Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles

By Nigey Lennon and Lionel Rolfe

This fascinating account of Los Angeles’ buried past tells the story of Job Harriman, a former minister turned union organizer and attorney, who in 1911 was narrowly defeated as mayor of Los Angeles running on the Socialist ticket. Behind his defeat lay an unthinkably brutal, stop-at-nothing campaign headed by Los Angeles’ de facto political boss, General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Harriman’s progressive mayoral campaign represented an epic battle for the future of Los Angeles against the bitterly reactionary forces of Otis and his backers. The authors amply demonstrate that Otis was the victor in this contest, and how that victory explains much about why Los Angeles is the way it is today. "Bread and Hyacinths" follows Harriman through his childhood as an Indiana farm boy, through his formative years as a union organizer to his emergence as a key figure in the pivotal era of American socialism. It eloquently describes his lifelong optimism and determination in the face of poor health, financial woes, and personal and political troubles. Viewed in perspective against the backdrop of a city - and a nation - torn by labor strife and political corruption, Harriman emerges as a crucial, if ultimately marginalized, figure in American political history. Viewed in the light of today's uncertain economy and political unrest, this period of California history can be seen as a disturbing omen of things to come. "Bread and Hyacinths" has been optioned as a motion picture by director Paul Haggis ("Crash", "Billion Dollar Baby", "Flags of Our Fathers"). This brief, useful book illuminates an obscure chapter in the history of Los Angeles and America’s socialist movement...The book also serves as a corrective to the Times’s distorted history of the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony, a socialist community founded by Harriman in Southern Calfornia’s Antelope Valley. – Los Angeles Times This slender but potent book draws us into an early and unfamiliar era of Southern California, when Los Angeles seemed more like Charcoal Alley than Lotusland...[A] fine example of what regional publishing can and ought to be: vigorous, knowing, committed and unafraid, even if a bit eccentric. – Los Angeles Daily News

• Language: English
• Publisher: Airstream Books
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780983488415

Nigey Lennon

Nigey Lennon is a professional journalist whose work has appeared in publications such as The Village Voice. She is also the author of seven books.

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Index

Authors’ Introduction

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 hour’s 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 hotel’s 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 Harriman’s nemesis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the most primeval of robber barons. Otis’s 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 Harriman’s last hurrah, within three and a half years the colony’s volatile population had dwindled and finally vanished.

As though the colonists had never existed, the desert marched in relentlessly to reclaim its own, leaving nothing untouched but the skeletal stone that had been Llano del Rio’s foundation. One of the authors of this book first saw these strangely noble stone relics during family car trips when he was a child in the 1960s. In the ensuing decade the pilgrimage remained in his mind, and when he went back as an adult in the mid-1970s to explore the Antelope Valley, he made it a point to try to find out what the ruins were. In roadside diners and gas stations, in gift shops and at vegetable stands, he asked local people what they knew about the lone chimneys on the Pearblossom Highway.

Many answers were forthcoming: That was a Swedish commune. It was some quack doctor’s house – he made millions selling patent medicine in the ’20s. I’ll tell you what that was – a German colony. Some sort of dude ranch.

A cloud of local mythology enveloped the site, indicating that something out of the ordinary had indeed transpired there; but in the absence of hard facts, the author was left to draw his own conclusions. Several years later, he acquired a copy of a book called California’s Utopian Colonies by Robert V. Hine. There was a photograph captioned Group of Llano Colonists before the Hotel, about 1915. The photograph showed a number of men, women, and children in derbies, knickers, and topcoats, posing with a flivver in front of a wooden building. The Tin Lizzie was parked next to a tall stone chimney. Visible behind the clump of Llano colonists were two cement-topped stone columns; in fact, two or three hardy souls were even perched on the summit of the one on the left.

In this cut-and-dried day and age, the thrill of discovery is a novel thing indeed. As the author read the chapter on the Llano del Rio commune, the fog of myth swirling around the columns and chimneys began to dissipate, revealing larger-than-life figures and a sweeping pageant of political history that for its verity was no less mythological.

