1940-1950 Starr 2002

Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1940, 1912,

     [p. 97, 1943] Los Angeles, in short, was a Jim Crow town in which numerous nobodies-failures, drifters, downwardly mobile Folks, those expelled from their previous communities-had one thing and only one thing going for them, either con- [p. 97, 1943] sciously or subconsciously; they were white. As racial hatred against the Japanese surfaced into respectability-indeed, became a vehement proof of patriotism-such Los Angelenos began to identify their whiteness with America itself, and with the war effort.

     [p. 98, 1943] With the Japanese removed into camps, Mexicans provided the next obvious target for racial hatred . . . Among the many charges leveled by whites against Mexicans was their alleged proclivity for violence. Captain Edward Duran Ayres, chief of the Foreign Relations Bureau in the office of the sheriff of Los Angeles County, spoke for many white Southern Californians in a 1942 report to the county grand jury: Mexicans were descended from Indians, Orientals, with Mongolian tendencies to violence . . . resorting to knives or lethal weapons rather than the fists of Anglo-Saxon youths . . .

     [p. 98. 1943] Once again, the racism of California caused international embarrassment, since Mexico was an ally of the U.S, against the Axis . . . American liberals . . .  drew obvious comparisons to the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.

     [p. 98, 1942] On the other hand . . . A significant percentage of the officers of the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff's Department agreed with Ayres. For many years, in fact, the LAPD and the sheriff's department had been making war on young men of Mexican descent in the belief that such young men were by definition criminal in fact and intent. . . young Mexican men found themselves hauled into jail for seventy-two hours on mere suspicion, then released. Beatings were frequent, as were frameups . . An [p. 99, 1943] impressive number of young Mexican men were shot dead in the streets by trigger-happy officers. No white police or sheriff's deputies in the Deep South of the period kept the local population under a more intense level of intimidation through violence.

     [p. 99, 1943] Central to this perception of the young Mexican-American as violent gang member were the pachuco and pachuca and the zoot suiter. Not every pachuco was a zoot suiter (pachucas had their own stylized attire), and not every zoot suiter was a pachuco. Evolving in the barrios of Los Angeles, pachuquismo represented a more fundamental condition than the mere wearing of a zoot suit . . . The pachuco was a young male Mexican-American caught between two worlds and belonging to neither . . . the pachuco was in a condition of generalized revolt born of alienation. . . . the pachuco retreated into a stance of defiant isolation broken only by loyalties to other pachuco in associations invariably seen by the police as criminal gangs. Interestingly enough, given the deracination of the pachuco in American society, the pachuca was reaching back into Spanish tradition for the creation of his argot: an idiosyncratic blend of Calo (the perennial language of the underground and underworld, having its origins in medieval Spain), gypsy, Ladino (Iberian-Hebrew), Mexican tough-guy talk, jive, Anglicized Spanish and Hispanic-cised English, together with numerous linguistic terms of strictly Los Angeles coinage. Pachuquismo also brought to Los Angeles its own ballad tradition, the ballads being mainly about the Los Angeles Police Department beating pachuco heads. Pachucos were given to tatoo-crosses, mainly, surroundedAngeles by initials-which the Los Angeles press invested with near-cabalistic significance.

     [p. 99, 1943] Pachuquismo represented a defiant response on the part of many young men who belonged to neither Mexico nor the United States . . . From the perspective of white Los Angeles, the pachuco was its worst nightmare come true: The avenging Mexican-dark, fierce-eyed, Indian, bent on violence and revenge.

     The pachuca expressed more style than revolt. She was, in fact, little more than a Mexican-American version of the Anglo-American V-girls who had emerged by 1943 as a social type in the American city. Like the V-girl, the pachuca featured a stylized version of popular dress: saddle shoes, bobby socks, skirts at or above, the knee, sheer blouses, cardigan sweaters, heavy lipstick, drawn square above the lip . . .

     [p. 101] . . . In 1942, the Los Angeles Police, the Los Angeles Courts, the Los Angeles Ruling Oligarchy, the Los Angeles newspapers committed, "the most egregious persecution of Mexican-Americans in the history of American criminal courts-the mass arrest, trial and conviction of the Sleepy Lagoon defendants" . . .

The Sleepy Lagoon Incident (Aug. 1, 1942). . .

     [p. 103, 1942] University of Southern California historian and psychoanalyst, Mauricio Mazon: "Only a community in a form of trance could have sustained such mass indictments on such non-existent evidence and the phantasmagoric trial that followed."

     [p. 103, 1942] The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was chaired by the California Housing and Immigration Commissioner Carey McWilliams, "a brilliant voice and prolific pen on the left (and the single finest non-fiction writer on California-ever)," included Orson Welles and Hollywood screenwriter Guy Endore . . .

[p. 104, 1942] . . . On 10 August 1942 . . . a dragnet organized by the LAPD, the sheriff's office, and the California Highway Patrol swept through Los Angeles County and arrested more than six hundred Mexican American men on a variety of trumped-up charges . . .

     " . . .

     [p. 112] "During the Second World War, more than seven hundred thousand African-[p. 113] American moved into industrial cities seeking employment in defense industries. Some 150,000 of them moved to the Pacific Coast, mainly to Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area. Shipbuilding proved a magnet . . . At the outbreak of the war, fully half of all defense jobs were either overtly or covertly closed to African-Americans. Two powerful unions, the International Association of Machinists and the Boilermakers Union, which together represented 20 percent of all shipyard workers, excluded blacks from union membership or admitted them only to segregated locals with no right to vote in industry wide negotiations.

     [p. 112] "On 28 June 1941 Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, mandating fair employment practices in all war industries and the situation slowly improved . . .

     "[Different observers indicated the deep social distrust and prejudices of every group toward every other . . . including Women, Okies and Jews . . .

     [p. 115] "At the bottom of the shipyard pecking order were African-Americans."

     [p. 118] In 1943, black recruits were entering a segregated Army. Not until 1947 would the armed forces of the United States be desegregated. During the war, African-Americans, while segregated found their best opportunities in the Army Air Force and in certain Army ground units. The Navy assigned blacks almost exclusively to steward duties or to stevedore work in labor divisions . . .

     [p. 119] Port Chicago, north of San Francisco, was where the black stevedores loaded the U.S. Navy's ammunition.

     [p. 119] On the night of Monday, 17 July 1944, shortly after 10 o'clock, Port Chicago exploded, expending the energy equivalent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, killing 320 men and injuring another 390. Workers refused to return to work leading to court martial proceedings. NAACP attorney, Thurgood Marshall, "This is not fifty men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy towards Negros. Negroes are not afraid of anything anymore than anyone else. Negroes in the Navy don't mind loading ammunition. They just want to know why they are the only ones doing the loading!" It wasn't until after the war that the military convictions were reversed.

     [p. 121] Mexican-American soldiers, by contrast, were not segregated . . . Nearly half a million Mexican-American young men served in the armed forces during World War II, despite the fact that the Mexican-Americans constituted less than 3 percent of the nations's population . . .

     [p. 121] . . . Mexican-Americans constituted the most highly decorated ethnic group in the Second World War. Because young Mexican-Americans tended to gravitate to elite combat units, there were proportionately more Spanish surnamed casualties . . . Mexican-American young men were especially fond of the paratroops. . .

     [p. 122] ' . . . Mexican-Americans liked the special uniform worn by airborne troops. It reminded them of a zoot suit. By 1944 the hated zoot suit and pachuca style of 1943 had made their way into mainstream feminine fashion. Heavily padded shoulders, sharp lapels, single-button jackets, knee-length pleated skirts, high pompadours, a blotch of lipstick above the upper lip: by 1944 the Andrew Sisters and millions of other young women had adapted a stylized version of the attire. On 13 June 1943 the Los Angeles City Council had passed an ordinance prohibiting the wearing of zoot suits within the city limits, classifying it as a misdemeanor. There is no record of the City Council or the LAPD having served a warrant of any kind on the Andrew Sisters.

