For the millions who have come to the Los Angeles area in the past quarter of a century and for the additional millions on the way, the end of the rainbow is more fact than fancy. Those who have lived in Los Angeles usually will proclaim that here, more than anywhere else they know or care about, is a place where the ordinary guy can cut in on the jackpot. Ask those from Tennessee or anywhere else why they came; they will shed a tear for home sweet home, but will stay in Los Angeles.
To understand Los Angeles and its problems, to see what it is and where it is going, it is essential to start with the premise that it is the end of the rainbow. Some—even residents—would call it by other names. The late Brian Bell of the Associated Press once said Los Angeles had been described in the Book of Solomon, ". . . and then Solomon descended into the garden of nuts." The nut angle, however, is old stuff, and overworked.
Nuts or pioneers, crackpots or conquistadores arriving in gas buggies—whatever you call them, Los Angeles' people are, for the most part, today's frontiersmen.
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner propounded the theory that the frontier played practically the principal role in shaping American history. He wrote thousands of words to prove it. But what it all added up to he expressed rather succinctly as follows: "...democracy was born of no theorist's dream. . . . It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier."
Democracy working up a sweat isn't always, of course, simple textbook stuff, But that it has, on occasions, despite a strained muscle or two and some mighty queer behavior, managed to assert itself, can't be doubted. That today democracy may gain strength, also, in the patchwork and bizarre bazaar which is Los Angeles is likely.
Yet it may be equally probable that the so-called "golden age of urbanism," i.e., spreading and jamming houses, stores, factories—unplanned—may come to a crazy end here in this southwest corner of the United States. For postwar Los Angeles is balanced dangerously between two futures.
Civic planners and business interests, or at least their paid secretaries, tend to see the brightest prospect. For them, Los Angeles is always Opportunity Unlimited. They are filled with plans and visions. To equip the city to hold its present population and to accommodate its future millions, the planners have merrily rolled out a program like a magic carpet. Mostly, thus far, it is a program of capital projects to be undertaken by various governmental units and to be financed out of huge bond issues and fancy schemes for new taxation.
Altogether, nearly three-quarters of a billon dollars of capital projects have been put on the boards, and the end is not yet. Bonds to carry forward some of these have been approved, others are awaiting approval. Those projects for which no money has yet been found are awaiting revised tax legislation.
The Los Angeles Metropolitan Parkway Engineering Committee has plans for two hundred and eighty-nine miles of intracity super roads costing $463,302,000. The Board of Playground and Recreation Commissioners has plans for a series of recreational projects costing $12,078,344. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles has plans calling for a twenty-five million dollar expansion of low-cost shelter units, which is not nearly enough. This would build only five thousand homes at five thousand dollars per unit as against one hundred and fifty thousand home units, public and private, urgently needed immediately after World War II. Following the recent approval of a seventy-five-million-dollar school-bond issue, educational authorities are drawing plans for scores of additional junior and senior high and elementary schools, and three additional junior colleges.
A hospital survey, looking toward a local increase of six thousand beds, is under way. Both the county and the city have far-reaching civic center plans. And the University of California is planning a twenty-one-million-dollar expansion of its Westwood campus.
In short, postwar Los Angeles has projects and blueprints galore. Whether they will answer the city's basic needs remains to be seen.
The outlook for expanded private investment, likewise, is broad. One indication of how broad it is can be gathered from the accumulation, in the Los Angeles offices of the Civilian Production Administration, of applications for nonresidential construction, estimated in excess of one hundred million dollars. If materials were available, applications would probably reach five times this figure.
Thus, from the standpoint of quantitative growth and sheer physical expansion, the Los Angeles area is an American wonderland. At the border "inspection stations" which California maintains at its golden portals—stations established for the apparent purpose of looking for diseased fruit—the count of in-migration versus out-migration discloses a heavy net influx each month. During depression years and boom years this accretion has continued. It has varied from a substantial trickle to a thundering flood but has never departed from the credit side of the population ledger.
Growth has become the normal state of affairs in Los Angeles. No one expects it will ever be any different. Tell a resident of Greater Los Angeles the day might come when people would pull out in droves and he'll shake his head and feel downright sorry for you. You just don't "belong" in Southern California if you're skeptical about bigness or more bigness.
Bigness in Los Angeles is different from bigness elsewhere. Here it flattens and spreads out rather than rears up to scrape the sky. Which explains the city's worst headache, transportation. The "city of dented fenders"; the city where more than twelve hundred lives are lost in traffic each year; where you drive around the block ten times trying to find a place to park your car; the city where the average individual thinks nothing of motoring fifteen or twenty miles from home to work; the city on wheels that grew up with the automobile—that is Los Angeles.
Despite talk of improved rapid transit, Los Angeles is still thinking in terms of gasoline and privately owned motor vehicles. Little of its traffic is borne by public carriers. Besides, such public transportation as is available consists of wheeled slums—decrepit streetcars and busses operated on infrequent schedules by two companies, the Pacific Electric Railway Company and the Los Angeles Transit Lines.
After business hours and on week ends the streets are literally choked with automobiles and the sidewalks more packed than Times Square. During working hours the same streets still are heavily crowded. Also, Los Angeles motor traffic is dangerously fast, with intracity speeds of forty and fifty miles per hour the rule rather than the exception. More than any other city in the nation, it is a metropolis where there is never a closed season on pedestrians.
Longevity for the average Angeleno is first a matter of learning to obey traffic signals when on foot, and, second, of keen eyesight, sound wind, and active limbs equal to a sudden flying leap to curbside safety.
Such conditions affect a city. They affect its people and shape its cultural patterns. Its immense traffic, its lack of an integrated system of public rapid transit, its lack of effective liaison between its myriad neighborhoods, have, more than any other factors, contributed toward making Los Angeles "a collection of suburbs looking for a city." It is no wonder San Franciscans derisively claim the Angel City is, after all, merely "Bakersfield-by-the-sea."
In the sprawling county of Los Angeles is the "Big City" of Los Angeles, plus forty-five incorporated cities of varying sizes, as well as some ninety-odd unincorporated communities. Outside the Big City, but often contiguous with it, are the satellite towns. There is Beverly Hills, well landscaped, neat, attractive, with many good shops, but mostly a fine residential city for an extensive colony where many movie stars and others sleep it out at lower taxes and no responsibility, civic or otherwise, to Los Angeles. Additionally, there are Monrovia, Whittier, both twenty miles from the heart of Los Angeles, Long Beach (by the side of San Pedro in Los Angeles), Pomona, an educational center, El Monte, El Segundo, and scores of others, the city of Los Angeles wrapping around some and protruding into others.
Such a conglomeration, if made into a map, would look like an octopus thrown on a square floor, with some tentacles cut off and others wrapping around little squares, with wooden blocks of varying sizes lying in between the tentacles. It is clear that something must be done about it, but nobody knows just what, as yet. The county, and, in fact, practically all of Southern California, is really one problem as to drainage, sewers, water, irrigation, streets, roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and over-all police protection.
But the various communities engender local interest and pride. Each has its various noonday clubs, chambers of commerce, mayor or city manager, and labor leaders. To have one big government, one big city, and one big manager, would knock all this out. Yet to have all these self-governments is to have conflicts, unfair fax burdens, lack of planning, and lack of sanitation. How to solve such a chaotic jumble and still preserve local interest and community consciousness, nobody knows.
Likewise, this hodgepodge has affected the region's political and social environment. Politically, Angelenos are not precinct conscious. Their idea of political action is largely passive. They listen to the radio, read what the papers have to say, get a tip from a neighbor, go to the polls (providing they can find them), and sometimes vote with more than average intelligence. Politics are not taken too seriously, unlike some sections of the country, where killings over elections are not unusual. Murder statistics, however, have a high and growing average, but murders in Los Angeles are chiefly for love.
