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
AN ARROYO CATHEDRAL
Gamble House (1908), Pasadena
The preeminence of the Arroyo Set in defining the cultural parameters of Los Angeles’s development, and in investing real-estate speculation and class warfare with an aura of romantic myth, began to come to an end after World War One. Lummis’s special relationship with Otis was not part of the inheritance that Harry Chandler took over in 1917. The Times’s subsidy to Lummis was cut, the movies arrived as more effective promoters of immigration than The Land of Sunshine, and, in any case, the Mission Romantics became older and more disenchanted in rapidly urbanizing and auto-congested Southern California. Taos and Carmel began to usurp the Arroyo’s role as elite culture center of the Southwest. By the early 1920s, bungalows and rugged outdoor living were passing out of vogue; the upper middle classes, enriched by oil speculations or Hollywood, were preferring servants and massive ‘Spanish Colonial Revival’ homes. Yet the upscale popularity of the Spanish Colonial style testified to one of the two most durable legacies of the Arroyans: the creation of an ersatz history which, through its comprehensive incorporation into landscape and consumption, became an actual historical stratum in the culture of Los Angeles.18 (Contemporary mini-malls and fastfood franchises, with their Franciscan arches and red-tiled roofs, are still quoting chapter and verse from the Mission Myth – not to mention the Mission-style design of the new Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.) The other major legacy, of course, was the ideology of Los Angeles as the utopia of Aryan supremacism – the sunny refuge of White Protestant America in an age of labor upheaval and the mass immigration of the Catholic and Jewish poor from Eastern and Southern Europe.
THE DEBUNKERS
It seems somehow absurd, but it is nevertheless a fact, that for forty years, the smiling, booming, sunshine City of the Angels has been the bloodiest arena in the Western world for Capital and Labor. Morrow Mayo19
‘The weather is beautiful . . .’
The only words spoken by a Wobblie before his arrest in the 1921 San Pedro free speech fight
One of these immigrants, and the first (at least among the non-Jews) to become a major American writer, was Louis Adamic. His personal odyssey carried him from Carniola in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the milltowns of Pennsylvania, then with the American Expeditionary Force to the trenches of the Somme. Like so many other demobilized veterans, he decided to try his luck in Los Angeles, ending up broke and homeless in Pershing Square (as old Central Park had just been renamed). What the Times would later call the ‘Forty Year War’ of capital and labor was drawing to its bitter close. The city’s once powerful Socialist movement (they came within a hair’s-breadth of the mayoralty in 1911) had retreated to Llano in the Mojave, while one AFL union after another had been broken in a succession of violent metal trades strikes and street transport lockouts. Only IWW seamen and longshoremen defied the Merchants and Manufacturers Association crusade to make the open shop complete. Adamic was swept up in this final battle of the local class war, befriending the IWW organizers, relishing their gallows humor and indiscipline, and ultimately recording their suicidal bravery in his Laughing in the Jungle (1932) – an ‘autobiography of an immigrant in America’ that was also an extraordinary documentary of Los Angeles in the 1920s from the standpoint of its radical outcasts and defeated idealists.
Adamic’s ‘epistemological position’ was curious. Although in his guts he sided with the IWW’s doomed struggle, he remained intellectually aloof from their ‘naive belief’ in revolution and One Big Union. As he put it, ‘I was not a regular Socialist, but a “Menckenite”.’ He soon became part of a like-minded salon of Los Angeles bohemians, gravitating around bookdealer Jack Zeitlin’s home in Echo Park, that included architect Lloyd Wright, photographer Edward Weston, critic-librarian Lawrence Clark Powell, artist Rockwell Kent and a dozen others.20 Yet Adamic was also uncomfortable with these genteel rebels; as Carey McWilliams (a young member of the circle) would later observe, he had an ‘instinctive hostility to typically middle-class concepts’. Eventually he withdrew to a Slavic neighborhood in San Pedro, Los Angeles’s bustling port (‘It was a normal seaport town . . . there were no tourists and sick old people from Iowa and Missouri’).21
From this base in the harbor – with one foot in the literati camp (Mencken had begun to publish Adamic in the American Mercury)