[p. 123] Chapter 5 1944 Swing Shift

 [p. 123] . . . bells and sirens of the Douglas plant in Santa Monica shrieked . . . The day shift followed by the swing shift. All over Los Angeles County at approximately the same time-at Douglas, Lockheed, Vega, Northrop, North American, Convair at approximately the same time . . . After Pearl Harbor, all six Los Angeles County aviation plants accelerated into a three-shift, around-the-clock schedule that yielded an immediate 30 percent increase in productivity. By early 1944, the height of wartime production, most aviation plants were supporting three eight-hour, or the equivalent, shifts.

     . . . By 1944 more than 230,000 men and women were at work in aviation in Los Angeles County . . . [in Life magazine photos] the departure of the day shift and the arrival of the swing shift-Few workers were carrying lunch pails . . . for most aviation plants provided a low-cost, highly subsidized cafeteria service.

     " . . . [Swing shift activities] . . . [p. 124] Life magazine photos: workers dancing to the Douglas Welfare Band. At Douglas and Northrop, the workers themselves organized and produced a minstrel show. . . .

     [p. 124] "Were these wartime factories . . . or were these scenes from an industrial utopia, a social democratic experiment more suitable to Scandinavia than to the laissez-faire United States? [There were also . . . ] a full range of social benefits afforded aviation workers.

     "Aviation plants maintained an extensive program of industrial medicine, with an integrated system of emergency clinics and preventive health programs, including short-term psychological counseling for those experiencing difficulties in the working place or, more tragically, those who had suddenly lost a loved one to the war. Each worker received a health code number, which indicated handicaps, deficiencies, and job descriptions. Thousands of the handicapped, moreover, had found work. The hearing-impaired were assigned to the noisiest tasks and departments. The sightless proved especially skilled at hand-assembly, and seeing-eye dogs became a common presence in aircraft factories. Management also facilitated the countless tasks of day-to-day life-banking, postal services, car registration, optometry and dental care, payment of telephone and utility bills-by setting up kiosks and other service centers adjacent to assembly lines.

     "Rather than have workers bring their lunches, always a difficulty in a rationed economy, or leave the premises to eat, which wasted time and money, aircraft companies maintained a highly subsidized program of on-site food service. In February 1944 the Lockheed plant in Burbank unveiled its new cafeteria, the largest in the world, capable of serving sixty thousand meals a day, six days a week. Designed by the distinguished Los Angeles firm of John and Donald Parkinson (Bullock's Wilshire, City Hall, the Union Station), the Lockheed cafeteria covered an entire city block . . . Up to seventeen thousand workers could be seated at a time . . . Another thirty-six thousand hot meals were rushed each day to twenty-two canteen locations in outlying Lockheed factories. At North American, fifty cents dropped into a turnstile entitled a worker to eat all he or she wanted from an ample menu. The Douglas plant in Santa Monica provided free Eskimo Pie ice creams, twelve thousand of them daily, at break time. Not only were such food service programs a boost to morale and efficiency, they also ensured that [p. 125] workers enjoyed a standard of nutrition essential to their health in the rationed wartime economy . . . [Starr reminds us of the slave labor used by the Axis governments.]

     [p. 125] . . . Getting to work . . . In 1944 more than a hundred thousand Los Angeles County defense workers were commuting more than fifty miles each day . . . Douglas, Lockheed, and North American each established their own bus system . . .

     [p. 125] Extensive day-care . . . the Aircraft War Production Council by 1944 had established 126 nursery centers, accommodating more than 4000 children, and another 118 day-care centers [with] an average of 3,300 children.

     " . . . The introduction of women into the work force . . . came not as a matter of conscience or social equity but as one of necessity.

     " . . . [The Aircraft Industry competed with the US Military for personnel, workers, engineers . . .] p. 126]

     [p. 126] "To counter such losses to the draft, aircraft companies launched a nationwide recruitment of draft-exempt or draft-deferred family men, relocating entire families to Los Angeles. Locally employed professionals and other draft-exempt men were encouraged to work part-time shifts in aviation as a patriotic contribution. Policemen, firemen, and servicemen stationed in the vicinity were also integrated into the industry at the rate of a shift or two per week. Age barriers were dropped, especially for veterans; and thousands of World War I, even Spanish-American War, veterans worked full or part-time on the assembly line. Working with local boards of education, aircraft companies devised programs that would allow high school students over the age of sixteen to work a half-day shift, making up class time on Saturdays. In many cases, such programs were coordinated with technical instruction in the high schools to create a comprehensive apprenticeship program. More than four thousand young men of high school age, including nearly the entire football team from Burbank High School, were at work at Lockheed by the summer of 1943. All in all, some seventy-seven Southern California high schools participated in such work-study programs, which were in and of themselves notable achievements in industrial culture.

     [p. 126] It was not enough. . . . "By January 1942, personnel officials at Douglas, . . . announced that women would eventually constitute one third of the total Douglas work force. That figure was reached within months. By July 1943, some 113,028 women were on the job; 42.4 percent of the total work force in Southern California aviation. . . .

     [p. 126] "For a few brief years, it seemed as if a major revolution were occurring [p. 127] in American industry. Never before in the history of American industry had so many women worked side by side with so many men of comparable levels of working conditions, wages and skills. . . .

     [p. 127] "With some adjustments by the women to the technology (and some adjustments of the technology to the women), females made excellent assembly line workers. Lockheed retained the services of a female physician, Dr. Marion Dakin, to work at vaious tasks in the line into which women were being introduced . Dakin analyzed these tasks, then made specific recommendations regarding adjustments and retooling based upon average female heights, weights and body strengths. Women workers at Vultee developed a "lazy arm" to move heavy tools, which soon became standard throughout the industry. A true revolution was at work, anthropologist Margaret Mead believed, with young women coming into Los Angeles on their own, getting jobs in the defense industry on their own, experiencing anonymity and mobility on their own, in contrast to the restrictions of their previous environments. The revolution extended to the male-female relationship as well . . .

     [p. 128] " . . .

      "Anxieties over sexuality in the workplace surfaced most intensely in 1942 as more and more women joined the line. Douglas Aircraft, for example, ran a major article on gonorrhea and syphilis in the company newspaper at the same time that women began to come into its plants in significant numbers. Only one such story ran. Personnel managers at Vultee were so disturbed by the problem of sexuality in the workplace that personnel officers were instructed not to hire overly attractive young women . . . Personnel officers wre also wary of hiring high-strung, blue-blooded Katharine Hepburn types or arty bohemians.

     [p. 128] "By and large, women in both the aircraft and shipbuilding industries were women of the blue-collar and middle-classes: high school graduates, not college co-eds; the wives, sweethearts, and sisters of enlisted men, for whom war work represented . . . a step up in the world.

     " . . .

     [p. 129] "While reports of sexual activity in the holds of ships . . . were greatly exaggerated . . . on-the-job sexual activity in the aviation industry seems more extensive and better documented. Civil defense shelters seemed especially convenient. Lockheed had a constant problem with amorous couples using its bomb shelters for lovemaking on the lunch break; management requested that employees refrain from leaving garments and discarded condoms on the floor. Despite state and federal requirements that air raid shelters had to be kept accessible, management at the Douglas plant in Santa Monica closed off its civil defense shelters with heavy tar paper because too many couples were repairing there for lunchtime trysts. On the home front, the Second World War was, in general, a sexually intense, venturesome. and unstable time, a situation made even more compelling in the aircraft factories of Southern California by the increasing presence of young and attractive women and the decreasing presence of available men.