The present trio of Los Angeles writers came together in 1986. The more research we conducted, the more we believed that Job Harriman resembled that great American political figure, Abraham Lincoln, rather than a Socialist footnote such as Daniel De Leon (Harriman’s bitter opponent at the turn of the century). We realized that Harriman’s life (he was born in 1861 and died in 1925) chronicled the rise, and to a large extent the fall, of American socialism, from the Industrial Revolution to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building on the night of October 1, 1910, which sapped the influence of the American labor movement.

On close inspection, Harriman’s life can be seen to describe a curve: the gradual rise toward his political prominence (and that of socialism) in the second decade of the 20th century, followed by a brief plateau, of which the Llano del Rio colony was a part. Although overt socialism waned after the flushed glory years of the ’teens, nonetheless the Llano colony (which moved from California to Louisiana in 1917 and remained in operation there for another 20 years) left its mark on American progressive politics. Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign during the Depression benefitted from the managerial input of several former Llano colonists, and presented principles which had been developed by Harriman and his colleagues. In the 1970s and ’80s Tom Hayden’s Coalition for Economic Democracy, which incorporated large chunks of Harriman’s municipal ideology of cooperation, captured municipal governments in cities such as Berkeley and Santa Monica.

More of the ruins of Llano

(Photos by Phil Stern)

Along the way, our research proved riveting. At every turn, something new and fascinating popped up: for example, we learned that the eminent 20th-century writer Aldous Huxley had lived in Llano during the 1940s. From his letters, we gleaned that Huxley had been inspired to write his dystopian novel Ape & Essence (and perhaps ultimately his utopian novel, his last book, Island, in 1963), because of his proximity to the ruins of the Llano colony.

We envied Huxley – he had lived in Llano in the early and middle 1940s and thus had been able to interview many of the local people who remembered the colony vividly. These old timers, Huxley wrote in an essay on Harriman and Llano, had often talked to me nostalgically of that brass band, those mandolins and barber-shop ensembles which were key features of Llano del Rio life. Huxley also spoke with three or four former colonists who had remained in the area, describing them as older, sadder, possibly wiser – and all of them bore witness to the happiness of those first months at Llano. Housing, to be sure, was inadequate: food monotonous, and work extremely hard. But there was a sense of shared high purpose, a sustaining conviction that one had broken out of an age-old prison and was marching, shoulder to shoulder, with loyal comrades, into a promised land. One recurring theme in most of the reminiscences of the colonists, whether written or spoken, was that the experience of Llano made men and women grow – and often it made them into life-long political activists.

For us, one incident in particular illustrated this. In 1988 the authors visited Fred Halsted during the last year of his life. He had been a Socialist Workers Party candidate for president in the 1970s. We had gone to talk to Halsted because we had heard that his parents had met in Los Angeles during Job Harriman’s 1911 campaign for mayor. Halsted agreed that this was the case and admitted that as he was growing up he often heard about what a great man Harriman was.

Some of his parents’ best friends had actually been active in the colony. But, Halsted insisted, he was sure that his mother had not herself been mixed up with Harriman’s utopian foolishness. She was an old-fashioned class-struggle socialist, not a utopian socialist, he insisted with a snort.

We talked for several hours. During that time he slowly sifted through a trunk full of old family records. Down near the bottom he discovered things he had never known were there, such as a name tag his mother had worn at a banquet in honor of Job Harriman in 1914 – an event that would, at that date, have been a fundraiser for Llano.

As he kept digging, he discovered some photographs of Young People’s Socialist League weekend truck outings of the kind that regularly visited Llano. The first eight colonists at Llano in 1914 had been YPSL members.

Name tag for Llano fundraiser used by Fred Halsted’s mother

YPSLs going to Llano

(courtesy of Fred Halsted)

Are you sure, we asked him, your mother wasn’t involved in Llano? He silently kept searching, finding more and more Llano mementos. After a while, we noticed that there were tears in his eyes. He had discovered something about his mother he had never known before.

