to make the organic connection to indigenous radicalism that had eluded a majority of his exile comrades in the 1940s. Unfortunately the Last Dialectician in Lotusland fell afoul not only of rising Nixonian hysteria (every day brought fresh death threats from San Diego’s fascist fringe), but, fatally, of the fickle attention of the Culture Industry. Unwonted media celebrity first ‘gurufied’ Marcuse (Time magazine’s ‘Pied Piper of Insurgent Youth’), then stamped his thoughts with the killing censorship of a fad whose time has passed.
Yet the spectre of Frankfurt Marxism (Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse) still haunts Southern California, even if their once ironic observations have been reduced to guidepost clichés for the benefit of Postmodernism’s Club Med. If the Weimar exiles appeared in Los Angeles as tragedy, then today’s Fifth Republic tourists come strictly as farce. What was once anguish seems to have become fun. As a local critic has observed with regard to a recent visit of the current Parisian philosopher king:
Baudrillard seems to enjoy himself. He loves to observe the liquidation of culture, to experience the delivery from depth. . . . He goes home to France and finds it a quaint, nineteenth-century country. He returns to Los Angeles and feels perverse exhilaration. ‘There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. Only Hieronymous Bosch’s Hell can match the inferno effect.’94
THE SORCERERS
If Southern California is to continue to meet the challenge of her environment . . . her supreme need . . . is for able, creative, highly endowed, highly trained men in science and its appplications. Robert Millikan95
In the South of California has gathered the largest and most miscellaneous assortment of Messiahs, Sorcerers, Saints and Seers known to the history of aberrations. Farnsworth Crowder96
Not every Los Angeles intellectual of renown ended up behind a studio gate in the 1940s. Even adjusting for the relative exchange values of literary and scientific prestiges, the famed writers’ stable at MGM was small cheese compared to the extraordinary concentration of Nobel laureates gathered around the recently founded California Institute of Technology in Pasadena from the mid 1920s onward. With a permanent or visiting faculty that included Einstein, Millikan, Michelson, von Karman, Oppenheimer, Dobzhansky, Pauling and Noyes, Cal Tech was the first institution in the West to claim national preeminence in a major science, physics.97 More importantly, Cal Tech was no mere ivory tower, but the dynamic nucleus of an emergent technostructure that held one of the keys to Southern California’s future. While its aeronautics engineers tested airframe designs for Donald Douglas’s DC-3 in their wind tunnel and its geologists solved technical problems for the California oil industry, other Cal Tech scientists were in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco, above Devil’s Gate Dam (where NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory stands today), helping launch the space age with their pathbreaking rocket experiments. Cal Tech, together with the Department of Defense, substantially invented Southern California’s postwar, science-based economy.
But Cal Tech itself was largely the invention of George Ellery Hale, pioneering astrophysicist and founder of the Mount Wilson Observatory. Smitten with Pasadena and its extraordinary concentration of retired, ‘surplus’ wealth, Hale envisioned a vast scientific-cultural triangle around the Observatory (‘already the greatest asset possessed by Southern California, not excluding the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce’), the Institute, and the Huntington Library (whose creation he also influenced).98 The indefatigable Hale (closely associated with the Carnegie interests) was also the chief catalyst in organizing the National Research Council in 1917 to support Woodrow Wilson’s war mobilization. The NRC was the scientific-military-industrial complex in embryo, bringing together the nation’s leading physical scientists, the military’s chief engineers, and the heads of science-based corporations like AT&T and GE. Moreover it was the model for the triangular regional collaboration that Hale wanted to establish around Cal Tech, and whose ultimate offshoot was the Los Angeles aerospace industry.99
In order to realize this dream, Hale convinced one of his NRC colleagues, and America’s leading physicist, Robert A. Millikan, to forsake his beloved University of Chicago for the presidency of Cal Tech. A key factor in Millikan’s recruitment was apparently a promise by Southern California Edison to provide him with a high-voltage laboratory for experiments in atomic physics. Hale and Millikan shared an almost fanatical belief in the partnership of science and big business. It was their policy that Cal Tech be allied to ‘aristocracy and patronage’ and shielded ‘from meddling congressmen and other representatives of the people’.100
Their chief apostle in mobilizing the local aristocracy was Edison director Henry M. Robinson, also president of the First National Bank and intimate of Herbert Hoover (‘his Colonel House’). Robinson had personally advanced science in Southern California by applying Einstein’s theories to capitalism in a little book entitled Relativity in Business Morals. (Critics suggested that Robinson had acquired experimental evidence for his treatise while participating in the great Julian Petroleum swindle of the 1920s.)101 With un-bounded enthusiasm for alloying physics and plutocracy, Robinson helped Millikan and Hale recruit more than sixty local millionaires (Mudd, Kerckhoff, O’Melveny, Patton, Chandler, and so on) into the California Institute Associates, the most comprehensive elite group of the era in Southern California.
In his role as Cal Tech’s chief booster, Millikan increasingly became an ideologue for a specific vision of science in Southern California. Speaking typically to luncheon meetings at the elite California Club in Downtown Los Angeles, or to banquets for the Associates at the Huntington mansion, Millikan adumbrated two fundamental points. First, Southern California was a unique scientific frontier where industry and academic research were joining hands to solve such fundamental challenges as the long-distance transmission of power and the generation of energy from sunlight. Secondly, and even more importantly, Southern California ‘is today, as was England two hundred years ago, the westernmost outpost of Nordic civilization’, with the ‘exceptional opportunity’ of having ‘a population which is twice as Anglo-Saxon as that existing in New York, Chicago or any of the great cities of this country’.102
Millikan’s image of science and business reproducing Aryan supremacy on the shores of the Pacific undoubtedly warmed the hearts of his listeners, who like himself were conservative Taft–Hoover Republicans. An orthodox Social Darwinist, Millikan frequently invoked Herbert Spencer (the ‘great thinker’) in his fulminations against socialism (‘the coming slavery’), the New Deal (‘political royalists’), Franklin Roosevelt (‘Tammanyizing the United States’), and ‘statism’ in general. In the face of breadlines, he boasted ‘the common man . . . is vastly better off here today in depressed America than he has ever been at any other epoch in society’. Yet, as private support for scientific research collapsed during the Depression years, Millikan reconciled his anti-statism with Cal Tech’s financial needs by advocating military research as the one permissible arena where science and industry could accept federal partnership – an $80 million windfall to Cal Tech in the war years.103
In an important sense, this utter reactionary, who was totally out of step with younger, more progressive scientific leaderships in places like Berkeley and Chicago, defined the parameters – illiberal, militarized and profit-driven – for the incorporation of science into the economy and culture of Southern California. Nowhere else in the country did there develop such a seamless continuum between the corporation, laboratory and classroom as in Los Angeles, where Cal Tech via continuous cloning and spinoff became the hub of a vast wheel of public-private research and development that eventually included the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hughes Aircraft (the world center of airborne electronics), the Air Force’s Space Technology Laboratory, Aerojet General (a spinoff of the latter), TRW, the Rand Institute, and so on.
But the rise of science in Southern California had stranger resonances as well. Just like Hollywood, that other exotic enclave, Cal Tech struck sparks as it scraped against the