     [p. 129] "Many attractive young women flocked to the aircraft industry in Los Angeles County from around the nation with the hope of eventually getting into the movies, in fact, that a new type emerged combining the attributes of a defense worker and a starlet . . . The Hollywood Guild, which ran the Hollywood Canteen, recruited young women from Lockheed to act as dance hostesses at the Canteen after the swing shift. Formally [p. 130] designated the Blue Stars, the young women would work an eight-hour shift, get off at midnight, then dance with servicemen at the Hollywood Canteen until three in the morning. At North American, some five hundred young women volunteered as dance hostesses for nearby Army Air Force training detachments.

     [p. 130] " . . .

     [Starr tells a pretty story about Norma Jean's success as a production worker, who studied to be a model, who then modeled for the Douglas Aircraft Co., a glamourous aviation worker. A career path for Marilyn Monroe.]

     [The Aviation Industry seemed to follow directly the history and contribution of . . .]

[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, Douglas Aircraft had so much business, a backlog of nearly $140 millions in orders, it was forced to inaugurate a three-shift, around [p. 134]-the-clock schedule . . .

[p. 134] . . . In May 1940 President Roosevelt called for the aircraft industry to gear up to produce fifty thousand planes a year. No one knows where Roosevelt got this figure . . . By Pearl Harbor 113,000 men and women were at work in the aircraft industry in Los Angeles County, up from 13,000 in January 1939. Taken together, the six Los Angeles County-based aviation companies were soon to surpass citrus and motion pictures as the leading industry of the region. [What happened to oil? KR] . . .

     [p. 134] . . . "In March 1941 Fortune described the industry as "an arsenal next door to Hollywood, in a Southern California atmosphere of orange groves, neon signs, movie stars, race tracks, chiropractors, leg art, radio studios, and pension movements." "They are making dive bombers in the Land of Oz." By 1942 . . . Aviation had replaced the film industry as the important action in the Southland. Douglas Aircraft, said Life on 12 October 1942, employed more people than all the Hollywood studios put together [while still] showing the same eclectic mix of people as the Hollywood studios (the pretty girls hoping to be starlets, the merely star struck, the Folks for the Midwest, the anonymous people who had left behind other lives; one aircraft company reported that there were enough trained musicians in its employ to form two orchestras. There were free bands at noon, and fashion shows with local models . . .

     [p. 134] If aircraft had replaced film in local chic, then the heads of the aviation companies became the new producers, and the aviation factory replaced the film studio as the preeminent industrial structure . . .[p. 135] Gigantic plants such as the Douglas plant in Santa Monica and the Convair plant in San Diego were cities unto themselves, incorporating the full spectrum of urban functions-fire, police (with 162 officers, Douglas had the sixth largest police department in California), transportation, branch city halls, lending libraries, voting booths. While the major film studios had achieved impressive levels of social organization by the late 1930s, the size and social intricacy of the aircraft plants represented a quantum leap in comparison.

     [p.135] "Like the Hollywood studios, moreover, aviation plants while industrial did not seem so. [They exuded an atmosphere of skilled production and technology. They were extremely well-lit. They were glamorous.] Aviation plants employed Hollywood set designers to camouflage their facilities from possible air attack. Set artists devised cunning color patterns to integrate plants in agricultural areas into the surrounding landscape. In the case of the Douglas plant in Santa Monica, a replica of an entire Santa Monica neighborhood, complete with mock houses and cars, was spread across the roof. . . .

     [p. 135] "A photograph in Life for 12 October 1942 showed the all-male members of the Aircraft Production Council in session. Growing out of informal pre-war talks hosted twice a month by Donald Douglas at his Santa Monica plant, the council coordinated the aircraft industry in the Southern California region. Briefly, in January 1942, Washington had been contemplating the appointment of an aircraft czar to coordinate the entire industry; but West Coast aviation leaders had balked, pointing out that they already were accustomed to cooperating and sharing ideas. Obviously, such an emergency wartime council suspended just about all anti-trust provisions of American law and created what was in effect a coordinated industrial [p. 136] policy operating through a temporary instance of capitalist-syndicalism parallel to those of Germany and Japan. Under the guidance of the Aircraft War Production Council, Southern California aviation incorporated liberal and conservative elements in its structure and operations. On the one hand, it was an industrial cartel, but then again: it was government-sponsored. In terms of its employee relations and benefits, it was a planned social democratic utopia.

     . . .

     [p. 138] ". . . By Pearl Harbor, Lockheed had fifty-four thousand employees, which grew to ninety thousand by 1944, making it the single largest employer in Los Angeles County.

     [p. 138] Lockheed was also the most progressive of the aviation companies. Many of the employee polices and services that made Southern California aviation seem an industrial utopia-transportation, food service, counseling, day care, medical, banking, and public utility services, on-site optometry and dental care-first appeared at Lockheed. As a boost to employee morale, Lockheed went so far as to persuade the city of Burbank to rescind an ordinance prohibiting dancing on Sunday. Lockheed welcomed women into its work force and rather early in the war hired 150 sight-impaired workers and five hundred other phywhiteness-indeedsically challenged employees.

     Southern California aviation was initially a white person's game. As of June 1941 [p. 139] there were only four . . . African American production workers on the assembly line in all of Southern California aviation. In its March 1941 article, Fortune noted the overwhelming whiteness-indeed, the Anglo-Saxon blondness-of Los Angeles aircraft workers, so many of them Old English stock of Appalachia via the Dust Bowl . . . Fortune also suggested that anti-Semitism was rampant in the industry, especially among management who perceived Jews as having radical, which is to say, unionizing, tendencies. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Gerard Tuttle of Vultee openly confessed in a letter to the National Negro Congress that his company hired only workers of the Caucasian race. In June 1941 President Roosevelt had issued Executive Order 8802 establishing a Committee on Fair Employment Practices in an effort to protect the rights of black Americans seeking work in the defense industry. Eighteen months later, Northrop was still hiring no African-Americans.

     Lockheed and Douglas pursued a different policy. By the end of 1942, Douglas was employing 1,800 black workers. By the end of the war, African-Americans filled 4.5 percent of all jobs at Douglas. Lockheed ran special bus lines into black neighborhoods to bring workers to its Burbank plant. When the one hundredth black worker was hired at Lockheed, the company brought in heavyweight champion Joe Louis, then a sergeant in the Army, to welcome him onto the line. Lockheed public relations made much of the fact that relatives of such black celebrities as Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens were with the company. Lockheed also supported the construction of an African-American-oriented YMCA in Burbank. In the summer of 1942 Lockheed placed the first black female on the production line. By 1943 Lockheed was employing some three thousand African-American workers. Even such progressive companies as Lockheed and Douglas, however, initially maintained all-black sports teams, canteens, choral groups, and dances, although segregation tended to break down as the war progressed.

     In further testimony to its social democratic progressivism, Lockheed maintained excellent relations with its unions before and during the war. Remarkably, the United States did not require a labor draft during World War II. All labor needs rather were met on a voluntary basis. On the other hand, the question of union representation and such union sanctions as the strike became especially controversial in wartime. Nowhere was this more true than in Southern California, the most unorganized region outside the South for a variety of reasons: the mobility of a population comprised of strangers from elsewhere, hence lacking group identity; the fluidity of social and economic conditions, in which few Southern Californians saw themselves as permanently fixed in any one or another class or occupation; the lack of heavy industry, in which union organization was the norm; and, perhaps most important, the effective organization against unions by the ol- [p. 140] igarchy, led by the fiercely anti-union Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles County Chamber of Commerce, which repeatedly outmaneuvered whatever union sentiment managed to coalesce.

