Mark E. Kann Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1986. 322 pp., 1986, 1838, 1850-1800
Preface
"Santa Monica is a prosperous oceanside city just west of Los Angeles. Beginning in the early 1970s, it hosted a growing grassroots movement that struggled to protect and enhance the local quality of life against business interests promoting growth and development. By 1979, the movement had garnered enough citizen support to pass one of the most radical rent control laws in the United States. In 1981, activists moved from rent control to political control when Santa Monicans elected a radical city council majority that started to experiment with building a "human scale community" founded on principles of "participatory democracy" and priorities putting "people ahead of profits." The next year, residents affirmed their support for the leftist agenda by sending Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED) leader Tom Hayden* to the California State Assembly . . ." p. xi
". . . [Santa Monica's political base] was strictly "Main Street," composed almost exclusively of successful, "bourgeois" citizens who normally ignore or oppose radicals . . . Santa Monica activists . . . self-consciously identified with their own privileged class; and they hoped to extract from middle class culture the roots of an indigenous American radicalism, more moral and political than economic, that would appeal to the prosperous as well as the poor.
" . . . The larger story also involves changes in the values and strategies of the American left. Activists who participated in the student movement of the 1960s and explored alternative institutions and politics in the 1970s became more sympathetic to the emerging dilemmas of middle class life and more interested in solving them . . ." p. xii
"[In 1981, when the idea of this book originated at a dinner party in Pacific Palisades] Elizabeth Rappoport suggested the [the author, MK] write an article for Socialist Review on Santa Monica politics. [MK] . . . taped interviews with people involved in Santa Monica politics. [MK] began with [Santa Monica mayor Ruth] Goldway and [Santa Monica planning commissioner Derek] Shearer . . . and then spoke with city councilmembers Dolores Press, James Conn, Dennis Zane, Kenneth Edwards, Christine Reed, and William Jennings. I also interviewed city manager John Alshuler, city attorney Robert Myers, city liaison officer Vivian Rothstein, and assistant city planner Christopher Rudd. Finally, I set up formal talks with activists involved with different political groups or neighborhood organizations in the city, including Maurice Zeitlin, Roger Thornton, Allan Heskin, Judy Abdo, Fred Allingham, and Herman Rosenstein . . . Conrad Melilli and Laurie Lieberman were particularly helpful . . ." p. xiii
Chapter I Where the Rainbow Ends
". . . In 1980, the average Santa Monica home sold for a hefty $203,825—slightly more than in nearby Beverly Hills. The mean income for Santa Monica families was $28,825, a respectable middle class figure that would be higher if accumulated and invested wealth were added. Nearly 78 percent of the residents were white, 60 percent of the adult women employed, and fully 43.5 percent of all residents engaged in professional and managerial careers. Relatively unusual for American communities, more than 70 percent rented their homes but the renters were almost as affluent as the homeowners . . . In addition, 17 percent of the Santa Monica population was black or Hispanic, and less than 14 percent was working in manufacturing." pp. 5, 6
". . .
". . . One can bicycle down to old Main Street and be transported back to the 1890s by its wooded storefronts and stained glass windows, Victorian restorations, period restaurants, and sidewalk vendors . . . The more contemporary consumer can choose between Santa Monica Place, a new indoor center featuring major chain outlets, chic boutiques and galleries, and lots of roofed-in greenery designed by a famous local architect . . .
"One item regularly produced and consumed in Santa Monica is culture. Simply living in Santa Monica is a form of cultural enrichment. One's neighbors are likely to be interesting if not important people in the world of ideas and the arts. The city houses an incredible concentration of scientists, professors, journalists and writers, architects, designers, doctors, and lawyers as well as producers and directors, actors, dancers, sculptors, painters, and artisans. These "captains of culture" for the Southern California region and beyond form a critical mass of support for public and commercial performances. Many of them contribute time, talents, and money to city cultural affairs, and many patronize the experimental theaters that germinate there. Furthermore, their avocational interests compose the demand that attracts an abundant supply of private schools and lessons that cater to middle class hobbyists.
"The source for Santa Monica's middle class affluence, consumption, and culture is marketable intellectual skills . . ." pp. 6, 7
" . . . budget . . .
"In the early 1970s, Santa Monica became a center of considerable grassroots activism across a range of issues. By 1979, activists had initiated and won popular support for the most stringent rent control law in the United States. In 1981, a group of 'radicals" won control of city government, including the mayor's office, the city council majority, the city manager's office, the city attorney's office, the rent control board, the planning commission majority, the redevelopment agency majority, citizen task forces and advisory commissions, key posts in the bureaucracy, and an annual $90 million budget . . ." p. 7
". . . Santa Monica has no discernible core of university students who might transcend their middle class upbringing to fuel radical politics and its countercultural core evidences more interest in protecting its Ocean Park neighborhood than in promoting a radical liberationist ethic . . ." p. 11
" . . . The Wall Street Journal, for example, attributed some of their success to the fact that they did not look very threatening to young professionals. Their leaders included a mother of four, a Methodist minister, a college professor, and even Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, who owned an "unpretentious two-story house near the beach."" p. 14
". . . Hayden was a leading 1960s radical, best known for his founding role in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and his courtroom role as defendant in the Chicago Seven trial that followed the 1968 national Democratic party convention. [KR: Haden was editor of the University of Michigan's Michigan Daily, and worked in civil rights before the 1968 convention, and Lawrence Lipton, discussed in Venice West was injured by the police while covering that 1968 convention in Chicago.]
