by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Leftist writer Louis Adamic, who lived and worked in San Pedro during most of the Roaring Twenties, could have used more editing in his pocket-sized volume, “The Truth About Los Angeles,” published by devoted Socialist E. Haldeman-Julius as part of the very popular “Little Blue Book” series. That’s because the six part of the work repeats the title of the fifth “Go-Getters From the East,” though the heading actually is appropriate enough.
Here, Adamic observed that “Los Angeles . . . is the most American city in America any way one looks at it” and that “of all the large centers of population in the Republic, Los Angeles is the most representative of it.” He asserted that it represented such archetypes as Upton Sinclair’s fictional character, George F. Babbitt, as well as President Calvin Coolidge, politician William Jennings Bryan, media mogul William Randolph Hearst, movie studio owner Mack Sennett, oil tycoon Edward Doheny, and, with the writer’s tongue firmly planted in cheek, “other such great saints and mighty heroes” of the period.
Moreover, Adamic continued, in his broad-brush, critically snide style:
It is the newest of our great cities, inhabited, for the most part, by folks from the East and the Corn Belt [in the Midwest] who constitute the great majority of our democracy—retired farmers and cross-road grocers and small-town dry-goods and hardware merchants who have worked like slaves and swindled like hell all their lives, made their little stakes, sold out, and come to California to rest, regain their health, and “enjoy” climate and scenery to live in bungalow courts and eat in cafeterias. Many of them are tired out, squeezed dry; many of them were born tired and dry of tired and dry, toil-broken pioneer parents; and now they are in Los Angeles, or somewhere nearby, these pathetic fugitives from the injustice of life . . . They are standardized, conformed souls, safe and sane, the spirit of revolt dead in them, 100 percent and Protestant, moral and cowardly and nervously intolerant.
To add to his unusual expressions, the writer insisted that Los Angeles was not a metropolis, but, rather, “a huge, exaggerated village” and no different than an Iowa or Kansas town “multiplied by 500” and with height-limit business structures. To Adamic, “life in Los Angeles is an extravagant delineation of life in the average up-and-coming American village” and absorbed “the sickly, wan complexion” as well as “the tendency to depress the heart and mind” from such places. Put another way, “it is a vast superstructure of modernism evoked by industrial development, imposed upon a base of Mid-Western traditions.”
These “Folks,” to borrow another Sinclair term, “are old and unwell, in body and spirit—racially fatigued—and their presence alone imparts to the modernism of Los Angeles a gray, sickly color.” Politically involved, these majority residents, “are simple, credulous souls, easily swayed by the smooth-tongued rogues and quacks who appeal for their support . . . in the name of decency and horse-sense, in the name of Jesus Christ and the Old-fashioned Religion.”
As critical as Adamic was of the Angel City, part seven is headed “Why I Like Los Angeles,” and he noted that he was asked by “boost-don’t-knock Angelenos” to “get the hell out of here . . . if I don’t like the place.” He insisted, “I like it fine and intend to stay here awhile longer” and professed that it wasn’t the climate that was a major factor, but that “even the peculiar odor that is a mingling of soul-stench and the various Christian religious perfumes” suited him just fine. He added,
Lord! what a show! . . . My Corona but feebly conveys the fascination that I feel for the scenes and folks of Los Angeles. I would have to travel all over the United States to witness things that I can see here almost any day. Droll, sad, pathetic, sacred, profane things.
To accentuate his point, Adamic wrote that he saw the canine movie star Rin-Tin-Tin appearing as a featured attraction at a Los Angeles church; heard hundreds of peoples yelping like dogs as commanded by a Hindu yogi claiming it would be of benefit to their health; heard a talk on achieving beauty by dieting from an obese lecturer; saw a prominent political figure drunkenly pounding on a bass drum; witnessed a woman picking through garbage behind a cafeteria; observed Catholic priests sailing on Doheny’s yacht; heard jazz played during Christian services; noted a Japanese woman telling Wobblies (International Workers of the World members) to go back to the country from which they came; saw a nun reading a book on marriage; and noticed a minister reading the Haldeman-Julius Monthly, a Socialist magazine.
A unnumbered section in Adamic’s work is titled “Long Beach, Calif.—Yokel’s Paradise” and it treats the growing South Bay city to his potent bland of sarcasm and snappy prose, including the comment that there were up to 90,000 “humans and near-humans” there, comprised of “mostly folks, though—that is, Plain People; the kind that God, in his peculiar ways, loves so well.”
What made Long Beach so notable to the wrier was its combination of Gopher Prairie, the fictional setting of Sinclair Lewis’ recent and very popular novel, Main Street, and Zenith, which was the metropolis in another of Lewis’ 1920s works, Babbitt, with the coastal city’s “fourth-rate Coney Island [the Pike] for a bit of sickly color, and a bum suggestion of Atlantic City for a dash of class. More prose color was applied so that “the heathen, mirthful surf of the Pacific laps at its front while for its background the Lord has put there Signal Hill” and its highly productive oil deposits [at this time, Walter P. Temple was drilling there].
