LAND OF SUNSHINE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 170, 8 October 1927, Page 10

LAND OF SUNSHINE

Los Angeles and Its People

BACCHANALIAN— IN NICE WAY

LOS ANGELES—a city of romance and the mirror of a new civilisation. Under its tropic skies the metropolis of California presents a kaleidoscope view of humanity developing in an environment of beauty and luxury unexcelled in the world’s history. In the “New Republic” Leonie Adams, a student of human progress, gives a vivid picture of the people, and the material advantages bestowed on them by Nature and science.

SJPCAKING for myself, I adore it, says Miss Adams. lam aware, of course, that, such an attitude is most unusual. Nearly everyone I know who comes from the East, or from Europe, to viyit Los Angeles, goes away declaring that it is embodied nightmare; but I can only say that those who hold this view seem to me amazingly short-sighted. For this city is a social laboratory in excelsis. It offers a melting-pot in which the civilisation of the future may be seen, bubbling darkly up in a foreshadowing brew. Besides, it is gorgeously amusing. Anything may happen in Los Angeles in the next quarter-century, and nearly everything did in the one just gone.

Consider it in terms of sheer growth and you have a phenomenon only approached in one other community— Detroit, the dedicated temple of the motor-car. Twenty-five years ago, the population of this City of the Angels (a title which discreetly fails to say whether fallen or not) was 100,000. Today it numbers not less than 1,300,000 souls, and twenty telegrams will lie on my desk next Tuesday assuring me that this is a cowardly understatement by 90,000 at least. Every working day its builders start forty-seven new private dwellings and two apartment houses. Every week, last year, it built a new hotel. Two out of every three inhabitants have moved from somewhere else within a decade. Assessed valuation of property has tripled in ten years; postal receipts have almost quadrupled; bank clearings have gone from one billion to nearly eight. And so on.

However, figures can’t give any real sense of this choking jungle growth of people. I prefer to remember my friend, the advertising man, with whom I talked recently on the thirteenth floor of a brand new skyscraper, which had been built, if not over night, at least over the week-end. My friend showed me the layout for a souvenir booklet ho was preparing against the arrival of a national convention (they meet in Los Angeles so incessantly that the thump of gavels, on a quiet morning, sounds like? a machine-gun nest). He had before him two contrasting photographs of the city’s idol: the sky-line. They were called “The Old” and “The New,” and they looked about as much alike as, say, Vienna and Chicago. The new one was taken, I saw, in 1926, but whit about the other, the prehistoric perspective? “It is,” said my friend, “an ancient view I dug up out of a desk 4rawer. It show’s the skyline in 1922.” SURE TO GROW RICH This steady, speedy growth is the ©ne most important thing to understand about Los Angeles, as about many another American community to-day. It creates an easy optimism, a lax prosperity which dominates people’s lives. Anything seems possible; the future is yours, and the past?—there isn’t any. The first comers, if they can just get their fingers on a little property, are sure to grow rich with the unearned increment. Retail shops may count on A large increase every year from the city's growth, regardless of other factors. Those who live in this intoxication of success, of course, cherish two delusions: first, that they are personally responsible for it; and, second, that it will last for ever.

The other great fact about Los Angeles is that it is now a completely motorised civilisation. Nowhere else in the world have human beings so thoroughly adapted themselves to the automobile. The advertisers’ ideal, two cars to a family, has very nearly been attained, not merely among the rich, but on the average. The number of licensed drivers is just about equal to the adult population, and all the children above the age of ten are bootleg chauffeurs. Any Angeleno without his automobile is marooned, like a cowboy without his horse, and cannot stir from the spot until it has been restored to him. The highest form of popular art la found in the decoration of filling stations; one tours them as one does the chateau country of France. A great proportion of the male population has no other real interest in life

than motor machinery. Bridge and golf mean a little something; but mention air cooling, or valves-in-head, and behold the sudden warm expansion! It is like seeing an upper-class Englishman turn into a Neapolitan before your eyoa.