     [p. 140] The war changed this, bringing the union movement to a previously impregnable fortress of the open shop. By late 1944, Fortune was reporting that Los Angeles could no longer be considered a predominantly open-shop city. The Teamsters, for one thing, had forty thousand members in Los Angeles County alone. The CIO had organized the waterfront and gained a foothold in oil and the garment industry. [The major breakthrough was centered in the aircraft industry, between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day.]

     Two unions vied for power in the aircraft industry: the International Association of Machinists (an AFL union) and the United Auto Workers (of the CIO) . . . The CIO union also possessed a more encompassing attitude toward women and minorities, while the IAM remained, at least implicitly resistant of females and persistently Jim Crow . . . ]

     [p. 141] . . . Eventually, with the exception of Northrop, every aviation company in Southern California recognized either the IAM or the UAW as a collective bargaining agent. With the exception of a few localized disputes, there was no further strikes or walkouts in Southern California aviation during the course of the war.

If Donald Douglas hated unions before this event, he certainly hated them after; and Local 683 returned the sentiment, excoriating Douglas as Donald Duck, the quacking union-basher. Throughout 1942, Douglas warded off the organization of his plants by matching union gains in other companies. By the end of 1943, however, his El Segundo plant had gone over to the other side, and in February 1944 Local 683 of the UAW won collective bargaining elections at Long Beach, leaving only the Douglas plant at Santa Monica unorganized. And finally, in October 1944, a majority of workers in the Santa Monica plant elected the IAM as their collective bargaining agent . . .

     [p. 141] ". . . The productivity statistics of aviation in Southern California remain today an impressive chapter in the history of American industry . . . First of all, there is the . . . tooling up of an entire industry from 1939 onward and the training, almost overnight, of a vast skilled and semi-skilled work force. Up to 90 percent of all jobs connected with airplane manufacturing were at least at the semi-skilled level . . . Yet no one had ever done such work before . . . on such a scale . . . Aviation skimmed the cream from other industries. One cannot overestimate the industrial accomplishment of bringing together so many intelligent, skilled, highly motivated men and [p. 142] women and transforming them into the single most accomplished corps of industrial workers outside the specialized crafts.

     [p.142] " . . .

     "There were few, if any, precedents for this productivity and cost-effectiveness, other than those techniques borrowed from the automotive industry. Everything, each tool, each technique, had to be invented on the assembly line . . . [In 1942, more than 4000 suggestions from the assembly line were implemented by management. Later there were many suggestions from the field which were implemented.] Much of what was being built in the aviation plants, together with the techniques employed in manufacturing, was secret, even top secret. Workers could not discuss what they were doing . . .

     [p. 142] "Because it was a new industry, and because workers were involved and management was listening, the aircraft industry pioneered ergonomics, the science and art of fitting tools and machinery to human capacity and limits. Workers were constantly making suggestions as to how tools and production techniques could be made more efficient and less fatiguing. As women became more central to the work force, a number of ergonomic adjustments were made on their behalf, such as the lazy arm for moving machinery . . .

     "By its very nature, aircraft manufacture necessitated a near-heroic level of synchronized cooperation. Each airplane involved a minimum of 587,000 bits and pieces. From diverse points of origin, these 587,000 parts had to be made, transported, assembled, then further assembled into the component parts of an individual aircraft. Thirty-eight percent of the work was subcontracted. Hundreds of feeder plants prepared prepared airplane parts and systems for assembly at the major sites. Sometimes these feeder plants were subcontractors; sometimes they were owned by the company. Douglas, for example, had sub-assembly sites in Anaheim, El Monte, Fullerton, Elsinore, Santa Ana, and Long Beach, each of these places now [p. 143] transformed into an industrial suburb. All this intricacy of manufacture-thousands of parts flowing together into a river of aluminum and other metals that came to rest, at last, in one plant, then one airplane-had to be tracked and monitored without benefit of computers, through the simple technique of establishing index cards for each bit and part, then each component, then each aircraft. Each shipment generated its own cards, to be shuffled and reshuffled with other index cards so as to track and control the flow of aluminum parts into, eventually a single aircraft.

     [p. 143] "Not only did each airplane involve thousands of parts, hence thousands of index cards, planes were manufactured in a consortium. Four companies . . . Freed from restrictions of anti-trust, functioning across company lines as as a vertically and horizontally integrated cooperative, the aircraft industry was functioning, paradoxically, in an industrial structure similar in some ways to that of Germany and Japan.

     [p. 149] ' . . . In 1942, Kaiser had yet another idea: the construction of giant Flying Boats. Liberty ships of the air, which could ferry cargo and troops above the submarine infested Atlantic. . . .

     ". . . Fearful of of being upstaged, and having to share the aviation industry with Kaiser, the aviation industry reacted. Robert Gross, president of Lockheed and Donald Douglas were especially effective in lobbying Washington against Kaiser's bid to build five thousand Flying [p. 150] Boats. At the end of the wrangling, Kaiser had funds only to build one experimental prototype in partnership with Hughes Aircraft of Culver City.

     [p. 151] "The aircraft industry housed its people in Los Angeles and its suburbs. Many of them in fact were middle-class residents of the region, already housed. . . .

     [p. 152] "In Los Angeles, by contrast, private developers, sensing the long-term middle-class ambitions and financial capabilities of many aircraft workers, developed whole neighborhoods of one-story, two-bedroom bungalows for sale to them. . . .

     [p. 152] "Of the three major civilian-administered shipbuilding facilities in California-the California Shipbuilding Corporation shipyards on Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor, the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, and Marinship in Marin County-only Marinship displayed a middle-class texture analogous to that of the aircraft factories . . .Marinship . . . was small, located in Sausalito in affluent Marin County. . . Established in March 1942 by former members of the Six Companies who had built Boulder/Hoover Dam, Marinship was directed by a who's who of California corporate and industrial blue bloods-including Kenneth and Stephen Bechtel, Felix Kahn and John McCone, a Bechtel employee [p. 153] who would soon be serving as high commissioner in Germany and later founding director of the CIA. Marinship built . . . [among others] the EC-2 Liberty freighters, which were named in honor of prominent figures from California history, including Jack London and Sun Yat-sen, the sometime San Franciscan who served as first president of the Republic of China.

[p. 208] . . .

     " . . . bohemian writer and all-round rebel Henry Miller might very well [have disagreed with the promise of prosperity in 1940 California]. Life in Panorama City was just another example of the air-conditioned nightmare. Miller first used the phrase "air-conditioned nightmare" as the title of a book he completed late in the war while living in Big Sur on the central coast. Based on a year-long auto tour of the United States from October 1940 to October 1941 and published by New Directions in late 1945, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare can be taken as a prophetic, anti-statement to everything that Panorama City stood for: conformity, routine, philistinism, sexual repression; the long, grey death, in short, to Henry Miller's way of thinking, of middle-class life in America.

     "Born in Brooklyn in 1891, Henry Valentine Miller-Val to his friends and the intimates who were legion-had spent only a few months in Southern California in 1910, doing odd jobs in Los Angeles and San Diego, before returning to New York. Like Walt Whitman, whom he resembled in so many respects, Henry Miller, both the man and the writer, was hard to classify. Was he the last representative of the 1920s generation, so infatuated with Paris, as Edmund Wilson claimed? Was he a social critic of prophetic importance, warning against the increasing conformity and mechanization of American life? Or was he a cad, a heel, a shameless sponger, whore-mongering pornographer, a poseur and blowhard, the perpetrator of some two million words of stream-of-consciousness prose that seemed to be saying everything, hence nothing, simultaneously?

