Chapter 3
California, more than any other part of the Union, is a country by itself, and San Francisco a capital.
—James Bryce
East is East, and West is San Francisco … Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a state.
—O. Henry
Los Angeles is fertile soil for every kind of impostor that the face of the earth has been cursed by. The suckers all come sooner or later and the whole twelve months is open season.
—H. L. Mencken quoting a local patriot
Thought is barred in this city of Dreadful Joy [Los Angeles] and conversation is unknown.
—Aldous Huxley in 1926
MOST Americans take the highly divergent characteristics of San Francisco and Los Angeles for granted; we know all about their special qualities. But suppose the man from Mars—or Moscow—should suddenly arrive in the United States, and ask that these two great cities be exposed to him.
San Francisco is, as every American knows, brilliant, polyglot, sophisticated, with some of the best hotels and restaurants in the world, and views of incomparable beauty and distinction. Los Angeles has beautiful views too, and some fine places to eat and drink in, but it is no rival to San Francisco in these respects. San Francisco fronts the sea, and you can sniff the spices of Cathay; it is a Bagdad of the West. But no fewer than 400,000 southern Californians are Iowa born; Los Angeles is Iowa with palms.
San Francisco is a community (like New York) built high, I heard it said; Los Angeles is a community built wide. San Francisco’s brightly corrugated hills are stitched in by bay and ocean, but Los Angeles spreads out all over the place; it covers not less than 451 square miles, and is the largest city on earth in area; to cross it by motorcar may mean a trip of fifty miles. San Francisco doesn’t care much whether it is big or small; it is, as Bret Harte once wrote, “serene and indifferent to fate.” But the Angelenos are very proud of their monstrous size, and as far away as Butte, Montana, a prankster may erect a sign, LOS ANGELES—CITY LIMITS.
San Francisco has, as we know, a robust and chromatic history; its roots go deep. Los Angeles too has some interesting history; but try to think of any Angeleno family that could fairly be called “old.” San Francisco was built by gold, railways, and the port; Los Angeles by oil, climate, and real estate. In San Francisco people will tolerate everything, including the intolerable; but Los Angeles (the coruscating enclave of Hollywood excepted) takes a middle-aged and middle-western conception of manners and morals. Another point is that San Francisco has more native Californians, and a younger population; if an Angeleno says he was born in Los Angeles, people almost expect him to be an aborigine with a ring in his nose. By contrast, it took Paul C. Smith a long time to live down the fact that he was not San Francisco born. San Francisco pays little attention to its sister city but Los Angeles, though three times bigger, is apt to be pretty jealous. When Los Angeles had its zoot suit riots, San Francisco made small note of the fact; when, on V-J Day, San Francisco went wild and Market Street saw three fine days of hurly-burly with a lot of window smashing and some amiable rape, Los Angeles held its head in horror and talked smugly about “regrettable misconduct in the north.”
To sum up, San Francisco (which incidentally was once called Yerba Buena) is tranquil and mature, whereas Los Angeles is the home par excellence of the dissatisfied; with its wonderful “imperial position” San Francisco has more authentic joie de vivre than any other American city I know; finally, it possesses the incomparable quality of charm. What other American city has flowers at every other street corner, like prewar Riga or Vienna? What other city has small shops, even the pharmacies, so meticulously chic? In what other city is it a heat wave if the temperature reaches seventy-eight in August, and where you can start crossing the bridge in smiling sunshine and emerge in fog? Even the telephone exchanges are romantically named in San Francisco—to wit China, Klondike, Seabright, Skyline, Evergreen.
Los Angeles has of course been called every name in the book, from “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis” to a “circus without a tent” to “less a city than a perpetual convention.” Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, is supposed to have said once, “If you tilt the whole country sideways, Los Angeles is the place where everything loose will fall.” And listen to Westbrook Pegler: “It is hereby earnestly proposed that the U.S.A. would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.”1
Everything goes in Los Angeles, so it may be thought; but here are some things forbidden by city ordinance, as itemized by H. L. Mencken in Americana:
Shooting rabbits from streetcars.
Throwing snuff, or giving it to a child under 16.
Bathing two babies in a single bathtub at one time.
Making pickles in any downtown district.
Selling snakes on the streets.
Freakishness, however, is not the characteristic that makes the town most interesting. What distinguishes it more is (a) its octopuslike growth, and (b) the way it lives on climate, mobility, and water.
Not only the Chamber of Commerce and the real estate interests made Los Angeles stretch and spread. What happened was that the suburbs could not afford to go two hundred or more miles for their own water. Beverly Hills, Glendale, and Pasadena are “independent,” because (though they do belong to the Metropolitan Water District) they have their own water supply; the other communities do not, and hence are forced to incorporate with Los Angeles, which has superior taxing power, to get water in. This has produced some geographical anomalies. For instance the community of Tujunga is part of the city of Los Angeles, but it is altogether separated from the municipality proper by non-Los Angeles territory, as East Prussia was once separated from West by the Polish Corridor. Hollywood is part of Los Angeles. But Beverly Hills is not. In general what is going on is a spreading out of the city of Los Angeles to a point where it will someday be coterminous with the county.
Since the entire life of the area depends on imported water, a political conflict between the people and the public utilities that provided water (and power out of water) was inevitable. This was resolved in Los Angeles by the creation of a municipal authority; the city owns its own water and power systems, which are the biggest in the country. (San Francisco has municipal water, by contrast, but not power.) Another point: water means electricity and this in turn means clean industry—the great Douglas and Lockheed factories are smokeless—which in turn means clean towns. Finally, to call the civilization of Los Angeles “artificial” is to beg the question, since the whole giant community has been artificially created out of desert by irrigation.
The chief reason for the prodigious flow of people into California is that the old rheumatism doesn’t twitch there any more, and the climate helps to produce tall and healthy folk who can live most of their lives out of doors. Children get quarts of orange juice from the time they are born; the sun almost always shines and when it does rain—there can be berserk storms as everybody knows—-the Angelenos dismiss such crimes of nature as “seasonal dew.” Then consider the factor of the automobile. The population of southern California is by all odds the most automobile conscious in the world; most people, if they had to choose between a house and a car, would probably choose the car, though the proportion of home owners is the biggest in the United States; this has had one interesting social consequence among others. The growth of the community came to depend on public highways, not on the private right of ways of railroads; so part of the population at least became planning conscious and social minded.