It is easy to smile scornfully at all this sudden new proliferation of houses and shops and boulevards and signboards and stop-go signs. Derision is not difficult, at the raw smell of paint and packing boxes, especially if one has a taste for civilisations worn smooth with age, for ivy which does not bear a sign, “Planted by Miss Mary Pickford. June, 1927.” And yet the newness has its advantages. One of them was indicated by a city planner when I visited him in his high tower. He looked out on thronging streets and talked of the metropolis of the future; and as he waved his hand I saw huge boulevards, sixty paces wide, unfurl in smooth ribbons through the welter of sandstone and steel. Parks rolled out like green rugs from the hand of a Turk. The skyscrapers were levelled off, the hollow spaces between them filled up. At every street intersection one roadway dipped beneath the other. The city turned rapidly into paradise—retaining its motor-cars. CITY PLANNERS’ PARADISE The city planner, a salaried municipal official who is really doing all this, and not just recording his dreams in a book, broke off to admit, with an em-

barrassed laugh, that he is envied of all his fellow craftsmen the world over. Why? For two reasons. The first is that, though the city is growing at such appalling speed, it will probably halt for ever, at a certain point. There’s only a limited amount of water available, unless they learn to di3till it from the ocean: even now, they are bringing the precious stuff 230 miles. A stationary population is the citjr planner’s paradise, as it is the realtor’s nightmare.

The other reason? “Well, you see, most planners are hampered because the evil conditions which they must fight have been there so long, are so deeply entrenched. But here, everything is new, and the wrong things haven’t such a head-start.” And that is why the plan for the Dos Angeles region, with its decentralised population, its marvellous boulevards running in great concentric circles, on which satellite centres are strung like beads; its purchase of land for parks and schools and fire engine houses years in advance of necessity, while the land is still cheap. —this scheme breaks the hearts of planners elsewhere, who find themselves rubbing their noses in vain against a brick wall of vested property rights, social inertia, stupidity.

The human materials from which Los Angeles has been synthesized have been indentified often enough. Of the original Spanish culture of the tiny, moribund pueblo, there is now hardly a trace. It has been overlaid with successive waves from the solid Ameri-

can Middle West. Of the individuals in this migration, some have become mildly rich by sitting on their land and waiting for its value to increase; and others have come West, almost as beggars, in order to enjoy the not inconsiderable advantages of being poor in an open-air climate. Between these groups is a third, most pathetic of all, consisting of those with some money but not enough. Too often the farmer and his wife who have reached the age of sixty, gnarled and weather-worn, exhausted by the long struggle against cyclones, blizzards, drought, locusts and low prices, sell the farm and come to California with the proceeds, expecting that they will only survive a few years, and that by spending their capital, a little at a time, they can keep going in the interim. In that salubrious climate, of course, no one ever dies; and so, not infrequently, their calculation goes astray and they are left facing the world penniless at seventy-five or eighty. AGGRESSIVE PURITANISM The transplanted Middle Westerners loyalty to California is excessive, and painfully vocal. It was one of these, I am sure, who told President Foster, “that’s a real pretty sunset, if I do say so myself.” But their allegiance to the old home is not diminished by their adherence to the new. They are organised into numerous State societies which meet frequently and conemoto. A gathering of the lowa Society, for example, is a sight to think about. A huge park, or other open space, is taken over, and the map of lowa laid out upon it, each country, in its proper place, being marked by a flagpole and pennant. When the erstwhile lowans arrive in their Dodges and Chevrolets —and 125,000 is not an uncommon figure for the attendance—each family rallies round its own flag amid its former neighbours, and holds high carnival, with reunion, reminiscence, fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs.