Halsted had also learned something about the Llano experience and the history it represented. We feel that the nation, too, needs to rediscover this period of buried history. Events may have conspired to end the socialist dream at Llano, but it continued on in a sort of half-life long after the colony itself had disbanded. That was the legacy of Job Harriman. The Llano experience became an unusual force in people’s lives – it was a moment of great optimism, when anything seemed possible and everything appeared to be hanging in the balance.

Son of the Plains

OB HARRIMAN, the firstborn son of Newton and Elizabeth Miller Harriman, was named Job after his paternal grandfather. Biblical first names were common enough among American farm boys during the 19th century. Still, Job was a relatively rare Christian name, perhaps because of its negative connotations: the Old Testament Job having been put through the tortures of the damned by a vengeful and cruel God. But the Biblical Job stood for more than a symbol of patient suffering. The parable of his trials can also be taken to represent man’s awakening to social injustice, and to the ultimate realization that man himself – not some remote God – is responsible for its redress. Indeed, the life of Job Harriman was to follow this pattern almost exactly, and his tale tells the greater part of his century’s political and social American history.

Job Harriman was born June 15, 1861, on his parents’ farm in Clinton County, Indiana. The Harrimans were solid agrarian Midwesterners, Job Harriman’s grandfather Job Harryman having arrived in Indiana from Kentucky in the mid-182Os. Indiana was then part of the American frontier, and land was abundant and cheap. Harryman and his brood prospered so much that by 1850, the family holdings were valued at $4,000, a considerable sum for the time. Little else is known about Job’s grandfather except that he was involved in local politics and served as one of Clinton County’s first grand jurors.

Job’s father, Newton Harriman – the spelling of the name had been modified in the county records – was also a farm boy. Tiring of the back-breaking monotony so familiar to the small farmer, he left Indiana for a brief period in 1849 to seek his fortune in the gold fields of California. (This dissatisfaction with farm life, along with the desire to seek wealth through speculation, were two traits he would pass on to his son Job.) Returning to the Midwest in the early 1850s, probably no richer than before, he married an Ohio girl, Elizabeth Miller, and the couple settled down on a small farm in Clinton County.

Although he was not ashamed of being the son and grandson of farmers, neither was Job Harriman especially proud of the fact. Many years later, during the most decisive phase of his political career, he composed a brief biographical sketch. Discussing farm work, he wrote that it is the hardest work any man ever did, to split rails and haul them through the mud, slush and frost in the springtime, the only season of the year we had to make rails and build fences, and then go home at night, feed the cattle and hogs and horses and turn in at eight or nine o’clock and get up at four and go at it again. It made the back ache and the heart ache too.

The young Job found solace far from physical labor in the world of books and ideas, as had another Midwestern farm boy before him, Abraham Lincoln. Walter Millsap, a close associate and confidante of Harriman in later years, observed that Harriman was greatly influenced by the life of Abraham Lincoln, which influence was very strong in the district where Harriman spent his boyhood. He would spend hours up in the hay loft of the old barn, reading American history, especially the history of the Civil War and the terrible injustices that were caused by rich men with their European notions and habits, ruthlessly taking advantage nor only of the native people but imported slaves, bond servants and indentured slaves brought over from England. The precocious Harriman was also a model pupil in Clinton County’s one-room schoolhouse.

Another factor also determined the route the rest of Harriman’s life would take. From an early age, Job suffered shortness of breath and a chronic cough, and as he entered adolescence, these ailments worsened into sporadic tubercular episodes. Although Harriman rarely complained about his health, the long hours of toiling with rake and hoe and pickaxe took their toll on him. It is little wonder, with his fragile health and his interest in history and literature, that he would turn away from farm life as soon as he was able.

That moment came in 1879, when the eighteen-year-old Harriman set off for Irvington, Indiana, to enroll in Northwest Christian University (which later became Butler University). He had already decided to follow in Lincoln’s footsteps and help others, although when he entered the university, he was still undecided about what vocation to pursue. Since the curriculum at Northwest included the standard divinity-school Greek and Latin, Scripture, homiletics, and rhetoric, not surprisingly Harriman soon found