Ocean Park

Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1947, 1940, 1940s, 1930s, 1912, 191

     " . . .

     [p. 51] "The most complete version of this invasion scenario came in 1909 from [p. 52] Homer Lea, a Southern Californian, and the English naval strategist Hector Bywater in 1925. Born in Denver in 1875, and moving with his family to Los Angeles in 1892, Homer Lea was one of these eccentrics touched by genius whom one frequently encounters in turn-of-the century Southern California. Despite his diminutive stature (five feet) and a curved spine, which earned him the nickname "Little Scrunch-Neck" among his classmates at Los Angeles High School, Lea dreamed of a military career (as did his contemporary George Smith Patton, Jr. then attending a private academy in Pasadena.) Educated at Occidental and Stanford, Lea became involved with Chinese students committed to the overthrow of the imperial system and the establishment of a republic. In July 1895, just before the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion, Lea sailed for China in search of further involvement. Concealing his republican sympathies, he seems to have wrangled some sort of military commission in the army of the Emperor. In any event, he appeared at the relief of Peking in the last days of the Boxer Rebellion wearing the uniform of a lieutenant general (the rank authorized in his imperial commission, presumably) and directing a ragtag army of reform volunteers.

     "When it became apparent that there would be no republic in China, not yet at least, Lea returned to Los Angeles in 1901 wearing his general's uniform. He spent the next few years writing and lecturing on military matters. Among other activities, Lea drilled Chinese students in military fundamentals, in the hopes of preparing them to serve as officers in a revolutionary republican army. Lea's assistant and chief drill master was Ansel O'Banion, a leather-lunged former sergeant in the United States Cavalry who had later secured a commission in the Philippine constabulary. Lea returned to China in 1904 on behalf of the republican movement, and was in Nanking in 1911, the only white man in the room, when Dr. Sun Yat-sen, with whom Lea had worked closely in Sun Yat-sen's California exile, was elected President of the newly formed Republic of China. Three years before his death in 1912, Harper & Brothers published Homer Lea's The Valor of Ignorance (1909), the result of long study and extensive reconnaissance of the Pacific Coast he and O'Banion had conducted after his return from China.

     [p. 52] "In the first third of The Valor of Ignorance Lea developed the thesis that war between Japan and the United States was inevitable because of economic competition. Lea was no crude Japan-basher. On the contrary, he admired the Japanese for their intelligence, enterprise, and military skill. Lea devoted the middle third of his book to a discussion of Japanese military capabilities on land and at sea. Japan, Lea observed, was capable of fielding an invasion army of 1.25 million men. Its navy was the finest on the planet, and it was capable of transporting in one troop transport ship more soldiers than the British had brought to the United States during the entire War of 1812. A military invasion of the Coast, Lea concluded, was fully in the reach of the Japanese from the point of view of their population and industrial capacity, the skill and training of their general staffs and officer corps, and the technical capacity of their army and navy. As important as any of [p. 53] this, the Japanese possessedbushido, the code of the samuri, an instinctive affinity for the sword (in Franz Boas's later term) running parallel to their love of the chrysanthemum.

     [p. 53] "In the final third of The Valor of Ignorance, Lea sketched a scenario of Japanese invasion, which later read as an almost eerie prediction of the course of the Second World War in the Pacific. First, Lea argued, the Japanese would seize and occupy the Philippines. From there, they would move to Samoa, Hawaii, the Aleutians, and Alaska, establishing in each a center of overlapping strategic spheres, which would give them control of the entire Pacific. The attack on the Pacific Coast would come on three axes: Washingt State, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles and the South Coast. With extensive detail and maps, the result of his and O'Banion's surveys, Lea described how the Japanese could land at Santa Monica Bay, seize Los Angeles, and rapidly seal off most of Southern California. Landing in Monterey Bay, the Japanese would move north and encircle San Francisco, bombarding it from strategic heights around the Bay until it surrendered. Eventually, a Japanese army of more than 1.25 million men would establish a defensive perimeter in the Sierra Nevada. It would take years, perhaps a decade, for an American army to be raised, trained, and successfully employed against the invaders.

     "As a prophetic document, The Valor of Ignorance gained credibility, indeed great power, through its detailed plausibility. Lea envisioned the Japanese invasion of California down to the emplacement of specific artillery batteries. He had personally surveyed landing beaches and deployment routes and had reviewed all relevant military maps to back up his assertions. Lea also grasped the essential isolation of California, sealed off as it was by the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin beyond: an isolation that meant California could be seized and defended by Japanese invaders.