It is the fashion to blame these Middle Westerners for all that is wrong with California civilisation, but this indictment is a littje too easy to be wholly true. It is a fact that the latterday pioneer is usually an earnest church-goer, an aggressive Puritan, who believes there’s enough sex in real life without bringing it into plays and books. But his aggressive good citizenship is also responsible for much genuinely admirable social legislation, of the sort which has made California one of the world’s leaders in this respect. The retired farmer has a passion for education, which has given Los Angeles an

amazing system of public schools, and more colloge students, in proportion to population, than are to be found in any comparable city in the world. As a taxpayer, he cheerfully maintains a fine series of municipal institutions. He is not afraid of city-owned waterworks, or of such “socialistic” enterprises as municipal summer camps in the mountains, where any family may have a glorious fortnight at a cost of practically nothing. Time takes its revenge on the Puritan; for he sees his sons and daughters, born in California or early transplanted there, growing up with hardly a trace of his own inhibitions about them. They are big, these new-crop California Americans; they are broad-shouldered, silent, sun-burned, and the females would be heart-shakingly beautiful if they would stop painting their faces in metallic orange hues. They swim, play tennis, and worship motors with quiet fanaticism, their devotional ceremonies being; conducted at sixty miles an hour over boulevards surpassingly smooth. In moral matters, as in everything else, they do exactly as they please, which is never what their parents desire. If frigid Puritanism is a menace, be of good cheer: it is thawing quickly away under the sensuous sun of the Western Riviera. Another great element in the human layer cake of Los Angeles is the (anatic. I leave it to the sociologists to say whether cranks go to California, or Californians become cranks; whatever the

process, the results are wonderful. There is not a queer creed to be found an:'where which doesn’t have its faithful little band of adherents in the city which so thoroughly took Aimee Semple McPherson to its heart. Nor is religion the only subject of preoccupation. There are food faddists who never eat meat, or eat only meat, or live on raw fruit, or fast ten daj'S in every sixty. There are tax reformers, soft-money advocates, anarchists? with never a bomb or a whisker. Most of these persons, including the religious ones, are wholly sincere. There isn’t enough money in the graft to make hypocrisy profitable, unless you are one Sister Aimee in a million dubs. There is an office building in Los Angeles which is devoted exclusively to these new and errant sects. While the leisurely elevator creaks upward, you may see a veritable congress of religions gold-lettered on the doors—- “ Children of the Sun Church.” . . . “Nature-Way Medical College for Drugless Healing.” ... “The Vedantic Brotherhood, Hours 10-12, 2-4.” . , . “The Light, the Key, the Path, Editor’s Office.” . . . “Pre-Astral Fraternity of Love.” What opportunities for learning all the mysteries of the universe, all the secrets of success, the elevator boy confronts every day! . . . and misses, if we may judge by the shabby hang-dog look of him.

More important than the tired, elderly lowan and the mildly mad fruit-eater, the characteristic indivdual in Los Angeles to-day is just the simple customary American type, the Babbitt, realtor, Rotarian, good-hearted, well meaning, honest, affectionate, loyal, narrow, dogmatic and dull. Money has been made in that town every day for many years—quantities of it—chiefly, not by producing things but by selling them. To this honeypot have come the same drones who always cluster around it. The type is the big, beaming man, with clipped military moustache, whose golf is in the nineties, motor speed in the sixties, waistline in the forties, wife in the thirties, and sweetheart in the (early) twenties. Every luncheon club which exists anywhere either has its biggest branch in Los Angeles, or the runner-up. There are fifty golf courses within an hour’s run of the city, and heaven knows how many beach clubs. (These latter are so snobbishly reserved that they sometimes take advertisements four newspaper pages in length to ask for new members—“if you feel yon can pass our rigid • tests, clip the coupon.”) Mr. Babbitt, the New American, in Los Angeles as elsewhere, is noisy, cheerful, pleased with himself. He makes plenty of money, spends most of it, drives a snappy car, dresses in snappy clothes.

