Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 1930s
Chapter 5 1944 Swing Shifts
[p. 133] " . . . the [aeronautical] companies of Southern California possessed the mass and the depth necessary for large-scale production. By 1937 Southern California had surpassed New York, meaning Long Island, as the leading center of aircraft manufacture, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena had become the leading center of aeronautical research and teaching in the nation. In early 1938 General H.H. (Hap) Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps, met with Southern California companies and discussed the probability of a major gearing-up of the industry. Already, a number of companies were expanding to fill British orders. On 23 June 1938, for example, the British purchasing Commission headed by Arthur Purvis placed a $25 million order for planes from Lockheed. Within the next three years, the British had a total of $34 million in orders with Northrop alone. By the summer of 1940, it was forced to inaugarate a three-shift, aroud [p. 134]-the-clock schedule . . .
" . . .
[p. 145] "Henry J. Kaiser [1882- ], as he always called himself, was largely a product of self invention. Born and raised in upstate New York, he turned to photography as a teenager, then moved west to the state of Washington, where he got into the roadpaving business, there and in Cuba. Not that Kaiser initially knew anything about paving roads, or about photography for that matter; he merely threw himself into a pursuit and learned it through practice. Road-paving on a large scale in Cuba in the 1920s trained Kaiser in the management of men and equipment. From there he went into the construction business, making a stunning debut as the president of the consortium of Six Companies that built Boulder/Hoover Dam in the early 1930s. From this experience evolved a structure of organiztion and procedure which Kaiser maintained for the rest of his professional career.
[p. 145] "Stout, manic, citified, Kaiser was anything but a field man. His genius consisted rather, in determining great projects, assembling teams, then handling the politics and finances. During the construction of Boulder/Hoover Dam, for example, Kaiser spent most of his time in Washington, D.C., working on finance and governmental regulations. During his next big project, constructing the dams and aqueducts of the Metropolittan Water District of Southern California and the Grand Coulee Dam in western Washington for the bureau of Reclamation. Kaiser remained headquartered in his corporate office in Oakland, a city that eventually became for all practical purposes a Kaiser company town.
[p. 145] "Kaiser had a knack for spotting talent, young men usually, far younger than normal for the responsibilites he assigned them, beginning with his son Edgar, a [p. 146] talented field manager, Clay Bedford, Edgar's fraternity brother, and Eugene Trefethen, another young Cal Berkeley graduate. These young men, well before they were thirty, played major roles in the construction of Parker Dam, Imperial Dam, and Grand Coulee Dam by the Kaiser Companies. Kaiser, meanwhile, was doing what he did best: wrangle, wheedle, finagle, prod, finesse-most of this in the course of blitzkrieg calls on government officials or telephone conferences with his men in the field. Kaiser loved the telephone . . .
[p. 146] "Living for work, the Wizard of Oz behind the green curtain of countless construction projects, Kaiser relaxed with the same heedless prodigality with which he worked. Loving fine food, good scotch, and even better cigars, he grew to gargantuan proportions, which he enveloped in great double-breasted suits whose lapels flapped in the wind like the sails of a schooner . . .
[p. 147] . . . Roosevelt saw Henry Kaiser as the essence of the New Deal [p. 148] industrialist, a man capable of working with government on the largest possible scale. Kaiser's critics used this against him, claiming that Kaiser had never been successful unless he was publically employed. Kaiser, they claimed, was a socialist industrialist, not a capitalist entrepreneur.
[p. 148] . . . Of all major industrialists of the period, Kaiser had the broadest, most encompassing social philosophy. He maintained close relations with his unions, much to the disgust of many industrialists, who accused him of fostering featherbedding, and other non-productive practices. Kaiser also insisted that African-American workers get an even break in his shipyards, although he was forced, finally, to go along with many of the Jim Crow restrictions favored by the shipbuilding unions. Despite this, thousands of black workers migrated to Richmond to work for Kaiser, attracted in part by his reputation for fair play. During the war, Kaiser gave a number of speeches regarding the necessity of pensions and pre-paid comprehensive medical coverage in the post-war era. Astonishingly, he provided such coverage for a significant percentage of the two hundred thousand men and women working in his shipyards and associated companies. Obsessed with medicine . . .