Precinct organizations in the Tammany sense are practically unknown; elections are won on ideological waves or emotional ground swells. In a councilmanic recall election, the building of a close-meshed precinct machine, with "block captains" and door-to-door solicitation, was heralded as a novelty. But even this election grew out of "an antifascist campaign wave." There have been some precinct organizations in congressional and gubernatorial campaigns, but none of the machine type to be found in the East.
Politically, the town is a go-to-meeting town, a "joiner" town, and a great place for rallies and "colossal demonstrations," where movie stars headline the bill. There are, also, gigantic gospel assemblies with all the trimmin's, save the movie stars.
How many active political and civic organizations flourish in the Los Angeles area no one really knows. But they number in the hundreds. "Ham 'n' Eggs" still has offices on Hill Street, near the Chamber of Commerce Building. "HICCASP," as it is referred to locally—The Hollywood Independent Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions—sits atop the Olympian heights of Los Angeles' left-of-center progressivism. It descends from those heights only on such occasions as Labor Day, to mingle with hoi polloi, or the National Citizens Political Action Committee, or the C.I.O. and A.F.L. But never, heaven forbid, with regular Republican or Democratic political organizations.
HICCASP, by its own admission, has a good deal of the money, and almost all of the "big-name" talent available to politically conscious Angelenos. Although the boys and girls are learning and have good intentions, they tend too frequently to disdain a grass-roots conception of politics and prefer to be sought after by the grubby G.I.'s of the political fold. Their belated decision to amalgamate with NCPAC was taken only after the 1946 congressional elections landed a hay-maker on the HICCASP solar plexus.
In Los Angeles there are just two good sources of campaign funds: the movie rich and the aircraft-oil-Spring Street-corporation rich, with the film money bags bulging the biggest and shelling out the easiest. Some of the town's other well-heeled citizens—such as, for example, rich widows and certain big merchants—sometimes kick in sizeably, of course. But Hollywood is the Cave of Ali Baba. Most budding politicians try to learn its open sesame.
In this eminence it has succeeded in large measure (and with more glamour) to the lordly position occupied for so long in other days by the city-owned and -operated Department of Water and Power. This agency, whose investment value is approximately five hundred million dollars, has long been regarded as one of the most successful municipal utility enterprises in the United States.
Los Angeles is what it is today by reason of its water economy and the expansion of its power resources. More than any city in the land it is dependent upon its water lines and power lines. Led by "empire builders" who are now merely memories—men such as engineer William Mulholland, publisher Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, and Dr. John Randolph Haynes—Los Angeles began in 1906 to stick out its tongue for water. The history of the subsequent despoiling of Owens Valley, a prosperous farming community in the Sierra Nevada, two hundred and forty miles northward, has been adequately recounted elsewhere, especially by Carey McWilliams in Southern California Country. The plain fact is that Los Angeles, in its Drang nach Osten for water lines, was like an aggressor nation on the march.
With the building of Boulder Dam, local promoters were able to announce confidently that the City of the Angels could now rely upon water and power sufficient to maintain life and promote opportunities for twenty million inhabitants. To a great extent, this claim is true. A bomb of any kind, much less an atomic bomb, would set the population trekking back across the desert—but that's another question.
So tremendous, however, is the obligation to maintain the water economy of a desert region such as Los Angeles (since, if it isn't maintained, life would cease to exist), that it calls for community responsibility—for socialism, if you prefer a blunt word—on scale surpassing normal conceptions of municipal responsibility.
Nevertheless, most residents of Los Angeles are unaware of this fact. Those who are—habitués of the California Club and the Chamber of Commerce Building—are thus forced to ride two horses at the same time. On the ideological level, they ride the Big White Horse and whoop it up for Private Enterprise, hanging all devils of "collectivism" in horror struck effigy. On the coldly practical level, knowing their existence and profits are at stake in the collectivism of socialized water and power, they ride, warily, the old Red Roan horse and keep a weather eye on the Department of Water and Power.
In this drama of conflicting philosophies—as in all conflicts—there must be a villain. The villain in this instance is Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation. Although its headquarters are in San Francisco, from which it directs unremitting campaigns against developing the proposed power nexus of California's Central Valley Authority—proposed power nexus of California's Central Valley Authority—"P.G. and E.," as it is known everywhere throughout the state—is a potent force in what might be called the macrocosm, or unseen world, of Los Angeles politics.
With its propaganda arms reaching into all corners of the state, P.G. and E. carries on a well-financed, thoroughly articulated campaign against any and all ideas "spawned in the sin pots of Russia." In this crusade Chamber of Commerce gallants ride side by side on their big white horses, having previously carefully washed themselves in sinful socialized water.
In this joyous work the local Chamber is joined by the California State Chamber of Commerce, the Associated Farmers, and the half-centry-old Merchants and Manufacturers Association. The latter, functioning for many years under the leadership of the late Paul Shoup, who rose from yard-boy in the San Bernardino shops of the Southern Pacific to the presidency of the nation's biggest railway corporation, has become in recent years the somewhat blunted spearhead of "open shop" crusades in now labor-minded Los Angeles.
To save free enterprise in California, the State Chamber artfully conceals the facts of corporate power while addressing itself to what it calls its "biggest postwar job—letting the people know the facts." It also conceals the fact of California's peculiar pattern of state government, in which the Legislature represents geography instead of people. The need to combat regulation by government seems uppermost in the minds of California's business and industrial leaders: Hence, a State Senate which is not answerable to the preponderant urban masses suits them to at T.
When criticisms of "harmful regulation" are examined, it is discovered that the phrase embraces practically all governmental fiscal and taxing powers, although how to get sufficient public money worries every city official because California cities, and Los Angeles in particular, have had to grapple with the problem of a shrinking tax base in the midst of unprecedented demands for added civic services to care for war-bought population increases.
Los Angeles' electorate has subscribed generously to bond issues. But since most modern taxing powers are vested in the state and federal governments, Los Angeles has had to look to Sacramento and Washington for additional funds.
Moreover, California generally is finding it extremely difficult to live within its income. In 1929, for example, the state had a surplus of thirty million dollars. In 1945 this surplus had grown to two hundred and eighty-eight million dollars, but a special session of the Legislature, called by Governor Earl Warren to meet "postwar needs," quickly appropriated practically the entire surplus for a variety of statewide projects. In this spending spree Los Angeles city and county didn't come off badly. From a kickback of more than ninety million dollars from the state's general fund, the Los Angeles area received thirty million dollars to relieve its financial strains. Even so, after arguing for more than a year over ways and means of uncovering new revenue sources, Mayor Fletcher Bowron and the City Council agreed that only by an increased state sales tax, a portion of which would be budgetary requirements. This proposal was endorsed by the League of California Cities in 1946 and is shaping into a statewide issue.
For the status quo, however, money raised for public works isn't objectionable to the business elements. What the State Chamber, the M. and M., the Associated Farmers, and the interests for whom they speak really object to are fiscal outlays for social welfare and governmental development projects. Los Angeles, for example, is one of the leaders in the nation in the number of paid unemployment claims. The solid citizens lunching at the solid California Club are apt to grow apoplectic over the contradiction of a local economy in which downgraded jobs go begging which thousands line up each week at the U.S.E.S. offices on Flower Street to pick up their unemployment checks.
