Читать книгу Set the Night on Fire - Mike Davis - Страница 10
ОглавлениеE. P. Thompson, one of the auteurs of the New Left, characterized the 1950s as the “apathetic decade” when people “looked to private solutions to public evils.” “Private ambitions,” he wrote, “have displaced social aspirations. And people have come to feel their grievances as personal to themselves, and, similarly, the grievances of other people are felt to be the affair of other people. If a connection between the two is made, people tend to feel—in the prevailing apathy—that they are impotent to effect any change.”1 1960 will always be remembered as the birth year of a new social consciousness that repudiated this culture of moral apathy fed by resigned powerlessness. “Our political task,” wrote the veteran pacifist A. J. Muste that year, “is precisely, in Martin Buber’s magnificent formulation, ‘to drive the plowshare of the normative principle into the hard soil of political reality.’”2 The method was direct action, nonviolent but unyielding.
First behind the plow were Black students in the South, whose movement would name itself the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The lunch counter sit-ins in February began as quiet protests but soon became thunderclaps heralding the arrival of a new, uncompromising generation on the frontline of the battle against segregation. The continuing eruption of student protest across the South reinvigorated the wounded movement led by Dr. King and was echoed in the North by picket lines, boycotts and the growth of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).3 Separately, the Nation of Islam grew rapidly, and the powerful voice of Malcolm X began to be heard nationally. Meanwhile, as the United States continued to install ICBMs in Europe, the growing revolt against nuclear weapons, as historian Lawrence Wittner put it, “signaled an end to the Cold War lockstep among sizable segments of the American population … the peace movement by 1960 had been reestablished as a significant social movement.” The same could be said for student activism and radical scholarship at some of the major Cold War universities. Progressive campus organizations such as SLATE at UC Berkeley (the precursor of the Free Speech Movement) and VOICE at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor dramatically broke the ice of student apathy, while journals like Studies on the Left (founded in 1959 in Madison) and New University Thought (Ann Arbor/Detroit 1960) gave voice to what everyone was soon calling the “New Left.”
A young generation was waking up in Southern California as well, despite the stunted character of political and intellectual life in most of the region, and the year 1960 previewed the social forces, ideas, and issues that would coalesce into “movements” over the course of the next decade. This chapter follows month by month the emergence of a new agenda for social change and introduces some of the key actors and organizations. “Agenda” in this case meant something more than a simple menu of issues and causes. Indeed, events and protests in 1960 also delineated the “issue of issues”: the dynamic tectonics of racial segregation that were shaping the future of Southern California. With the benediction of federal lenders and the full complicity of the real estate and construction industries, racially exclusive suburbanization was creating a monochromatic society from which Blacks were excluded and in which Chicanos had only a marginal place. The legal victories for civil rights won in the late 1940s and early 1950s had yet to yield edible fruit. In a booming regional economy, irrigated by billions of dollars of military spending, minorities possessed little more than low-skill toeholds in the region’s three major industries: aerospace/electronics, motion pictures, and construction. Los Angeles schools, meanwhile, segregated more students than any Southern city, and as far as most residents of South Central L.A. were concerned, the LAPD might as well have flown a Confederate battle flag outside its new “glass house.”
January: The US Commission on Civil Rights
In the summer of 1959 a psychologist named Emory Holmes bought a house in the northeastern San Fernando Valley from an engineer known only as “Mr. T.” The transaction would have been utterly unremarkable except that Holmes was Black, “Mr. T” was white, and the home was in a previously all-white neighborhood in Pacoima. According to an investigation by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Holmes’ family was welcomed in the following manner:
—A group of people with spades and shovels started digging up their garden, claiming a local paper had advertised a free plant giveaway.
—A drinking water company started delivery—though no order had been received for same.
—A television set repairman called at 11 pm one night without having been sent for.
—A taxi came to the house at 11:30 pm one night without having been called.
—An undertaker called at the home to pick up the body of the dead homeowner.
—Delivery of a Los Angeles newspaper was stopped, without any request from the Holmes.
—A veterinary doctor came to the house, saying that he was answering a call for a sick horse.
—A sink repairman paid an unsolicited home call.
—A termite exterminator showed up, though not requested.
—An unsolicited pool company agent called to install a pool.
—Someone painted on the walls of the house the epithet: “Black cancer here. Don’t let it spread!”
—Tacks were found in the driveway.
—A window was broken by a pellet from an air gun.
—Rocks were thrown at the house.
—A second undertaker showed up.
All of this happened during the first two weeks, and the harassment (the Holmeses cited one hundred separate incidents) continued relentlessly for months. However, they were luckier than the seller, “Mr. T,” whom white homeowners tracked in vigilante fashion. He was fired from his job as a direct result of the sale, and the LAPD had to be called in when a demonstration in front of his new home in Northridge threatened to turn into a mini-riot. Although “massive resistance” to integration was not an organized movement as in the South, it was a spontaneous reality everywhere in L.A.’s booming “Ozzie and Harriet” suburbs. As the NAACP underscored in testimony to the US Commission on Civil Rights on January 25 and 26, 1960, more than 10,000 people, many of them workers at the new GM Van Nuys Assembly Plant, were squeezed into the segregated Black part of Pacoima. Meanwhile there were only “15 to 18 Negro families [presumably all undergoing experiences similar to the Holmes family] in the entire San Fernando Valley, living in so-called “white neighborhoods.” Although apartment owners in the valley groaned about high vacancy rates, only one was found who was willing to rent to Blacks.4
In its Los Angeles hearings, the Commission on Civil Rights, established by Congress in 1957 after the Montgomery bus boycott, focused principally on the housing problems of minorities.5 Mayor Norris Poulson welcomed the commission with the assurance that Los Angeles had an “excellent record in the treatment of minority groups and in the lack of intergroup tension or friction.” He also patted himself on the back for establishing an advisory committee on human relations whose major priority was to work with minority newcomers “to raise their appreciation for sanitation.”6 After this comic relief, the commission accepted several hundred pages of dense reports and two days of testimony about housing segregation from the Community Relations Conference of Southern California, an umbrella group that included the NAACP, CORE, the Urban League, the Jewish Labor League, American Friends Service Committee, and the LA County Commission on Human Relations.