Los Angeles is, heaven knows, full of crackpots; yet it is a smart town politically. Nobody bosses it, and the tensions are more than normally acute, since it is the seat of both the most extreme conservatism in the state and the most outspoken radicalism. The cleavages are much sharper than in San Francisco. And people can act quickly, if aroused. A councilman named McClanahan came out for Gerald L. K. Smith in 1945. Promptly the issue was put to public vote and he was recalled.
I have said that San Francisco is polyglot. So as a matter of fact is Los Angeles, which is the second largest Mexican city in the world with 250,000 Mexicans; also it has about 135,000 Negroes, a big Filipino colony, and a smattering of Chinese and Japanese.
Chinese and Japanese
San Francisco’s Chinatown is unique if only because it is so conspicuous—a solid bloc of twenty thousand directly in the center of the town. It is the biggest Chinese community, outside China, in the world, except that of Singapore. Its origin, like much else in California, is the old Central Pacific and the mines, which imported the first Chinese for coolie labor.
What makes Chinatown additionally remarkable is its self-containedness; it is a complete city within a city, with its own hospital, its own telegraph equipped to handle messages in Chinese (even the Western Union clock has Chinese characters), its own branch post office built in the Chinese manner, its own pharmacies and food shops, a radio station run by a bright young man named Tommy Tong, two theaters, five daily newspapers, and above all the telephone exchange. The girls who run this are of the third generation at the job. The first operators were men; they taught their daughters, and the granddaughters took over in turn. The girls have to know six Chinese dialects, and must memorize about 2,300 names and numbers. A telephone directory in Chinese exists, but few subscribers use it; names have to be indexed by street instead of alphabetically (since there is no such thing as a Chinese alphabet) and most people simply rely on the operator’s memory.
Chinatown is run by an organization known as the Six Companies, which represents the major clans; the Six are really a single board of governors or fathers. It raises special funds, gives advice, and serves as a kind of government within a government. The president changes every year; when I was in San Francisco he was Albert Chow, the first American-born Chinese ever to hold the job. Chow, when asked to describe himself, once replied that he was a “well-known notary public and bon vivant.” About two-thirds of his compatriots are now U.S. born; hence they are citizens and may vote. Until fairly recently, the vote was almost unanimously Republican, for historical reasons dating back to John Hay and the Open Door; today it is almost as solidly Democratic. No one knows how long this will last.
There are some remarkable human beings in Chinatown. Take Dr. Margaret J. Chung, who, one of eleven children, worked her way through the University of California as a waitress; she is now one of the best-known surgeons on the West Coast, and a famous patroness of American servicemen during the war. Ninety per cent of her medical clientele is white. Or take Frank Fatt, the amiable restaurateur, or Joe Shoong, who once worked for thirty dollars a month in a shirt factory, and who today, the owner of the National Dollar Stores, is one of the richest Chinese in the United States. Or take Charlie Low. His father had a general store in Nevada. The family, miserably poor, migrated to San Francisco, intending to return to China. Low walked into the Bank of America on Powell Street, and saw that one of the cashiers was Chinese. This convinced him anew that America was a wonderful land of opportunity, and he decided to stay on. Today he has three professions; first, master of ceremonies at a celebrated night club, the Forbidden City; second, proprietor of the most modern apartment house in Chinatown; third, a crack polo player and the owner of a string of horses.
. . . . . . .
During the war and for a time thereafter a prime issue perplexing California and the West was the displaced Japanese. These were of two categories, the Issei or foreign born, and the Nisei, those American born but of Japanese descent. Of the first, who were aliens, there were about 45,000; of the latter, who had American citizenship, about 80,000. All, by terms of a military order early in 1942, were uprooted, expelled from their homes, transferred to various concentration camps and relocation centers, and put under lock and key presumably for the duration.
Now, this was purely a West Coast phenomenon. Most Japanese-Americans elsewhere in the country were not molested, and enemy aliens on the Atlantic seaboard were not interned except for cause. To many, the forcible evacuation of the frugal, industrious, and in general quite patriotic Nisei seemed an outrage. The ancient principle that a citizen has individual rights, and should not be punishable by group indictment, was clearly violated; a distinguished professor of law at Yale University,2 pointing out that “one hundred thousand persons were sent to concentration camps on a record which wouldn’t support a conviction for stealing a dog,” called the episode our worst wartime mistake, a threat to society, and a violation of law that denied every value of democracy.
In 1944 the army reversed itself, and decided as from January 3, 1945, to release all evacuees except a small minority who, when first arrested, had expressed allegiance to Japan, or who were for other reasons considered incorrigibly disloyal. These—only about four thousand five hundred in all—were eventually repatriated to Japan. All the rest—many of whom had sons in the American services with excellent war records—were free to return to their homes. But about half, though they had lived in California or the West all their lives, decided to settle elsewhere. This was because they had found other parts of the United States more agreeable and because a lot of Californians had gone in for a reckless and inflammatory campaign to keep them out, though their loyalty had been proved by exhaustive Army screening, and their right as American citizens to return to California was incontestable.
About forty thousand Nisei did return. They had a hard time for awhile. They were discriminated against vigorously; threats, vandalism, arson, and minor outrages occurred, and something called the Japanese Exclusion League fed the fires of anti-Nisei propaganda. But, it is only fair to add, most of the excesses took place in isolated interior counties, and no violence took place on a serious or widespread scale. The focus of resistance to the Japanese was in almost every case the same, that of the white horticulturists, vegetable growers and the like who hated them as competitors. The exclusionists were motivated more by economic than by racial bias. In some cases feeling against a Japanese farmer was deliberately whipped up by whites who had grabbed his land while he was interned.
One result of all this became manifest to the housewife at least. No class of people has ever rivaled the California Japanese in the subtleties of specialized farming. A lady told me in Monterey, “We haven’t had a good vegetable here since the Nisei were kicked out.”