     "The general staffs of the United States and Japan each took Lea's scenario seriously enough to incorporate it into their own contingency plans. Dining with a group of Army officers in Manila in October 1941 Clare Booth Luce was treated to a description by Colonel Charles Willoughby of how the Japanese would soon be moving on the Philippines. Luce asked Willoughby his source of information. The colonel laughed. "Just quoting military gospel," he told her, "according to Homer Lea." Willoughby went on to describe how his generation of officers had first encountered Lea in their readings at West Point. Among staff officers in the Philippines, The Valor of Ignorance was considered established doctrine. Luce returned to the United States and wrote an article on Lea for the Saturday Evening Post, which Harper & Brothers used in 1942 as an introduction to a reissue of a book whose prophecies-an attack on Hawaii, the siege of the Philippines, a deployment into Southeast Asia-were now in the process of coming true.

     "In 1909 the plausibility of The Valor of Ignorance was especially high among Californians. Homer Lea might be a shadowy and eccentric figure, but no one [p. 54] less than Lieutenant General Adna Chaffee, the retired chief of staff of the United States Army, wrote the preface to the first edition of Lea's book. Chaffee was not only a retired chief of staff, he was a Los Angeleono as well-someone, that is, fully capable for reasons other than his military career of saying that, yes, the Japanese would one day invade the Coast. This was no fantasy, Chaffee argued, merely an inevitability Home Lea had envisioned and analyzed.

     "Brilliant in his depictions of the land war in California, Homer Lea was rather sketchy when it came to details of the Japanese naval strategy in the Pacific. This scenario was left for Hector Bywater . . ."

     " . . .

Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1947, 1944, 1943, 1942, 1940s

[p. 96] Chapter 4 1943 Zoot Suit

[p. 96, 1943] "By 1943 the United States was at war with itself as well as with the Axis powers. The mobilization of American society for war was bringing into close contact disparate groups of Americans who feared, distrusted, even hated each other. Nowhere was this more true than in California. The war itself, after all, was for much of white California a racially motivated conflict with Japan: a conflict already a half century in duration before it broke into actual hostility. By the end of 1942 California had imprisoned most persons of Japanese ancestry and was serving as the central training and staging zone for the fierce war-a fierce racial war-against Japan in the Pacific. In the final phases of that war alone, more than seventy-five thousand Americans and an estimated one million Japanese would lose their lives in terrible, no-holds-barred, hand-to-hand island battles lasting to the bitter end . . .

     [p. 96, 1943] " . . . in 1943, Americans were recognizing . . . [p. 97] that they were in for a long and very dangerous war in which one major enemy was perceived in racially hostile terms. So much hostility could not help but destabilize the home front. Whipping themselves into a racially focused frenzy against the Japanese, Americans could not help but intensify and destabilize racial antagonisms in their own society. In 1943 such tensions erupted into riot.

     "It began in Los Angeles. By 1943 there were three million people of Mexican descent living in the United States, most of them in the Southwest or in Southern California, with some two hundred thousand in Los Angeles County. The Mexican-American colonia was divided into a number of barrios: Dogtown, Alpine, the Flats, Happy Valley in East Los Angeles, and other unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. Only five thousand Mexican-Americans had found jobs in the war industries of greater Los Angeles by early 1943, [according to] the Congress of Industrial Organizations. . . . For most of the twentieth century, the Mexicans of greater Los Angeles, Mexican nationals and Mexican-American citizenss alike, had been living on the margins pf white Los Angeles, the forgotten founders of the city.

     [p. 97, 1943] "While white California, Southern California especially, was willing to sentimentalize old California, as in the Ramona myth, neither they nor the Mexican population of the Southland (with the exception of a few surviving Old California families) saw any continuity between the Spanish and Mexican founders of California and the present population of the state. Even the Roman Catholic Church, to which most Mexicans adhered, had become an English-speaking entity, hence pychologically part of the Anglo-California that existed on the other side of a great cultural and ethnic divide. . . . Southern California lacked an integrative industrial system and so remained an assemblage of ethnic enclaves, each of them self-contained, each of them excluding and being excluded up and down the social scale. The Mexicans of Los Angeles, along with the blacks and Asians, were restricted to certain districts by custom and real estate covenants; were assigned to a separate second-tier, even third-tier school system . . .were excluded from public swimming pools on all but one day a week . . .; were turned away at the door of numerous theaters and dance halls and saw the sign Se Sirve Solamente a Raza Blanca in numerous restaurants . . .

     [p. 97, 1943] Los Angeles, in short, was a Jim Crow town in which numerous nobodies-failures, drifters, downwardly mobile Folks, those expellled 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 Californias 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 suspicicon, then released. Beatings were frequent, as were frame ups . . An [p. 99, 1943] impressive number of young Mexican men wre 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 everypachuco 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, pachuquismorepresented 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 fo the underground and underworld, having its origins in medieval Spain), gypsy, Ladino (Iberian-Hebrew), Mexican tough-guy talk, jive, Angleicized 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 gtiven to tatoos-crosses, mainly, sumounted by initials-which the Los Angele 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-Anerican 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 defendents" . . .