Apparently, many worker simply don't see eye to eye with employers on what constitutes "suitable" employment. Likewise, the specter of a State Compensation Insurance Fund to administer workingmen's compensation gives solid citizens the jitters. Partial reimbursement for wage loss, paid by private companies permitted to handle four-fifths of the state's compensation insurance business, is the sort of "good business" employers and corporate directors want.
What all this adds up to is that in Los Angeles the fighting fronts of postwar American democracy are everywhere. They permeate all levels of business and social and professional life. NO clear lines of demarcation separate them. And neither is there discernible any clear philosophy. Some Angelenos are hell bend for a more effective social democracy; others want a modern metropolis built on the social and economic outlooks of wagon-wheel days. Thus far no one has ventured to blueprint the twin responsibilities of public enterprise and private enterprise in answering Los Angeles' needs.
At the Biltmore Hotel, facing downtown Pershing Square, some five hundred leading citizens who like to think of themselves as receptive to ideas meet weekly in a hopeful gabfest called Town Hall. Prominent visitors hold forth for Town Hall's members on a variety of subjects. In section meetings Town Hall discusses all manner of local problems. But what it amounts to, by and large, is a kind of ideal smörgåsbord, productive thus far of a good deal of fatty mental tissue. The development of a sound marrow of civic and governmental planning is yet to come. Across the street from the Biltmore is Pershing Square, where freedom of speech for the common people is alleged to be practiced. But no one dares stand on a box, soap or otherwise. Such theorists as do assemble stand on the ground and converse softly and carefully as the local police listen, looking out of the sides of their hostile eyes.
The utility issue in Los Angeles illustrates the general confusion over civic directions.
Until 1938, when Superior Court Judge Fletcher Bowron became Mayor in a recall election which repudiated the smelly regime of Mayor Frank Shaw, public utility ownership was riding high. Ezra F. Scattergood was the Man with a Mission who made public power synonymous with political power. As long-time Advisory Engineer of the Department of Water and Power, Scattergood could literally turn the juice on and off. He survived Bowron's first administration by being retired to a sort of emeritus position.
Whether Scattergood was in truth an archangel of civic virtue will be debated for years to come. Certainly, he had a political machine based on thousands of bureau employees. He was an exponent of decentralization and a zealous proponent of lower power costs. What Scattergood seems to have wanted was a water-and-electricity network, capable of establishing, "free from the domination of any group of powerful interests, endless opportunities for thrift, happiness, and civic loyalty on the part of all classes of people in industrial, commercial, professional, and cultural activities."
When Mayor Bowron booted the septuagenarian Scattergood into a semiretirement, champions of public ownership were quick to charge he had sold out to the "interests." Actually, Bowron's long tenure as Mayor—his present term does not expire until 1949—has been marked by an incessant struggle for political control of the city's vast complex of bureaus, agencies, commissions, and departments. Bowron naturally wants to be head man. But Scattergood's influence still is powerful around the towering City Hall.
To take active charge of the Department, the Mayor appointed Samuel B. Morris, a Pasadena engineers. Since Morris' appointment the Department has seemed to decline as a political force. Actually, however, the decline is more illusory than real. Its lights merely have been dimmed by brighter, though less realistically grounded, kliegs in Hollywood; its voice drowned by the shriller shouts of the C.I.O. and A.F.L. labor councils.
By their own admission the most politically conscious elements in Los Angeles, none of these three groups bothers to co-operate with one another. The split between "right" and "left" has witnessed the C.I.O. under secretary Philip ("Slim") Connally, opposed on most issues by the A.F.L., under William J. Basseau, of the Central Labor Council. Labor Day, 1946, saw two separate and distinct (and very imposing) parades at different periods of the day, followed by separate celebrations at night. Yet both wings of organized labor have made steady gains in membership.
Los Angeles' labor history has run the spectacular gamut from an open shop to a union tow in a quarter-century. Long noted for its antilabor climate after the McNamara brothers dynamited the Times Building in 1910, Los Angeles is a perfect example of persecution and suppression begetting revolution. Labor is militantly on the march in Southern California today.
It marches sometimes quixotically, battering against avoidable obstacles. But it continues to march, nevertheless. Spearheaded by the Teamsters Union, A.F.L. organizers are busy "organizing the boss first," and applying secondary boycott practices, presumably outlawed, in an effort to force employers into signing closed-shop contracts. The maneuver has worked in many instances. Meanwhile, the C.I.O. carries on a broader campaign of individual indoctrination.
The average citizen, as in most cities, has little conception of organized labor's strength and weakness. Of the four metropolitan dailies, only one, Manchester Boddy's Daily News, bothers to present labor's side of innumerable controversies. The attitude of the News can be said to be objective rather than pro-labor. Hence, the labor press itself, with its limited circulation, led by the C.I.O. Labor Herald, essays the job of presenting the unions' case. This is not very difficult, as the Herald's readers are already for the unions.
Organized labor's case, by the way, is simply that Los Angeles has too long been a scab town, with ruthless competition in the labor market. However, strikes and violence, played up in the local press, have, as elsewhere, prejudiced the union cardholder's position. Recently, jurisdictional rows have hurt labor's cause. That these disputes have in many instances been aggravated by employers who preferred one union as an easier bargaining agent isn't as well known as it should be.
On the whole, however, Los Angeles labor lacks cohesiveness. If and when the labor groups make common cause, they may well become the dominant political force in the community. Both old-line political parties are relatively ineffective. Neither the Democrats, with a county registration of approximately one million, three hundred thousand, nor the Republicans, numbering eight hundred thousand, pull much weight in local politics. The reason is that Los Angeles has a nonpartisan election law. This means the impetus for local political movements must come from other than traditional party sources.
Sporadically, a citizens' movement gets under way, but outraged civic virtue evidences itself only when things get really bad, and even then the outburst doesn't last long. In the past score of years two councilmen have been ousted, one by court action after a grand jury indicted him for using a city-owned car for a vacation trip; the other because he aligned himself with Gerald L. K. Smith.
In a sprawling, growing city where the average voter usually doesn't know which councilmanic district he's living in or who is his representative in Congress or the State Legislature, or that Los Angeles County has but one State Senator, although entitled by population to fifteen—in this sort of community, neighborhood political responsibility is nil.
Moreover, the average Angeleno has come to Southern California to live out his dreams, and his dreams, for the most part, haven't included taking local citizenship too seriously. What he wants is color, amusement, pleasant climate, and a chance to express himself in ways a more tradition-bound social order would frown upon. So long as his public servants aren't transparent crooks, he's content to let them plug along, while he, himself, dressed in the "casual Southern California manner," pursues the more fanciful ways of poet, mystic, or go-to-meeting member of one of the town's innumerable societies: some religious, some crackpot, and some just time-consuming.
Henry George Single Taxers are an active clique in Los Angeles. So are other groups devoted to antivivisection, mountain climbing (the Sierra Club), yoga, nudism, or what have you.
Beginning with the great human influx of the war years, however, cultural unity has attracted the largest share of converts. Los Angeles is an ethnic patchwork quilt. Its Mexican-Amerian population numbers over two hundred and fifty thousand but has as yet been unable to develop a substantial middle-class leadership. The Negro population increased from twenty-eight thousand to nearly one hundred and fifty thousand, and the city now has more than two hundred Negro precincts. The Jewish population, likewise, has mushroomed. But, in the main, Los Angeles' population increment was gained at the expense of the South and Southwest, as war workers from Texas, Oklahoma, and the deep South migrated by the thousands to work in airplane plants and shipyards.
What has emerged is a crazy and threatening pattern of ethnic conflict. Jews and Negroes are alive to the issue of prejudice and segregation. Mexican-Americans accept discrimination with less resentment. Even they, however, are beginning to rise and organize.