Politics of the Movie Industry
The only way to avoid Hollywood is to live there.
—Igor Stravinsky
I would like nothing better than to describe Hollywood at length—that fabulous world of profit hunger, agents, ulcers, all the power and vitality and talent and craftsmanship with so little genius, options, dynastic confusions, goona-goona, the vulgarization of most personal relationships, and 8,000 man hours spent on a sequence that takes three minutes. There might well be a line or two on any of several salient characteristics, for instance that Hollywood is a place above all others where creation is a composite phenomenon, not individual.3 Or on its femininity (I don’t mean effeminateness)—the preoccupation with gossip, personality, dramatic nuances, “entrances”—and its Jewishness. Or on the quasi-theological aspects of the star system, what Rebecca West many years ago described as “a new secular form of old religious ideas.” Or the fact that the movie industry is the only one I know which supports its own blackmail, in the form of trade journals and the like.
And of course the temptation to include auxiliary gems is almost irresistible. For instance this paragraph from Leonard Lyons:
MARRIAGE. Nunnally Johnson gave a dinner party for eight in Hollywood. During a discussion of an impending wedding of a screen-star, one of the guests started musing about the length of Hollywood marriages. When he went home later, he tabulated the number of marriages represented at that dinner party for eight. They totalled 26.
Or this remark by Maureen O’Hara as quoted by Hedda Hopper:
I guess Hollywood won’t consider me anything except a cold hunk of potato until I divorce my husband, give my baby away, and get my name and photograph in all the newspapers.
Or the following tidbit from the New Republic (November 5, 1945):
Lizabeth Scott, heroine of “You Came Along” … was Elizabeth Scott in 1941. During the war She patriotically dropped the “E” to conserve newsprint.
Two fundamental things, it seems, underlie most of the politico-economic-social stresses of the community. The first is that a great many people in the top income brackets—and a fantastic number of people earn fantastic salaries—only reached these brackets at the time that taxation first became really intense. This made them loathe and detest Roosevelt and the New Deal; it gave them a grudge against society as represented by government, and, as they made more and more money, they became more and more reactionary. The other thing is that a good many talented folk—writers and so on as well as executives—who are not on the supreme level of Louis B. Mayer but who nevertheless get tidy salaries like a thousand dollars a week, feel a sense of subconscious guilt at earning so much money. Hence they tend to submerge or deflect their bad conscience by generosity to all kinds of leftist “causes” and escape-valve politics.
That the movie world is highly self-conscious politically is well known; the activity is violent on both the Washington and local level. But normally the Hollywood moguls pay little attention to Sacramento, since the major companies are controlled by eastern capital and are in reality based in New York; they do their main lobbying in Washington and the East. But when Upton Sinclair ran for governor, they naturally woke up and had catfits; some even threatened to leave the state if he got in, and they spent dazzling sums supporting his opponent. The arch-Republican, arch-conservative studio is the fat king M-G-M. Warners, on the other hand, is Democratic. Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox, who produced “Wilson,” was an orthodox (but liberal) Republican, then a Willkieite, then a strong Roosevelt man. Frank Freeman of Paramount is a middle roader; the studio was very proud of itself for producing “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” even though the Hemingway story was drastically denatured. David Selznick is a tenaciously extreme Republican. Sam Goldwyn voted for Roosevelt for the first time in his life in 1944. In fact a Goldwyn committee raised $51,684 of the total of $137,998 that the Democrats collected for the state campaign in that year; among substantial contributors were Spencer Tracy, Jack Benny, and James Cagney. The Republicans on their side collected a much larger sum—$1,040,884, with Cecil B. de Mille, Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby, and Walter Pidgeon among contributors.
Behind the two wings, which cut across all the studios, are two groups, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, on the right, and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences and Professions on the left. The MPA has its share of witch hunters, red-scare artists, and embittered ex-liberals; it was organized to “correct the growing impression that this industry is made up of and dominated by Communists, radicals, and crackpots”; among its members are Sam Wood, Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, Rupert Hughes, and a brace of M-G-M retainers. The Hollywood Committee, founded in 1943, has a considerably more distinguished list of members, including—to pick at random—Marc Connelly, Orson Welles, Olivia de Havilland, Thomas Mann, Artur Rubinstein, Norman Corwin, Charles Boyer, Humphrey Bogart, Paulette Goddard, Lewis Milestone, Gregory Peck. These were among the “crackpots” that the MPA went after. Another element in the scene is the Hollywood Free World Association, the leading spirits of which have been Dudley Nichols, Arthur Hornblow, and Walter Wanger. This is not, like the Hollywood Committee, an overtly political organization, but it too has been attacked by MPA. In fact, a Free World dinner for Henry Wallace early in 1944 was what set the fireworks off, and the Free Worlders automatically became what the Coughlin-Gerald L. K. Smith axis calls the “red opposition.” I asked one Hollywood friend who was the “brains” of MPA. Answer: “the College of Cardinals in M-G-M.”
One assertion to make is that, even with such internecine tussles going on, writers and producers and actors continue to work together amicably. Sam Wood, boss of the MPA, directed “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” But Dudley Nichols, the spearhead for the other side, wrote the script! Even in the most reactionary studio, nobody will be quicker than an MPA sympathizer to grab off a Russian director, say, or a best-selling novel by a leading antifascist, if the prospect is lucrative enough, since the profit motive is the final arbiter in Hollywood, the ultimate and unanswerable determinant of all behavior.