The Sleepy Lagoon Incident (Auig. 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. 104, 1943] Thus tension built in Los Angeles on multiple levels into mid-1943 as the oligarchy, the police, the district attorney, the courts, and the Hearst newspapers continued to depict the Mexican-American young male as a subversive and criminal element . . .

     [p. 104, 1943] By now, mid-1943, many Mexican-American young men, pachucos and non-pachucos alike, were wearing the zoot suit. Even more than pachuquismo, which it overlapped, the wearing of the zoot suit held multiple layers of identity, pro and con, for the Mexican-Americans and their enemies. Whereas pachuquismo had one imporant level of meaning, the defiant alienation of young men caught up in a cultural and psychological borderland, the zoot suit had many possible interpretations; for it was not confined exclusively to the Mexican-American community, and it eventually made its way, with modifications, into mainstream fashion. The zoot suit consisted of a long frock jacket, with wide lapels and pronounced shoulder pads, and pleated trousers, high-waisted and pegged at the cuff. Triple-soled shoes, an overlong watch or key chain, and a wide-brimmed hat completed the outfit. Zoot suiters did not wear ties. In any event, shirt collars were oversized. A heavily pomaded ducktail haircut, with waves swept to a meeting point at the back of the head, was also de rigueur.

     [p. 104, 1943] "Never has one fashion meant so many different things to so many different people, at either the gut or most rarified levels. Most basically, the zoot suit had arisen out of the jitterbug cult. The suit itself had evolved so as to make the athletic movements of jitterbug dancing easier. From this perspective, the zoot suit was an icon of youth perceived as a sub-group or cult, organized around jitterbugging. Only young people, after all, could perform the jitterbug properly, just as only young poeople could truely Charleston in the 1920s. Worn by a young Mexican-American in Los Angeles, the zoot suit declared style, independence, and a level of personal [p. 105] control that foreshadowed the coolness of the hipster, the detachment of the beat . . . Rejected by an alien environment, the Mexican-American in his zoot-suit (his drapes, as he called his attire) reasserted his individualism, paradoxically through a uniform. . . . the zoot suit served as an existentialist icon: a way of stabilizing an uncertain identity via one of the most extreme male fasions to emerge in the First World in the twentieth century."

     " . . .

     [p. 105, 1943] "For the young sailors, soldiers and Marines stationed in and around Los Angeles in 1943 or coming into the city on weekend leave, the zoot suit had a similarly provocative effect. Here these young men were, in uniforms, regimented, their heads shaved, deprived of prior identities; and there were the zoot suiters, glorious in their plumage, out of the military, free to stand on street corners and flirt with [girls] . . . Just three weeks prior to the outbreak of the Zoot Suit Riots on 3 June 1943, two sailors made moves on two Mexican-American girls at a dance in the seaside Venice district of Los Angeles and provoked a full-scale brawl between young sailors and young Mexican-American men, some of them in zoot suits.

     [p. 105, 1943] It was a volatile time in general. Hundreds of thousands of young men, were being trained . . .

     [p. 106, 1943] "It had become a tense time in the garrison state. In the two weeks prior to the Zoot Suit Riots, there were eighteen serious incidents involving servicemen in Southern California. Seven of those involved involved fatalities . . .

     [p. 106] . . . the punch ups and scuffles between zoot suiters and service men [ ] resulted in no fatalities and only a few minor injuries . .

     [p. 109, 1943] "However horrible and racist [Zoot Suit Riots] incident, it could not compare to the race riots erupting in Detroit a week later in which thirty-one people died, mostly African-Americans, fifteen of them gunned down by the police. . . .

     [p. 109, 1943] "Writing in the aftermath of the Sleepy Lagoon case and fully aware of the long history of anti-Mexican repression in Los Angeles, Carey McWilliams reported on the Zoot Suit Riots as if they wre a full-scale race riot analogous to the Detroit riot or the riot that broke out in Harlem on 1 August, in which six people were killed and three hundred were injured. Not so, argues Mazon. Photographs of the Zoot Suit Riots . . . depict an atmosphere that could almost be described as festive . . . What transpired waa a carnival-like atmosphere in which [p. 110] servicemen and civilians acted out inhibitions about the war in a complex series of rituals . . .

     [p. 110, 1943] Even military authorities seemed initially willing to allow young servicemen [to mutiny, AWOL] to riot . . .

     [p. 110, 1943] . . .Washington was displeased as well. . . . Mexico was an ally. The U.S. Navy was using naval bases in Baja California. By the fall of 1943 some 233,000 Mexican nationals-called braceros, or the srongarm ones-were working in the fields of California, harvesting crops. Another 3,325 Mexican nationals were working for the Southern Pacific, comprising 72 percent of its track maintenence force. By the end of 1944, more than eighty thousand Mexican nationals were engaged in railroad work in the United States . . . constituting a significant portion of the national wartime economy.