The Pike was given the Adamic treatment with its juxtaposition of “merry-go-rounds, fortune-tellers’ booths, side shows, peep shows, leg shows and freak shows” with “the Folks who sit and talk and chew and knit” and who were “tired, unwell people, bleached, faded souls, fugitive from the injustice of life, from work and duty.” It was in Long Beach, he claimed that “they have as much opportunity to follow their mad hedonistic purpose as anywhere,” while, as to those who were retired, “how pathetically they try to “enjoy” their belated holiday!” and “how pathetically some of them strive to be young again, gay and wicked!”
Then, there were the young “scantily clad girls with firm, slender bodies, and sturdy, sun-browned young men, many of them gobs [sailors] from the [Pacific] Fleet, giving themselves to their embrace,” that is, of the ocean’s waves. Because, the author noted, “it certainly would not do for young men and girls to embrace—not on the beach, it is against the law!” It was a mandate of the “Folks” to pass such ordinances and he added that “the only male legally charged, empowered and authorized to rescue a female bather . . . is the life-guard,” while wearing a bathing suit anywhere else but at the beach was “illegal, i.e., immoral” as was “to kiss in public anywhere at all.” This meant, Adamic joked, that “in brief, the town is pure, pure.”
The account then turned to a lengthy peroration about a Sunday Men’s Bible Class held at the Pike’s spacious auditorium, dubbed “the scene of one of the most interesting Babbitt acts in the country” as well as “the peppiest, the snappiest Bible class in operation anywhere,” while doubling as “the town’s dominating political organization, a sort of jitney Tammany Hall, operating beneath the banner of the Lord.” Its leading light was George P. Taubman, “a go-getting he-Christian.”
Adamic added that the minister was backed by members of the chamber of commerce, realty board, other clergy, newspapers and politicians in “an inner circle made up of shrewd Babbitt politicians and business men adept in the simple psychology of the cornfields and the corner drug-store, who run the show and rake in the gold.” Moreover, he asserted that members of the Bible Class controlled all in Long Beach and had done so since about the start of the decade and he claimed that he was encouraged by “certain residents” to “investigate the outfit and debunk it. Hence, his visit to a class meeting.
For this visit, readers were informed, the morning began overcast, so that “the Pacific Ocean seemed strangely displeased,” but, “glory be!—all of a sudden” the sun broke through “and kissed Long Beach smack on the Pike,” this suggesting to Adamic, sarcastically, of course, that “there was a mystic significance” and that “Heaven was especially pleased with Long Beach.” He added, however, that, as a resident of nearby San Pedro, “I instinctively resented such crass favoritism.”
Upon entering, Adamic and his friend found that there were perhaps 2,000 persons, though “three-fourths of the heads are either gray or bald.” An attendee conveniently describes some of the best-connected men in town to the writer, while adding that Governor Friend Richardson (whose term ended at the beginning of January 1927) was an attendee when in town at his summer house. Described was the opening singing, with a command from Taubman to everyone to wiggle their fingers (why was not explained) to improve their vocalizing.
Patriotic exercises included a bugle call to the colors and a Pledge of Allegiance, including a salute that was given across the country but, years after the Nazi salute was soon devised, was then discarded and, in 1942, holding the right hand over the heart was substituted. It is also worth nothing that, in 1927, the Pledge was in its fourth edition and was recited as: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America [these two words added in 1924] and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The words “under God” were not added until 1954.
Once this was completed, a collection was taken and it was stated that, while Taubman received no formal compensation, a holiday gift of a couple thousand dollars was presented to him. Another attendee told Adamic that total membership was around 10,000 persons, some around the nation. When the sermon was given, Adamic offered that “he has pep and punch” and “puts it over fine” so that “George is there with the goods.” This included decrying modern iniquity, questioning the impiety of the young, violations of Prohibition lamented, and flattery of the aged membership and Adamic offered, again satirically we can presume, that “George is a great fellow, a great Teacher.”
Once the class concluded, “the pier is crowded with men” who “stand in groups, large and small, and talk and chew [tobacco] and talk.” Taubman and his sermon were discussed, though “here and there an infidel intrudes and is promptly drowned in floods of loud words.” This included discourses on Prohibition and debates about the merits of chewing as opposed to smoking tobacco, while there were disquisitions on whether two or three meals a day were proper. Arguments over which of the home states of the gathering were the finest was described as “small talk, brittle talk—sharp, rasping, crackling voices.”
Once Adamic and his companion left to go down to the shoreline, it was recorded that,
On the beach is youth and some beauty. We observed that the law forbidding persons of the opposite sexes to touch one another, which was passed by the Folks of the Bible Class, is not being strictly obeyed and enforced. We actually saw couple hold hands!
With this, the writer and his friend gobbled down a couple of sauerkraut-laden hot dogs and took a spin on the merry-ground as this section came to an end. Next is another lengthy portion of the publication, titled “Los Angeles—A Christian City,” and, as it takes up more than a dozen pages, we’ll halt here and return with part three and a look at Adamic’s critique of the Angel City and its religious realm. Be sure to check back with us then.