Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