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 observers inured to the bedrock conservatism of Southern California’s Midwest immigrants were incredulous in 1934 when Upton Sinclair, the region’s most notorious socialist, captured more than a hundred thousand cross-over Republican votes for his ‘End Poverty in California’ (EPIC) program with its quasi-revolutionary advocacy of ‘production for use’. (In an interview thirty years later, Los Angeles EPIC organizer Reuben Boroughs confirmed that the movement primarily ‘spoke to the broken down middle class’ with little attention to labor or to the unemployed.)37 Four years later, journalists were warning of the potential for local fascism as the voting tide switched toward the shadowy ‘Ham and Eggs’ movement with its weird combination of pension reform and brown-shirt demagoguery.38 Agitated middle-class voters also embraced the temporary sensations of Technocracy, Inc., the Utopian Society, and the Townsend Plan. Symptomatically, the epicenters of this turbulence were the suburban growth-poles of the roaring twenties: Glendale (a hotbed of EPIC) and Long Beach (with 40,000 elderly Iowans, the birthplace of the Townsend Plan and stronghold of Ham and Eggs).
These Depression-crazed middle classes of Southern California became, in one mode or another, the original protagonists of that great antimyth usually known as noir. Beginning in 1934, with James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, a succession of through-the-glass-darkly novels – all produced by writers under contract to the studio system – repainted the image of Los Angeles as a deracinated urban hell. ‘Writing against the myth of El Dorado, they transformed it into its antithesis; that of the dream running out along the California shore . . . [they created] a regional fiction obsessively concerned with puncturing the bloated image of Southern California as the golden land of opportunity and the fresh start.’39
Noir was like a transformational grammar turning each charming ingredient of the boosters’ arcadia into a sinister equivalent. Thus, in Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1935) the marathon dance hall on Ocean Pier became virtually a death camp for the Depression’s lost souls. The ‘changeless monotonous beautiful days without end . . . unmarred by rain or weather’ of William Faulkner’s noir short story, Golden Land (1935) were a Sisyphean imprisonment for the matriarch of a Midwestern family corrupted by L.A. success. Similarly, Cain, in Double Indemnity (1936) and Mildred Pierce (1941), evoked poisoned bungalows, whose white-walled, red-tiled normality (‘as good as the next, and perhaps a little better’) barely hid the murderous marriages within. In Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Hollywood became the ‘Dream Dump’, a hallucinatory landscape tottering on apocalypse, while in successive Chandler novels the climate (‘earthquake weather’ and mayhem-inspiring Santa Ana winds) was increasingly eerie; there were even ‘ladies in the lakes’.
Collectively, the declassé middle strata of these novels are without ideological coherence or capacity to act except as McCoy’s sleepwalkers or West’s stampeding ‘flea people’. Individually, however, their petty-bourgeois anti-heroes typically expressed autobiographical sentiments, as the noir of the 1930s and 1940s (and again in the 1960s) became a conduit for the resentments of writers in the velvet trap of the studio system. Thus the very first hardboiled Hollywood detective, Ben Jardinn, the hero of a 1930 serial in The Black Mask, echoed the studio-weary cynicism of his creator, Raoul Whitfield, bit actor turned hack screenwriter.40 Likewise, Tod Hackett in The Day of the Locust is portrayed in a situation similar to West’s own: brought to the Coast by a talent scout for the studios and forced to live ‘the dilemma of reconciling his creative work with his commercial labors’.41 Chandler’s Marlowe, by the same token, symbolized the small businessman locked in struggle with gangsters, corrupt police and the parasitic rich (who were usually his employers as well) – a romanticized simulacrum of the writer’s relationship to studio hacks and moguls.42
NOIR UNDER CONTRACT
Paramount Gates, Hollywood
Budd