     "The answer was yes to each query. In some vast and nearly impenetrable way, Henry Miller was managing by the mid-1930s, when his autobiography Tropic of Cancer (1934) was published in Paris and banned in the United States, to have contained within himself all the contradictions and paradoxes that two of Miller's favorite writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, considered a salient characteristic of the free-thinking, free-spirited American man of letters as social and cultural critic. Whatever Henry Miller might have become by 1940, when he [p. 209] returned to the United States after a tour of Greece resulting in The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) which some believe his best book-hierophant or shameless lech, free spirit or sponging bum, ingrate or reformed visionary in the Americanist tradition-Henry Miller was well on the way, as man, writer, and legend, to becoming one of the most influential writers ever to be based in California, for what Miller wrote, together with what he acted out and stood for, would in time pervade the value system of an entire generation and shift the sensibility of the entire nation.

     "All of this was a big order for [Henry Miller]a down-and-out writer nearing fifty in 1940, with only one important book available to the general public: a writer turned down by the Guggenheim Foundation when he applied for funds to tour the United States just as he had recently toured Greece, and write a book about his travels and observations. Thanks to an advance from Doubleday Doran, Miller made his trip anyway, after learning to drive in five lessons from aspiring poet Kenneth Patchen and buying for $100 a 1932 Buick sedan, which terrified him as he headed south toward New Hope, Pennsylvania, and from there into America itself.

     [Note that Kenneth Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Padell Press, 1941, was in its fifth printing when Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare was published. KR]

     "In the course of this year-long journey of return and anti-homecoming, Miller drove, worked, crashed, and sponged his way across America: an over-age-in-grade Parisian expatriate returning to America along with a whole generation of emigres, the vast majority of them more solvent and respectable than Miller, which was not a difficult accomplishment. A decade later, another rebel, Jack Kerouac, would make a similar journey in part under Miller's inspiration; for the important thing about Miller's journey was that it brought him, once again to California, where he hung out with like-minded people-John Steinbeck's friend Ed (Doc) Ricketts in Monterey and Lawrence Clark Powell, a literary critic and former French expatriate, then settling into a career as librarian and writer at UCLA.

     "Like so many expatriates, Henry Miller liked California-inasmuch as he could find anything to like about the the United States-and decided to settle there. Thanks to the generosity of two friends, Margaret and Gilbert Neiman, he could now do exactly that: settle into the Neiman's home in the Beverly Glen district of Los Angeles as a more or less permanent non-paying guest. Two years later, in May 1944, Miller accepted a further offer of hospitality, moving in with artist Lynda Sargent . . . in Sargent's Log House on the Big Sur coast, later famous as the site of the Nepenthe Restaurant . . . [p. 210] [The text goes on to say that Sargent sold the building to Orson Welles in May 1944, forcing Miller to move to Partington Ridge, further into the Big Sur mountains . . . ]

     ". . . From one perspective The Air-conditioned Nightmare [which he had begun before Pearl Harbor] can be seen as a bitter, dismissive, contempt-ridden indictment of American life as ordinary men and women lived it-or were being asked to die for it in wartime . . . He encountered the great American ugliness, the great American chill. "I didn't like the look of the American house . . . there is something cold, austere, something barren and chill, about the architecture of the American home. It was home, with all the ugly, evil, sinister connotations which the word contains for a restless soul. There was a frigid moral aspect to it which chilled me to the bone.""

     "". . . Topographically, the country is magnificent-and terrifying . . . Nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere [he had encountered] such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak. . . . To call this a society of free people is blasphemous . . . What we have to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment."

     " . . . [p. 211] Miller's work, "the dirty books of a generation, a call, however muddled, to transcendence and liberation through eros . . .

     "Others, however, considered Miller's books prurient-and worse, radical-trash, speaking with an especially corrupting power to the young. Already, well before the war had ended-indeed, because of the war-America was finding itself uneasy about its youth: not so much of the young men and women in uniform, but the half-generation just behind them, the pachucos and V-girls, the growing number of young offenders from the inner city. Writing in Look magazine in January 1946, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover predicted an outburst of juvenile delinquency in the post-war era. Already, Hoover pointed out, seventeen-year olds had the highest arrest rate of any age group in the country. Then there was the recently released veteran, only a few years older, to be watched, the sort who had made up the bulk of the motorcycle gang that had taken over Hollister in July 1947 . . . only jeans and a T-shirt and a mumbled way of talking could manage to express a massive rebellion and thus . . . hold a troubled identity together.

     "Rebellion then was in the air and would grow steadily throughout the next decade, and Henry Miller . . . was in some palpable way emerging as the guru and avatar of an emerging alternative vision . . . From Miller, . . . a generation of alienated young people, especially pacifists, but veterans as well, were imbibing "an engaging potpourri of mysticism, egoism, sexualism, surrealism, and anarchism."

     "Accentuated and enhanced by Miller's own eclectic and chaotic religiosity, which emphasized astrology and the occult, a certain free-wheeling mysticism dovetailed easily with the already flourishing tradition of religious cults in California . . .

     [p. 212] " . . .

     " . . . There was in Miller's world view a hallucinogenic quality transcending drug-induced visions, although lesser beings would need drugs to get there; a view of the world, that is, as nightmarish and deceptive-and only true and beautiful on the other side, however one got there.'

     " . . . as early as 1946, one observer at least was seeing in the gathering Berkeley-Big Sur bohemia the makings of an alternative view of American life that could in time become the makings of a mass movement. Over the next decade and a half, the attitudes described by Brady would emerge as the beat movement and this sensibility, in turn quickened by generational revolt and a hated war in Vietnam would become the hippie movement, the anti-establishment movement, the anti-everything movement: that congeries of resentments and shifting values and attitudes, in short, that would coalesce in the 1960s as a whole new way of looking at American life . . .

     " . . .

     [p. 230] ". . . Los Angeles and its hinterlands grew even more eccentric and colorful as the area approached its new status, reached in 1949, of being the third largest metropolitan region in the United States. Tthirty-twohirty-two percent of the population of greater Los Angeles had arrived since 1940. The largest number of immigrants had come from either the west south-central census area (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas) or the west north-central census area (Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas). Los Angeles, in other words, remained the whitest big city in America. On the other hand, it had more Mexicans than any other city outside of Mexico itself and nearly fifty distinguishable tribes or nation-groups of Native Americans: all this augmented by the returning Japanese-Americans and a growing [p. 231] black population, forecasting the diversity in place by the 1970s. Aside from the City of Angels proper-the fourth largest city in the United States since 1945, 1.9 million people spread over 451 square miles, divided by the City Planning Commission into fifty-nine distinct communities with a total of 932 recognizable neighborhoods-the greater Los Angeles region encompassed forty-five cities and nearly ninety unincorporated areas. One critic compared it to an aggregation of movie sets.

     "After the war, American observers began to respond to what English residents such as Aldous Huxley had long since noticed, the delightful singularity of the region. . . . Saturday Evening Post, "Los Angeles is New York in purple shorts with its brains knocked out." Los Angeles Daily News columnist Matt Weinstock: Los Angeles was the most insulted city in the world-and frequently deserved it." "Los Angeles has been described as a glorious climate wasted on an undeserving, vulgar, boorish people." Sam Boal, New York Times Magazine, "Los Angeles is hopelessly overcrowded. It is short of houses, short of restaurants, short of stores, even short of filling stations. Its traffic problems, because it lives on wheels, is complex almost beyond description."

     "In great part because of the lure of Hollywood, Los Angeles in the mid-to late 1940s was noticeably peopled by attractive young women. It was also an important American divorce capital, granting twice as many divorces as Reno, three times as many as Miami . . . The judges in wartime and post-war Los Angeles County were especially liberal and hasty granting divorces . . . Photographers made a specialty of photographing newly minted divorcées . . .