Involved in all this is an extremely difficult and sinuous labor situation. All the big studios are antilabor, even those most “liberal.” The first of the important guilds, and still one of the strongest and best run, is the Screen Writers Guild, of which Dudley Nichols was president for two stormy years. The producers tried to break it with a company union called the Screen Playwrights; this perished after a vote under the Wagner Act. Actors also have a powerful guild, as do the cameramen and technicians; directors have a guild too, but it is weak, largely because they do not need as much protection as actors and so pay less attention to their own organization. Beyond all this is the celebrated International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), an AF of L union which has had a highly disagreeable past to say the least. That for a long interval it fell into the hands of crooks like George E. Browne and Willie Bioff is, of course, scandalous and disgusting. Browne was sentenced to eight years and Bioff to ten, and each fined twenty thousand dollars, on conviction in 1941 for extortion and conspiracy. In 1945 came a Hollywood strike that lasted 238 days, and made national news as workers stormed picket lines outside the studios. This was a purely jurisdictional struggle between IATSE and a rival AF of L union, the radical and up-and-coming CSU (Conference of Studio Unions) led by Herbert Sorrell. A second big strike followed in 1946. IATSE is enormous and conservative, an old-type union organized vertically; CSU is a smaller craft union including carpenters, painters, electricians, and folk who do minor but strategically important specialized jobs; also, the reactionaries charge, it is packed with Communists. CSU stuck in IATSE’s side like a burr; and the whole issue became interpreted as one between the “stanch old AF of L” and Communism. The producers are, of course, almost helpless in a dispute of this kind, though naturally they like IATSE, much as they hated it before, better than they like CSU.
A word, finally, on the Hays office. Actually there are now two. Warners withdrew from the old Hays office (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association) last year, which weakened it considerably; then Eric Johnston, as bright a young man as this country has produced these many years, was imported to take it over, give it a thorough overhauling, and bring it up to date. But meantime a rival organization under Donald Nelson, the former head of war production, was formed by some of the “independents”—Disney, Selznick, Wanger, Goldwyn (who also belonged to Hays)—called the Society of Independent Producers. I asked an expert if Nelson got the job because of his spectacular record in Washington. Reply: “Not at all. We picked him up because he went to China and hence knows all about civil wars.”
The federal Department of Justice brought suit against the big movie companies, alleging monopoly in distribution and exhibition, back in 1938 under the antitrust law. The case is still sub judice. If the government wins, the industry will have to sell some sixty million dollars worth of theaters. The key to practically everything in Hollywood is that the great studios control the theaters where their products show. Paramount owns 1,376 theaters, Warners 509, and 20th Century-Fox 546.
Cults of the Spectacular
No discussion of California can possibly be complete without at least brief reference to what might be called cultism. Nothing in the world quite rivals the cults of California; the state has drawn the cream of believers in utopia from everywhere in the union. The phenomenon is, it would seem, severally based. I have already mentioned the geographical factor, viz., that the Pacific coast is the end of the line in the westward trek across the continent. The hills around Ventura, let us say, are the last stop; California is stuck with so many crackpots if only because they can’t go any farther.
Most of the migrants who settle in California from Iowa and Kansas have quite special characteristics. First, they are old. But no official in the state ever dreams of using phrases like “elderly pauper”; they are called “senior citizens.” Second, most of them are not, as a matter of fact, paupers at all; a good many have half-acre chicken or rabbit farms; many have a little money, and come to California to retire on the income from their savings, which may amount to forty or fifty dollars a month. Third, most have leisure. They don’t have to work. Yet most are also people of more than average intelligence; so, having plenty of time to think, they developed the idea that if they could get forty or fifty dollars per month more from the state, through some pension scheme, they would be doubly better off. Thus the unique phenomenon of a radical rentier class arose.
My friend Walter Duranty suggests a point here. It is the effect of excessive sunlight on northerners. “Iowa gets here,” he put it, “and goes crazy.” Something of the same characteristic may be observed in the south of France. The Provençal natives don’t become eccentric, but the invading British do. Even Aldous Huxley became a mystic when exposed to the California sun long enough. The religious factor is, indeed, closely associated with all the movements of the discontented, particularly in the south. The radical rentiers look for salvation in lunatic manifestations of God as well as in lunatic manifestations of medicine and economics. They were folk who were “somebody” back home; they think they know the answers; they like certainty; hence, in every field, they seek dogma.
Pick up any copy of a Los Angeles newspaper, and read the “religious” advertisements. They are unique; this is theology in extremis. I cannot go into details; merely to list the most bizarre organizations would take a page. But the fabulous economic power of the chief crackpot groups is not always appreciated. The size of their congregations, the amount of real estate they accumulate, the number of contributors on whom they call, can become staggering. Take the case of Arthur Lowler Osborn Fountaine Bell and his Mankind United organization. His new church has, according to Time (May 21, 1945), $3,400,000 in assets, including “two laundries, six hotels, five restaurants, two canneries, two lumber mills … a cheese factory, and 10,000 acres.” What does Mr. Bell believe in? That “he has seven doubles all capable of thinking as one,” and that he “can transport himself anywhere in an instant by an act of his own will.” Mr. Bell’s agility was not, however, sufficient to keep him from being indicted for sedition after Pearl Harbor. He was convicted in a Federal court; at the moment of writing, the case is on appeal. Most of the extreme cultists have, or had, strong Fascist leanings, since they believe in salvation through “energy and power.” Or consider the “I Am” organization which, according to Carey McWilliams, had at one time over three million dollars in assets, mostly from sales of its revelations in pamphlet form, small individual contributions from believers, and “love offerings.” For the “I Am” crowd had strong sexual as well as revivalist overtones, as did the McPherson movement. And it, too, was explored and cultivated by would-be Fascists.
There is, finally, another factor. It rises, as Raymond Swing once pointed out in an acute essay on Dr. Townsend, straight out of traditional western leanings toward cheap money, “inconsequent radicalism,” and the belief that you can beat the law of supply and demand by inflation. A good deal of California radicalism is simply free silver up-to-date.
As to serious or quasi-serious examples of direct political power in this field, we may allude to three. (But one should not forget that Henry George, a Californian, started Single Tax as far back as 1871.) All three were, of course, given great impetus by the smothering depression of the 30’s, which ruined thousands of little people living on fixed incomes; all three substantially declined when good times came again. Let a new depression come, and the cults and crackpots will rise like weeds; the worse conditions get, the wilder will be the efforts to ameliorate them.