To ward off possible violence, there have sprung up several organizations devoted to the broad aims of cultural unity. The Council for Civic Unity is one. Under its executive director, Dr. G. Raymond Booth, it has attempted without success to write a civic unity charter similar to the Chicago plan. The City Council has thus far turned a deaf ear to Booth's pleas for a commission on human relations. Prominent business men and civic leaders apparently prefer the position that to admit the existence of ethnic and racial problems or to talk about them or—worse—to attempt to deal with them, is merely an embarrassing admission that Los Angeles is not the best of all possible worlds.
The National Conference of Christians and Jews has acquired the services in Los Angeles of Dr. John Granrud, architect of the Springfield, Massachusetts, plan of education for home-front unity. Dr. Granrud has succeeded in having features of his plan introduced into the county-schools curriculum and has the backing of influential motion-picture producers for a city-wide campaign of education for democratic citizenship.
Probably the seed of a rebirth of local political consciousness is being planted in the cultural unity campaign. Los Angeles' ethnic minorities are awaiting constructive leadership and a goal toward which they can aspire. They have been hemmed in by restrictive real-estate covenants. They want wider representation on all governmental boards and elective bodies. Where their zeal will lead them, however, is questionable. "Gradualists" among Negro, Mexican-American, and Jewish citizens look with disfavor upon the impatience and determination of ethnic political-action groups now forming. Others profess to see ethnic minorities being exploited by Communists.
The fact, nevertheless, is that, in the melting pot Los Angeles has become, many elements are bubbling. Social democracy will be severely tested before the mixture has finally cooked down.
Deserving of mention among beginnings toward greater political and social consciousness for the Angel City are the People's Educational Center in Hollywood and the National Citizens' Political Action Committee. The former, at its school headquarters on Vine Street, in the heart of Hollywood's gay-way, is looked upon by most Red-fearing folk as a Communist-front organization, seething with subversive activity. N.C.P.A.C., also, while not so much in the limelight as the People's Educational Center, has come in for its share of suspicion from those who want to go back to the good old days.
As a matter of fact, it should surprise no one if both these outfits number among their more tireless and enthusiastic supporters a few Commies. As perhaps has been the case in other cities, however, politicians on the make and propagandists on the qui vive have succeeded to a considerable degree in smearing groups such as these as outposts of the Kremlin.
California's state legislative "investigating committees" have done an especially effective smearing job, aided by the two Hearst papers, the Los Angeles Examiner and the Herald Express, which recurrently launch campaigns against "Red-Fascists in Hollywood."
Los Angeles County's State Senator, Jack Tenney, long a dues-paying member of Mr. Petrillo's American Federation of Musicians, has headed in recent years a "Little Dies Committee" which beats the brush periodically to flush out coveys of dissidents promptly labeled Commies and fellow travelers by a co-operative press. Tenney's last revival meeting in Los Angeles, a strange gathering of testimonial givers, succeeded in lumping together leaders of some of the Hollywood studios, striking A.F.L. unions, students and faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles, the latter's able new provost, Dr. Clarence A. Dykstra, a few matriculants of the People's Educational Center, and two or three of the more admittedly left-wing film writers, in what was suggested was an awful concordat of "enemies" of our American way of life.
Although this sort of scare technique has become old hat in Los Angeles, its effectiveness isn't to be discounted. It succeeds at least in setting back each timid and weak start toward arousing citizens from the long, snoring siesta of political indifference and naïvete. To what extent—and how soon—there will emerge the down-to-the-citizen, doorbell-pushing, precinct-palavering understanding and practice in practical politics Los Angeles so sorely needs is anyone's guess. But the seeds of the understanding are being sown. They are being sown by the People's Educational Center and N.C.P.A.C., the A.F. L. and C.I.O. political factions, and in the Philbrick report on lobbyists.
Scant publicity has been given this report. It discloses the immense power exercised by paid lobbyists in Sacramento, and describes many well-financed pressure groups from the Los Angeles region.
As awareness of the realities of California politics and local politics spreads, the multitudes of this loose-jointed metropolis will no doubt grow more sophisticated. The pueblo-mindedness which has characterized Los Angeles since its inception may gradually give way to an urban outlook able to assess the realities of local politics.
For Los Angeles is not merely naïve politically. It is still in many respects a hick town hoping for big-league recognition but not quite clear how to crash the gates to big-time participation. With a sports-minded public, it is still limited to bush-league baseball. With an amusement-minded public, it is still without a civic opera or auditorium. The difference between what it is and what it could be can best be demonstrated by the fact that Los Angeles has the finest cemetery in the world and the mangiest zoo.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in adjacent Glendale, "where it's a pleasure to be dead," has everything even a dying Faustus might ask for except "the face that launched a thousand ships." To repair this omission, there are mountains of statuary, mechanical contrivances everywhere for soft weep-music, three quaint little churches—including the Little Church of the Flowers, which serves intermittently as a burial and wedding chapel by the simple expedient of bringing into play, for the latter ceremony, a papier-mâché bell which opens at the yank of a string and releases pent-up doves that flit dutifully over the bridal couple. Forest Lawn boasts "everything in time of sorrow"—one telephone call and all is well. It also boasts the sarcophagus of Aimée Semple McPherson, Los Angeles' great foursquare evangelist, whose home "temple" and subsidiary "gospel missions" still do a flourishing business in a city noted for the variety and eccentricity of its religious sects.
The Griffith Park Zoo, situated not far from an emergency quonset-hut housing project for veterans, is the denial of Forest Lawn's serene affirmation. Human animals may find pleasure in being dead, but other species penned up in Griffith Park find living singularly unrewarding. By comparison with the inhabitants of San Diego's beautiful and extensive zoo, these hapless creatures are neglected and unnoticed. Comparatively few visitors come to make faces at them or throw peanuts, perhaps because the sight is too depressing. Lost in a back canyon of giant, practically treeless Griffith Park, Los Angeles' decimated animal wards seem silent and morose, packed in old, bad-smelling cages, waiting for civic consciousness to awaken to their plight.
If the animals in the zoo are ignored, the reason can probably be found in the fact that other animals surpass them in attention-getting qualities. Statistics show this is particularly true of women and dogs. Los Angeles has an abundance of both. Latest census figures recorded approximately eighty thousand more women than men, with widows and spinsters increasing. The women of Los Angeles range from dowagers and insurance-rich old ladies who have built themselves one of the nation's most lavish feminine social centers, the Wiltshire Ebell Club, to young things ready to try the latest fling in garish costuming displayed in Beverly Hills's zany shops. Mink coats and slacks are a common sight.
Los Angeles womanhood is independent, however, not only in fashions. The League of Women Voters is becoming a political force. Women's clubs abound, providing a speaker's paradise. One organization, the University Women's Club, has led in practicing racial equality by voting into membership a prominent Negro woman physician. Although some of the club's members resigned in a huff at this honest display of democracy, life still throbs at the U.W.'s clubhouse on Hoover Street, and other women's organizations have been made uncomfortable as a result.
Women and labor and ethnic minorities—these are the postwar forces most likely to shape Los Angeles' future. Thus far these three social groups have nothing in common except, in some of their respective circles, a common interest in civic and political progress. Labor is still, for the most part, dedicated to its own goals—increasing union membership and getting higher wages. Los Angeles women have as yet few specific political goals. Their talk is mostly of their ineffectiveness and what they can do to promote for their city and their world a better, wiser way. The ethnic minorities are still understandably self-conscious, self-oriented. But among all of them is beginning to stir a sense of the community.