     [p. 234] ". . .

     "Los Angeles so often seemed a city of people on the edge, people pushing it to the breaking point, either from an excess of resources and opportunities or from desperate scarcity. . . .

     " . . .

     "Post-war Los Angeles, one writer claimed, was one big cocktail lounge, with every stool occupied by a female available for pickup. An infinite array of restaurants, nightclubs, and watering holes, ranging up and down the social scale, from dives to such reservation-only establishments as Ciro's, Chasen's. the Brown Derby, Perino's, and Romanoff's extended from the Chateau Gardens in San Fernando to Shanghai Red's at the San Pedro Harbor . . .

     [p. 235] " . . . Higher on the evolutionary scale were such hangouts as Charlie Foy's Supper Club in the San Fernando Valley; the Tail o' the Cock on La Cienega and Musso and Frank on Hollywood Boulevard; Lucy's on Melrose Avenue; Jack's at the Beach on [in] Ocean Park where Bugsey Siegel enjoyed his last meal; the Pacific Dining Car in the Downtown; the original Taix on East Commercial Street, where antiquarian bookseller Jacob Israel Zeitlin ran a literary round table; and the Good Fellows Grotto . . .

      "Historians of Americn night life might justifiably pass over Los Angeles 1947 as a significant restaurant city, its major claim to fame in this regard having been the invention of the cafeteria in 1905, an eating place perfected by the Boos brothers John and Horace, and Clifford Clinton in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet being a singles city, Los Angeles was a place where people frequently ate out, and hundreds of establishments, great and small, rose up to meet this market. Lawry's on La Cienega helped Los Angeles celebrate the post-war return of beef with heroic servings of prime rib. Mama Weiss's served goulash . . . Paul's Duck Press catered to hunters, prepared game in the style of the Tour d'Argent. Perino's one of the most expensive, mixed show biz and upper-crust WASP . . .

     [p. 236]  " . . . 1947 the last year of studio feudalism . . .

     [p. 237] " . . .

     [p. 238] "Perhaps, only someone as bleak, as desperate. as displaced as Raymond Chandler-bleak in his career prospects, bleak in his emotional life and thwarted sexuality, bleak in his constant drinking-could capture the essential bleakness of life in what so often seemed the bleakest city in America. Only James M. Cain and Nathanael West equal Chandler . . . Raymond Chandler was essentially a 1940s writer. His Black Mask stories of the 1930s are significant, but many of them were recycled into later novels. More important, Chandler's point of view, his style, his tone, his obseessions were 1940s: 1940s Los Angeles, more precisely, the city of Bugsey Siegel and George Raft; the city of Detective Lieutenant Harry Fremont, capable of shooting a suspect down in cold blood, and all the other LAPD cops not reluctant to administer to Philip Marlowe, or anyone else for that matter, a beating; the city of five daily newspapers and sixteen hours of headlines; the city of the Black Dahlia and the dives on Beacon Street and furtive homosexual action in Pershing Square and the sex jungle on the palisades above Santa Monica Beach.

     " . . .

     "Chandler despised Los Angeles . . . [p. 239]

     [p. 239] "Not accidentally, Chandler's brief career as a writer coincided with Hollywood's film noir years, in which Chandler himself played an important part as screenwriter and story source. Six of Chandler's novels were made into movies in his lifetime, and Chandler himself was nominated for Academy Awards for his work onDouble Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia. Inspired in part by German Expressionism, with a preference for bleak people in claustrophobic settings, film noir was suited perfectly to 1940s Los Angeles as Chandler, the cops, the crime reporters, and the gangsters themselves were encountering it: a restricted and restrictive city, angular, grim, asking no quarter and giving even less. . ..

     " . . .

     [p. 242] ". . . The rise of Earl Warren coincided with the rise of California, and the governor was shaped almost exclusively by the state's culture and institutions. Earl Warren was at once the last of the High Provincials, in Josiah Royce's phrase, with roots in the frontier, and among the youngest of the New Men, the Progressive generation led by Hiram Johnson and Herbert Hoover, the public men in the vanguard of California's rise to national prominence. A native Californian, Earl Warren was born in Los Angeles on 18 March 1891, when that city had slightly more than fifty thousand citizens. He was reared in Bakersfield in southern Kern County when that community was still a raw and sometimes violent frontier town. Only four previous governors-Romualdo Pacheco, George Pardee, Hiram Johnson and James Rolph Jr.-had been native sons; and only one governor, Hiram Johnson, had ever been elected to a second term. Earl Warren was elected three times, in 1942, 1946, and 1950. He served as governor of California for ten years and eight months, the longest gubernatorial term in California history. He then assumed an office, Chief Justice of the United States of America, second only to the presidency in importance, and in that office earned a secure place in the history of his country.

     " . . .

[p. 271] ". . . Artie Samish became the political boss of California by orchestrating the flow of campaign contributions to candidates favoring his clients or conversely, by financing opponents of can-[p. 272]didates who were showing signs of being unwilling to take guidance from [Samish]."

     [p. 265] In 1946 Artie Samish ran Howser, the district attorney of Los Angeles, against the Democrat's San Francisco district attorney, Edmund (Pat) Brown for Kenney's vacant Attorney General seat. Brown was defeated and Howser proved corrupt. Warren created a statewide Commission on Organized Crime under [p. 266] the chairmanship of retired Admiral William Standley, formerly chief of naval operations and ambassador to the USSR. To administer the Commission, Warren appointed his longtime associate Warren Olney III. By 1950 Warren had completely undermined Howser, who failed to win the Republican nomination for reelection. In the general election of 1950, Republican candidate Edward Shattuck was defeated by Pat Brown . . . with the tacit approval of Warren . . . The bond between the two men . . . constitutes the central political continuity in California between 1950 and 1966 when Pat Brown was defeated for governor by Ronald Reagan. Earl Warren, Republican, recruited Pat Brown, Democrat, into the Party of California, committed to an essentially bipartisan, growth-oriented, neo-Progressive program based in public works. . . .

     [p. 266] "Warren refused to endorse candidates . . .

     " . . . Warren was unbeholden to the corporate sector that exercised such a continuing influence in Republican circles . . . [p. 267]

     [p. 267] " . . .

[p. 269] Warren " . . . was the governor of a dynamic state, second only to New York in population, and he had a solid record of administration and reform, in the prison system especially. As attorney general, Warren had inherited a [lackadaisical] correctional culture . . .

     "Although the term had not yet been invented, Earl Warren was an avid environmentalist in the style of outdoorsmen who love to hike, camp, hunt and fish. . . . To revitalize the Division of Forestry, Warren turned to Professor Emanuel Fritz of the Department of Forestry at UC Berkeley, who as chairman of the state commission oversaw the expansion and improvement of the Division and established a program of timber replacement. To improve the conservation and management of wildlife resources in California, Warren turned to General of the Army Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, the retired chief of staff of the Army Air Forces, then living in Sonoma. As chairman of the Fish and Wildlife Commission, General Arnold put California in the forefront of the wildlife conservation movement, while at the same time maintaining a responsible fishing and hunting program under strict licensing.

     "To supervise the reform of California's overburdened and lethal road and highway system, Warren turned to Charles Purcell-the person most responsible for the successful construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Serving as state engineer . . . Purcell represented the essence of the Progressive activities, public works . . . Warren promoted him, putting him in charge of an ambitious new highway program. During the war . . . [p. 270] devoted his best his best energies to keeping the road and highway system of California functional for defense shipments and troop movements. After the war, Purcell drew up plans for an entirely new system that was long overdue. . . . a billion-dollar master plan of freeways, highways and county roads . . . Warren fought to have a gas tax enacted to finance this ambitious program. It took him until 1953 for him to overcome the opposition of Big Oil . . .