"In the 1970s, Hayden put on a coat and tie and began to work within the political system. He made an impressive run for California's Democratic party nomination for U.S. senator in 1976, founded the Santa Monica-based Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED) the next year, served on several state commissions under Governor Jerry Brown, and was elected to represent the Santa Monica area in the California State Assembly in 1982. Hayden is a prolific writer, a regular interviewee, and a common center of controversy. When he went to the State Assembly, newspapers reported both surprise among his colleagues that he was a team player and the expected accusations of groups that wanted him impeached for having aided the enemy during the Vietnam war." p. 14
"Hayden is married to Jane Fonda . . . She eventually earned recognition as a fine actress in her own right, making socially conscious films that stirred controversy and stimulated box office success . . . she has promoted liberal to radical causes, including economic democracy . . ." p. 15
". . . [Ruth Yanatta] Goldway received her first dose of political recognition in 1973, when she spearheaded a national meat boycott as chair of a group called Fight Inflation Together. She went on to direct the Center for New Corporate Priorities. In 1979, she was elected to the Santa Monica City council; in 1981, the radical council majority appointed her mayor. A former Ph.D. candidate in English, Goldway is articulate as well as outspoken, making her the key figure on the city's most controversial issues . . . She met [Derek Shearer] at a Ralph Nader citizens group meeting . . . and marriage soon followed, officiated by James Conn, "a Santa Monica City council member . . ." pp. 15, 16
". . . Derek [Shearer] is a Yale-educated urban planner and college professor who has worked with Tom Hayden and Ralph Nader and has also served as a presidential appointee on Jimmy Carter's National Consumer Cooperative Bank. He is perhaps best known as coauthor of . . . Economic Democracy: The Challenge of the 1980s. Shearer is often considered the key intellectual strategist for the Santa Monica radicals; he co-chaired their most successful electoral campaign and served on the city planning commission, eventually becoming its chairman . . . " p. 16
". . . [MK] will trace the evolution of Santa Monica's affluent middle class to identify a more general American phenomenon: today's middle class is on the defensive, forced to tally the costs of its material success in terms of significant moral defeats. And one middle class response is to investigate radical political alternatives, both left and right.
"Perhaps part of the reason that the American middles class has so long persisted in its ambivalent loyalty to prevailing power structures is that its own intellectuals have not developed relevant or coherent alternatives . . . middle class intellectuals have usually identified middle class interests with capitalism, sometimes as a lesser evil, while leftwing intellectuals have portrayed the middle class as in the enemy's camp, in opposition to working class socialism. These alternatives offer little solace to a discontented middle class: it must live with its discontents. Capitalism and socialism are primarily economic alternatives founded on issues that are crucial to owners who want to protect accumulated wealth and workers who have yet to accumulate wealth. But such economic perspectives may be secondary to an affluent middle class population whose most pressing concerns are moral and political . . . the middle class has spawned its own version of radicalism that appeals directly to moral and political rather than economic values.
". . . the emergence of middle class radicalism in Santa Monica may indicate not "the revolution" but a peculiarly indigenous revolution brewing where the rainbow ends." pp. 24, 25
Chapter 2: The Highest Bidder
"Southern California was founded on corporate promotion schemes that converted the climate into a marketable commodity and made rapid expansion the main business of the region. Santa Monica was also produced by corporate entrepreneurs who sought to control the city's future in order to reap monopolistic profits. But their bid failed, and early Santa Monica history is marked by a small town autonomy and a small business dominance that stood in sharp contrast to nearby burgeoning Los Angeles. Not until the post-World War II period was Santa Monica caught up in the maelstrom of regional growth. Local autonomy was eroded as the regional marketplace overspilled local boundaries; small business dominance was undermined by an influx of middle class professionals and managers, themselves escaping an unhappy existence in the metropolis. The result, by the 1970s, was a fragmented social structure and a political vacuum that created new opportunities for radicals who could appeal to middle class discontents.
"Local historians disagree about which entrepreneurs should be considered Santa Monica's official founders. The first candidates are Ysidro Reyes and Francisco Marquez "enterprising harness makers" who won the favor of the king of Spain and were granted title to the 6,400-acre Rancho Boca de Santa Monica in 1838. A great great grandson claims that these founders started a hospitable community that was occasionally forced on the defensive by outsiders, marauding Indians and gringo bandits. The Anglicized history begins with Colonel Robert S. Baker and Arcadia Bandini de Baker. Colonel Baker sought his fortune in the 1849 goldrush in Northern California but found it instead in the cattle and sheep trade. He invested in landholdings (Bakersfield, California, is named after him) and in 1872 purchased half of Rancho Boca de Santa Monica. He consolidated his Southern California empire when he married Arcadia Bandini de Stearns, whose deceased husband left her heiress to the largest individual landholdings in California history. Thus one local historian suggests that "Arcadia Bandini de Baker and Colonel Robert Baker were the real mother and father of Santa Monica." Nonetheless, in 1874, the Bakers took on a partner in their Santa Monica Land and Water Company and it is the partner's bust as official city founder that now graces the Santa Monica Mall.
"John P. Jones was a corporate dreamer worth of the Robber Baron Age. He came to California in 1850 seeking wealth in silver rather than gold and eventually cashed in on Nevada's fabulous Comstock Lode. Jones moved to Nevada in 1868, a man of substantial wealth and influence, and was elected by the state legislature to the U.S. Senate in 1873. Jones "won" his Senate seat "at a reputed cost of $500,000." With wealth, position, and ambition, he hatched a scheme to make himself one of the most powerful men in America.
"Jones invested heavily in California's Panamint mines knowing that their full profit potential could not be realized until the silver could be easily transported to the ocean and shipped to major markets. His plan was to build an integrated corporate monopoly that would include his own mines, his own railroad to the ocean, his own seaport city, his own deep sea harbor, and thus his own control of West Coast shipping. Jones' major problem was that he would be in competition with the Southern Pacific Railroad, the fabled "Octopus" that wrote the book on integrated corporate monopoly west of the Mississippi River. The Southern Pacific owned the only rail line between Los Angeles and the Wilmington-San Pedro harbor twenty-five miles to the south, controlled the harbor facilities, and dominated regional shipping. It would not look kindly on Jones's competitive bid.
