cooperative housing, Austin attempted to translate the specific cultural values and popular enthusiasms of Southern California into a planned and egalitarian social landscape. In the model that she presented to colonists on May Day 1916, Llano was depicted as a garden city of ten thousand people housed in graceful Craftsman apartments with private gardens but communal kitchens and laundries to liberate women from drudgery. The civic center, as befitted a ‘city of light’, was composed of ‘eight rectangular halls, like factories, with sides almost wholly of glass, leading to a glass-domed assembly hall’. She crowned this aesthetic of individual choice within a fabric of social solidarity with a quintessentially Southern California gesture: giving every household an automobile and constructing a ring road around the city that would double ‘as a drag strip with stands for spectators on both sides’.11
If Austin’s vision of thousands of patio apartments radiating from the Bonaventure Hotel-style Assembly Hall, surrounded by socially owned orchards, factories and a monumental dragstrip sounds a bit far-fetched today, imagine what Llanoites would have made of a future composed of Kaufman and Broad chateaux ringed by mini-malls, prisons and Stealth Bomber plants. In any event, the nine hundred pioneers of the Socialist City would enjoy only one more triumphant May Day in the Mojave.
The May Day festivities of 1917 commenced at nine o’clock in the morning with intra-community athletic events, including a Fat Women’s Race. The entire group of colonists then formed a Grand Parade and marched to the hotel where the Literary Program followed. The band played from a bunting-draped grandstand, the choral society sang appropriate revolutionary anthems like the ‘Marseillaise’, then moved into the Almond Grove for a barbecue dinner. After supper a group of young girls injected the English into the radical tradition by dancing about the May Pole. At 7:30 the dramatic club presented ‘Mishaps of Minerva’ with newly decorated scenery in the assembly hall. Dancing consumed the remainder of the evening.12
Despite an evident sense of humor, Llano began to fall apart in the later half of 1917. Plagued by internal feuding between the General Assembly and the so-called ‘brush gang’, the colony was assailed from the outside by creditors, draft boards, jealous neighbors, and the Los Angeles Times. After the loss of Llano’s water rights in a lawsuit – a devastating blow to its irrigation infrastructure – Harriman and a minority of colonists relocated in 1918 to Louisiana, where a hard-scrabble New Llano (a pale shadow of the original) hung on until 1939. Within twenty-four hours of the colonists’ departure, local ranchers (‘who precariously represented capitalism in the wilderness’) began to demolish its dormitories and workshops, evidently with the intention of erasing any trace of the red menace. But Llano’s towering silo, cow byre, and the cobblestone foundation and twin fireplaces of its Assembly Hall, proved indestructible: as local patriotic fury subsided, they became romantic landmarks ascribed to increasingly mythic circumstances.
Now and then, a philosophical temperament, struggling with the huge paradox of Southern California, rediscovers Llano as the talisman of a future lost. Thus Aldous Huxley, who lived for a few years in the early 1940s in a former Llano ranch house overlooking the colony’s cemetery, liked to meditate ‘in the almost supernatural silence’ on the fate of utopia. He ultimately came to the conclusion that the Socialist City was a ‘pathetic little Ozymandias’, doomed from the start by Harriman’s ‘Gladstone collar’ and his ‘Pickwickian’ misunderstanding of human nature – whose history ‘except in a purely negative way . . . is sadly uninstructive’.13
Llano’s other occasional visitors, lacking Huxley’s vedic cynicism, have generally been more charitable. After the debacle of 1960s–70s communitarianism (especially the deadly trail that led into the Guyanese jungle), the pear trees planted by this ragtime utopia seem a more impressive accomplishment. Moreover, as its most recent historians point out, Huxley grossly underestimated the negative impact of wartime xenophobia and the spleen of the Los Angeles Times upon Llano’s viability. There but for fortune (and Harry Chandler), perhaps, would stand a brave red kibbutz in the Mojave today, canvassing votes for Jesse Jackson and protecting Joshuas from bulldozers.14
THE DEVELOPERS’ MILLENNIUM?
But, then again, we do not stand at the gates of Socialism’s New Jerusalem, but at the hard edge of the developers’ millennium. Llano itself is owned by an absentee speculator in Chicago who awaits an offer he cannot refuse from Kaufman and Broad. Setting aside an apocalyptic awakening of the neighboring San Andreas Fault, it is all too easy to envision Los Angeles reproducing itself endlessly across the desert with the assistance of pilfered water, cheap immigrant labor, Asian capital and desperate homebuyers willing to trade lifetimes on the freeway in exchange for $500,000 ‘dream homes’ in the middle of Death Valley.
Is this the world-historic victory of Capitalism that everyone is talking about?
On May Day 1990 (the same day Gorbachev was booed by thousands of alienated Moscovites) I returned to the ruins of Llano del Rio to see if the walls would talk to me. Instead I found the Socialist City reinhabited by two twenty-year-old building laborers from El Salvador, camped out in the ruins of the old dairy and eager to talk with me in our mutually broken tongues. Like hobo heroes out of a Jack London novel, they had already tramped up and down California, but following a frontier of housing starts, not silver strikes or wheat harvests. Although they had yet to find work in Palmdale, they praised the clear desert sky, the easy hitchhiking and the relative scarcity of La Migra. When I observed that they were settled in the ruins of a ciudad socialista, one of them asked whether the ‘rich people had come with planes and bombed them out’. No, I explained, the colony’s credit had failed. They looked baffled and changed the subject.
We talked about the weather for a while, then I asked them what they thought about Los Angeles, a city without boundaries, which ate the desert, cut down the Joshua and the May Pole, and dreamt of becoming infinite. One of my new Llano compañeros said that L.A. already was everywhere. They had watched it every night in San Salvador, in endless dubbed reruns of I Love Lucy and Starsky and Hutch, a city where everyone was young and rich and drove new cars and saw themselves on television. After ten thousand daydreams like this, he had deserted the Salvadorean Army and hitchhiked two thousand five hundred miles to Tijuana. A year later he was standing at the corner of Alvarado and Seventh Streets in the MacArthur Park district near Downtown Los Angeles, along with all the rest of yearning, hardworking Central America. No one like him was rich or drove a new car – except for the coke dealers – and the police were as mean as back home. More importantly no one like him was on television; they were all invisible.
THE DEVELOPERS’ MILLENNIUM
Tract homes, Mojave Desert
His friend laughed. ‘If you were on TV you would just get deported anyway and have to pay some coyote in Tijuana $500 to sneak you back to L.A.’ He argued that it was better to stay out in the open whenever possible, preferably here in the desert, away from the center. He compared L.A. and Mexico City (which he knew well) to volcanoes, spilling wreckage and desire in ever-widening circles over a denuded countryside. It is never wise, he averred, to live too near a volcano. ‘The old gringo socialistas had the right idea.’
I agreed, even though I knew it was too late to move, or to refound Llano. Then, it was their turn to interrogate me. Why was I out here alone, amongst the ghosts of May Day? What did I think of Los Angeles? I tried to explain that I had just written a book. . . .
NOTES
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Despite the incautious claims of Lynne Foster in her recent Sierra Club guide (Adventuring in the California Desert, San Francisco 1987), there is absolutely no evidence that ‘many thousands of pronghorn antelope roamed the
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