     [p. 270] " . . . Warren promoted an aggressive program of publicly sponsored health care . . . he reorganized and improved the state's Department of Public Health . . . Warren established a Department of Mental Hygiene, which pioneered the employment of preventive and treatment-oriented mental health programs . . . Warren was outspoken in favor of a statewide program of state-sponsored health insurance. As early ass 1944, discussion of a pre-paid comprehensive health insurance plan for California . . . surfaced as a recommendation of the Reconstruction and Reemployment Commission. The ultra-conservative California Medical Association, through the campaign firm, suggested that Warren's program were "socialized medicine." The Association and other ultra-conservatives began to whisper that Warren was secretly a Communist, or at least a Communist sympathizer."

     [p. 270] "The long resistance of Big Oil to the highway tax and the ability of the California Medical Association . . . to sink Warren's health insurance program underscored the difficulty of governing California . . . the absence of parties and party discipline . . . the susceptibility of the electorate to manipulations by mass media . . . .

     [p. 272] . . .

     "Was Artie Samish corrupt? . . . Investigated in the late 1930s by H.R. Philbrick, a private detective in the employ of the grand jury, Samish had helped the speaker of the Assembly be put on the payroll of the Santa Anita race track. The speaker, William Moseley Jones, had in turn appointed assemblymen to the Committee on Motor Vehicles and the Committee on Public Morals . . .

     [p. 273] "Telling it all, letting the world know California's nasty secret-that the reforms of the Progressive era had been subverted, that California had become controlled by corporate and other interests," Samish gave his story to Collier'sThe Secret Boss of California 13 and 20 August, 1949, written by Velie.

     " . . .

[p. 285] " . . .

     "Nixon's [1946] anti-Communist crusade was only in part about Communism. In Southern California at least, the very heart of Nixon country, anti-Communism also framed the debate regarding development. For all its boom mentality, pre-World War II Southern California had paradoxically sustained within itself a quirky tendency to the left, even among developers. H. Gaylord Wilshire and John Randolph Haynes, for example, two of the most successful developers of the pre- and post-First World War era, were committed Socialists. Pasadena sustained a flourishing Fabian socialist circle among its millionaires. The post-Second World War boom, by contrast, was controlled by shadowy corporations and banks and equally shadowy developers who pushed the anti-Communism issue and supported anti-Communist politicians such as Richard Nixon. By so doing, the pro-development forces sought to create by implication and psychological association a strong counter-argument and counter-force in favor of laissez-faire growth. The anti-Communist crusade, in short, helped soften up innumerable city councils, planning commissions, and zoning boards, threatening them with the implied argue- [p. 286] ment: regulation of growth replicates the planned economies and political controls of Communism.

Eugene Burdick, The Ninth Wave, 1956

     [p. 286] . . . In 1940-41, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, then chaired by Representative Matin Dies of Texas, had engaged in a preliminary skirmish against the Hollywood Reds but backed off when the Soviet Union and the United States became wartime allies. The Dies Committee had been curious about what it called "premature anti-fascism" in Hollywood, which is to say, anti-fascist activity the committee suspected was Communist-inspired, such as the formation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936 which sponsored the visit of French novelist turned Loyalist aviator Andre Malraux. Arriving in Los Angeles on behalf of the Spanish Republic in 1937 . . .

     After the war . . . [p. 287] Internally and externally, Hollywood was in trouble on the Communist issue, and on other matters. Among other things, there was television. . . .

     [p. 287] "What turned out to be a decade of woe for Hollywood opened in 1945 with two years of ferocious strikes in which Communist and anti-Communist elements in the various unions struggled for power.

       ". . .

     [p. 288] "Executive Hollywood was on the defensive, then, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities sent out its subpoenas in the fall of 1947. First of all, there were the strikes themselves, which had brought the studios dangerously close to being dominated by the Communist-Controlled Conference of Studio Unions, which did not look good to Washington. Then there was the embarrassing matter of the pro-Soviet films produced during the war. The war, in fact, offered pro-Soviet screenwriters the opportunity of a lifetime. Prior to the war, Hollywood demanded a distanced, at best satiric, approach to Soviet society as in the case of Ninotchka(1939), starring Greta Garbo as a Soviet commissar who falls in love with the Western way of life. By 1943 John Howard Lawson, the archdeacon of Hollywood Communists, could put a scene in the film Action in the North Sea (1943) . . .

     "By 1947 Hollywood moguls such as Jack Warner had grown fearful at what they had done. They had celebrated Stalin as a great world statesman, musing over maps and spinning globes with Davies and Churchill. They had recognized aircraft as our own, and depicted a utopian Russia-nightclubs, dancing peasants, Tchaikovsky music everywhere-more idealized than any Soviet propaganda would dare attempt . . .

 [p. 290] "The first major sign that Hollywood was in trouble . . . with the American public on the Communist issue was the overnight reversal of the popularity of Charles Chaplin. Arriving in the United States on the SS Cairnrona in September 1910 along with British comedian Stan Laurel . . . [p. 291]

     [p. 291] "By 1917 Chaplin was making a million dollars a year under contract to First National and had achieved his wish. Yet for all his popularity, the Little Tramp missed something essential-whatever that was-in his connection to the American people. . .

     " . . . In 1944 Chaplin was indicted on felony charges under the Mann Act . . . from which he was acquitted. The next year another paternity suit was filed by the same woman, Chaplin was ordered to pay child support despite the failure of a blood test to establish paternity . . . Chaplin concluded the year 1946 by marrying Oona O'Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill . . .

   [p. 292] . . . At this point, Chaplin began to become an active member of the Salka Viertel's émigré circle, as if to reconfirm to himself his residency in a hostile country . . .

     "It took one last element, the hostility of Roman Catholics when Chaplin released Monsieur Verdoux in 1947 . . . Clare Booth Luce and the Legion of Decency campaigned against Chaplin . . .

     ". . . On 18 September 1952 Charles and Oona Chaplin sailed for London on the Queen Elizabeth. On board he received a warning that if he returned he would be questioned about his political affiliations and turpitudity.

     " . . .

     [p. 293] Starr tries to explicate the complex relations aroused in and by the movie business as it tries to unleash, channel and profit from celluloid dreams. Certainly the Communists had applied Marxist analysis to the generation of cinematic consciousness; Benjamin certainly understood the sorts of ideological forces generated by this system. And the movie business becomes its own problem to the oligarchy, until it eventually becomes the oligarchy . . . ]

     Starr appends several alternatives or caveats: 1)the ostracism of Charlie Chaplin constituted a ritual act in which the slave-master relationship between Hollywood and its audience reversed itself because Chaplin had exceeded even the elastic boundaries of Hollywood sexuality without the permission of the American people; 2) Chaplin's contempt for the public, which was the contempt of Chaplin's employers in Hollywood as well-had become too overt and had linked itself to the far left, as it had in the case of so many screenwriters; 3) During the Second World War, Hollywood had overplayed its hand in telling the American people that Hollywood was winning the war, almost singlehandedly, while, in fact, while others fought and died, Hollywood had increased its status as a privileged enclave.

     In October 1947, American nobodies, most of them film fans, including freshman congressman Richard Nixon, took cyclical revenge on their Hollywood royalty . . . The HUAC hearing repeated the Red Scare that followed the First World War. They were also a replay of the mid-1920s When the American people had clamped down on Desmond Taylor and Fatty Arbuckle. . . .