"Jones's strategy was to bypass the Southern Pacific as much as possible. He could build a railroad between the Panamint mines and Los Angeles without raising too much fuss because the Southern Pacific was concentrating its expansion efforts on a line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Once Jones's railroad reached Los Angeles, it would veer west toward the Santa Monica Bay rather than south in direct competition with the Southern Pacific line to the San Pedro harbor. Jones purchased from Colonel Baker a three-quarter interest in his Santa Monica landholdings, intending to transform what was essentially a weekend campsite into a major seaport city. Jones would then build a wharf with docking facilities for loading and unloading deep sea vessels off of the Santa Monica coastline; and he would use his political influence in the U.S. Senate to win a federal appropriation for a breakwater that would make Santa Monica the major deep sea harbor for all Southern California.
"In 1875, Jones laid out the town of Santa Monica, registered it with the government, and hired noted auctioneer Colonel Tom Fitch to begin selling lots. He also began construction on his wharf and docking facilities, and on his Los Angeles and Independence Railroad that would link the Santa Monica harbor to Los Angeles and then to the Panamint mines. Before the year was out, his 1,740-foot wharf was operational, complete with warehouse and depot; excursion trains were running between Santa Monica and Los Angeles; and advertisements appeared in newpapers throughout the United States inviting West Coast steamers to dock at the new harbor and businessmen to invest in the new seaport city. The promotional literature called Santa Monica "the Zenith City by the Sunset Sea."
"The sun set on Jones's scheme almost immediately. The Southern Pacific cut its own rates and applied considerable pressure on shipping companies to continue to dock in San Pedro rather than Santa Monica. Jones expected this and confidently predicted that he would "ruin" the other harbor and that Santa Monica would become the "logical metropolitan center of California." Jones was losing money at the moment but figured that the growth of the shipping trade and the town of Santa Monica would convert temporary losses into long-term profits. What he did not figure on, however, was that his Comstock mines would crash, his bank would close, and his financial support would disappear in a statewide depression, or that his Panamint mines would fail and his construction on the railroad from the mines to Los Angeles would be stopped for lack of funds. By 1877, Jones's dream of an integrated corporate monopoly was shattered.
"It was time to salvage his investment. He hoped to safeguard his Santa Monica holdings by selling his wharf and railroad to someone who would build a future for his new seaport city. He approached the county of Los Angeles but it feared offending the powerful Southern Pacific; he approached Jay Gould of the Union Pacific Railroad but Gould was not convinced that investments west of Los Angeles would pay off. Jones had no choice other than to deal with the Southern Pacific, which, having eliminated the threat of Jones's competition, had no particular interest in his wharf and railroad. However, Collis P. Huntington persuaded his Southern Pacific partners that they could get the railroad dirt cheap (at one-fourth of Jones's investment) and simultaneously "keep the Nevada legislator friendly, in view of his influence in the United States Senate." Jones retained his land interests in Santa Monica, eventually acquired a local bank that his son would manage one day, but left the city's future to the Southern Pacific.
"The Southern Pacific had no plans for Santa Monica; its purchase was largely a political one. In 1878, when Southern Pacific engineers determined that the wharf needed expensive repairs, the corporation decided that it was simply cheaper to dismantle the wharf. The Los Angeles and Independence Railroad, whose service had deteriorated during Jones's downfall, now ran on a reduced schedule, bringing weekend campers and beachgoers rather than silver, businessmen, and buyers who were to have made Jones's dream metropolis into a reality. What happened to the individuals who had invested in Santa Monica's future? "A pervasive gloom now settled over Santa Monica, and the town went into a 'slump.' Business failures were common, property values sank, and within a few months the population had dropped from 1000 to 350 citizens." Santa Monica seemed to have become a silver miner's ghost town.
"This fate was avoided, however, by a new twist in Southern California's railroad wars. In 1890, a powerful syndicate of St. Louis capitalists decided to challenge the Southern Pacific's hegemony by laying its own track to the San Pedro harbor and building its own docking facilities there. The Southern Pacific in essence resurrected Jones's old scheme as a competitive response. Collis Huntington drew up plans to construct a deep harbor off Santa Monica that it could monopolize by virtue of its ownership of Jones's Los Angeles and Independence Railroad. Huntington also began a campaign to discredit as unsafe the harbor facilities in San Pedro where the Southern Pacific had once had uncontested control. Ultimately, Southern California shipping would be shifted to the new harbor, and Santa Monica, once again, was slated as a high growth metropolis. By 1893, the Southern Pacific had completed construction of a new 4,500-foot Long Wharf just north of Santa Monica, bought up land throughout the area, and marshaled enough congressional support (including that of Senator John P. Jones and Senator Cornelius Cole, who also had land investments in Santa Monica) to prevent federal appropriations for a breakwater in San Pedro. Huntington meanwhile courted the support of the Los Angeles business community and other influential politicians to win federal appropriations for building a sheltered [port]."
The founder of the Los Angeles Times and the key single figure in the making of Southern California. Otis put together a coalition of powerful business interests and politicians (including California US Senator Stephen White) to stop the Southern Pacific by ensuring that federal appropriations went to the San Pedro harbor. Otis's public posture was nicely summarized in this Times editorial of 1892:
"Is any individual or corporation to have a monopoly on this deep sea harbor when it is constructed? If it is found as a result of investigation that the Southern Pacific has taken in advance a mortgage (death grip) on the forthcoming artificial harbor at Santa Monica, then we say let us not give any assistance to the scheme. On the contrary, let us fight with all the self-respecting manhood we have. Better that the deep sea harbor be defeated altogether than that the government should be encouraged to appropriate $4 million or $5 million for the exclusive benefit of this already overgrown and too dictatorial corporation." (1)
- pp. 29, 30, 31, 32
(1) quoted in Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California, Putnams: NY, 1977. p. 59
"Again, those who had invested in Santa Monica's metropolitan future suffered when the Southern Pacific bubble burst. However, the various promotional schemes of Jones and Huntington had produced a steady stream of tourists and small businesses plying the tourist trade . . . Santa Monica's 1900 population was 3,000 residents, increasing to 7,800 by 1910 . . ." p. 33
" . . . Santa Monica's small businessmen were always willing to work with government and accede to its intervention in the marketplace. They supported city-owned and operated amusement piers that helped the resort economy; they welcomed New Deal programs that enhanced the local environment, including a Federal Arts Project that placed a statue of the city's namesake in Palisades Park and a Federal Emergency Public Works Project that built Santa Monica's impressive city hall. . .