[p. 148] "In the mid-1930s, Kaiser began to offer workers on his construction projects in the deserts of Southern California a program of pre-paid comprehensive medical coverage. The idea was simple: eveyone contributed a small amount per month, whether sick or healthy. These pre-payments created a fund sufficient to support a program of comprehenisve medical care for all Kaiser employees. To run this system, Kaiser recruited a young surgeon, Sidney Garfield, a freckle-faced, sandy-haired physician of Russian Jewish background whose entrepreneurship in matters medical equalled that of Kaiser. From Desert Center, Garfield took the program up to the Grand Coulee project in Washington; and when Kaiser got into the shipbuilding business in 1941-42 he secured Garfield's release from the Army Medical Corps to run the health care program at Richmond and Portland/Vancouver. The 4-F's of America, meanwhile-the sick, the halt, and the lame-were pouring into the Kaiser shipyards to build Liberty ships. One physician in attendence described the working population at Richmond as an ambulatory museum of American diseases.
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Chapter 10 1949 Mexicali Rose
[p. 288] "The fact is: Hollywood did support a flourishing Communist community from [p. 289] 1936 onward. In her posthumuously published The Hollywood Writer's Wars (1982), Nancy Lynn Schwartz chronicled the rich range and extent of Communist Partty culture in Hollywood during these years. [Starr believes Schwartz's account is fair because she was sympathetic to the Left and has no witches to burn, or Satan to deny] For screenwriters especially, Schwartz suggests, so many of them from privileged backgrounds, the Party functioned as a means of redemptive release from the guilt many of them felt over the obscene salaries they were making as the rest of America suffered through the Depression. Hollywood writers knew that in literary terms, under the studio system, they were hacks, or at least quasi-industrial workers, yet they were making thousands of dollars every month. Since the Communist Party pursued an informal style of tithing-screenwriters were expected to pledge a certain percentage of their earnings to various causes as well as to the Party itself-it offered a form of redemption from guilt. And besides: the Party presented itself as something mainstream, genuinely American, thoroughly assimilated. "Once we were told that we could be Communist and still support the New Deal and Roosevelt," Budd Schulberg later remembered, "and that the Communist Party was simply a more advanced group going on in the same general direction, it was pretty heady and convincing stuff to us.""
[How then did the CP differ from the Congregational Church, the Masons, Synanon or the Hillcrest Country Club?]
[p. 289] "In a milieu obsessed with status, Communist Party members considered themselves a moral and social elite. (Screenwriter Paul Jarrico attended his first Communist Party meeting at the Hillcrest Country Club.) The national Communist Party extended kid-glove treaatment to its Hollywood organization, which was controlled directly by the national Party office in New York, bypassing state and regional headquarters. The Party was also fun. It was secret, for one thing, like a Masonic Circle in late eighteenth-century Vienna. No cards were issued, although members were known to each other and were expected to help one another professionally. In high-living Hollywood, the Communist Party was bohemian in style and tone. There were plenty of fundraising parties where one could enjoy oneself on behalf of Spain, striking cannery workers, or a workers' education center . . . [Here bohemian seems to refer to some variations of free love . . .] For the less bohemian, membership in the Communist Party, like membership in a church or synagogue, offered a conventional social life-picnics, potluck suppers, Sunday barbecues-for married couples who might otherwise be alone in the fragmented social scene of Southern California. Flourishing amidst the star system, the Hollywood Communist Party had its hard-driving studio boss, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, and its leading lady-its star, its poster girl-Virginia (Jigee) Ray, later Jigee Schulberg, later Jigee Viertel. A Los Angeles resident, educated at Fairfax High School in Hollywood, Jigee Ray had become a Goldwyn Girl with a difference: a chorus girl who read Marx and held Communist [p. 290] ideas . . . Her brother-in-law, Melvin Frank, a writer turned producer and director, remembered, "All the Jewish Communists were attracted to her because she was this gorgeous gentile princess who was accessible because she was a Communist."