In the old days when Los Angeles depended on two annual crops, tourists and fruit, there was quiet prosperity, nothing gaudy. But to-day she is bursting out at the seams in half a dozen other directions. She has gone in for manufacturing, and the annual product of her factories is worth a huge sum. (The city grows so fast that the estimate of a billion on page 46 of an official booklet expands to a billion and a quarter on page 48.) Ship lines radiate from her big and artificial harbour, which is second only to New York in tonnage, and in coastwise shipping exceeds even that city. I am omitting discussion of the movies from this article because they belong to Hollywood, and that is a Couple of Other Articles, but it is only fair to mention here the $168,000,000 a year which they add—at least temporarily —to the wealth of Los Angeles. And there are fisheries; and textiles; and meat packing; and furniture; and so on and on, not forgetting oil. CRAZY STORY OF OIL

The story of the Los Angeles oil field is one of the craziest chapters in a crazy epic. For years, a few derricks had risen from city backyards and languidly pumped out a little of the “black gold.” Then, not long ago, vast new deposits were found, some actually within the city’s 400 square miles, some just outside its limits. Scores of poor people, who, by years of effort, had managed to get legal title to a bungalow and a twenty-five-foot lot, found on Tuesday that their income, beginning Monday, was a hundred dollars a day—or three thousand, or any other incredible figure. Shall Ali Baba count the pearls he finds in the robbers’ cave? A duck-hunting club in the marshes discovered that its memberships were worth $125,000 each. At present, oil to a value of $200,000,000 is removed every year from Los Angeles district. The wild scramble of unrestrained private competition has resulted in the sinking of wells just as close together as they could be drilled, and the cost of bringing out the oil has been five or six times greater than was necessary. Already, geologists say, the field has passed its peak of productivity. Also, for every person in modest circumstances who struck it rich, a hundred have been pillaged by the confidence men who came with the oil fever, and deluged the city with their worthless, pretty paper. The State government has fought valiantly against this, but it is hard to battle both the shark and the normal avarice of his prospective victim.

If, in the past, Babbitt has had his way in Los Angeles, there are signs that his reign will not last for ever. Extraordinary things are on foot. People are beginning to raise their voices, arguing that mere bigness is, after all, not the finest of ultimate ideals. These sentiments have even been uttered within the sacred walls of the Chamber of Commerce, without causing them to fall apart, as in one of the earthquakes which Los Angeles never, never has ( . . . well, hardly ever). The little group of painters and poets who have lived lonely lives, in thrall to the beauty of California’s brown hills and dark blue sea, all at once begin to be persons of some im-

portance, at least as much so as one of the lesser realtors. It has become the fashion to hang the works of the painters in public and semi-public buildings. The architects are beginning to assert themselves, and many an oil millionaire finds himself living in an Italian or Spanish house far more beautiful than he probably wanted. TROPIC DARKNESS AND MUSIC The fact that, for seven months of the year, not a drop of rain ever falls makes possible out-of-door theatrical and musical performances, and some of these are enchanting. There is, for example, the Pilgrimage Play, which tells the story of the life of Christ, given : at night, in an amphitheatre of hills, the actors appearing at various levels on a wooded slope, cunningly illuminated from concealed spotlights. The whole effect, beneath the tropic, burning black night, is unbelievably lovely. The Hollywood Bowl is something which tempts one to ecstatic rhetoric —a vast open-air auditorium, of steel and concrete, where 35,000 people gather lor a symphony concert, and not one need miss the last high whisper of the E string. I could say much more of the same sort, about galleries, museums, little theatres, fiestas with more than the conventional surface imitation of old Spanish days about them. * It is not impossible, I think, that a real civilisation may some day grow up on this shore of a sapphire sea, a civilisation which will not need to hang its head when the Athens of Pericles is; mentioned. Here is a community with youth, great wealth, a glorious physical basis. Its Puritanism it is shedding fast. Its per capita wealth is enormous; its racial elements are so fused that nearly all the citizens understand one another. It would be ironical would it not, if this city, in which to-day not many civilised persons choose to live, were to become in thirty years the one place in the world which they most prefer? LEONIE ADAMS.