     [p. 293] "The first group to testify before the committee, the anit-Communists associated with the Motion Picture Alliance . . . understood that a populist reaction was brewing . . . around communism. The MPAPA had been forged out of an earlier confrontation, a National Labor Relations Board election in 1940, in which the older and very left-wing Screenwriters Guild prevailed. MAPA members included: Adolphe Menjou, screenwriters Ayn Rand and Rupert Hughes, Mrs Lela Rogers, actors, Robert Taylor; Robert Montgomery, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan and Gary Cooper; director, Leo McCarey and producers Walt Disney and Louis B. Mayer.

     [p. 293] " . . .

     " . . . Jack Warner, head of the most liberal of the studios before the war, met in secret with "the HUAC staffers a few months before the open hearings and named people in Hollywood he thought were Communists, a list that was read back to him in opened session in October. Few of these people would ever work in The the industry over the next fifteen years. At the conclusion of Warner's testimony-the most shameless, self-seeking, sycophantic, and evasive testimony in the history of the committee- Chairman J. Parnell Thomas warmly shook Warner's hand. Warner had gotten himself off the hook . . . for various wartime indiscretions.

     [p. 294] Starr insists that the Hollywood Ten (Sometimes, nineteen) were all more or less Communists and that that is relevant to their harassment. John Howard Lawson . . . was a witch hunter's dream: a Jewish radical masquerading behind a WASP name, a brash doctrinaire activist incapable of discretion . . . Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, another one of the Ten, claimed that he joined the Communist party in 1943; . . . Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun, published on 3 September 1939 and serialized in the Daily Worker, offered the most powerful statement possible, the depiction of the American veteran as a living corpse, for keeping the United States out of war, or for that matter, for dissuading Hitler from invading Russia.

     Writing in the Saturday Review of Literature for 16 July 1949, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. attacked the Hollywod Ten as overpaid hacks who had gone Communist out of a mixture of guilt and arrogance and in the process had given mainstream liberalism a bad name . . . Alvah Bessie, while personally courageous (he fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain), had few screenplays to his credit; Ring Lardner Jr. didn't compare with his father; Edward Dymtryk, a director with some talent.

     [p. 295] "Dalton Trumbo . . . had real talent. Like the rest of the Ten, however, Trumbo was addicted to Hollywood for the money, the money, the money. He needed lots of it and nothing else in the United States-with the exception of robbing banks-yielded cash like scriptwriting. Trumbo had other addictions as well, the inevitable by-products of the fast-paced on-the-edge life he led, which included Seconal, Benzedrine, and dexedrine . . .

     ". . .

     [p. 301] "If one were to send to Central Casting for someone to embody the Folks of Southern California in all their hope, glory, and occasional grotesquerie, then John B. Tenny [1898- ] might very well turn up on the set. But then again, Tenny himself-hard-drinking, paranoid, dyspeptic-could have been played by W.C. Fields in one of the actor's grouchier moods. Born in St. Louis, Tenney arrived in Los Angeles as a boy of ten in 1908 with his parents as they joined the great migration of Folks to the Southland. During the war, he fought with the American Expeditionary Force in France. Upon his return, Tenney, a pianist, formed the Majestic Orchestra and spent the first half of the 1920s driving from dance hall to dance hall throughout the southern tier of the state. When bookings in the better dance halls or hotels wre lacking, the Majestic played places like the Owl in Mexicali. Situated across the border from Calexico, Mexicali functioned as a funnel for Mexican farm workers passing to and from the Imperial Valley. In January 1923 Tenney and the Majestic Orchestra were playing the Imperial Dance Hall in Mexicali. For some weeks previously, Tenney had been fiddling with a tune in his mind, a modified waltz. A regular at the Imperial was a woman named Rose, who ran a boardinghouse for railroad men in Brawley, which is to put the best possible interpretation upon the establishment. Rose would come into the Imperial after midnight, already a bit drunk, and was wont to break into tears, especially when Tenney and the Majestic played the waltz tune Tenney had composed. Seeing Rose in tears one night, Tenney was inspired to attach lyrics to his melody. He later described Mexicali Rose as a tribute to all beautiful, black-eyed señoritas. Like the Ramona myth, Mexicali Rose, took on a life of its own. Two movies were made, and the sheet music sold steadily throughout Tenney's lifetime. Mexicali Rose became one of the most recorded songs in the history of Tin Pan Alley. Banal, sentimental, touched with spurious Hispanic romance, the song embodied the hopes and dreams of the Folks as they settled into their new identity as Southern Californians.

      [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 politics, 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 Marin 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 . . .

     "During the war years, Tenney was cautious. After the war, by contrast, in hearings held between 1945 and 1948, the Tenney Committee aggressively concerned itself with allegations of Communism in unions, at the University of California, in local elections, in high school curricula and among teachers . . . Tenney's chief counsel R.E. Combs . . .

     [p. 304] " . . . people who might otherwise not given Jack Tenney the time of day, now were forced to listen as his committee humiliated them.

     "The transcripts . . . seethe with barely suppressed rituals of social revenge . . . The central investigative resource of the Tenney Committee was an elaborate system of index cards compiled by Combs, who subscribed to hundreds of journals and newpapers, including Communist Party publications. Painstakingly, Combs would enter onto cards the name of each organization and each indidvidual listed as a supporter. By 1943 he had nearly fourteen thousand cross-indexed cards."

[p. 304] ' . . . The Communist Party of California . . . was more or less an open affair. In 1938 the Party had launched the first openly Communist newspaper, thePeople's Daily World, edited and published in San Francisco. Party functionaries such as Dorothy Healy, secretary of the Communist Party in Los Angeles County, were in the late 1930s and into the war years increasingly operating in the open and aligning themselves with scores of other organizations; . . . Healy resisted the cult of secrecy that characterized CP activities in Hollywood. A 1939 pamphlet, The Communist Party: Whom and How to Recruit in California, set forth an ambitious program to make the Party become perceived as a mainstream political organization. by working people up and down the state. . . .

     [p. 305] " . . . Saturday 25 October 1942, the Los Angeles County Communist Part joined representatives from Governor Culbert Olson's and Lieutenant Governor Ellis Patterson's office . . . in the Embassy Auditorium on South Grand St. as a united front among liberal and Communist candidates.

     " . . . By 1947 . . . the Communist Party of California launched a drive to build its membership to ten thousand by September. Pamphlets and instructional manuals supporting this drive stressed a pro-labor, pro-union, pro-third-party, and pro-Negro front.

     "In this last emphasis, the securing of civil rights and economic opportunity for African-Americans, CP literature from the period anticipated the civil rights drive of the 1960s . . . Tenney had wanted the entire Civil Rights Action Conference investigated as a Communist front, but Pearl Harbor intervened. . . .

     [p. 305] "Tenney was especially angry with lawyer-activist-historian Carey McWilliams, who had played a major role in civil rights agitation, including an important role in the 1941 civil rights conference in San Francisco. Cross-examining McWilliams in 1947, Tenney coaxed from him a refusal to condemn interracial marriage. The 1947 report of the Tenney Committee claimed McWilliams advocated black and white marriage, "part of the Communist philosophy," the report [p. 305] claimed, "of breaking down the races." This attack represented the most ugly line of attack ever taken by the intemperate inquisitor form Los Angeles County.

     [p. 306] The 1948 third-party Progressive movement led by former Vice President Henry Wallace offered a renewal of the United Front of World War II for the Left in California as well as the rest of the nation . . .

     " . . .

     [p. 307] In 1949 Tenney place a poor fifth in the race for mayor of Los Angeles. He subsequently failed in two attempts to reach the House of Representatives. In 1952 he ran for Vice President of the United States on the Christian National Party ticket alongside General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. By 1959 Jack Tenney was back where he began, in the desert, practicing law in Banning, a Mexicali Rose sort of town.

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017