"Santa Monica peacefully evolved from a small resort town into a middle-sized city of 50,000 residents by 1940 . . . A few Hollywood figures bought oceanfront homes on Santa Monica's Gold Coast and some Los Angeles garment workers retired to modest bungalows and apartments in Santa Monica's Ocean Park neighborhood . . . .
" . . . As World War II approached, the relatively small Douglas Aircraft plant on the city's eastern extremity expanded to meet wartime demand, employing nearly 40,000 workers at the height of production . . . . " p. 38
" . . . Between 1940 and 1944 . . . Santa Monica . . . experienced a 40 percent population growth during the decade.
"Southern California was also on the brink of the Automobile Age. In the 1930s, General Motors bought up the Pacific Electric Railway system to scrap it. The corporation replaced trains with diesel buses that it manufactured. The buses did not carry freight, so merchants were forced to buy or rent trucks that General Motors also manufactured. The buses were uncomfortable and unreliable, which encouraged Southern Californians to purchase automobiles that General Motors gladly sold to them. The corporation was convicted in 1949 of having conspired to replace municipal transit systems with products that it monopolized. The $5,000 fine, however, did not deter General Motors from continuing its practices or from putting its considerable weight behind the $70 billion Interstate Highway Act that reinforced consumer demand for automobiles by underwriting massive highway construction throughout the United States.
"For Santa Monica, the fallout from this corporate maneuvering was the construction of the Santa Monica Freeway in the mid-1960s . . . .
". . . Santa Monica experienced the extraordinary demand {for housing} that invited rent gouging, arbitrary evictions, condominium conversions, demolition of low and moderate housing to be replaced by luxury developments, the constant selling and buying of real estate, and skyrocketing prices for land and single-family homes. Santa Monica's growth machine rushed to the party, as did outside investors, developers, and speculators, who saw a chance for quick and easy profits. During a five-year period in the early 1970s, apartment vacancies fell below 5 percent for the first time while speculation in residential income properties increased more than 1,000 percent. The anarchy of the real estate market rippled throughout local life.
"First, major shifts in Santa Monica's population base occurred. Beginning in the early 1940s, the city attracted more and more middle class professionals and managers who worked in nearby high growth, high technology industries. For these migrants, Santa Monica was a beach-front resort town with all the amenities of an autonomous community: a pleasing small town environment, good schools, parks, entertainment, the beaches, and so forth. Santa Monica's magnetic appeal grew, particularly when the Santa Monica Freeway provided easy access throughout the region and when rapid industrialization, congestion, pollution, and crime provided good reasons for leaving Los Angeles proper. The fact that Santa Monica real estate prices were higher than elsewhere was no deterrent to this affluent middle class population. Professionals and managers had incomes that outpaced inflation and they could even afford to profit from inflation by purchasing land, housing, and income property. Thus, in 1983, a remarkable 11 percent of residents in the city's more affluent neighborhoods owned rental property in the city. By the 1970s . . . Santa Monica was undergoing gentrification, that affluent newcomers were replacing less prosperous oldtimers.
"Santa Monica's population stabilized in the 80,000s during the 1960s. Consequently, the continuous influx of professionals and managers necessarily meant the loss of older, more stable residents. The Santa Monica Freeway, for example, cut through the city's lower income neighborhoods, eliminating considerable numbers of minority residences. The retired people in the Ocean Park neighborhood, whose numbers had been augmented by the growth of a countercultural enclave, suffered a major redevelopment project that replaced older affordable housing with luxury oceanfront condominiums. Even the more affluent people in Santa Monica's central neighborhoods faced escalating property taxes and rents that pressured them to move elsewhere. In the 1970s alone, Santa Monica lost 3,187 households, "most of them with low, very low, and moderate incomes" . . .
". . . the 1960s witnessed the onset of a twenty-year battle between growth machine diehards . . . and homeowners . . .
" Simultaneously, the growth machine's economic might was diminishing. Boosters who invested in growth became more dependent on outside interests. Local entrepreneurs were pressured to sell out to corporate developers with regional, national, or international interests. The local entrepreneurs might feed at the corporate troughs but it was the corporations that planned, designed, financed, constructed, and operated the new apartment, condominium, retail, and office complexes that appeared in Santa Monica in the 1960s and 1970s . . . Santa Monica's leading employers as General Telephone (communications), St. John's Hospital (health care), Systems Development Corporation (computer software) . . . Rand Corporation (research and policy think tank) . . .
"Finally postwar Santa Monica evidenced the first traces of a shift in political attitudes. These new middle class professionals and managers who had migrated to the city were more liberal than the small businessmen who ran it. Their liberal attitudes were first manifest in the 1972 presidential election, when they helped to provide a municipal majority for George McGovern . . .
- p. 41, 42, 43, 44
Ambivalent Liberalism
"The rise of large corporations, symbolized in Santa Monica, first by Southern Pacific and later by General Telephone, produced a sphere of work of a new middle class . . . "the professional managerial class." It now includes 'such groups as scientists, engineers, teachers, social workers, writers, accountants, lower- and middle-level managers and administrators, etc." who comprise roughly one-fourth of the U.S. workforce. The members of this new middle class are primarily "mental'" laborers who invest their energies in ideas rather than in the production and distribution of goods. They honor those who investigate new science and technology more than those who peddle for profit. They view themselves as experts who provide services that improve the human condition rather than as hucksters who feed off of it. [See the alternative history of hucksterism and materialism on the beach.] . . ." p. McGovern . . .) p. 44
"The established professionals who moved to Santa Monica after World War II had invested too much of their lives, careers, and ideals in the modern American Dream to write off the New Deal liberalism associated with it. But they could not avoid some disenchantment with it.
