Lionel Rolfe - Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles

1992 Paul Greenstein, Nigey Lennon and Lionel Rolfe.
Photos on pages 8, 13, 56 and 130 1992 Phil Stern.
All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 1-879395-21-5

Cover photos: bottom photo, Llano del Rio colony ruins
(O.A. Russell); all other photos are from the California
Historical Society/Hearst collection at the University of
Southern California Special Collections.

Book design by Nigey Lennon. Art direction and
typography by Ken Boor. Production assistance by
Charlene Fellows Boor. Typeset on a Linotype digital
typesetter. The text face is 10 point Adroit Light; chapter
titles are in Cheltenham Book. 3000 copies were printed
on acid-free 60 pound natural paper at
McNaughton & Gunn in Saline, Michigan.

Photographer Phil Stern captures the mood of Llano del Rio, the socialist Stonehenge in the

ve Desert

All three of the authors acknowledge and appreciate the help and input of Robert V. Hine, who was one of the first Californian historians to write about the Llano del Rio colony. John Ahouse, special collections librarian at USC, as well as a major bibliographer and scholar of the life of Upton Sinclair, not only helped round up some of the photographs for this book, but also contributed ideas, information and much of the nitty-gritty line editing. His access to the California Historical Society and Hearst photo archives from the old Herald-Examiner, and the California Historical Society collections (both collections are now in residence at USC) was also invaluable to us. Alan Hensher was a major researcher, photograph locator, and editor on this volume. Alan Jutzi of the Huntington Library went beyond the call of duty in attempting to help the authors obtain research materials that were difficult of access. The Lancaster Museum contributed photo and research data, as did some of the members of the Antelope Valley Historical Society. Additionally, we spent a pleasant, informative, and thought-provoking afternoon with California historian Abe Hoffman early in our research. The Los Angeles Central Library was an indispensable resource; the fire which destroyed the old facility during later stages of our research was a personal as well as a public tragedy. We also appreciate the efforts of Gibbs Smith, for providing the initial spark that got the project going as well as $200 toward the research that went into the present volume. All three authors were captivated by the charm, intelligence, and cooperative spirit of documentary filmmaker Beverly Lewis, who was working on a PBS documentary entitled Home Sweet Home: Cooperative Colony in America. The three authors gained considerable insight into various aspects of the Llano experience after conducting an interview with Fred Halsted shortly before his death. Lionel Rolfe, who first heard of Job Harriman while researching a history of the Painters Union in Los Angeles, acknowledges his debt to David Fishman of that union, for introducing him to the subject in the first place. It was as always an inspiration to work with Phil Stern, the Depression-era, World-War II combat photographer and later Hollywood photographer for Life magazine, who quickly recognized what we were trying to do and generously contributed to this project by documenting it at various stages in its creation. Ken and Charlene Boor were also both key in the emergence of the book, from design concept to finished product. If we have forgotten anyone, we hereby apologize publicly, with the usual shamefaced mutterings that to err is human, etc., etc.

HE SPRAWLING metropolis of Los Angeles, city-state of the Pacific Rim, is on the cutting edge of 21st-century capitalism. In this brave new world of high-tech finance, service industries, and the entertainment business, notions of socialism seem even deader than the 19th-century capitalism of redbrick factories and smokestacks belching sooty fumes.

But an hours drive from the dream factories of Universal City and other studios, beyond the celluloid individualism of the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum and the pleasure dome of the Magic Mountain amusement park, lie the visible remains of the socialist dream. For there was a time in this fabled land of opportunity when socialism was more than merely the visionary hope of the few; during the first decade of the 20th century, socialism was for a large number of Americans the wave of the future.

In the Antelope Valley, 70 miles northeast of Los Angeles, on a stretch of the Pearblossom Highway which winds its way through a high desert landscape bracketed by jagged foothill ranges and dotted with clumps of greasewood and Joshua trees, a modern Stonehenge is visible on the north side of the road. A surreal circular driveway, now reduced to hard-packed dust, circles up to four spectral pillars of native stone connected by the remains of a concrete foundation.

Twenty feet behind them loom two stone chimneys, the cheerful absurdity of their open fireplaces and wide hearths facing each other across a heavily littered thirty-foot expanse of desert floor. An old For Sale sign from a local realtor, long out of business, is propped against the front step; two crippled Barcaloungers, oozing dusty stuffing, rest side by side on top of the step, commanding a sweeping view of the highway and the foothills to the south that form the northern boundaries of the Los Angeles basin.

These are the ruins of a hotel which marked the center of the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony, one of the few remaining physical symbols of the socialist dream in Los Angeles, and the creation of Job Harriman. A consumptive farm boy from Indiana who had run as vice-president under Eugene Debs in the Socialists 1900 presidential campaign, Harriman twice narrowly missed being elected mayor of Los Angeles. He founded the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony as a haven from capitalism and competition: at its height in 1917, over 1,000 people worked and argued and sang there, talking long into the night in front of the hotels flickering fireplaces, building a socialist dream brick by homemade brick and cementing it with their own quicklime.

The other major figure in this saga was Harrison Gray Otis, who would be Harrimans nemesis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the most primeval of robber barons. Otiss self-adopted symbol was the eagle, which he used on his grave marker as well as on top of his Times building. Whether or not Otis was directly responsible for the downfall of Harrimans last hurrah, within three and a half years the colonys volatile population had dwindled and finally vanished.