     [p. 111, 1943] "Stung by the national perception of Los Angeles as a race-rioting city subversive of the wartime alliance between the U.S. and Mexico, the Los Angeles oligarchy got on its high horse. The Los Angeles Times chided Mrs. Roosevelt for daring to suggest that Los Angele nurtured any emotion other than reverence for Mexico and the Mexicans. . . . Southern California had once been part of Mexico and considered itself a continuing participant in the legacy of Mexican civilization . . . Governor Warren appointed a Citizen's Committee chaired by California attorney general Robert Kenney, Auxiliary Bishop Joseph McGucken of the Archdioces of Los Angeles, Leo Carillo, and others. The Catholic Press argued that the Zoot Suit Riots had revealed the prevalence of a white fundamentalist anti-Catholicism linked to anti-Mexicanism, in the City of Angeles.

     [p. 112] "During the Second World War, more than seven hundred thousand African-[p. 113] Americans 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.

Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1947, 1944, 1943, 1940s

     [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 . . .

     "[Differnent 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.

Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1947, 1944, 1943, 1940s

[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 thelaissez-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, accomodating 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 personel, 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 achievemenjts in industrial culture.

     [p. 126] It was not enough . . . "By January 1942, personnel officials at Douglas, . . . announced that women would eventually constitue 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 woment 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 Katarine Hepburn types or arty bohemians.

     [p. 128] "By and large, women in both the aircraft and shipbuilding industries wre 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. 123] Chapter 5 1944 Swing Shift

     [p. 128, 1942] "The year 1942 witnessed the tight-sweater controversy. One aircraft factory in the East sent fifty-three women home in one day for wearing sweaters to work. Even the chauvinistic 1940s could not straightforwardly state that the revelation of the female form would distract the male workers. Instead, it was argued that sweaters were unsafe around heavy equipment and were liable to catch fire from welding sparks. Very soon, sweaters, dangling bracelets or earrings, long hair, and heavy makeup were banned entirely from the assembly line. After hundreds of women caught their Veronica Lake-like tresses in machinery, aviation officials prevailed upon the Hollywood star to adopt an upswept hairdo for the duration of the war. Patriotically, Miss [p. 129] Lake complied, although her change in hairstyle can be said to have endangered her career.

     [p. 129] "In compensation for these restrictions, the aircraft industry in Southern California did its best to develop attractive working attire for its female employees. Following up on uniform design for WACS, WAVES, WRENS, and Women Marines, Lockheed employed a Hollywood designer to create a servicable but smart slack-suit for its female employees. North American prescribed blue slacks. These blue slacks caught on with other young women workers, for they were dressy as well as servicable and required only a change of blouse for after-work socializing. . . . Aviation . . . had a glamour that included its spiffy uniform.

     [p. 129] "Initially fearful of sexuality in the workplace, the aviation industry was beginning to see it as an asset by 1943. Companies sponsored swing bands and dances as morale boosters. North American initiated a date-counseling bureau, which matched women newly arriving in Los Angeles with suitable gentlemen already at work in the aircraft industry: a species of industrial matchmaking that raised to new heights the social outreach programs of Los Angeles aviation. There was no comparable need for assisting unmarried men. By 1944 the entire population of unmarried men betwen the ages of twenty and thirty -four working in the defense industry dropped to 1.7 million. At the same time, there were more than 4.1 million single females in the same age range and employment category.

     [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 contibution of . . .]

Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1911, 1910, 1909, 1908, 1900s

     [p. 130] Hollywood and aviation . . . developed side by side in Southern California as parallel industries . . . By 1908 Los Angeles already supported an Aero Club of California, which had two hundred members by 1909. In Janurary 1910 the Chamber of Commerce sponsored a pioneering international air meet on Dominguez Hill, a table-like plateau half-way between Los Angeles and the ocean. Glen Curtiss established a new speed record of sixty miles an hour, and the French aviator Louis Paulham . . . [p. 131] established a new altitude record of 4,165 feet.

     On 20 February 1911 Charles Walsh of San Diego, the first licensed pilot in California took his wife and two children for the first recorded passenger flight in American history. . . .

Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1914

     [p. 131] " . . . In May 1919 Cecil B. DeMille and a number of Hollywood investors established the Mercury Aviation Company, headquartered at DeMille Field No. 2. Mercury Aviation offered the first regularly scheduled commercial airline passenger service in the United States, with connecting flights from Los Angeles to Venice Beach, Long Beach, Pasadena, Bakersfield and Fresno . . .