Assembly member Augustus Hawkins, the sole representative of Black Los Angeles (13.7 percent of the city’s population) in any elected office, told commissioners that because Blacks were unable to buy homes financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), growth was accommodated through the widespread construction of rental units or second homes on single-family lots, resulting in overcrowding and blight. He also talked about hugely discriminatory fire and car insurance rates where such insurance was even available in inner-city areas. Eloise Kloke, regional director of the President’s Committee on Government Contracts, testified about the racial consequences of the suburbanization of employment: “We find where Government contractors are located in geographical areas in which Negroes are unable to obtain housing, Negroes are found within the work force not at all or in very small numbers.” In a submission, the Community Relations Conference cited the example of a medium-sized LA manufacturer that relocated to Placentia in Orange County. A single Black employee had succeeded in buying a home in the area, only to have vandals break into his house, cut up all the carpets and pour cement in the plumbing. This was soon followed by a Molotov cocktail hurled against the front window.7
The definitive presence at the hearings, however, was Loren Miller, publisher of the California Eagle and the nation’s leading legal expert on housing discrimination.8 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Miller had won a stunning series of legal victories—including (with Thurgood Marshall) the landmark case of Shelley v. Kraemer before the Supreme Court—that had overthrown the legality of the restrictive covenants that excluded Blacks, but also sometimes Chicanos and Jews, from more than 90 percent of housing tracts in Los Angeles. But these constitutional victories, Miller emphasized, so far had not opened a single suburb to Black homebuyers or altered the relentlessly discriminatory practices of realtors, developers, and savings and loan institutions. He told the commission of a study by FHA housing analyst Belden Morgan in 1954 that found that “approximately 3,000 of the 125,000 housing units built from 1950 to 1954 in the Los Angeles area were open to non-Caucasian occupancy.” More recent research by the Los Angeles Urban League concluded that less than 1 percent of new housing between 1950 and 1956 was occupied by minorities. In addition, “most of the housing that is open to non-Caucasian occupancy is located in subdivisions built expressly for Negro occupancy.” Miller reminded commissioners the contemporary ghetto was as much the deliberate product of federal policy as the organic result of local racism. Since the 1930s the FHA had underwritten exclusive practices and was continuing to subsidize mortgages in racially-restricted developments while allowing lenders to limit loans in minority areas.9
The result of government-sanctioned discrimination during the 1950s had been the creation of a super-ghetto: 75 percent of Los Angeles County’s Black population concentrated in the metropolitan core between Olympic Boulevard on the north and Artesia Boulevard on the south.10 Alameda Street, the old highway and railroad route to the harbor, was called the “cotton curtain” because Blacks could not live or be seen at night in any of the dozen or so industrial suburbs to its east. A clan of white gangs, the “Spookhunters,” patrolled racial boundaries, attacking Blacks with seeming impunity. Meanwhile the western edge of Black residence was roughly Figueroa Street on the south, but northward, at Manchester Boulevard, it began to bulge westward, ultimately as far as Crenshaw in the latitude of Slauson Avenue. South Central L.A. also had an internal physical and socioeconomic boundary: The Harbor Freeway, parallel to Main Street and completed as far south as 124th Street by 1958, “had created a massive structural and symbolic barrier between the Eastside and Westside [Black] communities.”11 By 1960, the old “main stem” on Central Avenue was in decline, middle-class Blacks were moving as far west as Crenshaw, and Western Avenue had become the business and entertainment axis of the Black community.
Thus Black Los Angeles expanded, with continuous friction and controversy, through white flight and “block busting” on its southern and western peripheries where the housing stock dated primarily from 1910 to 1940. The chief hot spots of white resistance were the city of Compton (south of Watts), where a racial transition had already begun, and all-white Inglewood, where police and residents were mobilized to defend the city’s eastern and northern boundaries against Black homebuyers. (Only the Crenshaw area, with its mixture of Jews, Japanese-Americans and Blacks, qualified as a true multiracial community.)
Apart from South Central Los Angeles, there were also historical Black neighborhoods in Pasadena, Santa Monica, Venice, Long Beach, and Monrovia in the San Gabriel Valley—each of which could be accurately described as a ghetto. The rest of the older secondary cities—like Torrance, Hawthorne, Burbank and, above all, Glendale—were zero-Black-population “sundown towns,” where the local police enforced illegal curfews on Black shoppers and commuters. Meanwhile in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, tens of thousands of acres of citrus groves had been bulldozed over the previous decade to create huge new commuter dormitories such as West Covina (which by 1960 already had a population of 50,300) and La Puente (pop. 25,000). It was a mirror image of the segregated San Fernando Valley, as were the hundreds of racially exclusive new home tracts in the southwest (the South Bay) and southeast quadrants of LA County.12 According to John Buggs of the LA County Commission on Human Relations, segregation was rapidly increasing: between 1950 and 1959 the percentage of nonwhites in thirty-four of the fifty-four county cities had declined; in twelve cases, the decrease was absolute.13
While realtors and white homeowners within the Los Angeles city limits confronted the threat—albeit still very small in 1960—that growing minority political clout might eventually pry open housing markets, the county suburbs were building invulnerable walls through home rule. Indeed, as political scientist Gregory Weiher illustrated in a 1991 study, after restrictive covenants had been ruled unconstitutional, the separate municipal incorporation of new suburbs (a practice upheld by California and federal courts) became the most effective method for excluding minorities.14 Lakewood was the pioneer. Faced with annexation by Long Beach in 1953–54, this mega-development of 17,500 new homes, Southern California’s counterpart to the Levittowns erected on the East Coast, had struck a deal to lease municipal services (police, fire, libraries, water, sewage, and so on) from the county. The so-called Lakewood Plan, subsequently reinforced by a law allowing municipalities to keep a portion of locally generated sales taxes, spurred thirty similar incorporations between 1954 and 1970. Through their control over land use, these “contract cities” could ensure residential homogeneity (for example, by excluding apartment construction), while attracting sales tax generators like malls and auto dealerships that enabled many to eliminate local property taxes.