"They became more convinced of the durability of social problems and more skeptical of the ability of their class and the welfare state to solve them. They're evolving consciousness was reinforced when the revolution of rising expectations took a feminist bent in the 1970s. Professional ideals demanded that women be admitted to the fold and rising divorce rates prompted more and more middle class women to explore their talents, seek professional credentials and find fulfilling careers. Though some middle class women were able to stake out a place in men's professional world, many could not find jobs in the depressed economy of the 1970s. Those who did often found ones where individual autonomy was restricted, outlets for intelligence limited, and concern for public service a luxury; moreover, the material rewards for women professionals were far less than either what was expected or what was obtained by male counterparts. For all their talk about equal opportunity and affirmative action, politicians and planners had done remarkably little to improve the career opportunities of most women. Meanwhile, professionals' children — male and female — frequently faced a trade-off between professionalism and material success. Those seeking professional careers might discover that they could not match their parents' standard of living; those recognizing professional careers as nothing special might opt for a business occupation where education is secondary and material rewards are primary; and many might simply struggle to get any job available to support themselves. The dream of finding a career that combined public service and personal affluence was receding.
"Rapid growth and development in Santa Monica force some of this disenchantment into the open as the city became more like metropolitan Los Angeles. More residents, stores, office buildings, and mobility added up to more traffic congestion. Santa Monica began to experience full-scale rush hours, with long waits to get on a freeway that had become the busiest in Southern California. The crime rate grew when freeway accessibility marked Santa Monica as a good location for murder, burglary, armed robbery, and rape. Homeless people wandered the streets by day and slept at city parks and beaches during the night. The professionals who turned to city government for help or who offered to help city government solve problems ran into the growth machine, still preaching the anachronistic politics of free market individualism and limited government. This encounter clearly offended the professionals' liberal sensibilities; but the professionals, their self-confidence shaken, could offer no coherent alternative. They had become wary of government programs that promised rational regulation only to deliver policy failures. Very much like the Democratic party after 1968, Santa Monica's new middle class suffered the political paralysis that comes with recognizing the problems with conservatism while being skeptical of the solutions posited by liberalism. Lacking a coherent alternative, they could not and did not contest the continuing power of the growth machine." pp. 53 and 54.
" . . .
"However, a new generation of middle class Santa Monicans discovered that ambivalence could be a fertile ground for experimenting with alternatives that revitalized middle class ideals in ways that justified significant changes in political reality. The young Santa Monicans shared their parents' ideals but not their ideological loyalties or paralysis. They too wanted economic security, autonomy, and community; they too validated entrepreneurial innovation and competition as means for realizing their ideals; and they too sought outcomes that would not serve simply themselves and their community but also the nation and even humankind. They came from families that dreamed the American Dream and partly lived it; equally important, they came from families that were disenchanted because the Dream was not firmly in their grasp. The younger generation then matured into a society that no longer validated the old tickets to the future. Most of them grew up on the 1950s, when conservatism, traditional and modern, had been all but discredited by New Deal liberalism; they went to school and came into political consciousness in the 1960s, when liberal myths about the welfare state were being undermined by mass protests against racism and militarism; they went on job searches in the 1970s, when fulfilling careers were scarce, established politicians were caught engaging in corruption, and oil corporations reaped super profits while customers suffered gasoline shortages. Half of them were young women who at some level understood that past ideological loyalties — right, center, left — had ignored their dreams; many of them were becoming young parents, the first generation of parents to have grown up in the shadow of a mushroom cloud, who feared that a world of environmental disaster and nuclear catastrophe would be visited on their children ] . . . " p. 55 & 56
3 Liking Middle America
". . .
From Port Huron
"In 1962, a student named Tom Hayden drafted a statement of principles for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at its convention in Port Huron, Michigan. Hayden's draft became the basis for the Port Huron Statement that guided SDS through the mid-1960s and provided a political identity for the early new left student movement. The SDS document was an appeal to the aspirations and frustrations of white middle class youth in America.
"'We are the people of this generation," it began, "bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we will inherit." . . . "Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people — these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men." . . . "
""Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity." . . . "
"The SDS document legitimated a new experiment in social change because the older methods had failed or at least not succeeded. . .
"The serious poet burns for a place, any place to work; the once-serious and never serious poets work at the advertising agencies."
"The imprecision of the Port Huron Statement bothered Tom Hayden very little. He came to Port Huron, states SDS historian Kirkpatrick Sale, "more convinced than before of the need to set out a broad definition of common values rather than a lot of narrow statements about this or that economic policy." SDS, Vintage: NY, 1973, p.45 ". . . Hayden has been criticized as too utopian but it was his call to an ad hoc sort of radicalism that legitimated the renewal of political dialogue and an openness to untried possibilities that captured the imagination of the first wave of middle class students who valued intelligence and experimentation enough to found the new left student movement . . . " p. 62
". . .
"But the support did not persist when "large numbers of young people pushed professional managerial class radicalism to its own limits and found themselves, ultimately, at odds with their own class." After 1967 or 1968, student politics changed. Those who once looked to the university as a source of leftwing promise began to mobilize against the university as an accomplice in warfare. For student organizations such as SDS, these shifts were wrenching. Participatory democracy gave way to factional control by highly organized sects . . . " p. 63
" . . . Suffering internal fragmentation and an erosion of its middle class base, the new left soon withered away. What persisted, however, was a generation of middle class activists who had graduated from college and were now entering the workforce as well as a disenchanted American middle class now entering a decade of economic instability." p. 64
To Santa Monica
" . . .