     [p. 131] "Within the next decade, Los Angeles became the air travel capital of the United States. In early 1927 Maddux Air Lines, in which Cecil B. DeMille held controlling interest, inaugurated twelve-passenger Ford Tri-Motor service to San Diego, Baja California, and Phoenix. By the end of 1928, five Los Angeles-based passenger companies-Western Air Express, Maddux, Standard Air Lines of California, Pickwick Airways, and Transcontinental Air Transport-were connecting Los Angeles [to the West Coast] . . . On 25 October 1930 Transcontinental Air Transport inaugurated service between Los Angeles and New York, with part of the journey by railway. By . . . 1929, the combined aviation industry in Southern California-manufacturing, freight, mail and passenger flight-approached a billion dollars in cumulative value. Los Angeles County alone had fifty-five airports and landing fields, together with twenty-seven accredited aviation schools with more than 1,500 students of aviation and aviation mechanics. Southern California handled 30 percent of all airmail traffic in the United States and had three thousand of the four thousand licensed pilots in the country.

     [p. 131] There were twelve airplane factories in Southern California . . . [p. 132] [inluding the Ryan Aeronautical Company of San Diego which built the Spirit of St. Louis for Lindbergh, a sometime Southern California mail pilot.]

     [p. 132] "The distance and load capacity of the Spirit of St. Louis had more than peacetime implications. Throughout the 1920s General Giulio Douhet of Italy and Brigadier General William (Billy) Mitchell of the United States wre advocating the high-level precision bombing of long-range military targets. As early as the Dominguez Hill air meet of January 1910, German representatives had been on hand to see aviator Roy Knabenshue demonstrate, for the first time in aviation history, the practicality of dropping explosives from a lighter-than-air ship. Four years later, on the verge of the outbreak of the war in Europe, at an air meet held in April 1914 at the Los Angeles County Fair Grounds, Glenn Martin dropped mock explosives on ground positions held by the California National Guard in a pioneering demonstration of the use of airplanes against troops. At the same event, Martin took his aircraft to an altitude of 14,200 feet-1,625 feet higher than the previous record- and a Miss Tiny Broadwick made a pioneering parachute drop from 1,500 feet. [p. 133] That July, less than a month before the war broke out in Europe, Congress authorized the first Aviation Section within the Army Signal Corps . . . allowing each branch of the military to establish their own aviation section . . .

Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1940, 1939, 1938, 1937, 1930s

[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 inauguate 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 technolgy. 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. 136] . . . Not yet fifty, Donald Wills Douglas was the paterfamilias, the Louis B. Mayer (or the Henry Ford) of the industry. The first person to take a degree in aeronautical engineering from MIT, graduating in 1914, Douglas had journeyed to the Coast to build planes in Los Angeles for Glenn Martin. In 1920 he had established his own Douglas-Davis Company, appropriately located in an abandoned movie studio at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Chelsea Avenue at the eastern border of Santa Monica. His partner David Davis was a sports writer from the Los Angeles Times who put up most of the money. Jack Northrop and Gerard Vultee joined Douglas as engineers.

     The Douglas company specialized in larger aircraft . . .

     [p. 136] As befitted a founder of the industry, Douglas sustained a quasi-Hollywood lifestyle. He lunched daily in a private dining room at the Santa Monica plant and sailed on weekends in his seventy-five foot yacht Endymion. Expanding his parent plant in Santa Monica before and after Pearl Harbor until it became a city unto itself, and expanding a second plant in El Segundo as well, Douglas built in 1942-43 his third and largest plant (it covered 142 acres) adjacent to the municipal airport in Long Beach.

     . . .

     [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 th 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 physically 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 whitness-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 anit-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 Caucasion race. In June 1941 President Roosevelt had issued Executive Ortder 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 mangaged 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 minorites, 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.

Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1940, 1939, 1938, 1937, 1930s

     [p. 141] This is not to say that conflict was lacking, especially at Douglas, where Donald Douglas fiercely resented and resisted unionization. As far back as February 1937, Douglas had fired all CIO organizers in his Santa Monica plant. A sit-down strike followed. Some strikers poured flammable solvent on the floor and threatened to torch the place. Douglas went to court and secured indictments against 345 workers for forcible entry and occupancy. It took 350 police and sheriff's deputies to clear the plant. 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 wer 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 aluminium 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 aluminium parts into, eventurally 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. 143] ". . .

Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1920s, 1882

     [p. 145] "Henry J. Kaiser [1882- ], as he always called himself, was largely a product of self invention. Born and raised in upstate New York, he turned to photography as a teenager, then moved west to the state of Washington, where he got into the roadpaving business, there and in Cuba. Not that Kaiser initially knew anything about paving roads, or about photography for that matter; he merely threw himself into a pursuit and learned it through practice. Road-paving on a large scale in Cuba in the 1920s trained Kaiser in the management of men and equipment. From there he went into the construction business, making a stunning debut as the president of the consortium of Six Companies that built Boulder/Hoover Dam in the early 1930s. From this experience evolved a structure of organiztion and procedure which Kaiser maintained for the rest of his professional career.