When this sense of the community emerges, Los Angeles will begin its maturity. Now it is adolescent, with the glandular imbalance of a youngster who has grown too rapidly and wants glamour more than wisdom or enduring strength.
Maury Maverick and Robert E. G. Harris, 'Los Angeles—Rainbow's End'
To understand Los Angeles and its problems, to see what it is and where it is going, it is essential to start with the premise that it is the end of the rainbow. Some—even residents—would call it by other names. The late Brian Bell of the Associated Press once said Los Angeles had been described in the Book of Solomon, ". . . and then Solomon descended into the garden of nuts." The nut angle, however, is old stuff, and overworked.
Nuts or pioneers, crackpots or conquistadores arriving in gas buggies—whatever you call them, Los Angeles' people are, for the most part, today's frontiersmen.
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner propounded the theory that the frontier played practically the principal role in shaping American history. He wrote thousands of words to prove it. But what it all added up to he expressed rather succinctly as follows: "...democracy was born of no theorist's dream. . . . It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier."
Democracy working up a sweat isn't always, of course, simple textbook stuff, But that it has, on occasions, despite a strained muscle or two and some mighty queer behavior, managed to assert itself, can't be doubted. That today democracy may gain strength, also, in the patchwork and bizarre bazaar which is Los Angeles is likely.
Yet it may be equally probable that the so-called "golden age of urbanism," i.e., spreading and jamming houses, stores, factories—unplanned—may come to a crazy end here in this southwest corner of the United States. For postwar Los Angeles is balanced dangerously between two futures.
Civic planners and business interests, or at least their paid secretaries, tend to see the brightest prospect. For them, Los Angeles is always Opportunity Unlimited. They are filled with plans and visions. To equip the city to hold its present population and to accommodate its future millions, the planners have merrily rolled out a program like a magic carpet. Mostly, thus far, it is a program of capital projects to be undertaken by various governmental units and to be financed out of huge bond issues and fancy schemes for new taxation.
Altogether, nearly three-quarters of a billon dollars of capital projects have been put on the boards, and the end is not yet. Bonds to carry forward some of these have been approved, others are awaiting approval. Those projects for which no money has yet been found are awaiting revised tax legislation.
The Los Angeles Metropolitan Parkway Engineering Committee has plans for two hundred and eighty-nine miles of intracity super roads costing $463,302,000. The Board of Playground and Recreation Commissioners has plans for a series of recreational projects costing $12,078,344. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles has plans calling for a twenty-five million dollar expansion of low-cost shelter units, which is not nearly enough. This would build only five thousand homes at five thousand dollars per unit as against one hundred and fifty thousand home units, public and private, urgently needed immediately after World War II. Following the recent approval of a seventy-five-million-dollar school-bond issue, educational authorities are drawing plans for scores of additional junior and senior high and elementary schools, and three additional junior colleges.
A hospital survey, looking toward a local increase of six thousand beds, is under way. Both the county and the city have far-reaching civic center plans. And the University of California is planning a twenty-one-million-dollar expansion of its Westwood campus.
In short, postwar Los Angeles has projects and blueprints galore. Whether they will answer the city's basic needs remains to be seen.
The outlook for expanded private investment, likewise, is broad. One indication of how broad it is can be gathered from the accumulation, in the Los Angeles offices of the Civilian Production Administration, of applications for nonresidential construction, estimated in excess of one hundred million dollars. If materials were available, applications would probably reach five times this figure.
Thus, from the standpoint of quantitative growth and sheer physical expansion, the Los Angeles area is an American wonderland. At the border "inspection stations" which California maintains at its golden portals—stations established for the apparent purpose of looking for diseased fruit—the count of in-migration versus out-migration discloses a heavy net influx each month. During depression years and boom years this accretion has continued. It has varied from a substantial trickle to a thundering flood but has never departed from the credit side of the population ledger.
Growth has become the normal state of affairs in Los Angeles. No one expects it will ever be any different. Tell a resident of Greater Los Angeles the day might come when people would pull out in droves and he'll shake his head and feel downright sorry for you. You just don't "belong" in Southern California if you're skeptical about bigness or more bigness.
Bigness in Los Angeles is different from bigness elsewhere. Here it flattens and spreads out rather than rears up to scrape the sky. Which explains the city's worst headache, transportation. The "city of dented fenders"; the city where more than twelve hundred lives are lost in traffic each year; where you drive around the block ten times trying to find a place to park your car; the city where the average individual thinks nothing of motoring fifteen or twenty miles from home to work; the city on wheels that grew up with the automobile—that is Los Angeles.
Despite talk of improved rapid transit, Los Angeles is still thinking in terms of gasoline and privately owned motor vehicles. Little of its traffic is borne by public carriers. Besides, such public transportation as is available consists of wheeled slums—decrepit streetcars and busses operated on infrequent schedules by two companies, the Pacific Electric Railway Company and the Los Angeles Transit Lines.
After business hours and on week ends the streets are literally choked with automobiles and the sidewalks more packed than Times Square. During working hours the same streets still are heavily crowded. Also, Los Angeles motor traffic is dangerously fast, with intracity speeds of forty and fifty miles per hour the rule rather than the exception. More than any other city in the nation, it is a metropolis where there is never a closed season on pedestrians.
Longevity for the average Angeleno is first a matter of learning to obey traffic signals when on foot, and, second, of keen eyesight, sound wind, and active limbs equal to a sudden flying leap to curbside safety.
Such conditions affect a city. They affect its people and shape its cultural patterns. Its immense traffic, its lack of an integrated system of public rapid transit, its lack of effective liaison between its myriad neighborhoods, have, more than any other factors, contributed toward making Los Angeles "a collection of suburbs looking for a city." It is no wonder San Franciscans derisively claim the Angel City is, after all, merely "Bakersfield-by-the-sea."
In the sprawling county of Los Angeles is the "Big City" of Los Angeles, plus forty-five incorporated cities of varying sizes, as well as some ninety-odd unincorporated communities. Outside the Big City, but often contiguous with it, are the satellite towns. There is Beverly Hills, well landscaped, neat, attractive, with many good shops, but mostly a fine residential city for an extensive colony where many movie stars and others sleep it out at lower taxes and no responsibility, civic or otherwise, to Los Angeles. Additionally, there are Monrovia, Whittier, both twenty miles from the heart of Los Angeles, Long Beach (by the side of San Pedro in Los Angeles), Pomona, an educational center, El Monte, El Segundo, and scores of others, the city of Los Angeles wrapping around some and protruding into others.
Such a conglomeration, if made into a map, would look like an octopus thrown on a square floor, with some tentacles cut off and others wrapping around little squares, with wooden blocks of varying sizes lying in between the tentacles. It is clear that something must be done about it, but nobody knows just what, as yet. The county, and, in fact, practically all of Southern California, is really one problem as to drainage, sewers, water, irrigation, streets, roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and over-all police protection.
But the various communities engender local interest and pride. Each has its various noonday clubs, chambers of commerce, mayor or city manager, and labor leaders. To have one big government, one big city, and one big manager, would knock all this out. Yet to have all these self-governments is to have conflicts, unfair fax burdens, lack of planning, and lack of sanitation. How to solve such a chaotic jumble and still preserve local interest and community consciousness, nobody knows.
Likewise, this hodgepodge has affected the region's political and social environment. Politically, Angelenos are not precinct conscious. Their idea of political action is largely passive. They listen to the radio, read what the papers have to say, get a tip from a neighbor, go to the polls (providing they can find them), and sometimes vote with more than average intelligence. Politics are not taken too seriously, unlike some sections of the country, where killings over elections are not unusual. Murder statistics, however, have a high and growing average, but murders in Los Angeles are chiefly for love.