"In fact, many activists from the 1960s entered into the business world in the 1970s, . . . They became artisans, craftsmen, and entertainers plying the street and tourist trade. They started cottage industries in their homes and garages that sometimes developed, for example, into solar energy or recycling businesses. They sought to live as independent producers and sellers of books, articles, art, and films; and they began new bookstores, magazines, art galleries, and movie theaters. They also founded new social service agencies and nonprofit corporations that catered to pressing human needs for affordable health services, legal services, housing services, and so forth. They sometimes entered into the world of high finance with a women's bank or a socially conscious investment firm or consumer network like Co-op America, which offers comprehensive life insurance to community groups through a plan developed by an employee-owned insurance company that invests premiums in low income cooperative housing. And they often experimented with things like food, housing, or even bicycle cooperatives, editorial collectives, and community development corporations . . . that is toward the virtues of small businessmen that Santa Monica's Harry C. Henshey appreciated a half-century ago." p. 67
" . . .
" . . . Furthermore, (the business activists) were of the middle class, heirs to the American Dream legacy that pronounced individual daring, intelligence, hard work, long hours, and self-sacrifice the key to success despite adverse odds.
"More so than other leftists, Tom Hayden* exemplified a continuing belief in struggling against the odds. His Port Huron idealism outlasted the 1960s and 1970s, showing up again in the conclusion to his 1980 The American Future: New Visions Beyond Old Frontiers {Boston : South End}: "Ours is a great and young nation, living in a yet richer and older world. It is not too late for a new beginning, no longer based on a hostile assessment of nature and others . . . Hope and love still know no boundaries." In fact, Hayden's political ideas had changed very little over the course of two decades. What had changed, however, was his understanding of the American middle class.
"By the mid-1970s, Hayden not only recognized that transformation of student activists into new professionals and new business people; he also sensed that their ideals had rippled throughout middle America to produce "a great shift in consciousness which began in the sixties and continues in less-noticed ways in the seventies." {Tom Hayden and the Tom Hayden for US Senate Campaign, Make the Future Ours, 1976 campaign document.} . . . Hayden decided to seek the Democratic party nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1976 with the notion that the Port Huron Statement, now updated in a campaign booklet . . . would appeal to affluent voters in places like Santa Monica.
" . . . Hayden's particular notion of economic democracy spoke directly to the concerns of the middle class. It emphasized people's right to control their lives and future, to assume mastery in their communities and workplaces, and to play a larger part in shaping the services that they produce, distribute and consume. As Hayden recognized, it was powerlessness not poverty at the root of middle class frustrations.
"One Hayden campaign goal was "building a lasting political organization that will go on whether I am elected or not." He was not elected. But he garnered an impressive 1.2 million votes in the primary, more than enough to suggest that his platform did have a social base in California and that a lasting political organization was needed to cultivate it. Undaunted by his 1976 setback in the political marketplace, Hayden manufactured in 1977 the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), a California "grassroots citizen's campaign to take back power over our lives — and create healthy individuals, families, communities, and workplaces." Appropriately, Hayden located CED State headquarters in middle class Santa Monica. There it spawned a local chapter that defined the core ideology and organizational thrust of the Santa Monica left.
The Core Ideology
". . . Local activists generally credited Zane with the energy behind organizing CED, the Santa Monica Fair Housing Alliance, and the city's Democratic Club into the Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights (SMRR) coalition and with masterminding SMRR's 1979 electoral victories. Zane himself was elected to a four-year city council term in 1981 . . .
". . . James Conn, for example, worked in the civil rights and antiwar movements as a student in the 1960s, became an active Methodist minister and community organizer in the 1970s, was deep into SMRR politics by the decade's end, and was elected to the city council at the same time as Zane.
". . .
". . . Derek Shearer went a step further. "I never mind being called a conservative. Santa Monica is an almost uniquely balanced city and we want to conserve it . . . Most city activists wanted to preserve the municipal pier against development as both a monument to the city's small town past and a reminder of what could be lost through growth and urbanization. They gave considerable support to parks, pedestrian walkways, and the arts, according to Dennis Zane, "to make the life of people better, more inviting, more community-oriented; the purpose of green space and art is to promote that kind of sense of community. Other ways to promote that sense of community included rent control as a means of protecting the current population mix against further gentrification, a moratorium on new development to preserve the residential and commercial balance, and strict environmental guidelines to safeguard local ecology. Relatedly, Santa Monica leftists supported neighborhood organizations and voluntary groups. Participation in them, said community liaison officer Vivian Rothstein, "builds community identification" and helps people "to know their neighbors." The organizations and groups were also viewed as political levers that neighbors could use to preserve the unique qualities of their particular section of the cityl "Santa Monica's biggest problem," Ruth Yanatta Goldway stated, "is that it is so desirable that people still want to develop it." {1982 interviews} p. 73
". . .
"Goldway told this story: "There was a bookstore on Main Street which was forced out by the landlord because it was supportive of the community organization. Well, it wasn't started through the community organization but the people who started it were clearly part of the communtiy organization and there was a great deal of community support for it and fundraising for it; and they helped it when it moved to another location . . . It was a center for various meetings and a wonderful place. Unfortunately, the new location made it impossible for it to survive . . ." p. 74
" . . . Derek Shearer* capsulized that vision in describing his own quality of life: "In our hometown of Santa Monica, California, my family shops at Co-Opportunity, a food cooperative, where we save 10 percent to 20 percent on our monthly bill, purchase healthy food, and see our friends while we shop. Our children attend the Santa Monica Alternative School (SMASH), which is a public school, but run in a democratic manner with student and parent participation. I shop for books at Midnight Special or Papa Bach, both run by political activists. The Liberty Hill Foundation, located in the nearby Ocean Park Church, gives donations to a variety of community groups in the Los Angeles area. We take our children to hear benefit concerts by artists like Pete Seeger for In These Times or Jackson Brown to raise money for the statewide nuclear freeze campaign. Mother Jones, Working Papers, democracy, and other publications arrive at our house with news and political information."" p. 75
" . . . James Conn* talked about "the leadership development process" whereby experienced leaders put new people into responsible roles that challenged them and cultivated their entrepreneurial skills to continue to "energize and enable and empower" more citizens." p. 76
4 Of Principles and Politics
Rent Control Wars
"In 1977, Tom Hayden* and the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED) were not particularly interested in pursuing the principle of human scale community through the politics of rent control. On the one hand, Hayden's own version of "small is beautiful" focussed mainly on solar energy as a decentralized technology and an alternative to the concentrated power of oil cartels. On the other hand, Hayden's solution to the housing crisis in California had little to do with human scale community or rent control. Hayden supported extensive building projects to create new low cost housing and public housing. Hayden* and CED were latecomers to the tenant activism that was emerging throughout California that year.