1. Upton Sinclair and EPIC. Sinclair is not a crackpot. He is an extremely honest man, a crusader and reformer, a good novelist, absolutely without humor and wonderfully stuffed with ego. I cannot in this space describe details of his plan, End Poverty in California. Much in it is probably sound if you believe in production for use, not profit. Sinclair stood for the establishment of land colonies, the creation of various state authorities like CAP (California Authority for Production), a stiff tax on unimproved land, and fifty dollars per month pensions for all needy persons over sixty. Sinclair’s great days were in the middle 30’s. He ran for governor in 1934, and despite fierce Roosevelt-Farley opposition won the Democratic nomination handily and was only narrowly beaten in the run-off. Sinclair got almost nine hundred thousand votes. His opponent, a sixty-nine-year-old former Iowa conservative named Merriam, added very little positive to the campaign; one slogan was, “Hold your nose and vote for Merriam.” What defeated Sinclair was not Merriam but, in short, big business. “No politician since William Jennings Bryan has so horrified and outraged the Vested Interests,” wrote Time, and the Merriam forces had to spend several million dollars to win. And though they beat Sinclair himself, no fewer than thirty-seven EPIC candidates were elected to the legislature.
2. The Townsend plan. This movement, proposing old age revolving pensions, reached its greatest growth in about 1936, under the leadership of Dr. Francis E. Townsend of Long Beach. It spread all over the country; it held a well-attended national convention in Cleveland; it is still a force in a great many American communities. Townsend supported Lemke for president in 1936 and, although a decent old man himself, let Father Coughlin speak on his platform. It is fascinating today to glance at the comments of serious economists and political writers, like Walter Lippmann, when they first investigated Townsend ten years ago. He scared them stiff. And with reason. Townsend’s economic aims were preposterously impossible of fulfillment; at the beginning, he suggested pensions of not less than two hundred dollars a month for all men and women in the nation over sixty, if unemployed. He hoped to pay for this by a national sales tax, which would have cost the country 70 per cent of the total national income.
3. Ham & Eggs. Politically, this was the most serious business of the three, and it attracted some quite respectable adherents, like Senator Downey whom it helped elect. The Communists supported it for awhile, and it was endorsed by both AF of L and CIO. Ham & Eggs began with a man named Robert Noble. He picked up contributions for a radio program in Los Angeles, and spoke for a pension plan to pay everybody over sixty the sum of twenty-five dollars every Monday. This made one hundred dollars a month as against Townsend’s two hundred dollars, and hence seemed more realizable. Noble was an old Huey Long adherent. He lost control of Ham & Eggs when two young advertising men, Willis and Lawrence Allen, moved in on it. They increased the pension proposal to thirty dollars a week (to be paid on Thursday instead of Monday) and dropped the age from Townsend’s sixty to fifty, which got more voters in. Quickly they became a powerful force, which has been described in fact as “the strongest political bloc ever created in California.”4 At one mass meeting in Los Angeles, sixty-four thousand people paid fifty cents each to get in; in 1938 its proposition was put on the ballot for the first time. Ham & Eggs got 1,143,670 votes, but it was beaten by a narrow margin. The movement kept on going, and in 1939 forced Olson (who was frightened of it by this time though it had contributed substantially to his election) to submit to the electorate a twelve thousand word constitutional amendment; if this had passed, not only would it have automatically become the law of the state, but also it would have transformed California into a Ham & Eggs dictatorship. “The issue was not,” Lippmann wrote, “whether retired citizens over fifty should be given $30 of doubtful money every Thursday; it was whether the people could be bamboozled into surrendering sovereignty of the state.” The proposal was beaten, but Ham & Eggs was still capable of getting about a million votes. Then came the war, and gradually the movement lost grip and influence. Its leaders tried to get on the ballot again in 1942, but without success; in 1944 they were on it again with another scheme, but were badly defeated.
California has, by the way, its own “Little Dies” committee, led by a state senator from Los Angeles, Jack B. Tenney. He was once president of Local 47, AF of L, the musicians’ union in Los Angeles; he once wrote a song called “Mexicali Rose”; a disgruntled radical who became violently antiradical, he is a typical enough American phenomenon. The committee has, however, done some useful work in exploring the background of such organizations as Mankind United and the National Copperheads.
The Pleasant Town of San Diego
We turn now to something a bit more placid—though placidity was certainly not the word for San Diego when I visited it during the apex of its activity as a naval base. At that time it was easily the most crowded city in the United States; a single factory, Consolidated Vultee, employed 48,000 workers, and a transient body of 125,000 soldiers, sailors, and marines was jammed into the community on top of its violently expanding civilian population.
San Diego is a shining plaque of a city, built around a great park with glorious views of hill and harbor; it has the “shortest thermometer” in the United States, with an average summer temperature of sixty-eight and winter of fifty-five. But the diversity of the area is tremendous; you can pick oranges in the morning, ski at noon, and swim at dusk. San Diego is, next to Phoenix, Arizona, the cleanest city I have ever seen; it has only a handful of smokestacks, even with its aircraft industry. And this brings up what has traditionally been its chief problem. The San Diegans are divided between the “geranium” and “smokestack” classes. The smokestackers want to bring in more industry, and the geranium folk resist this at all costs. They say, “Let San Diego live as it always did, on tourists, on retired Navy pensionnaires, on celery, asparagus, and climate.” To date the geranium people have won hands down, despite the war. I have seldom visited a place where the citizenry is so beauty conscious. They may be completely apathetic over a political upheaval; but let an acacia be blown down in Balboa Park, and a storm will rise. Some of the tall old palms in the central plaza are termite ridden; fronds fall off, and pedestrians have been injured. The Park Commission wanted to take the palms down. But the proposal was beaten by public vote.
San Diego covers 105.8 square miles, which means expensive problems in fire and police protection; it has spread out enormously, like Los Angeles, and for the same good reason—water; the adjacent villages cannot afford water on their own and have to be annexed. San Diego uses water about 100 per cent faster than it can be stored, and the supply on hand will, it is estimated, be seriously deficient in case of drought; hence, a $17,500,000 aqueduct has been authorized to bring more water all the way from the Colorado, though local citizens with “water-bearing” land, that is, property from which rain drains down, bitterly opposed the project. This, minor perhaps, is one example of many we shall find in this book of opposition by special interests to the interests of the community as a whole.