Precinct organizations in the Tammany sense are practically unknown; elections are won on ideological waves or emotional ground swells. In a councilmanic recall election, the building of a close-meshed precinct machine, with "block captains" and door-to-door solicitation, was heralded as a novelty. But even this election grew out of "an antifascist campaign wave." There have been some precinct organizations in congressional and gubernatorial campaigns, but none of the machine type to be found in the East.
Politically, the town is a go-to-meeting town, a "joiner" town, and a great place for rallies and "colossal demonstrations," where movie stars headline the bill. There are, also, gigantic gospel assemblies with all the trimmin's, save the movie stars.
How many active political and civic organizations flourish in the Los Angeles area no one really knows. But they number in the hundreds. "Ham 'n' Eggs" still has offices on Hill Street, near the Chamber of Commerce Building. "HICCASP," as it is referred to locally—The Hollywood Independent Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions—sits atop the Olympian heights of Los Angeles' left-of-center progressivism. It descends from those heights only on such occasions as Labor Day, to mingle with hoi polloi, or the National Citizens Political Action Committee, or the C.I.O. and A.F.L. But never, heaven forbid, with regular Republican or Democratic political organizations.
HICCASP, by its own admission, has a good deal of the money, and almost all of the "big-name" talent available to politically conscious Angelenos. Although the boys and girls are learning and have good intentions, they tend too frequently to disdain a grass-roots conception of politics and prefer to be sought after by the grubby G.I.'s of the political fold. Their belated decision to amalgamate with NCPAC was taken only after the 1946 congressional elections landed a hay-maker on the HICCASP solar plexus.
In Los Angeles there are just two good sources of campaign funds: the movie rich and the aircraft-oil-Spring Street-corporation rich, with the film money bags bulging the biggest and shelling out the easiest. Some of the town's other well-heeled citizens—such as, for example, rich widows and certain big merchants—sometimes kick in sizeably, of course. But Hollywood is the Cave of Ali Baba. Most budding politicians try to learn its open sesame.
In this eminence it has succeeded in large measure (and with more glamour) to the lordly position occupied for so long in other days by the city-owned and -operated Department of Water and Power. This agency, whose investment value is approximately five hundred million dollars, has long been regarded as one of the most successful municipal utility enterprises in the United States.
Los Angeles is what it is today by reason of its water economy and the expansion of its power resources. More than any city in the land it is dependent upon its water lines and power lines. Led by "empire builders" who are now merely memories—men such as engineer William Mulholland, publisher Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, and Dr. John Randolph Haynes—Los Angeles began in 1906 to stick out its tongue for water. The history of the subsequent despoiling of Owens Valley, a prosperous farming community in the Sierra Nevada, two hundred and forty miles northward, has been adequately recounted elsewhere, especially by Carey McWilliams in Southern California Country. The plain fact is that Los Angeles, in its Drang nach Osten for water lines, was like an aggressor nation on the march.
With the building of Boulder Dam, local promoters were able to announce confidently that the City of the Angels could now rely upon water and power sufficient to maintain life and promote opportunities for twenty million inhabitants. To a great extent, this claim is true. A bomb of any kind, much less an atomic bomb, would set the population trekking back across the desert—but that's another question.
So tremendous, however, is the obligation to maintain the water economy of a desert region such as Los Angeles (since, if it isn't maintained, life would cease to exist), that it calls for community responsibility—for socialism, if you prefer a blunt word—on scale surpassing normal conceptions of municipal responsibility.
Nevertheless, most residents of Los Angeles are unaware of this fact. Those who are—habitués of the California Club and the Chamber of Commerce Building—are thus forced to ride two horses at the same time. On the ideological level, they ride the Big White Horse and whoop it up for Private Enterprise, hanging all devils of "collectivism" in horror struck effigy. On the coldly practical level, knowing their existence and profits are at stake in the collectivism of socialized water and power, they ride, warily, the old Red Roan horse and keep a weather eye on the Department of Water and Power.
In this drama of conflicting philosophies—as in all conflicts—there must be a villain. The villain in this instance is Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation. Although its headquarters are in San Francisco, from which it directs unremitting campaigns against developing the proposed power nexus of California's Central Valley Authority—proposed power nexus of California's Central Valley Authority—"P.G. and E.," as it is known everywhere throughout the state—is a potent force in what might be called the macrocosm, or unseen world, of Los Angeles politics.
With its propaganda arms reaching into all corners of the state, P.G. and E. carries on a well-financed, thoroughly articulated campaign against any and all ideas "spawned in the sin pots of Russia." In this crusade Chamber of Commerce gallants ride side by side on their big white horses, having previously carefully washed themselves in sinful socialized water.
In this joyous work the local Chamber is joined by the California State Chamber of Commerce, the Associated Farmers, and the half-centry-old Merchants and Manufacturers Association. The latter, functioning for many years under the leadership of the late Paul Shoup, who rose from yard-boy in the San Bernardino shops of the Southern Pacific to the presidency of the nation's biggest railway corporation, has become in recent years the somewhat blunted spearhead of "open shop" crusades in now labor-minded Los Angeles.
To save free enterprise in California, the State Chamber artfully conceals the facts of corporate power while addressing itself to what it calls its "biggest postwar job—letting the people know the facts." It also conceals the fact of California's peculiar pattern of state government, in which the Legislature represents geography instead of people. The need to combat regulation by government seems uppermost in the minds of California's business and industrial leaders: Hence, a State Senate which is not answerable to the preponderant urban masses suits them to at T.
When criticisms of "harmful regulation" are examined, it is discovered that the phrase embraces practically all governmental fiscal and taxing powers, although how to get sufficient public money worries every city official because California cities, and Los Angeles in particular, have had to grapple with the problem of a shrinking tax base in the midst of unprecedented demands for added civic services to care for war-bought population increases.
Los Angeles' electorate has subscribed generously to bond issues. But since most modern taxing powers are vested in the state and federal governments, Los Angeles has had to look to Sacramento and Washington for additional funds.
Moreover, California generally is finding it extremely difficult to live within its income. In 1929, for example, the state had a surplus of thirty million dollars. In 1945 this surplus had grown to two hundred and eighty-eight million dollars, but a special session of the Legislature, called by Governor Earl Warren to meet "postwar needs," quickly appropriated practically the entire surplus for a variety of statewide projects. In this spending spree Los Angeles city and county didn't come off badly. From a kickback of more than ninety million dollars from the state's general fund, the Los Angeles area received thirty million dollars to relieve its financial strains. Even so, after arguing for more than a year over ways and means of uncovering new revenue sources, Mayor Fletcher Bowron and the City Council agreed that only by an increased state sales tax, a portion of which would be budgetary requirements. This proposal was endorsed by the League of California Cities in 1946 and is shaping into a statewide issue.
For the status quo, however, money raised for public works isn't objectionable to the business elements. What the State Chamber, the M. and M., the Associated Farmers, and the interests for whom they speak really object to are fiscal outlays for social welfare and governmental development projects. Los Angeles, for example, is one of the leaders in the nation in the number of paid unemployment claims. The solid citizens lunching at the solid California Club are apt to grow apoplectic over the contradiction of a local economy in which downgraded jobs go begging which thousands line up each week at the U.S.E.S. offices on Flower Street to pick up their unemployment checks.
Apparently, many worker simply don't see eye to eye with employers on what constitutes "suitable" employment. Likewise, the specter of a State Compensation Insurance Fund to administer workingmen's compensation gives solid citizens the jitters. Partial reimbursement for wage loss, paid by private companies permitted to handle four-fifths of the state's compensation insurance business, is the sort of "good business" employers and corporate directors want.