" . . . A group of Santa Monica seniors . . . wrote, petitioned, and organized a rent control initiative that ultimately became Proposition P on the June 1978 ballot. Their initiative was defeated by a 56 percent to 44 percent margin in the same election that brought California its famous Proposition 13 tax reduction measure. Apparently many people voted against the rent control initiative based on tenants' hopes and landlords' promises that lower property taxes would be converted into lower rents.
"Tenants' hopes were quickly shattered on the altar of landlords' profits. An overheated real estate market combined with the confidence of electoral victory prompted landlords to raise rents, convert apartments to condominiums, and sell out to speculators and big developers. More than 70 percent of the population, Santa Monica tenants were incensed. The battle lines were more clearly drawn than ever before and the growth machine was the enemy." p. 95
". . . in late, 1978, the SMRR coalition was born.
"The SMRR people oversaw the drafting of a new rent control initiative that was to be place on the municipal ballot in the April 1979 election. . . .
" . . . SMRR interviewed possible candidates pledged to support rent control and then endorsed the candidacies of Ruth Yannatta Goldway* and William Jennings. Goldway* was a consumer advocate who had narrowly lost the Democratic primary for a State Assembly nomination in 1977. Although not a member of CED, she had gained considerable support from CED in her State Assembly race and was associated with it on a broad range of issues. . . ." p. 97
"If the April 1979 election was ever in doubt, the Santa Monica growth machine eradicated all uncertainties. Between 1977 and 1979, more than 2,000 Santa Monica rental units were demolished or converted to condominiums. But just months before the April 1979 election, the city council and the city planning commission gave out tentative tract maps for the asking. This allowed landlords and developers the right to demolish or convert their units before Proposition A was submitted to the voters. What followed became known locally as "the demolition derby." Tenants were suddenly evicted en masse; buildings were torn down; new luxury developments were announced . . . some 3,000 additional units were threatened by the city's largesse with permits. The darker side of the marketplace was illuminated and SMRR campaigners had the political savvy to organize in most of the affected buildings.
"They accumulated enough voter support to win Proposition A by a 54 percent to 46 percent margin — a 20 percent turn around from the previous rent control initiative. SMRR also elected its two city council candidates by comfortable margins . . . . In July, 1979, SMRR ran five candidates for the five seats on the new rent control board and won every single contest. That November, SMRR successfully ran a rent control candidate to fill a city council seat vacated by an ailing opposition member, giving the coalition control of three out of seven council seats; SMRR also engineered the defeat of a so-called fair rent initiative put up by the landlords to gut rent control . . . " p. 98
". . .
"The SMRR coalition's most important and decisive victory came in April 1981, when its four candidates for the city council won their races. Overall, the coalition candidates won by an impressive 57 percent to 43 percent margin . . ." p. 99
"Shearer, who co-managed the 1981 campaign stated that SMRR had learned from the previous elections the importance of avoiding complicated theories and arguments in making one's case to the voters . . ." p. 100
". . .
"The result was that SMRR began to transform itself from a fairly informal coalition into a formal organization with rules, regular forums for deciding issues, and exhaustive and exhausting procedures for candidate selection. And SMRR did indeed come up with a politically wise slate of candidates. It chose Dennis Zane, a CED member also involved with SMFHA, the Democratic Club, community groups in the Ocean Park neighborhood, and SMRR itself . . . Finally, it chose James Conn, the Ocean Park minister whose church had become a center for peace activism and other progressive causes for a range of Santa Monica and West Los Angeles groups . . . " p. 101 and 102
"On the outskirts of this emerging hierarchy loomed the figure of Tom Hayden. His role in the rent control and electoral contests was shadowy. By and large, he was a late and ambivalent supporter of SMRR politics . . . " p. 103
". . .
"The Santa Monica CED chapter and the Democratic Club, for example, were crucial miniforums that brought together a diversity of activists who eventually . . . They were augmented by SMRR . . . In addition, Santa Monica's major neighborhood organizations - the Ocean Park Community Organization (OPCO) and the Pico Neighborhood Association (PNA, later to be joined by the Mid-City Neighbors (MCN) - held regular block meetings, neighborhood forums, and yearly congresses that brought together resident, activists, and leaders to chart some values, priorities and strategies." p. 105
". . .
" . . . [The left wing council members] also appointed new professionals to key city posts in a way of consolidating their authority. One of their most important appointments was putting John Alschuler in the city manager's office. A former advisor to Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the Carter administration and the assistant city manager of a progressive government in Hartford, Connecticut, Alschuler brought to Santa Monica an extreme self-consciousness about securing local autonomy . . . Alshuler's* job made him the executive officer of approximately 1,400 city employees; and one of his tasks was to see that the city staff, which he characterized as being "as talented a group of people as there is in the country in a government this size," worked closely and smoothly with the city council to carry out council policies. His managerial approach was to mediate council-staff relations. He educated councilmembers to provide "clear direction," which is what the bureaucrats, who he said are "among the more maligned" in American society, as dedicated professionals who "are in public service because they want in fact to provide service to the public."
"Alschuler's approach bore fruit throughout city government. Assistant city planner Christopher Rudd, who worked under the old conservative councils as well as the new radical one, said that his division "really supports what the council's been doing" in terms of giving clear direction, facilitating planning, and actually implementing some of the quality of life proposals recommended but ignored in the 1970s. Most impressively, the city council radicals were able to develop amiable relations with city police and firefighters. "We treat them decently as public employees," stated Derek Shearer. The City council made an effort to improve police and firefighter's working conditions and salaries, facilitate dialogue with citizen groups concerned with public safety and hire a city attorney who would respect them and work well with them . . . " p. 110
" . . .