I write about San Diego for another reason: to mention briefly its mayor, Harley Knox. He is, like Lapham in San Francisco, an admirable example of the good citizen in politics. Knox was born in Nebraska. He left it as a boy of twelve, when the temperature was forty below; he has never been back since. He could not afford to go either to high school or college. Also, it happens, he is one of the best-educated Americans I know. Knox built up a successful dairy business, and the thought of politics never entered his head until 1939, when he was drafted by the business community to serve in the city council. He had always been deeply interested in juvenile welfare work. In 1943 he ran for mayor. One of his opponents in the primary (which is of course nonpartisan) boasted that he had a thirty thousand dollar campaign fund, and that Knox didn’t have a chance. Knox replied, “If it was worth all that money for someone to make you mayor, I don’t think they were preparing to buy good government.” Knox won by a 2½-1 majority. I talked with him one evening, and we ended up in the roof garden of a hilltop hotel. A modest man, nobody there knew that he was mayor. He kept looking at the glimmering, beckoning lights along the harbor with an intense, happy, glowing pride; as well as anything I found in forty-eight states, he showed what a city can mean to its first citizen.
Knox, as mayor, holds a position that is mostly ceremonial, though his power of appointment is considerable and his personality is an essential clue to the community’s civic mindedness. The San Diego government was reconstituted in 1932, with a reform government that “took.” There is no graft, no spoils system. Administratively the city is run by an appointed manager, one of the 363 city managers in the United States.
Central Valley and Its Project
The heart of California, its most vital area, is not San Francisco or Los Angeles or San Diego; it is Central Valley. Nothing in the world is so fertile as Central Valley except perhaps the Valley of the Nile—or another valley in California itself, Imperial Valley in the extreme south of the state, which has also been made fantastically rich by irrigation. Central Valley is in fact two valleys. The Sacramento River in the north, the San Joaquin in the south, both help to make it; the combined rivers pour into San Francisco Bay.
“Agriculture in Central Valley,” says Fortune (February, 1945), “is not so much a farm chore as an industrial operation.” Nothing is left to chance; the fertility is “unbelievable,” and the harvest moves with mathematical precision. This is made possible, of course, by irrigation. The trouble with most farming is that rain and weather are unpredictable. But in Central Valley all such vagaries as not knowing when it is going to rain are done away with. The “rainfall” is provided by the artifice of man; the controls are as precise as those of a laboratory, and the water can be turned on or off at will.
Central Valley also provides what is today one of the overriding political issues in the state, the future of the Central Valley Project, which, if it is completed, will open up new thousands of arid acres to fertility. The annual runoff of the two rivers at San Francisco Bay is about thirty-two million acre feet, which is about twice that of the Colorado; yet the Colorado drains seven states, whereas Central Valley exists in only one. We hear a great deal these days about the splendid work in another valley of the TVA; California has been grappling with the same problem, but as a one-state enterprise, for forty years. One reason why the TVA is a dazzling success whereas the Central Valley Project is still incomplete and in a violently controversial stage is that TVA, by terms of its authority, can do things that a single state cannot do. One major point is that the northern part of Central Valley, in the Sacramento basin, gets too much rainfall; the southern part, in the San Joaquin area, gets too little. So the problem has been—if I may oversimplify—to transfer surplus water from north to south, thus furthering flood control and irrigation both. The federal government has had a part in this development since 1937, when Shasta Dam, one of the greatest in the world, was built, and private power interests have fought completion of the project with continuing tenacity. Questions of land tenure are also importantly involved, since no water from a federal installation, may, by federal law, be given to farmers who own more than 160 acres. So all the big landowners (like the Kern County Land Company, which has more than 354,000 acres) have become involved in the issue. No one can deny the immediate necessity of over-all planning for the whole area, if it is not some day to revert to desert. Finally, there is the issue of “salinity.” Water, even in California, isn’t always well behaved; noisy rivers like the Sacramento sometimes burst their banks, and when this happens millions of gallons of irrigation may be lost; what is more, salt water from San Francisco Bay then leaks back into the valley, and ruins the soil.
Of matters like this we shall soon hear a great deal more, when we reach Oregon and Washington.
Oil on Troubled Waters
To ask the question “What is oil?” is almost like asking “What is love?” Oil is at once a tantalizingly complex mixture of hydrocarbons; the net result of millions of years of decay in animal and vegetable matter washed into the sea and then compacted in rock under the land; a devouring monster; life blood to nations and a prime source of martial strength; the “black Golconda”; the basis of the wealth of such an admirable institution as the Rockefeller Foundation; the direct cause of one recent war and more than one great international crisis; a mirage beckoning the adventurous; and an American industry worth fourteen billion dollars.
I looked at the refineries near Long Beach, and smelled them, and drove through the thickets and hedges of derricks planted like trees. California accounts for about 20 per cent of total U.S. petroleum production, 1,213,254,000 barrels; it has about 20,000 wells in 112 separate fields owned by 1,060 different people or companies, including “concubine subsidiaries.” Its oil will last, according to some present estimates and not including potential tidewater production, not more than fifteen years or so more. The state does not belong to the Federal Oil Compact, which establishes over-all production quotas; it tries to keep production stable by agreement among the companies, who have an “oil umpire.” But what is known as the “rule of capture” makes conservation difficult. This rule has governed much of the industry ever since oil was first drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, and means simply that, inasmuch as the surface owner also owns subsoil rights, he can drain off his neighbor’s pool as well as his own if the configuration of the subsurface lies that way, unless his neighbor drains his first. “Thus, fields were overdrilled and produced too rapidly, without regard to good engineering practice or to whether the oil was needed at the time.”5
A forty-two-gallon barrel of crude oil, as produced in California or elsewhere, will according to Life (May 18, 1942), produce half a gallon of high octane aviation gasoline, capable of driving a P-40 for twenty seconds; 18.4 gallons of regular gasoline, which will drive an automobile 9¼ hours at 30 miles an hour; 10.2 gallons of residual fuel, which will drive the Queen Mary 105 feet; 6 gallons of distillate fuel which will drive a Diesel truck for 6 hours; 2.4 gallons of kerosene, which will drive a farm tractor for 2½ hours; 1.2 gallons of lubricating oil which could be used in all the above; and a residuum of hydrocarbon gases, asphalt, wax, and petroleum coke, which can be used for practically anything, down to a salve for chapped lips. The barrel of crude oil sells originally for about one dollar. No wonder the oil business makes money. And no wonder that, more than any other industry in the United States, it has attracted the piratical.