“Promiscuous incorporations,” wrote two UCLA researchers, also prevented “the equalization of tax resources among local units of government. Areas possessing high property valuations, such as Commerce, Industry, and Irwindale, have incorporated as cities and have sought to withdraw from arrangements that distributed their taxable resources so as to assist less favored communities.” The Lakewood Plan quickly became the utopia of pioneer “public choice” theorists like Charles Tiebout, Robert Warren and Vincent Ostrom, who argued that a large number of competing local governments created a “quasi-market” that optimized consumer choice in public goods. Residents could, in theory, “vote with their feet” for the municipality with the best schools, the lowest taxes and the highest likely appreciation of home values. But minorities had no “foot vote” and could rarely use home equity to buy up into preferred housing; thus their capacity for wealth accumulation through homeownership was extremely limited. The political fragmentation of metropolitan Los Angeles, in other words, was an insidious and largely unassailable form of disfranchisement; one member of a 1959–60 commission studying Southern California’s urban issues aptly called it “apartheid.”15
February: Don’t Mess with Lena
At the beginning of February four Black college freshmen reignited a faltering Southern civil rights movement by sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and politely trying to order coffee and donuts.16 Two weeks later, as the sit-in protests spread wildfire-like across the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia, Lena Horne and her husband Lennie Hayton stopped by the Luau restaurant in Beverly Hills for a late-night meal with Lena’s old friend Kay Thompson, a big band singer who had recently won new fame with her Eloise children’s books (modeled after Thompson’s goddaughter, Liza Minnelli). Decorated like a stage set for South Pacific, the Luau on North Rodeo Drive was a popular hangout for the movie colony.
In the midst of a two-week run at the Cocoanut Grove, the 46-year-old Horne was one of the most famous entertainers in the world. Queen of the nightclub circuit, she moved seamlessly between the Moulin Rouge in Paris and the Sands in Vegas, thrilling audiences with her definitive interpretations of American standards. Since her teenage days in the chorus line at the Cotton Club in New York, moreover, her spectacularly integrated love life (including liaisons with Joe Louis, Orson Welles, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra, among others) had been the bread and butter of Hollywood gossip columns.
But despite occasional exposés, few white Americans realized that this regal woman—who never forgave Sinatra for once being rude to Eleanor Roosevelt—was also a militant Black progressive whose close friends included Paul Robeson and Harlem Communist leader Ben Davis. Because of her stubborn refusal to disavow these connections, she had been blacklisted by MGM, cheated out of Broadway roles that been written for her, and only appeared on television because Ed Sullivan, otherwise a noted conservative, had been willing to battle his network bosses. Within the year she would be fundraising for the young Southern activists behind the sit-ins, now coalesced as SNCC.
Back at the Luau, Thompson was late, so Hayton went to phone her while Horne waited for the food. At a neighboring table, a few feet below hers and hidden by a screen, a drunken 38-year-old white businessman named Harvey St. Vincent was impatient with the service. A waiter explained that he would be back as soon as he had served “Miss Horne’s table.” (Her fifteen-year marriage to Hayton, a white arranger, was still something of a public secret.) St. Vincent exploded. “Where is Lena Horne, anyway? She’s just another nigger.” When she leaned over the partition and confronted him, he answered, “Well, all niggers look alike to me and that includes you.” According to one account, he also called her a “nigger bitch.”
Horne promptly hurled an ashtray at him, followed by a storm lamp and various other objects. St. Vincent was coldcocked, dazed and bleeding when the police arrived. Horne was fiercely unapologetic, and her defense of Black dignity was applauded in some mainstream newspapers as well as the Negro press. A few weeks later the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. visited LA churches to extoll nonviolence as “the most potent weapon of oppressed people in a struggle for freedom,” but not a few civil rights activists must have wondered if the occasional flying ashtray wasn’t a good idea as well.17
March: The Jive with Jobs
Johnny Otis, the “godfather of rhythm and blues,” seemed to be everywhere in 1960. He had his own weekly TV and radio shows, a famous band that showcased local talent, and a popular column in the Sentinel, the largest of the city’s three Black newspapers. In the early Fifties, however, his integrated concerts and dances had become the target of such intense LAPD harassment that he was forced to move them to an obscure venue in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. As an inadvertent result, the El Monte Legion Stadium became legendary as the birthplace of Chicano R&B. In 1958 “Willie and the Hand Jive” hit the top ten, introducing Otis to a new generation of teenagers. All the same, he was almost as ubiquitous as a civil rights activist as he was as a musician, songwriter, and R&B impresario. Recently he had picketed a downtown Woolworth’s in solidarity with the Southern lunch counter sit-ins, and he would soon file as a candidate in the race for the Sixty-Third District of the California State Assembly, with the support of Loren Miller’s Eagle.18
On the evening of March 14, he was at home with his four children, playing chess with a friend. His dog began to bark, and then the phone rang. “Listen, you nigger, if you keep on writing about niggers taking white men’s jobs, this is just a sample of what you’re going to get. Look out on your lawn.” There was a burning cross, Mississippi style. Otis grabbed a shotgun. Meanwhile in Compton, fifteen minutes later, rocks shattered the front windows of John T. Williams’s home, terrifying his three children. Williams, one of the great unsung heroes of the 1960s labor movement, was a Teamsters activist who had taken up the cause of Andrew Saunders, a veteran union member and beer truck driver recently arrived from Newark. Under the Teamsters constitution Saunders had the right to transfer into Los Angeles Beer Local 203 (and had been assured so over the phone), but when officials discovered he was Black, they sent him home. The Teamsters’ beer locals (bottlers as well as drivers) were already notorious for their opposition to Anheuser-Busch’s concession, after a nine-month consumer boycott by the NAACP, to allow Blacks to apply for jobs at its huge Van Nuys brewery.19 Williams, along with two other Black Teamsters, Richard Morris and Willie Herrón, strongly spoke up for Saunders at union hearings, which Otis attended and then wrote about in his Sentinel column. A few days before the attacks on Otis’s and Williams’s homes, Saunders received a death threat from the “White Citizens’ Council.”20 Although Saunders, unlike Emory Holmes, had the backing of courageous activists, his case demonstrated that resistance to equal employment opportunity in Los Angeles could become just as violent as opposition to open housing.