[p. 290] "On New Year's Eve 1936, Jigee Ray married Budd Schulberg, whom she had met in a Marxist study group meeting in Schulberg's home in Benedict Canyon. She had joined the Party sometime that year. For the next half dozen years, Budd and Jigee Schulberg flourished as the social center of the younger set among Hollywood Communists. [Nearly fifty years later, Nancy Lynn Schwartz was able to interview seventeen male survivors from the circle.] In 1944 Jigee divorced Schulberg and married Peter Vietel, Salka's son, a UCLA graduate and an accomplished novelist since writing the Southern California classic The Canyon (1940), an account of his Santa Monica boyhood, at the age of nineteen. Jigee then became the equally attractive center of her mother-in-law Salka Viertel's Sunday soirees. Peter, however, then on active duty with the Marines, was rabidly anti-Communist, and Jigee left the Party in 1945.
Budd Schulberg later noted that the Communist Party in Hollywood was losing much of its glamour . . . During the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939-41, signs of tightening control surfaced when word came from national headquarters in New York to reverse the anti-Nazi crusade launched with the formation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in June 1936 . . . Anti-Nazism now became the implied pacifism of Party member Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1939), which vividly depicted the horrors of war as filtered through the consciousness of a severely maimed American veteran who was little more than a quasi-sentient corpse. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, however, it became time once again to crank up the anti-fascist, pro-Soviet propaganda machine . . .
[p. 301] ". . . the third-tier orchestra leader knew he had to find a better way to make a living . . . Graduating from night law school and passing the bar, Tenney entered local poliitics, and in 1936 he won election to the assembly from Los Angeles County as a populist Folk-oriented Democrat, more than a little to the left. Tenney entered elective politics via the usual route in [p. 302] California: political boss Artie Samish. According to Samish, Tenney called on him in Sacramento and told the rotund boss of his interest in getting elected. "What's your background, what have you done?" asked Artie. Replied Tenney "I've written the song Mexicali Rose." To which Samish responded: "That's good enough for me,"and John Tenney, erstwhile pianist and bandleader with the Majestic Orchestra, went to the assembly along with his pal Samuel Yorty, another son of the Folks, Nebraska-born, and like Tenney, a night law school graduate.
[p. 302] The Los Angeles County Tenney and Yorty represented had strongly supported Upton Sinclair in his campaign for governor in 1934. The Folks were mostly Democrats and mad as hell against the prevailing plutocracy of Southern California. Successively, the Yorty-Tenney constituency supported such radical measures as Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign of 1934, the pension plan advocated by Dr. Francis E. Townsend of Long Beach under the rubric Old Age Revolving Pensions, Ltd., the Ham and Eggs pension plan that went before the voters in 1938, the crypto-millenarian United States Senate campaign of Sheridan Downey that same year, which was successful and the equally successful gubernatorial campaign of Culbert Olson, which at long last brought the New Deal to California. The Folks of Los Angeles County, in short, were decidedly to the left. The House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Marvin Dies, in fact, had affidavits in its possession to the effect that John Tenney and Samuel Yorty had been members of the Communist Party between 1936 and 1937. . . Tenney was also listed with the Dies Committee as a supporter of a large number of left-wing causes, including the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. No sooner had they reached the assembly than Tenney and Yorty joined together to sponsor a bill to repeal the Criminal Syndicalism Act of 1919, which had been used with such a telling effect against left-wing agricultural unions throughout the 1930s.
In December [1938] Tenney was elected to the lucrative post of president of Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians. No one was expected to live on an assemblyman's salary. Tenney loved the job. [The dates are confusing through this anecdote.] Then in 1939, Tenney lost the union presidency-his job, his income, his prestige, his identity-in a closely contested election. Tenney blamed the Communists for organizing his ouster. He returned to Sac- [p. 301] ramento a bitter man . . .
[p. 303] Already, Tenney's friend and colleague Sam Yorty was turning right. In December 1939 Yorty had become chairman of the Assembly Relief Investigating Committee, which in 1940 turned into a witch-hunt for Communist social workers in the State Relief Administration. By the fall of 1940, Jack Tenney had followed Yorty to the right. In September Tenney led a drive in the legislature to ban the Communist Party from the ballot. The bill passed and was signed by Governor Olson, but the California Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1942, the year Tenney, now a Republican, won election to the state senate. Tenney achieved the chairmanship of the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California, formed in 1941 . . . Tenney emerged as the Grand Inquisitor . . . Senator Tenney had become . . . an inquisitor from the Folks, smart enough to be dangerous, publicly placed to do mischief, and out to avenge the loss of the Musician's Union . . .