What all this adds up to is that in Los Angeles the fighting fronts of postwar American democracy are everywhere. They permeate all levels of business and social and professional life. NO clear lines of demarcation separate them. And neither is there discernible any clear philosophy. Some Angelenos are hell bend for a more effective social democracy; others want a modern metropolis built on the social and economic outlooks of wagon-wheel days. Thus far no one has ventured to blueprint the twin responsibilities of public enterprise and private enterprise in answering Los Angeles' needs.
At the Biltmore Hotel, facing downtown Pershing Square, some five hundred leading citizens who like to think of themselves as receptive to ideas meet weekly in a hopeful gabfest called Town Hall. Prominent visitors hold forth for Town Hall's members on a variety of subjects. In section meetings Town Hall discusses all manner of local problems. But what it amounts to, by and large, is a kind of ideal smörgåsbord, productive thus far of a good deal of fatty mental tissue. The development of a sound marrow of civic and governmental planning is yet to come. Across the street from the Biltmore is Pershing Square, where freedom of speech for the common people is alleged to be practiced. But no one dares stand on a box, soap or otherwise. Such theorists as do assemble stand on the ground and converse softly and carefully as the local police listen, looking out of the sides of their hostile eyes.
The utility issue in Los Angeles illustrates the general confusion over civic directions.
Until 1938, when Superior Court Judge Fletcher Bowron became Mayor in a recall election which repudiated the smelly regime of Mayor Frank Shaw, public utility ownership was riding high. Ezra F. Scattergood was the Man with a Mission who made public power synonymous with political power. As long-time Advisory Engineer of the Department of Water and Power, Scattergood could literally turn the juice on and off. He survived Bowron's first administration by being retired to a sort of emeritus position.
Whether Scattergood was in truth an archangel of civic virtue will be debated for years to come. Certainly, he had a political machine based on thousands of bureau employees. He was an exponent of decentralization and a zealous proponent of lower power costs. What Scattergood seems to have wanted was a water-and-electricity network, capable of establishing, "free from the domination of any group of powerful interests, endless opportunities for thrift, happiness, and civic loyalty on the part of all classes of people in industrial, commercial, professional, and cultural activities."
When Mayor Bowron booted the septuagenarian Scattergood into a semiretirement, champions of public ownership were quick to charge he had sold out to the "interests." Actually, Bowron's long tenure as Mayor—his present term does not expire until 1949—has been marked by an incessant struggle for political control of the city's vast complex of bureaus, agencies, commissions, and departments. Bowron naturally wants to be head man. But Scattergood's influence still is powerful around the towering City Hall.
To take active charge of the Department, the Mayor appointed Samuel B. Morris, a Pasadena engineers. Since Morris' appointment the Department has seemed to decline as a political force. Actually, however, the decline is more illusory than real. Its lights merely have been dimmed by brighter, though less realistically grounded, kliegs in Hollywood; its voice drowned by the shriller shouts of the C.I.O. and A.F.L. labor councils.
By their own admission the most politically conscious elements in Los Angeles, none of these three groups bothers to co-operate with one another. The split between "right" and "left" has witnessed the C.I.O. under secretary Philip ("Slim") Connally, opposed on most issues by the A.F.L., under William J. Basseau, of the Central Labor Council. Labor Day, 1946, saw two separate and distinct (and very imposing) parades at different periods of the day, followed by separate celebrations at night. Yet both wings of organized labor have made steady gains in membership.
Los Angeles' labor history has run the spectacular gamut from an open shop to a union tow in a quarter-century. Long noted for its antilabor climate after the McNamara brothers dynamited the Times Building in 1910, Los Angeles is a perfect example of persecution and suppression begetting revolution. Labor is militantly on the march in Southern California today.
It marches sometimes quixotically, battering against avoidable obstacles. But it continues to march, nevertheless. Spearheaded by the Teamsters Union, A.F.L. organizers are busy "organizing the boss first," and applying secondary boycott practices, presumably outlawed, in an effort to force employers into signing closed-shop contracts. The maneuver has worked in many instances. Meanwhile, the C.I.O. carries on a broader campaign of individual indoctrination.
The average citizen, as in most cities, has little conception of organized labor's strength and weakness. Of the four metropolitan dailies, only one, Manchester Boddy's Daily News, bothers to present labor's side of innumerable controversies. The attitude of the News can be said to be objective rather than pro-labor. Hence, the labor press itself, with its limited circulation, led by the C.I.O. Labor Herald, essays the job of presenting the unions' case. This is not very difficult, as the Herald's readers are already for the unions.
Organized labor's case, by the way, is simply that Los Angeles has too long been a scab town, with ruthless competition in the labor market. However, strikes and violence, played up in the local press, have, as elsewhere, prejudiced the union cardholder's position. Recently, jurisdictional rows have hurt labor's cause. That these disputes have in many instances been aggravated by employers who preferred one union as an easier bargaining agent isn't as well known as it should be.
On the whole, however, Los Angeles labor lacks cohesiveness. If and when the labor groups make common cause, they may well become the dominant political force in the community. Both old-line political parties are relatively ineffective. Neither the Democrats, with a county registration of approximately one million, three hundred thousand, nor the Republicans, numbering eight hundred thousand, pull much weight in local politics. The reason is that Los Angeles has a nonpartisan election law. This means the impetus for local political movements must come from other than traditional party sources.
Sporadically, a citizens' movement gets under way, but outraged civic virtue evidences itself only when things get really bad, and even then the outburst doesn't last long. In the past score of years two councilmen have been ousted, one by court action after a grand jury indicted him for using a city-owned car for a vacation trip; the other because he aligned himself with Gerald L. K. Smith.
In a sprawling, growing city where the average voter usually doesn't know which councilmanic district he's living in or who is his representative in Congress or the State Legislature, or that Los Angeles County has but one State Senator, although entitled by population to fifteen—in this sort of community, neighborhood political responsibility is nil.
Moreover, the average Angeleno has come to Southern California to live out his dreams, and his dreams, for the most part, haven't included taking local citizenship too seriously. What he wants is color, amusement, pleasant climate, and a chance to express himself in ways a more tradition-bound social order would frown upon. So long as his public servants aren't transparent crooks, he's content to let them plug along, while he, himself, dressed in the "casual Southern California manner," pursues the more fanciful ways of poet, mystic, or go-to-meeting member of one of the town's innumerable societies: some religious, some crackpot, and some just time-consuming.
Henry George Single Taxers are an active clique in Los Angeles. So are other groups devoted to antivivisection, mountain climbing (the Sierra Club), yoga, nudism, or what have you.
Beginning with the great human influx of the war years, however, cultural unity has attracted the largest share of converts. Los Angeles is an ethnic patchwork quilt. Its Mexican-Amerian population numbers over two hundred and fifty thousand but has as yet been unable to develop a substantial middle-class leadership. The Negro population increased from twenty-eight thousand to nearly one hundred and fifty thousand, and the city now has more than two hundred Negro precincts. The Jewish population, likewise, has mushroomed. But, in the main, Los Angeles' population increment was gained at the expense of the South and Southwest, as war workers from Texas, Oklahoma, and the deep South migrated by the thousands to work in airplane plants and shipyards.
What has emerged is a crazy and threatening pattern of ethnic conflict. Jews and Negroes are alive to the issue of prejudice and segregation. Mexican-Americans accept discrimination with less resentment. Even they, however, are beginning to rise and organize.