The jobs battlefield, however, was more complex than in the case of housing. Minorities sometimes had to fight unions as well as employers, and victories often proved hollow, as when Blacks and Chicanos were hired only to be segregated in low-skill and dangerous jobs. For example, there were approximately 1,500 Black autoworkers in L.A. circa 1960, but less than 40 craftsmen. The only Black studio employees were janitors and messengers. Even in factories or firms where minorities held skilled jobs, they were almost never seen in clerical or sales positions—an iron ceiling that especially affected minority women. Likewise, in public employment—the Postal Service, for example—integration tended to stop at the managerial level. Minority job markets, moreover, were ethnically segmented. Blacks were janitors, Mexicans dishwashers; Mexicans had an important foothold in the freight industry, Blacks none. Although their numbers were roughly equal in auto, rubber, building labor, meatpacking and the longshore, Mexicans, who had entered the manufacturing workforce earlier than Blacks, were more likely to hold skilled jobs or belong to craft unions. On the other hand, Blacks constituted a much larger percentage of the civil service workforce.21
Statutory relief was stubbornly elusive. In 1946, after Congress refused to renew the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), Augustus Hawkins had mobilized councils of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and chapters of the NAACP to support an initiative outlawing job discrimination by both employers and unions. Proposition 11, denounced by business groups, the Farm Bureau and the Times, was rejected by a stunning two-thirds majority of white voters.22 (Twenty years later the same proportion of the white vote would strike down the state’s new fair housing law.) Three further attempts to pass a law failed in the state senate. Meanwhile the Los Angeles City Council in the 1950s repeatedly rejected proposed municipal FEPC ordinances, although a major effort by a coalition of Jewish, Black and Mexican-American groups in 1958 came within one vote of success. They were opposed by the Chamber of Commerce, the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, and, again, the Times, whose political editor, Kyle Palmer, linked the proposed ordinance with the union shop as minority attacks on majority democracy.23
Without government oversight of hiring practices, only unions had the power to keep the door open to workers of color, but the 1949 national purge of the left wing of the CIO had been locally disastrous, removing many of Los Angeles’s most forceful advocates of fair employment and housing. Although the Packinghouse Workers’ large LA local remained a paragon of equality, Jim Crow had undiminished support in major craft unions such as the Machinists (who represented Lockheed and Vultee Aircraft workers), the super-nepotistic motion picture crafts, and the skilled construction trades. The Oil Workers, for their part, refused to implement their own nondiscriminatory constitution. Even the San Pedro local of the otherwise-left-wing International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was accused of systematic discrimination.24 As for the rapidly growing and increasingly powerful Teamsters, A. Philip Randolph, the legendary leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and architect of the wartime March on Washington Movement, had told a 1958 conference in Los Angeles that the conduct of its locals made Southern California “one of the worst spots in the United States for racial discrimination by unions.”25
Finally in 1959 there was a dramatic breakthrough in Sacramento, when “Big Daddy” Jesse Unruh, a Los Angeles state assembly member who chaired the crucial Ways and Means Committee, threw his weight behind FEPC legislation with the full support of recently elected Governor Pat Brown. The bill that Gus Hawkins and his Bay Area counterpart Byron Rumford had been pushing uphill for fourteen frustrating years finally become law. Unruh, a dirt-poor white Texan who had enrolled in USC after leaving the Navy in 1945, was brilliant, ruthless and genuinely committed to equal rights.26 After passage of the FEPC, confident that he could prevail over the conservative Senate, he authored a bill in his own name that straightforwardly banned discrimination by “all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.” The NAACP feared the bill was too radical to have any chance of passage, but Unruh, in a masterful demonstration of how to wield power in Sacramento, won the day. Still, it remained to be seen whether the nascent state FEPC could grow the teeth needed to actually enforce the new laws.27
Meanwhile the biggest industry in Los Angeles County was bleeding tens of thousands of entry-level semiskilled jobs. Blue-collar workers everywhere felt the tremors of the so-called Eisenhower Recession of 1958, but in Southern California the primary reason for layoffs was the advent of the Space Age. The metamorphosis of airframe manufacture, with its Detroit-like assembly lines, into the high-tech aerospace industry created an insatiable demand for engineers and technicians while sharply reducing the need for welders and assemblers. The transition was wrenching. Between 1957 and 1963, 80,000 workers were laid off in aircraft assembly while 90,000 new jobs were created in electronics and missiles. The rapid change in skill sets and required education raised new “nonracial” barriers to minority entry into the industry, as did the seniority system protecting older whites. Although minority engineers and technicians now faced few obstacles to employment (indeed they were migrating into L.A. from all parts of the country), it was little solace to those who had been fighting so long for a place on a North American or Lockheed assembly line. Affirmative action’s time had not yet come, and Black workers found themselves chasing a mirage of jobs about to be restructured, eliminated by automation or moved to segregated suburbs.
April: Game Theory
Santa Monica in 1960 was still the three-shift company town of Douglas Aircraft. The huge factory complex at the Santa Monica Airport, which at its peak in 1943 had employed 44,000 workers, was the bread and butter of the city where Route 66 met the Pacific Ocean. Douglas was also the mother (the Air Force was the father) of “Project RAND,” a secret weapons planning and strategy group that after the war moved out on its own to become the RAND Corporation. Rand’s core mission for the Air Force was to make nuclear warfare, including a possible preemptive strike on the Soviet Union, feasible. To accomplish this it was given the resources to hire the best minds in mathematics and decision theory and put them to work in an atmosphere that was casually academic rather than oppressively military or corporate. Indeed, Albert Wohlstetter, RAND’s meister of nuclear strategy, encouraged his younger colleagues, such as 29-year-old Daniel Ellsberg, to embrace the exhilaratingly Southern Californian lifestyle. RANDites surfed, sailed, listened to jazz, sent their kids to progressive private schools, collected contemporary art, and lived in modernist “Case Study” homes in the hills. At their own Laurel Canyon home, the Wohlstetters regularly entertained such stimulating company as Saul Bellow, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Mary McCarthy.