The essence of the California tidelands dispute can be told in a paragraph or two. (1) Oil is not only indispensable to the national economy; it is indispensable to national defense. (2) The proved United States reserves are about twenty billion barrels. (3) More than six billion barrels were used in World War II, and it is competently estimated that the entire national supply may only last another twenty years.
Now, for reasons of geology which are fairly obvious, oil lies under the sea as well as land, and if the sea is reasonably shallow, it is not too hard to get at. Oil can, it is thought, be profitably drilled at an ocean depth of about six hundred feet and there may be as many as twenty-two billion barrels available under water along the whole length of the Gulf and Pacific coasts. Not all of this is, strictly speaking, tidelands oil, since tideland means only the strip between low tide and the three-mile limit; it may be entirely feasible to drill for oil beyond the three-mile limit in many areas; in fact Mr. Ickes urged President Roosevelt several years ago to extend our oil frontier to include the entire continental shelf, the belt of subaqueous land ranging from five to one hundred miles broad, all around the country.
But the question of property rights in submerged land is abstruse in the extreme. It is like the question of air rights over a railroad track—on which skyscrapers may be built—in reverse. Both the federal government and the states claim the subaqueous or tidewater properties. For many years federal right to the tidelands was taken almost for granted:; that the national government should have something to say about what, elementally, is its own boundary, seemed only logical. But the question of oil reserves became pressing, and some very special interests got to work. Late in 1945 the House of Representatives, by a vote of 108 to 11, after only half a day of debate and without hearing any experts from Army, Navy, or the Department of Interior, passed one of the most sensational laws in the history of American legislation, providing that the United States of America should renounce and disclaim any right or interest in all lands “beneath tidewaters and navigable waters within the boundaries of the respective states.” A neater job of lobbying has never been put over. But the very outrageousness of the proceeding was a boomerang. National interest began to be aroused—especially after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch forced the story open for which feat one of its reporters, Edward A. Harris, later won a Pulitzer prize. Meantime the federal government got busy too. Attorney General Clark brought a test suit before the Supreme Court, to explore the validity of the state claims and to obtain federal title if possible. Then the states went into action in turn. Forty-four attorneys general (including Bob Kenny) met together and protested that their rights were being contravened. They—and the private oil operators—want at all costs to keep the federal government out.6
“The stake of the oil companies, and of the states of California and Texas, is a mammoth one,” wrote Alan Barth in The Nation (November 3, 1945). “Private operators have leased the tidelands from the states and have paid royalties to state treasuries on the oil they extracted. The arrangement has, of course, been mutually profitable; but it has not resulted in any conservation of oil for national defense purposes. This happy partnership might have continued without a care had it not been for a notion which formed in the back of Harold Ickes’ curmudgeonish head that perhaps California and Texas were leasing lands which really belonged to the nation.”
Explosion came finally when the Senate Naval Affairs Committee investigated the nomination of Edwin W. Pauley, California oil man, to be undersecretary of the Navy. Pauley had been a main progenitor of the tidelands bill. On February 4, 1946, testifying under oath, Ickes stated that “Pauley said he could raise $300,000” [as contribution to Democratic party funds] “from oil men in California who have interests in offshore oil if they could be assured that the federal government would not try to assert title to these oil lands…. This is the rawest proposition that has ever been made to me.” What happened then is known to everyone. But some details may have escaped notice. One is that Pauley’s oil company, Petrol Corporation of California, which according to Mr. Harris of the Post-Dispatch has a “heavy stake in oil-rich tidelands,” conveniently kept a telephone under its own name in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Pauley was, as everybody knows, the committee’s treasurer. Another is that a Los Angeles advertising agency hired two distinguished and obliging members of the California legislature, no less, at two hundred dollars a month to work for Pauley’s Petrol Corporation.
In raising money for the Democratic National Committee Pauley did nothing that plenty of other people haven’t done. But the case had much wider implications—whether the nation itself shall have the right to conserve its most precious natural resource, oil, and whether it is right and fitting, that any oil man should be a presumptive secretary of the Navy. Also the point was well made that the democratic free-enterprise system takes hard knocks these days, and the case of Mr. Pauley does not enhance democratic prestige, whether you spell democratic with a big or little D.
Negroes in California
Now for the first time in this book we allude to a dominant and supremely difficult American problem, that of the Negro. I hope later, in a chapter on the Negro in the South, to discuss this in general terms and with specific reference to southern conditions, under which it is met in its most exacerbated form. As to Negroes elsewhere, particularly in the North, I propose to include a few brief passages in appropriate chapters, which will deal with the issue as seen locally, for instance in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Pittsburgh. Almost everywhere the same underlying characteristics are manifest. From the Negro point of view the great subproblem is that of segregation; from the point of view of the community as a whole it is usually housing. On a national level we cannot ignore basic political considerations; for instance the Negro vote can be the balance of power in a good many highly important states.
In California the Negro problem is, like most problems, double; it exists in quite different dimensions as between the Los Angeles region and San Francisco. The war brought a tremendous influx of Negroes to the state. There are no accurate figures; the best guess is that the total Negro population is around 400,000. Los Angeles jumped from 50,000 Negroes to, let us say, 135,000; San Francisco from 4,070 to something like 32,000. The rise in San Diego was 75 per cent. Toward the end of 1945, Negroes were still entering California at the rate of about 1,000 per week.
