of Coolidge America (‘additional proof of the accuracy of Marx’s generalization that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce’).22 As McWilliams recalled:
He thrived on Los Angeles. He reveled in its freaks, fakirs, and frauds. He became the magazine biographer of such eccentrics as Otoman Bar-Azusht Ra’nish and Aimée Semple McPherson. Lost in the files of the strange assortment of magazines published by R. Haldeman-Julius will be found a long list of Adamic’s contributions to Los Angeles. He was its prophet, sociologist and historian.23
Adamic’s most original contribution to the debunking of the Booster myth was his emphasis on the centrality of class violence to the construction of the city. Others had already attacked Los Angeles’s philistinism and skewered its apologists with Mencken-like sarcasm. (Indeed as early as 1913, Willard Huntington Wright was complaining in The Smart Set about the ‘hypocrisy, like a vast fungus, [that] has spread over the city’s surface’.)24 In his historically interesting but vapidly written 1927 novel, Oil!, Upton Sinclair (who had been a leading participant in the IWW free speech fight at the Harbor) debunked the oil boom and evoked the oppression of labor in Los Angeles. But Adamic was the first to carefully chart the sordid, bloody history of the Forty Year War and attempt a muckraking reconstruction of its central events: the bombing of the Times in 1910 and the subsequent trial of the labor conspiracy led by the McNamara brothers. Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (1931), although scarcely flattering to the California labor bureaucracy, painted a demonic portrait of General Otis and the ruling-class brutality that had driven labor to desperation. Equally it warned readers in the early Depression years that until employers bargained with unions in good faith, outbreaks of violent class warfare were inevitable.
Shortly after publishing the first version of Dynamite, Adamic synthesized his various Haldeman-Julius ephemera and pages from his diary in a famous essay, ‘Los Angeles! There She Blows!’ (The Outlook, 13 August 1930), later quoted in ‘The Enormous Village’ chapter of Laughing in the Jungle. This essay was widely noticed by the critical literati, exerting a seminal influence on McWilliams, as well as upon Nathanael West, who in The Day of the Locust (1939), would further develop Adamic’s image of Los Angeles’s ‘spiritually and mentally starving’ little people, the ‘Folks’. Also impressed was writer and satirist Morrow Mayo, who ‘paraphrased’ and amalgamated Adamic’s Outlook and McNamara pieces in his own Los Angeles (1933). Although Laughing in the Jungle was the incomparably more powerful work, Mayo’s lurid, vignette-style history (for example, from ‘Hell-Hole of the West’ to ‘The Hickman Horror’) scored its own points against the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Mayo was particularly effective in reworking Adamic’s ‘enormous village’ theme:
Here is an artificial city which has been pumped up under forced draught, inflated like a balloon, stuffed with rural humanity like a goose with corn . . . endeavoring to eat up this too rapid avalanche of anthropoids, the sunshine metropolis heaves and strains, sweats and becomes pop-eyed, like a young boa constrictor trying to swallow a goat. It has never imparted an urban character to its incoming population for the simple reason that it has never had any urban character to impart. On the other hand, the place has retained the manners, culture, and general outlook of a huge country village.25
Not all debunking of the ‘enormous village’ was merely literary. The Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles, who held their first exhibition in 1923, represented an analogous, even earlier, critical current in local art. A united front for the ‘New Form’, including Cubism, Dynamism, and Expressionism, they attacked the landscape romantics – the Eucalyptus painters, Laguna seascape painters, Mission painters, and so on – who perpetuated Helen Hunt Jackson in watercolor. Dominated by the ‘Synchromist’ painter Stanton 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