But these were just the sunny fringe benefits of a RAND job; it was the work itself that provided a unique, addictive and bizarre excitement. Sworn to the highest level of secrecy, the RAND people played Armageddon for weeks and months at a time. These Strangelovian games were organized around actual or probable crises—for instance, a Soviet blockade of Berlin or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan—with the goal of clarifying the criteria for the use of nuclear weapons. New mathematical models were used to explore the logical structure of strategic decision-making. “By the mid-1950s,” writes journalist Alex Abella in his history, “RAND became the world center for game theory.” John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, John Nash—the giants of “rational choice” and game theoretics, worked at RAND during the 1950s in the quixotic quest for a solution to the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” (a problem first formulated by RAND researchers in 1950). The essence of the dilemma was that two rational opponents might choose not to cooperate, even if doing so could avoid nuclear war. Daniel Ellsberg, one of many at RAND struggling with the grim implications of game theory, became so pessimistic about the future that he didn’t bother to subscribe to the life insurance offered by the corporation.28 The Cuban Missile Crisis was just around the corner.
Meanwhile another game, “the Game” in fact, was being played down the street from RAND in the brick three-story building that housed the Synanon Foundation. Its founder, Chuck Dederich, a former executive and recovered alcoholic, had been very active in AA, but became disillusioned by its refusal to help drug addicts as well as by what he regarded as the collusive and formulaic nature of its group sessions. Synanon in contrast was a racially integrated therapeutic commune organized around hours-long group confrontations, emotionally explosive and often terrifying to newcomers, that aimed to destroy self-deception while fostering a tough, “intimate honesty” between participants. No hint of violence was tolerated in the Game, but participants were otherwise free to use language as a sledgehammer. Dederich, who was both the autocrat and loving father inside 1351 Oceanfront Avenue, was frank about the perils of the process. “The Game is a big emotional dance and it’s like a dream. It’s random. Some dreams are nightmares.”29
In the event, Synanon seemed to work, as former addicts successfully helped newcomers through the torture of cold turkey withdrawal, and hundreds of vulnerable people, ranging from celebrities to San Quentin parolees, managed to live together in some harmony. In the later 1960s, the community would turn to activism. “Synanon residents marched with Cesar Chavez,” recalled activist-historian Frank Bardacke, “boycotted non-union table grapes, and supported a variety of leftish causes. The foundation was committed to environmentalism.”30 But whether seen as therapy or an alternative way of life, Synanon was an anathema to civic leaders who feared that Santa Monica would be deluged with addicts rather than tourists. They prosecuted, sued and then re-sued the foundation for years, with Synanon always winning a last-minute reprieve from eviction, but never exoneration from accusations of being a cult or criminal conspiracy. In contrast, the city council had no qualms about pipe-smoking RANDites sitting around a seminar table and quietly discussing how many millions of casualties would be “acceptable” in the event of a nuclear exchange.
May: The Independent Student Union
On May 2, just minutes before his long-delayed appointment in San Quentin’s gas chamber, Caryl Chessman’s lawyers made a final, desperate appeal to Federal Judge Louis Goodman in San Francisco to stay the execution. Goodman reluctantly agreed to hear their arguments and asked his secretary to quickly get Warden Fred Dickson on the phone. The secretary dialed the wrong number. By the time he reached the warden, Chessman’s face was already turning purple from cyanide fumes and Dickson refused to stop the process. The Los Angeles Times, which had earlier lauded the gas chamber as a “sanitary disposal mechanism,” termed Chessman’s execution a “breath of fresh air,” but millions around the world thought it was miscarriage of justice.31
Since his original conviction in 1948 for kidnapping (a capital crime under California’s Little Lindbergh Law), Chessman, representing himself, had won a sensational series of last-minute reprieves from the gas chamber and published a best-selling memoir, Cell 2455, Death Row which was made into a 1955 film. Although he protested his innocence to the last breath, the real issue in the case became the barbarous nature of the death penalty itself. After losing a last appeal in 1959, Chessman was supposed to die the following February, but Governor Brown, stalked by young protestors (including his own seminarian son Jerry) and inundated with clemency appeals from around the world, blinked at the last moment and stayed the execution for two months. This only unleashed fury from the Right as Republican legislators, seeing an opportunity to revenge themselves for their epic defeat in 1958, called for the governor’s impeachment. Brown, worried about collateral damage to his proposed Master Plan for the colleges and upcoming State Water System bonds, punted the issue to the legislature in the form of a bill to abolish the death penalty. He knew it had no chance of passage.
The Chessman protests in February coincided with the Southern sit-ins, while the execution in March was followed within two weeks by the so-called “HUAC riots” in San Francisco, when police used batons and fire hoses to violently disperse Berkeley students (including Albert Einstein’s granddaughter) peacefully demonstrating against hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Meanwhile, the Cuban Revolution was turning leftward (in March President Eisenhower had given permission to start training exiles for an invasion), and the international “Ban the bomb” movement was burgeoning (over Easter 100,000 Britons rallied in support of the Aldermaston peace march). Together these events catalyzed the birth of a new student activism on California campuses, with Berkeley, of course, as the nominal capital.32
In Southern California the foremost example was LA City College, where a spontaneous anti–death penalty rally in the winter, the first protest on campus in twelve years, led to the formation of a multi-issue activist group, the Independent Student Union.33 While continuing to work on the Chessman case, the LACC students quickly joined the CORE-coordinated demonstrations at local Kress and Woolworth’s stores, and by August they were sponsoring three weekly picket lines. On May 7, after extensive leafleting to unions and on campuses across L.A., the ISU led a nine-hour-long “Ban the bomb” march of 300 people from MacArthur Park to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—a distance of seventeen miles—where Nobel laureate Linus Pauling spoke. (The public that spring was skittish about the Bomb. Two weeks after the march, a Los Angeles company announced that it had stopped selling trampolines [a recent fad] and was moving instead into the more lucrative market for fallout shelters.) Meanwhile a rally of 300 sit-in supporters at Exposition Park in late May led to the formation of the Southern California Committee on Integration, with Walter Davis, who was organizing an ISU group at Cal State LA, as one of the leaders. In late October, still picketing the retails chains every Saturday, the LACC group mobilized 200 protestors outside a tribute dinner for a local member of HUAC.34
This was an impressive record of protest, especially for students on a junior college campus at the end of the 1950s. But LACC was an ethnic salad bowl of inner-city students, and, despite a reactionary administration, perhaps the most likely campus for the inauguration of a new generation of protest. A nearby coffeehouse, Pogo’s Swamp, provided a home for freewheeling political debate under the gentle eye of its manager, Levi Kingston, an LA native (from the Pueblo del Rio projects) who had seen the world as a merchant seaman. The ISU, unlike later student groups, was solidly multiracial, and two of its most charismatic leaders, both South Central locals, had recently joined the Communist Party: Carl Bloice, the speaker at the first Chessman rally, and Franklin Alexander, the ISU president. Bloice would soon move to the Bay Area and eventually become the editor of the Peoples’ World, while Alexander, after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, would become a leader of the Che-Lumumba Club (joined by Angela Davis in 1968). Other ISUers, if not party members, had heroic red diapers. Paul Rosenstein, a key figure in the LA Peace and Freedom Party in 1967–68 and much later mayor of Santa Monica, was the son of a renowned International Brigader. Likewise, Ellen Kleinman (Broms), soon to be a Freedom Rider, was the daughter of the last American prisoner released from Franco’s prisons.