First, consider the issue on a statewide basis. Technically there is no legal discrimination against Negroes in California; there is no Jim Crowism in transportation or the schools. Some towns in the south, however, like El Centro, do in effect have segregated schools. San Francisco has no restrictions; towns like Fresno and Bakersfield, midway between north and south, have restrictions. Several Negroes have risen to important positions in the political life of the state, like Augustus F. Hawkins, who has been an assemblyman from Los Angeles for six consecutive terms. Recently Governor Warren appointed as chairman of the Adult Probation Authority, an important post, a Negro named Walter Gordon, a former all-American football player who was a coach at Berkeley. As to the Negro vote in California, since Roosevelt it has been almost solidly Democratic. We shall find this pattern in almost every Negro community in the country.
Now take Los Angeles. This is the main port of entry to the state for the southern Negro, and most of those who arrive have never experienced nonsegregation before. So there has been a certain amount of friskiness, throwing weight around, and crime. The majority of newcomers tend to cling together, and at least two large and fast-growing Negro districts have become solidly established, one on the east side, one on the west. One high school, Jefferson, is like high schools in Harlem almost exclusively Negro. The city is not yet covenanted, and good homes in permanent locations are open to those Negroes who can afford them. Moreover it is important to remember that the migrants into Los Angeles have been able to affix themselves to what was already a well-integrated Negro community. Plenty of Los Angeles Negroes are well off; there is a large independent Negro church and an excellent newspaper; Negroes by and large know all about their constitutional rights, organize “Negro Improvement Associations,” and are not afraid of going into court to protect themselves. On the other hand, anti-Negro prejudice is steeply rising.
San Francisco is something else again. It is much more tolerant on the whole; yet the Negro newcomer is apt to have a harder time. On the day that Truman attended the San Francisco Conference, indication of the city’s tolerance came with nice emphasis—the traffic cop controlling the whole movement of the parade from its most important pivot, the intersection between the Fairmont and Mark Hopkins hotels, was a Negro officer, and thousands of people saw him direct the presidential cavalcade. A minor item in relation to tolerance is that a Negro visiting San Francisco can’t always predict whether a hotel will take him in. Two of the city’s first-class hotels accept Negroes without question; a third does so on some occasions, not on others. The procedure seems to vary week by week. And most Negro visitors would prefer to be excluded rather than to be kept on tenterhooks. (Los Angeles hotels and restaurants are much less tolerant, of course; it would be hard to imagine a Negro feeling comfortable in any of its good hotels, even granting that he would be admitted.)
Until the war San Francisco had so few Negroes—fewer by proportion than any other city in the country—that the problem scarcely existed; indeed, Negroes had a certain local prestige. Since the war, the main trouble has been housing. San Francisco is as we know a peninsula, and can’t bulge out like Los Angeles; with housing terribly short anyway, the Negro got badly pushed around. The municipality sent experts to St. Louis to find out how that city established its restrictive covenants, but the Negro community says that these were then affixed unfairly and without consultation. A good many landlords sucked the Negroes in wholesale to fill places vacated by the Japanese; then they howled plaintively about the terrible harvest they reaped. As a result there are in San Francisco few solid or semisolid Negro blocks like those in Chicago or Los Angeles; the Negroes are interspersed everywhere in the town, mixed up street by street. Some have been forced to live in old tenements condemned by the health authorities years before; the rules had to be relaxed, if only to keep people from sleeping on the Streets. Some 1,300 Negroes work, incidentally, in the municipal transportation system; there is no serious discrimination in employment. A final point is that the CIO encourages Negro membership much more than the AF of L (and San Francisco is a tremendously strong AF of L town). To sum up, the Negro situation hasn’t crystallized as yet in San Francisco; it may be a long time before it does.
State of Jefferson
Hawaii may, before very long, be the forty-ninth American state; before 1941 there was an attempt to make another. Four of California’s extreme northern counties, including Del Norte and Siskiyou, joined with one of the southernmost Oregon counties, Curry, and attempted to promote a union. These counties are remote, isolated, and somewhat neglected by their mother states; moreover they form a natural bloc. The man largely responsible for suggesting the idea—-he wanted to call the new state Jefferson—died however of a heart attack, and when Pearl Harbor came the campaign was dropped. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanton Delaplane, won a Pulitzer prize for his description of the episode.
This was, so far as I know, the most serious unsuccessful attempt to create a new state from existing states since 1788, when a fragment which called itself the “State of Franklin” split off from North Carolina and in fact had a life of its own for a brief period. One of the provisions of Franklin’s “constitution” was that doctors, preachers, and lawyers were forbidden to be members of its legislature. Its annals are still famous in Tennessee and Carolina folklore.
California Miscellany
California is the state par excellence of athletes and especially tennis players; of mink farms and camellia “ranches”; of the world’s largest man-made harbor (at San Pedro), and of the Santa Anita race track which has taken in as much as eight hundred thousand dollars in a day. It contains the biggest city in the country (Long Beach) not served by a steam railroad; its university is the largest in America, and its state budget is bigger than any except New York’s.
California has some of the oldest jalopies in the nation, and towns called Igo and Ono. It is the state where high-school teachers have to be college graduates with a master’s degree, and where some counties operate under a city manager plan. It has the harshest criminal syndicalism law in the country, and it is one of eight states with a community property law, derived from Spain.
California is the state where your automobile may contain an altimeter, where fifteen thousand people may go to a barn dance on a pier that will last from Friday evening to dawn of Monday, and where crude cardboard signs, CHECKS CASHED HERE, can be seen almost everywhere.
It is the state where the senate judiciary committee recently killed a bill to allow unfaithful wives of servicemen to give their illegitimate children away for adoption without informing their husbands, where the Los Angeles courts bestow more divorces than those of Reno, and where there are more traffic accidents than anywhere on earth.
1 New York World-Telegram, November 22, 1938. Mr. Pegler was being annoyed at Upton Sinclair and the Townsendites.
2 Eugene V. Rostow in Harper’s Magazine, September, 1945.
3 The word “Hollywood” is of course an abstraction. Most of the chief studios are not located in Hollywood at all, but in neighboring communities, and most stars, directors, and so on live not in Hollywood itself but in Beverly Hills or near the ocean.
4 New Republic, October 25, 1939.
5 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. XVII, p. 667.
6 The bill was successfully squeezed through the Senate largely through the efforts of Pat McCarran, but President Truman promptly vetoed it, and the House sustained the veto, August 2, 1946.