To ward off possible violence, there have sprung up several organizations devoted to the broad aims of cultural unity. The Council for Civic Unity is one. Under its executive director, Dr. G. Raymond Booth, it has attempted without success to write a civic unity charter similar to the Chicago plan. The City Council has thus far turned a deaf ear to Booth's pleas for a commission on human relations. Prominent business men and civic leaders apparently prefer the position that to admit the existence of ethnic and racial problems or to talk about them or—worse—to attempt to deal with them, is merely an embarrassing admission that Los Angeles is not the best of all possible worlds.
The National Conference of Christians and Jews has acquired the services in Los Angeles of Dr. John Granrud, architect of the Springfield, Massachusetts, plan of education for home-front unity. Dr. Granrud has succeeded in having features of his plan introduced into the county-schools curriculum and has the backing of influential motion-picture producers for a city-wide campaign of education for democratic citizenship.
Probably the seed of a rebirth of local political consciousness is being planted in the cultural unity campaign. Los Angeles' ethnic minorities are awaiting constructive leadership and a goal toward which they can aspire. They have been hemmed in by restrictive real-estate covenants. They want wider representation on all governmental boards and elective bodies. Where their zeal will lead them, however, is questionable. "Gradualists" among Negro, Mexican-American, and Jewish citizens look with disfavor upon the impatience and determination of ethnic political-action groups now forming. Others profess to see ethnic minorities being exploited by Communists.
The fact, nevertheless, is that, in the melting pot Los Angeles has become, many elements are bubbling. Social democracy will be severely tested before the mixture has finally cooked down.
Deserving of mention among beginnings toward greater political and social consciousness for the Angel City are the People's Educational Center in Hollywood and the National Citizens' Political Action Committee. The former, at its school headquarters on Vine Street, in the heart of Hollywood's gay-way, is looked upon by most Red-fearing folk as a Communist-front organization, seething with subversive activity. N.C.P.A.C., also, while not so much in the limelight as the People's Educational Center, has come in for its share of suspicion from those who want to go back to the good old days.
As a matter of fact, it should surprise no one if both these outfits number among their more tireless and enthusiastic supporters a few Commies. As perhaps has been the case in other cities, however, politicians on the make and propagandists on the qui vive have succeeded to a considerable degree in smearing groups such as these as outposts of the Kremlin.
California's state legislative "investigating committees" have done an especially effective smearing job, aided by the two Hearst papers, the Los Angeles Examiner and the Herald Express, which recurrently launch campaigns against "Red-Fascists in Hollywood."
Los Angeles County's State Senator, Jack Tenney, long a dues-paying member of Mr. Petrillo's American Federation of Musicians, has headed in recent years a "Little Dies Committee" which beats the brush periodically to flush out coveys of dissidents promptly labeled Commies and fellow travelers by a co-operative press. Tenney's last revival meeting in Los Angeles, a strange gathering of testimonial givers, succeeded in lumping together leaders of some of the Hollywood studios, striking A.F.L. unions, students and faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles, the latter's able new provost, Dr. Clarence A. Dykstra, a few matriculants of the People's Educational Center, and two or three of the more admittedly left-wing film writers, in what was suggested was an awful concordat of "enemies" of our American way of life.
Although this sort of scare technique has become old hat in Los Angeles, its effectiveness isn't to be discounted. It succeeds at least in setting back each timid and weak start toward arousing citizens from the long, snoring siesta of political indifference and naïvete. To what extent—and how soon—there will emerge the down-to-the-citizen, doorbell-pushing, precinct-palavering understanding and practice in practical politics Los Angeles so sorely needs is anyone's guess. But the seeds of the understanding are being sown. They are being sown by the People's Educational Center and N.C.P.A.C., the A.F. L. and C.I.O. political factions, and in the Philbrick report on lobbyists.
Scant publicity has been given this report. It discloses the immense power exercised by paid lobbyists in Sacramento, and describes many well-financed pressure groups from the Los Angeles region.
As awareness of the realities of California politics and local politics spreads, the multitudes of this loose-jointed metropolis will no doubt grow more sophisticated. The pueblo-mindedness which has characterized Los Angeles since its inception may gradually give way to an urban outlook able to assess the realities of local politics.
For Los Angeles is not merely naïve politically. It is still in many respects a hick town hoping for big-league recognition but not quite clear how to crash the gates to big-time participation. With a sports-minded public, it is still limited to bush-league baseball. With an amusement-minded public, it is still without a civic opera or auditorium. The difference between what it is and what it could be can best be demonstrated by the fact that Los Angeles has the finest cemetery in the world and the mangiest zoo.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in adjacent Glendale, "where it's a pleasure to be dead," has everything even a dying Faustus might ask for except "the face that launched a thousand ships." To repair this omission, there are mountains of statuary, mechanical contrivances everywhere for soft weep-music, three quaint little churches—including the Little Church of the Flowers, which serves intermittently as a burial and wedding chapel by the simple expedient of bringing into play, for the latter ceremony, a papier-mâché bell which opens at the yank of a string and releases pent-up doves that flit dutifully over the bridal couple. Forest Lawn boasts "everything in time of sorrow"—one telephone call and all is well. It also boasts the sarcophagus of Aimée Semple McPherson, Los Angeles' great foursquare evangelist, whose home "temple" and subsidiary "gospel missions" still do a flourishing business in a city noted for the variety and eccentricity of its religious sects.
The Griffith Park Zoo, situated not far from an emergency quonset-hut housing project for veterans, is the denial of Forest Lawn's serene affirmation. Human animals may find pleasure in being dead, but other species penned up in Griffith Park find living singularly unrewarding. By comparison with the inhabitants of San Diego's beautiful and extensive zoo, these hapless creatures are neglected and unnoticed. Comparatively few visitors come to make faces at them or throw peanuts, perhaps because the sight is too depressing. Lost in a back canyon of giant, practically treeless Griffith Park, Los Angeles' decimated animal wards seem silent and morose, packed in old, bad-smelling cages, waiting for civic consciousness to awaken to their plight.
If the animals in the zoo are ignored, the reason can probably be found in the fact that other animals surpass them in attention-getting qualities. Statistics show this is particularly true of women and dogs. Los Angeles has an abundance of both. Latest census figures recorded approximately eighty thousand more women than men, with widows and spinsters increasing. The women of Los Angeles range from dowagers and insurance-rich old ladies who have built themselves one of the nation's most lavish feminine social centers, the Wiltshire Ebell Club, to young things ready to try the latest fling in garish costuming displayed in Beverly Hills's zany shops. Mink coats and slacks are a common sight.
Los Angeles womanhood is independent, however, not only in fashions. The League of Women Voters is becoming a political force. Women's clubs abound, providing a speaker's paradise. One organization, the University Women's Club, has led in practicing racial equality by voting into membership a prominent Negro woman physician. Although some of the club's members resigned in a huff at this honest display of democracy, life still throbs at the U.W.'s clubhouse on Hoover Street, and other women's organizations have been made uncomfortable as a result.
Women and labor and ethnic minorities—these are the postwar forces most likely to shape Los Angeles' future. Thus far these three social groups have nothing in common except, in some of their respective circles, a common interest in civic and political progress. Labor is still, for the most part, dedicated to its own goals—increasing union membership and getting higher wages. Los Angeles women have as yet few specific political goals. Their talk is mostly of their ineffectiveness and what they can do to promote for their city and their world a better, wiser way. The ethnic minorities are still understandably self-conscious, self-oriented. But among all of them is beginning to stir a sense of the community.
When this sense of the community emerges, Los Angeles will begin its maturity. Now it is adolescent, with the glandular imbalance of a youngster who has grown too rapidly and wants glamour more than wisdom or enduring strength.
Maury Maverick and Robert E. G. Harris, 'Los Angeles—Rainbow's End'
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