Two leaders of the future Black Power movement were also habitués of Pogo’s Swamp. Ron Everett, whom Ellen Kleinman remembers whistling Beethoven’s Ninth on picket lines, was vice president of the LACC student body (the next year he would become its first Black president) and a spellbinding orator. Intensely interested in African languages and cultures, he went on to UCLA, and then, as Malauna Ron Karenga, founded the controversial US organization. His roommate, Ed Bullins, became a celebrated avant-garde playwright and a central figure in the Black Arts Movement. (He also served a stint as minister of culture in the Black Panther Party.) However short lived, the ISU was both a stepping-stone to the civil rights battles of 1961–63 and a sign that the anti-communist ice age was beginning to thaw on campuses.
June: Fire Rings
A specter haunted Los Angeles in the summer of 1960: beach fire rings. Captain Robert Richards of the Venice Division of the LAPD warned the press that the five rings at Playa Del Rey Beach would “sooner or later” be the scene of a riot. He cited instances of unsupervised teenagers gathered around beach fires, drinking and necking. When told to leave, he reported, “they become angry and vandalize property.” The county had already taken action against such anarchy by closing its beaches at night. Surf fishermen protested, and sheriffs replied that they would only enforce the law against “loiterers,” that is to say, juveniles and young adults.35 Los Angeles, it seemed, had too many beaches, too many deserted roads, too many spaces where young libidos and imaginations ran wild. Black and Chicano kids, of course, were used to being denied access to public space, but white teenagers were now seen as a comparable problem, not as individual, alienated delinquents like those depicted in Rebel without a Cause, but as rowdy crowds and defiant mobs.
Captain Richards’s warning seemed prescient when in August 3,000 young people in San Diego, angry at the closure of the only local drag strip, blocked off a main street to race their ’40 Fords and ’57 Chevys. The arriving police were greeted with a hail of soft drink bottles and rocks; it took baton charges, tear gas, and Highway Patrol reinforcements to finally quell the hot-rodders. One hundred sixteen were arrested. The city’s ultra-conservative daily paper immediately discerned “a family relationship” between the riot, the Southern sitins, and the supposed targeting of youth by Communists. According to one syndicated columnist, the Reds were also encouraging kids to organize “sex clubs” on their high school campuses. Los Angeles meanwhile braced for its turn, and in 1961 ten so-called “teen riots” erupted in a six-month period, three of them involving thousands of youth. These were not trivial events. The subsequent political activism and youth culture of the sixties would be built upon this substratum of rebellion against curfews, closed beaches, disciplinary vice principals, draft boards and racist cops. Indeed, spontaneous anti-authoritarianism would define the temper of an entire generation.
July: The Democrats Come to Town
The 1960 Democratic National Convention at the new LA Memorial Sports Arena is best remembered for the dramatic battle between Kennedy and Johnson for the nomination, both of whom were almost upstaged by an emotional last-minute rally for Adlai Stevenson. But it was also the occasion of a bitter breach between Jesse Unruh, who had already endorsed JFK, and Governor Pat Brown, who was running as a favorite-son candidate.36 (Henceforth, every California Democrat had to choose which camp they belonged to: Unruh or Brown.) It was also a unique opportunity for the nuclear disarmament and civil rights movements to strut their stuff on television and, for the latter, to directly confront the candidates about their plans to dismantle segregation.
On July 10, the day before the opening of the Convention, 3,000 supporters of a nuclear test ban marched from MacArthur Park to Exposition Park, to hear Nobelist Linus Pauling, fresh from an interrogation by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and General Hugh Hester. Hester had won a Silver Star in the First World War and was a quartermaster to MacArthur in the Second, but the nuclear arms race, he told the crowd, had turned him into an “atomic pacifist.” The sponsoring groups included the American Friends Service Committee, which later during the Vietnam War would play an inestimable role in supporting conscientious objectors and draft resisters; SANE, the largest mainstream peace group, internally wracked since May by accusations that it had been infiltrated by Communists; and the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs, the reliable old guard in any peace or civil rights demonstration. A new group also announced itself at the demonstration: the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth wing of the Socialist Workers Party (the main Trotskyist group in the United States). YSA members would become indefatigable, if sometimes sectarian, builders of the local and national anti-war movements from 1965 onward.