     [p. 145] "Stout, manic, citified, Kaiser was anything but a field man. His genius consisted rather, in determining great projects, assembling teams, then handling the politics and finances. During the construction of Boulder/Hoover Dam, for example, Kaiser spent most of his time in Washington, D.C., working on finance and governmental regulations. During his next big project, constructing the dams and aqueducts of the Metropolittan Water District of Southern California and the Grand Coulee Dam in western Washington for the bureau of Reclamation. Kaiser remained headquartered in his corporate office in Oakland, a city that eventually became for all practical purposes a Kaiser company town.

     [p. 145] "Kaiser had a knack for spotting talent, young men usually, far younger than normal for the responsibilites he assigned them, beginning with his son Edgar, a [p. 146] talented field manager, Clay Bedford, Edgar's fraternity brother, and Eugene Trefethen, another young Cal Berkeley graduate. These young men, well before they were thirty, played major roles in the construction of Parker Dam, Imperial Dam, and Grand Coulee Dam by the Kaiser Companies. Kaiser, meanwhile, was doing what he did best: wrangle, wheedle, finagle, prod, finesse-most of this in the course of blitzkrieg calls on government officials or telephone conferences with his men in the field. Kaiser loved the telephone . . .

     [p. 146] "Living for work, the Wizard of Oz behind the green curtain of countless construction projects, Kaiser relaxed with the same heedless prodigality with which he worked. Loving fine food, good scotch, and even better cigars, he grew to gargantuan proportions, which he enveloped in great double-breasted suits whose lapels flapped in the wind like the sails of a schooner . . .

     [p. 146] His Tahoe speedboat, in fact, was the closest Kaiser had come to the matters maritime by 1940. Within five years,m however, Kaiser had built 1,490 ships, for a total budget of $4 billion, in his California, Oregon, and Washington shipyards. . . .

     [p. 146] "Kaiser's shipbuilding career was based on the same formula as his construction career: a big project, a bold approach, and lots of government money. . .

     [p. 147] . . . Roosevelt saw Henry Kaiser as the essence of the New Deal [p. 148] industrialist, a man capable of working with government on the largest possible scale. Kaiser's critics used this against him, claiming that Kaiser had never been successful unless he was publically employed. Kaiser, they claimed, was a socialist industrialist, not a capitalist entrepreneur.

     [p. 148] . . . Of all major industrialists of the period, Kaiser had the broadest, most encompassing social philosophy. He maintained close relations with his unions, much to the disgust of many industrialists, who accused him of fostering featherbedding, and other non-productive practices. Kaiser also insisted that African-American workers get an even break in his shipyards, although he was forced, finally, to go along with many of the Jim Crow restrictions favored by the shipbuilding unions. Despite this, thousands of black workers migrated to Richmond to work for Kaiser, attracted in part by his reputation for fair play. During the war, Kaiser gave a number of speeches regarding the necessity of pensions and pre-paid comprehensive medical coverage in the post-war era. Astonishingly, he provided such coverage for a significant percentage of the two hundred thousand men and women working in his shipyards and associated companies. Obsessed with medicine . . .

     [p. 148] "In the mid-1930s, Kaiser began to offer workers on his construction projects in the deserts of Southern California a program of pre-paid comprehensive medical coverage. The idea was simple: eveyone contributed a small amount per month, whether sick or healthy. These pre-payements created a fund sufficient to support a program of comprehenisve medical care for all Kaiser employees. To run this system, Kaiser recruited a young surgeon, Sidney Garfield, a freckle-faced, sandy-haired physician of Russian Jewish background whose entrepreneurship in mattes medical equalled that of Kaiser. From Desert Center, Garfield took the program up to the Grand Coulee project in Washington; and when Kaiser got into the shipbuilding business in 1941-42 he secured Garfield's release from the Army Medical Corps to run the health care program at Richmond and Portland/Vancouver. The 4-F's of America, meanwhile-the sick, the halt, and the lame-were pouring into the Kaiser shipyards to build Liberty sships. One physician in attendence described the working poopulation at Richmond as an ambalatory museum of American diseases.

     [P. 148] "Under Garfields's supervision, physicians established a Kaiser Permanente Field Hospital, named in honor of a permanently running creek near Kaiser's Permanente Cement Plant . . . Organized as a health plan foundation, the Kaiser-Permanente program continued au- [p. 149] tonomously after the war until it was providing, by the 1980s, prepaid comprehensive medical care to more than five million Americans. In the case of his health care program, in which he played an equal role as founder along with Garfield and his physicians, Kaiser bridged the public philosophy of the New Deal and private capitalism. Criticized in the 1940s and 1950s as socialized medicine, the Kaiser Health Plan and its affiliated Permanente Medical Group in reality had the very opposite effect. They proved that private social medicine could remain free of government while meeting masss health care needs . . .

