followed. Southern California Country was falsely assimilated into the ‘guidebook’ genre, and, despite continuing popularity, produced little commentary and few progeny. The implicit political groundwork of McWilliams’s writing – the labor-reformist popular front in California – was demolished by Cold War hysteria. Called to New York to oversee an emergency ‘civil liberties’ issue of the Nation, McWilliams stayed there for the next quarter of a century as the magazine’s editor.31 Meanwhile, research on Southern California devolved once again into trivial genealogy or boosterism; until the late 1970s, with the appearance of Gottlieb and Wolt’s massive history of the Times,32 fewer serious monographs, let alone synoptic studies, were annually produced about the region than of any other major metropolitan area.33 Virtually alone among big American cities, Los Angeles still lacks a scholarly municipal history – a void of research that has become the accomplice of cliché and illusion. The chapters that would update and complete Southern California Country are absent; Los Angeles understands its past, instead, through a robust fiction called noir.
THE NOIRS
From Mount Hollywood, Los Angeles looks rather nice, enveloped in a haze of changing colors. Actually, and in spite of all the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it is a bad place – full of old, dying people, who were born old of tired pioneer parents, victims of America – full of curious wild and poisonous growths, decadent religious cults and fake science, and wildcat enterprises, which, with their aim for quick profit, are doomed to collapse and drag down multitudes of people . . . a jungle. Louis Adamic34
You can rot here without feeling it. John Rechy35
In 1935 the famous radical author Lewis Corey (née Louis Fraina) announced in his Crisis of the Middle Class that the Jeffersonian Dream was moribund: ‘That middle-class ideal is gone beyond recall. The United States today is a nation of employees and of propertyless dependents.’ As jobless accountants and ruined stockbrokers stood in the same breadlines as truckdrivers and steelworkers, much of the babbitry of the 1920s was left with little to eat except for obsolete class pride. Corey warned that the downwardly mobile middle stratum, ‘at war with itself’, was approaching a radical crossroads, and would turn either toward socialism or fascism.36
This invocation of the dual immiseration and radicalization of the middle classes applied more literally, and appositely, to Los Angeles during the early 1930s than anywhere else in the country. The very structure of the long Southern California boom – fueled by middle-class savings and channeled into real-estate and oil speculations – ensured a vicious circle of crisis and bankruptcy for the mass of retired farmers, small businessmen and petty developers. Indeed, the absence of heavy industry (together with the deportation of tens of thousands of unemployed manual workers back to Mexico) meant that the Depression in Los Angeles was foregrounded and amplified in the middle classes, producing a political fermentation that was at times bizarre.
Political