The big event, however, was a rally of 7,500 people at the Shrine Auditorium, which Loren Miller described in the Eagle as the largest Negro political gathering since the 1940s. The Eagle had polled a sample of the community, finding universal opposition to LBJ and some support for Kennedy. Stevenson, however, remained far and away the most popular choice. When Kennedy arrived at the Shrine, the crowd, which had been jeering the names of Truman and Johnson, continued to boo, very disconcertingly, as he entered the auditorium. In contrast, “tumultuous, whistling standing ovations were given to Senator Hubert Humphrey [far down the list in the delegate count] and later, Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King.” Powell, Harlem’s outlaw congressman, stole the show, as he almost always did with urban Black audiences. After the speeches and lofty promises, 5,000 people marched down Figueroa to the Sports Arena, where Democratic Party chairman Paul Butler declared, “We dedicate ourselves to the elimination of all discriminatory practices at the earliest possible moment without violence.” Black voices chanted, “No! No! Now—not later!”37
August: Moving Mountains and Neighborhoods
In August the California Division of Highways began to excavate the tonnage equivalent of the Panama Canal in the Sepulveda Pass between West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. This segment of the San Diego Freeway—supplanting Sepulveda Boulevard and its infamous “Dead Man’s Curve”—would uncork the worst traffic bottleneck in Southern California and humanize (for a few years at least) the drive between the aerospace plants around LAX and the homes of engineers and technicians in Sherman Oaks and Reseda. If the giant Caterpillar earthmovers were symbols of liberation to middle-class commuters, they had more sinister significance for the communities they divided or destroyed. Ground zero of residential displacement in Southern California was the star-shaped ring of freeways around downtown that sliced the Eastside into half a dozen pieces, consuming 20 percent of its land area and forever enshrouding its playgrounds and schools in carcinogenic pollution. The great stacked interchanges, still engineering wonders of the world in the early 1960s, had been sited on residential and park land to avoid any conflict with adjacent railroad yards or the huge Sears Roebuck distribution center in Boyle Heights. In any event, inner-city residential property was easier to condemn, cheaper to buy and risked less of a political backlash.38
Affluent neighborhoods, on the other hand, had dismaying clout. Although the Division of Highways wanted to construct freeways down Olympic Boulevard, across Beverly Hills, and through Laurel Canyon, wealthy homeowners and celebrities eventually nixed the latter two projects and forced planners to reroute the Santa Monica Freeway southward to avoid country clubs and exclusive white neighborhoods. Instead of tony white Cheviot Hills, “Sugar Hill,” the elite Black neighborhood in West Adams, was sacrificed to the bulldozers, while angry Black and Chicano residents of Santa Monica’s Pico neighborhood protested throughout fall 1960 against the demolition of most of their homes by a final alignment. By its opening in 1965 the Santa Monica Freeway had displaced 15,000 people; all the freeways, perhaps 150,000.39 The priorities of suburban mobility translated into housing disasters for segregated inner-city populations, whose own transport situation simultaneously deteriorated with the extinction of metropolitan rail transit. 1960 was the last full year of operation for Pacific Electric’s famous Red Cars along their remaining route from downtown L.A. to downtown Long Beach. They would trundle down the tracks for the last time in April 1961. The streetcars would disappear a few years later, and their diesel-powered replacements never fully compensated for the loss of faster electric transit routes to work and shopping.
September: Toxic Bohemia
Stinking, muck-filled canals; tired pumpjacks dribbling oil; abandoned bungalows; semi-derelict arcades; kids shooting heroin in the alleys; “hobo jungles”; beatnik coffeehouses; outlaw bikers—Mayor Norris Poulson said it was finally time to clean up Venice, L.A.’s dilapidated Coney Island. The city would begin by chasing the bums off the beach and scouring the toxic canals. The first goal dovetailed nicely with the LAPD’s war on nocturnal beach parties and nonconformists, while the second—so the street maintenance department told the mayor—would just require flushing out the canals with seawater. When the ocean gates were opened, however, the reaction of the seawater with the bacteria and organic matter in the stagnant canals produced, the Times reported, a “vile gas … peeling paint off of many homes and changing colors of others.” Within a few days, the gas had seeped through kitchen and bathroom vents and was discoloring interior walls and furniture. At least 150 homes were damaged, and stunned residents found it difficult to accept official reassurances that chemicals that dissolved paint would not harm their children and pets. They sued the city.40
The gas attack, however, was not an unmitigated disaster. Venice’s toxic pollution raised the costs and slowed the pace of redevelopment, thus keeping rents down and making it the most affordable beach community in California until the early 1970s. Lawrence Lipton’s The Holy Barbarians, published in June 1959, had advertised Venice as the counterpart of San Francisco’s North Beach or Greenwich Village, a paradise of sexual promiscuity, mind-expanding drugs, and stream-of-consciousness poetry. In fact, as John Arthur Maynard shows in his history of the Beats in Southern California, Venice bohemia in the 1950s had never involved more than thirty or forty people, most of whom had passed from the scene by 1960. But Lipton was a superb booster, and the Holy Barbarians became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.41 In the early Sixties the Venice West coffeehouse, owned by John and Anna Haag, became a hub for a growing radical community of artists, folk singers, communist carpenters, runaways, blacklisted writers, war resisters, and, of course, scribblers of all kinds. Police harassment, as we shall see, was unremitting, but so was community resistance. Venice’s new golden age was still to come.
October: The Immovable Object
This month local American Federation of Teachers leader Henry Zivitz accused the LA County Board of Education of blatant discrimination for refusing to assign or transfer Black teachers to schools in majority white areas. “Our present policy,” he asserted, “helps to perpetuate a de facto segregation of teachers to the degree that in vast areas … the number of Negro teachers may be counted on the fingers of one hand, while in other areas, the concentration of Negro teachers bears a disturbing relationship to the concentration of Negro students.” His charges echoed those made a year earlier by the Black educator Wilson Riles to the California Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. According to Riles, in the midst of an acute teacher shortage, there were hundreds of fully credentialed Black teachers who could not find jobs. Rather than hiring experienced Blacks to teach in suburban schools, California was giving thousands of provisional credentials to unqualified whites, half of whom had not yet completed college. “Out of the 108 school districts in Los Angeles County,” Riles had reported, “only 12 employ Negroes.” (One district, Hermosa Beach, also refused to hire Jews.)42
As for school integration, the school board insisted that the racial composition of schools was strictly a reflection of housing patterns; in any event, it no longer collected data about such matters. But as UCLA history professor John Caughey would repeatedly point out: “On the residential segregation of minorities largely brought on by court-enforced restrictive covenants, the school authorities superimposed its set of enrollment regulations that implacably resulted in segregated schooling.” Although a small minority of schools would meet latter-day standards of “racial balance,” including Dorsey High School in the Crenshaw District, the overall racial isolation of students was extreme: more than 90 percent of Black students and two-thirds of Mexican students were assigned to segregated schools.43 The campaign for integrated schools in Los Angeles would not be launched until 1962, but the subsequent battle would continue for decades and precipitate an angry white backlash accompanied by flight from public education.