     [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 industrry 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.

Chapter 6 1946 Homecoming.

[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-Condidtioned Nightmare. Miller first used the phrase "air-conditioned nightmare" as the title of a book he completeted 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 Edumund 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 wirite 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-Condiditoned 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 womn 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 purient-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 thoughout 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 withthe 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. 227] ". . . Al Capone was alleged to have visited Los Angeles in 1927 with an eye to organizing the city. By the mid-1930s, Phil Capone, Al's brother, Bugs Moran, Busgsy Siegel, and others had established themselves in Los Angeles . . . In the late 1930s gangster Willie Bioff penetrated and took over the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees and shook producers down on a regular basis . . .

     [p. 227] "The 1930s also witnessed a fusion of mob and Hollywood interests in the evolution of the gangster movie . . . George Raft . . . an open friendship with Busy Siegel.

     " . . .

     " . . . There were more than two hundred identifiable gangster or gangster-prison films released in the 1930s, a figure falling by more than half in the 1940s . . . The prison film was even more schematic than the gangster movie, for here there were no distracting themes of social class and urban sociology, as there were in gangster films. In the prison film, society was collapsed back into its basics, prisoners and guards, the powerless and the all-powerful, in a setting that awaited the analysis of French theorist Michel Foucault for its more complete construal . . .

     [p. 228] " . . .

     "And so too, like the movie they eventually became, were the last days of George Raft's good friend Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, then busy with the construction of a gangland institution of another sort, the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. . . .

     " . . . At some point during the war, Siegel had taken up with a rather mysterious woman from Chicago named Virgina Hill . . . Siegel's open association with Hill eventually [led] Esta Siegel [mother of Bugsy's children] to sue for divorcc in Reno in December 1945, and in the fall of 1946 Siegel and Hill were secretly married in Mexico.

     "By this time, Siegel had discovered the one great venture that would give him . . . glamour and power, legitimacy, respectability: a resort hotel in the Las Vegas desert . . . Every dream, however tawdry and meretricious, that had pulsated through the collective imagination of Los Angeles-Hollywood Bugsy Siegel brought to Las Vegas. [Along with George Raft's $200,000 investment], told his associates-among them Meyer Lansky . . . and Charles (Lucky) Luciano-that the Flamingo, which they bankrolled, would cost $1 million. Siegel hired Del Webb to build the hotel. [p. 229] Through his good friend United States Senator Pat McCarran, Webb arranged priorites for construction materials still scarce in the post-war period. Siegel interfered constantly with his architects and with Webb, ordering expensive adjustment, and the cost fo the project pushed towarrd $6 million. Part of the money Siegel raised from loans and the sale of hotel stock (no one ever fully accounted for how many shares Siegel issued); much of it came from Siegel's coll

     [p. 229] [On 26 December 1946, a storm kept Hollywood from the grand opening of the hotel.] In January of 1947, the hotel was closed to finish construction. [He was summoned to Havana for a meeting with Luciano, Lansky and others. He opened for a seond time on 1 March 1947. The Flamingo continued to lose money. . . . ]

     " . . . The 20th of June 1947 was Siegel's last day on earth . . . At 12:53 that morning Siegel and an associate, Swifty Morgan, boarded Western Airlines flight 23 for Los Angeles. In Siegel's briefcase was $600,000 in cash . . . Flight 23 landed at Mines Field in Los Angeles at 2:30 a.m. Siegel went directly to Virginia Hill's house on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills and went to bed. That morning and afternoon, Benjamin Siegel . . . embarked upon a prototypical day that seemed almost choreographed in its evocation of Siegel's personal version of the good life, Los Angeles style. He spent the morning with his associated Mickey Cohen, a tough guy out of Chicago, and his longtime friend George Raft. In the afternoon, Siegel went to his favorite barbershop in Berverly Hills, where he ordered a shave, a haircut, a manicure, a neck and shoulder massage, and a shoeshine. In the early evening he phoned the Hollywood office of Daily Variety and thanked columnist Florabel Muir for her favorable review of the floor show at the Flamingo. Later that evening he went with his associate Allen Smiley, Virginia's brother Chick, and Chick's girlfriend Jerri Mason out to Ocean Park for a seafood dinner at Jack's at the Beach.

     [p. 230] "As if he had not a care in the world, Siegel ate dinner with his back towards the door, as opposed to the usual gangster style of always eating back to the wall, facing the entrance fo a restaurant. Leaving Jack's shortly after nine, Siegel picked up a complementary copy of the next day's Los Angeles Times. Good Night, the front page was stamped. Sleep Well, With the Compliments of Jack's. On the way home he stopped briefly at the Beverly-Wilshire drugstore . . .