"When the city hall radicals enacted controversial laws and policies, they generally relied on three devices to ensure that their will would be done rather than "done in" by superior government agencies. First, they appointed the citizen task forces and commissions that provided popular support, procedural compliance and democratic legitimacy for council actions. Anyone seeking to overturn their actions were consequently in the position of being accused of usurping local democratic authority. Second, they commissioned professional studies by progressive policy organizations that pinpointed historical and legal precedents for council decisions and provided clues to potential barriers to their enforcement. Thus the SMRR councilmembers were careful to shape their policies in ways that maximized the chances that no one would be able to overturn them on procedural or legal grounds. Third, the radical politicians relied on the professional expertise of the city manager and the city attorney to defend their policies before state agencies and the judicial system. These devices usually worked.
"All three devices were employed when the city council majority decided to take control of development in Santa Monica. It appointed a commercial and industrial task force membered by citizens who produced a lengthy set of recommendations on zoning and controlled development. It paid the firm of Hamilton, Rabinowitz, and Stanton, Inc. to produce several hundred-page studies, entitled "Review of California Development Fee Policies " and "Review of Existing Santa Monica Development Fees," that provided legitimacy to council policies. And it called on the city attorney to develop a defensible legal model for negotiating development agreements and on the city manager to put together a professional team to negotiate the agreements. Consequently, when the city council enacted Ordinance no. 1220 and later revisions intended "to ensure that development is consistent with public peace, health, and safety," it was able to implement its human scale approach to Santa Monica's future despite vociferous protests and legal actions taken by the opposition."
"The SMRR councilmembers also made a conscientious effort to extend their authority and impact beyond their limited tenure in political office. Their model was the structure of rent control, which was based on changing the city charter (which could not be easily undone) and creating a semiautonomous agency, the rent control board (which could function regardless of who runs city government). The radicals took advantage of their commitment and energy to rewrite the various elements that made up the city charter and thereby left their imprint on the legal framework for future city policies. They also created sever quasi-governmental, non-profit corporations what would provide institutional support for SMRR policies for the foreseeable future . . . "There are not a lot of old agreements that were entered into in the past that bind the city in the future; this city council has entered into a number of contracts that to some extent bind future city councils." . . .
" . . . Dennis Zane made this point graphically: "Once we institutionalize some of the programs that are in place, it will be a significant political peril for anybody to try to fuck with them." p.112
"In theory, the greatest threat to the radicals' power was the ability of local business people to put pressure on them as has happened in many other cities where grassroots movements come to power. Such pressure usually takes the form of offering the carrot of new investment if politicians cooperate to provide a healthy business climate or the stick of disinvestment if people in government act contrary to what business elites consider the community's best interest . . . "
". . .
"The main economic restraint on city council policy was a projected revenue-expenditure gap. California's middle class taxpayers distrusted government authority and certainly did not want to pay into general revenue coffers that allowed governors a blank check. Thus they passed the Proposition 13 tax reduction measure that made it extremely difficult for municipalities to raise local revenues. But the SMRR politicians were committed to expenditures that would maintain and expand social services, upgrade the salaries and benefits of city employees, facilitate affordable housing for all city residents, fund neighborhood projects, enhance the local environment, and so forth. The radicals who took power were not certain that they could sustain current expenditure levels much less increase them to subsidize desired policies. Their approach to this fiscal dilemma was to find ways to enhance revenues without raising property taxes while changing expenditure priorities."
"For the most part, the SMRR councilmembers looked to their appointed professionals to find ways to enhance revenues, and the professionals went to work with considerable zest. City staff people unearthed $330,000 that had been on deposit with the state at only 6 percent interest. Staff investigated city business license fees, development fees, lease agreements, and contract arrangements to discover that Santa Monica charged much less for its services than nearby cities of comparable size. Staff also did cost-benefit analyses that show that the city would have more disposable revenues if it stopped contracting out legal work and increased the city's legal personnel, Staff proposed ways to generate more income from city-owned enterprises, from the local tourist industry, from limited partnerships with the private sector from municipal airport property, and from hidden pockets of money in county, state, and federal governments. From the left's viewpoint, fiscal responsibility, efficiency, and creativity meant more disposable revenue for worthwhile projects." p.113
"The council majority also made some decisions on spending priorities. James Conn* mentioned how the SMRR politicians brought to the city government "a new consciousness of the financial and economic impact of decisions that are made by the city and how they affect people in the city as a whole, in contrast to how they merely affect the business community." Part of that new consciousness was manifested in early budget decisions. "The first budget we received," Conn noted, "was an equipment budget; and we cut out all the equipment and put programs in." The program priorities shifted expenditures, for example, from subsidies to the Chamber of Commerce to support for neighborhood projects. As a result of the SMRR council's efforts to close the revenue-expenditure gap, Santa Monica was one of the few California cities in the the early 1980s that upgraded social services; almost every other city in the state was forced to make cutbacks.
"The SMRR politicians, in short, practiced what is conventionally considered to be "good government." They ran city government like a business, making sure that the ledgers balanced. But 'good government" and SMRR's core principles did not always complement one another. Human scale community and a finely tuned government bureaucracy do not necessarily mix, the one being founded on interpersonal relationships and the other on impersonal procedures, laws, and accountant reports. Participatory democracy may be more symbolic than tangible when politicians rely too heavily on professional experts in public administration, law, and policy. And one class society does not fare particularly well when fiscal responsibility means cutting deals with developers or enhancing revenues by leasing city land to the highest bidder rather than investing in the economic independence of all citizens. The tendency of Santa Monica activists, SMRR leaders, and city hall radicals was to practice political pragmatism without giving serious thought as to whether it works in behalf of basic principles." p. 114