November: Downtown in Question
Contractors in November began pouring concrete for the 50,000-seat Dodger Stadium in what was once the Chavez Ravine barrio. In February the LA Housing Authority, which had originally cleared the area for public housing, had quit-deeded it to the city council, who in turn leased it to Dodger owner Walter O’Malley for ninety-nine years. Epic resistance by residents had ended the previous year when the Arechiga family, the last holdouts, were dragged literally kicking and screaming from their home. Meanwhile the 5,000 or so low-income residents of Bunker Hill, L.A.’s famously noir slum on a hill, awaited the final court decree that would allow the Community Redevelopment Agency to begin condemnations and evictions. Opponents of the project claimed that “the city government by one means or another—mostly illegal and arbitrary—has tried to keep Bunker Hill as a slum for the purpose of keeping prices low” for eminent domain purchases.44 Whatever the case, the hope of transforming the neighborhood and its Victorian cliff dwellings into a shining acropolis of expensive apartment buildings and modernist office towers had become a cargo cult to the old LA dynasties and institutions (including the University of Southern California), whose fortunes were sunk in declining downtown real estate. Their high command was the notorious “Committee of Twenty-Five,” headed by insurance executive Asa Call and backed to the hilt by Times publisher Norman Chandler.
But a future “downtown renaissance” anchored by Bunker Hill redevelopment seemed mortally threatened by the simultaneous ground-breaking of Century City—an immense high-rise office and residential center being constructed by Manhattan mega-developer William Zeckendorf and Aluminum giant Alcoa on the former back lot of Twentieth Century Fox, just south of Beverly Hills. Despite the LA Times–engineered conservative counterrevolution of 1953, economic and cultural power in the eyes of many observers was inexorably shifting away from the WASPish and Republican central city toward the Jewish and more liberal Westside. From the perspective of the old power structure—or at least its reactionary majority—downtown was becoming dangerously encircled by minority neighborhoods, and any weakening of the color line, whether by increased minority political clout and/or residential integration, would only hasten the decline of their power.
December: The Eastside
Among large American cities outside the South, Los Angeles until 1970 had the highest proportion of white Protestants. It was not an accident: Los Angeles industrial boosters in the 1920s did not favor a large “trouble-making” labor force of immigrant Slavs, Jews and Italians as in eastern cities. Employment preference at the new auto and rubber branch plants, as well as in the skilled trades, went to sober working-class Protestants with a mortgage. The exceptions were sweatshop industries like garment, food processing and furniture, as well as fishing and casual labor. In the first half of the twentieth century, the city’s only truly multiethnic districts were San Pedro and Boyle Heights. The latter was L.A.’s “Brooklyn” (even subsuming a neighborhood named Brooklyn Heights) and had no majority ethnicity. The biggest population groups were Jews and Mexicans, followed by Japanese, Blacks, Armenians, Yugoslavs, Italians, Molokans (a persecuted Russian religious sect), and Oakies. In contrast to other parts of L.A. and to nearby white suburbs, Boyle Heights had gloriously integrated schools, playgrounds, swimming pools and even a local cemetery. Edward Roybal, the only Mexican to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council between 1881 and 1985, had been the candidate of a 1949 popular front that included Jews and Blacks, as well as Mexicans.
By 1960, however, the Eastside had decanted most of its Jewish population to the Westside, and Boyle Heights, although still surprisingly diverse, was majority Mexican and would become progressively more so over time. Despite the concerted voter registration efforts over the previous decade of the Community Services Organization (one of its organizers was Cesar Chavez), Los Angeles’s Mexican population (260,389) possessed only marginal political clout. When Roybal went to Congress in 1962, it would be twenty-three years before it again had representation on the city council (Richard Alatorre in 1985).45 Freeway construction had displaced significant numbers of Mexican voters in Roybal’s district, leaving it with a Black political majority who subsequently elected Gilbert Lindsay, the future “emperor of downtown,” and kept him in office for the next twenty-seven years. Moreover, the impact of the Mexican-American vote was sabotaged by political boundaries: 70,000 Eastsiders lived on the other side of Indiana Street (where the pueblo grid became the Jeffersonian) in a county enclave called East Los Angeles.
Unincorporated East L.A. had insignificant influence over a county government administered by five supervisors with huge electoral districts. Incorporated, however, East L.A. might become a power base for Chicano political aspirations—an idea that caught fire in the spring and summer of 1960. One prominent advocate for cityhood, Father William Hutson of the Catholic Youth Organization, even suggested that it might aid the United States in the Cold War: “In a time when Fidelismo is making strides among Latin Americans … the incorporation of East Los Angeles would make the residents better Americans.”46 In August the Committee to Incorporate East Los Angeles, led by attorney Joseph Galea, submitted a petition signed by 7,000 property owners to the LA County Board of Supervisors; in December the board heard contending arguments. The enemies of cityhood included business owners along Atlantic and Whittier Boulevards (majority Anglo) who feared higher taxes, as well as white homeowners from a new tract in the area’s northwest corner (West Bella Vista) who were unwilling to accept Mexican-American dominance.47
What blindsided proponents, however, was the decision of labor leaders, led by IBEW Local 11, to oppose cityhood without even hearing the arguments for incorporation. “We state without qualification,” Galea and another community leader told a press conference, “that COPE, as the strategic right arm of political action for the AFLCIO, has in Southern California consistently supported those interests that have opposed the development of Mexican-American leadership and the expansion of Mexican-American influence. We would like to feel that this is not due to racial bias or prejudice. However, it’s a little hard to try to figure otherwise.”48 In the event, cityhood was narrowly defeated in April 1960.
Ruben Salazar later wrote in the Times: “At a time in Southern California when new cities are popping up like toadstools after a rain, East Los Angeles—which perhaps had better reasons to incorporate than other areas because of its supposed homogeneity—turned down incorporation by 340 votes.”49 (Over the next half century there would be three more closely fought but failed attempts at incorporation.) In contrast to Los Angeles’s Black community, with its national civil rights organizations and incipient alliances with liberals on the Westside, Mexican-Americans (10 percent of the population) had no municipal representation, few allies, and a solitary voice (the young Salazar) in the English-language media. After 1965, ethnic competition for War on Poverty funds destroyed what little remained of the Black-Mexican political alliance. Eastsiders, spurned by city hall and Sacramento, would wander in the political wilderness for the next generation.