     "[Shortly after arriving in the Beverly Hills house] Bugsy was shot nine times throught the window with a rifle. The next day , a photograph of Siegel's body in the Los Angeles County Morgue . . . went out over the wires. Just about the same time, Moe Sedway and Morris Rosen waked into the lobby of the Flamingo in Las Vegas and assumed control of the hotel in the name of its Eastern investors. A few days later, Jewish services were held at Groman Mortuary on West Washington Boulevard. Only five people showed up. Virginia Hell not among them. She and Siegel's other firends were very frightened as to who might be next."

[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. T?hirty-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 compated 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."

     "Despite the fact that the streetcars were still running, and would continue to run for nearly another decade, one could not efficiently function in Los Angeles unless one owned an automobile, as Man Ray discovered, or as Thomas Mann learned . . Vicki Baum, a German emigre, novelist and screenwriter . . . Pre-freeway Los Angeles, moveover, was in the process of losing its battle with traffic. In 1948 there were 1,720,253 registered motor vehicles in Los Angeles County alone, nearly half the automobiles in the state. A six-hour check of traffic at Sunset and Figueroa counted more than thirty-four thousand cars. The demolition of older structures and the construction of parking lots was now a leading form of public works. [Note that the traffic check took place not far from the Artist's Against the War Art Tower, twenty years later.]

     [Star's Critical Mass Thesis] "Every criticism of Los Angeles, however, every sarcasm, implied a compliment and a possibility for art. Sprawling, eccentric, traffic-choked, peopled by oddballs of every sort. Los Angeles was acheiving a density, if only in its negatives, that could not help but nuture imaginative expression. The region possessed, among other things, the most colorful demimonde in the nation, which was one of the [p. 232] things that helped keep defense attorneys such as Jerry Giesler busy and well paid. First of all, there were the criminals . . . 13 August 1931 Los Angeles Examiner estimated that there were approximately fifteen thousand swindlers, confidence men, and other illegal promoters at work in the region. The war only intensified this trend. Lawyer, Bernard Potter in the late 1940s, "Los Angeles has become the dumping grounds for the riff-raff of the world. Racketeers of every type, bootleggers, bookmakers, black-market operators, thugs, murderers, petty thieves, procurers, rapists, fairies, perverts, reds, confidence men, real estate sharks, poitical carpetbaggers and opportunists. Ask for any violator of the law and we can promptly fill the order."

     [p. 232] "With the sudden departure of Benjamin Siegel, wiseguy Michael (Mickey) Cohen assumed the mantle of number one mobster. A Chicagoan, Cohen had come to Los Angeles in 1939. He held up a Siegel owned bookie joint and joined Bugsey Siegels organization as a top deputy along with Benny (the Meatball) Gamson, who was gunned down in 1946. Siegel was killed in 1947 leaving Cohen in charge of organized crime in Los Angeles, specifically some ten thousand bookies spread throughout the region. Gambling was a staple of life in Hollywood, either legitmately at Hollywood Park, Santa Anita, or Del Mar in San Diego County (a chartered DC-3, equipped with piano bar, left Los Angeles daily for the racetracks of the San Francisco Bay Area), or through any one of thousands of full-time or part-time bookies working the bars, clubs, and cigar- and newsstands.

     " . . .

     [p. 233] " . . . the Guarantee Finance Company, the alleged front for Cohen's bookmaking syndicate.

     "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 espeically 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 arrary 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; Lucey'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 Cliinton 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] " . . .

     "Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, by contrast-Chicago-born but raised in the London suburb of Upper Nowood in Anglo-Irish impoverished gentility, a Public School man (Dulwich) and a World War I veteran of trench warfare with the Gordon Highlanders of Canade-continued to believe that beyond Los Angeles there would ever be an England. Chandler drank gin with lime juice, the universal drink of the Raj, cultivated his Public School accent, affected English manners, read English books and magazines. In later life, he work yellow gloves, like an Edwardian dandy, to conceal a skin complaint. In the 1940s he formed a friendship with Christopher Isherwood. He wanted Cary Grant to star as detective Philip Marlowe, despite the fact that Marlowe was a decidedly non-British Los Angeleno born in Santa Rosa, California, and educated at the University of Oregon. When England treated him as a serious writer , he was deeply gratified.

     "Raymond Chandler belonged to the Lost Gerneration, which went through life a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Even by the standards of his era, however, Chandler set new records. In the 1920s drinking brought him at least once to the verge of suicide. Drinking helped end his business career. Drinking provided the leitmotif of his career in the 1940s as a Hollywood screenwriter . . . In order to overcome a writer's block when he was writing The Blue Dahlia (1946), Chandler stayed drunk for two weeks, launching himself [p. 238] with three double martinis before lunch at Perino's, followed by three double stingers. . . .

     [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 newpapers and sixteen hours of headlines; the city of the Black Dahlia and the dives on Beacon Street and furtive homosexual acction 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. . ..

     " . . .