Radical Movement of 1960s Led by Baby Boomer Generation
Jon Wiener and Mike Davis. Gear up the Dark on Burn down: L. A. in the Sixties. New York: Verso Books, 2020.
Reviewed by Ryan Reft
Anyone who chooses to focus on Southern California history must consult the work of Mike Davis. Full stop. Keep in mind you don't necessarily take to agree with Davis, but you must reckon with his vision of Southern California.
Metropolis of Quartz, which turned thirty in 2020, remains foundational and, for many, an inspiration. It birthed "a generation of radical historians and writers, including yours truly," quondam OC Weekly editor and currentLos Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote in 2018.[1]
While Davis has inspired multitudes, he's as well drawn his share of detractors—some of them reasonable, others not so much. More than thoughtful and considered critics argue that inQuartz Davis's Marxism overshadows dash, thereby bludgeoning the city's history into binaries. "There is a rigorous adherence to this binary: no in-betweenness, no ambivalence," historian and Los Angeles writer Eric Avila noted in a 2010 essay. "Course war is nota means, butthemeans of understanding Los Angeles' history." Ethnic identity, race, geography, sexuality, gender, and numerous other factors "that mediate social relations are secondary iterations." For Avila, Davis's pessimism reigns as well prominently: "Lesson: Promise is futile. Mike Davis's Los Angeles devours our aspirations, consuming our collective dreams along with the desert land."[2]
Yet, the UCLA professor as well acknowledges that Davis sparked a new interest in the city's civilization and past. For decades, critics assailed Los Angeles equally a city without a history. Such critiques emanated from individuals who found safe harbor in the City of Angels. During the 1930s, European emigres took refuge in Los Angeles simply to deride information technology as the "crystal ball of capitalism's future," an "anti-metropolis," and "a Gobi of suburbs." Bertolt Brecht famously compared it to hell.[3]
Whatever one thinks of its arguments,Quartz served as an inflection point towards a new L.A. historiography. By the early twenty-showtime century, geographer Michael J. Dear could write confidently, "Los Angeles has become, for many, not the exception but rather a prototype of the city of the future. As the volume of academic and pop writings has accumulated, the prospect of an L.A. School of urbanism has also ascended."[four] Whether Los Angeles had become the city of European nightmares, a dystopian straw of American capitalism, or, in dissimilarity, the encapsulation of the American Dream, or some other notion of urbanity between these two poles is left for time to come discussion.
Since Dear's 2002 announcement, numerous historians have added their perspectives to this growing catechism: Danny Widener, Becky Nicolaides, Eric Avila, Josh Sides, Natalie Molina, Wendy Cheng, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Max Felker-Kantor, Victor Valle, Rudolfo D. Torres, and Luis Alvarez amidst many others, all of them rebuilding, reconstructing, and refurbishing Los Angeles'south growing historiography.
Davis, too, has been a participant in this disciplinary remodeling.Ecology of Fear (1998), the 2nd prong in Davis'southward "literary double whammy" withCity of Quartz, provides a valuable and prescient overview of Southern California'due south and Los Angeles's environmental history, forth with the region's relationship to and responsibility for the various disasters and plagues that have befallen the city.[5] Earthquakes, polluted air, mudslides, flooding, all receive Davis's attention, every bit does burn down: "fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods." At the time ofEcology's publication, fire's threat had become a very visible trouble, only not yet the existential threat embodied by the raging conflagrations of 2020. Davis might have been specifically referencing Malibu in Ecology, merely his observations now apply statewide.[half dozen] In one case over again, Davis functioned every bit Southern California'south Cassandra.
Magical Urbanism followed in 2000. In it, Davis focuses on the influence of Southern California'southward Latino residents, and the book serves as a very useful curt text documenting their function in shaping politics, economics, and culture in urban America, a narrative that Davis argues had been ignored, obscured, or downplayed. "For more than a decade, urban theory has been intensely focused on trying to understand how the new world economy is reshaping the metropolis. Notwithstanding nearly of the literature on 'globalization' has paradoxically ignored its most spectacular US expression."[vii]
Nor has Davis been bars to discussing only Southern California. In 2001, Davis publishedTardily Victorian Holocausts: El Niño, Famines, and the Making of the 3rdWorld, which explored "how the policies adopted past the disciplinarian governments in the heyday of imperialism exacerbated the famines and made their impacts more severe." Writing in theNew York Times, economist Amartya Sen described it as "gripping" and "illustrative…of the disastrous consequences of fierce economic inequality combined with a desperate imbalance of political voice and power." At theRadical History Review, historian Michael G. Vann points to Davis's 2005 workMonster at the Door: The Global Threat of Avian Fluas as one of the "Marxist-environmentalist's" almost "disregarded" yet deftly executed efforts. Matt Steinglass, currently the European correspondent for theEconomist, called it a "vivid, concise jeremiad."
This absolutely very incomplete history of Mike Davis'due south bibliography explains why Verso has an Essential Mike Davis series and why his new work co-authored with journalist Jon Wiener,Ready the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, has been so eagerly predictable.[viii]
In terms of primary sources, Davis has never been big on digging deep into the archives; this proves no less true inSet the Night on Burn down. Instead, Davis and Wiener cascade over oral histories, interviews, memoirs (Angela Davis, Dorothy Healy, Bert Corona, and Sal Castro to name just a few), and newspapers – both mainstream outlets like theLos Angeles Timesand the New York Times as well as local publications such equally theLos Angeles Free Press (Freep). Wiener and Davis dedicate a chapter toThe Freep, transforming its passages into the occasional Greek Chorus. In the end,Ready the Night on Fire successfully straddles the line between synthesis and original work, a common characteristic of Davis's scholarship.[ix]
With some exceptions, such as unincorporated East Los Angeles, Torrance, and handful of other geographic outliers, Davis and Wiener confine the book's focus to L.A. County. What follows is a sprawling history of the radical movements spawned there: Ron Malauna Karenga and his US Organization, Ralph Bunche and the Black Panthers, the Los Angeles Blackness Congress, the Asian American publicationGidra, the Peace and Freedom Political party, Angela Davis, Johnnie Tillmon and the National Welfare Rights System, the United Civil Rights Movement, the Blowouts, the Brown Berets and Gloria Arellanes, Dusk Strip's Riot Nights, the L.A. Free Clinic, and Tom Bradley's failed 1969 mayoral entrada, amidst others.
Disenchanted with 5 decades of historical revision by bourgeois forces that caricatured social movements as consisting of "dopey hippies, traitorous peace protesters, bra-called-for feminists, dangerous black radicals, and commissars of political correctness,"Prepare the Night on Fire attempts to correct this record with a "motion history…from the vantage points of its flatland neighborhoods and bohemian beaches where the working class heroes of this story lived."
To be articulate, this history is sometimes doleful, filled with modest victories in the moment, followed by the kind of hard stumbles that go out ane incapacitated for years. For instance, Wiener and Davis explore the history of the Los Angeles affiliate of Cadre. The local branch contributed to the Freedom Riders movement in the summer of 1961, constituting a "reservoir of volunteers to keep the rides on the road." Among northern cities, simply New York contributed more volunteers. The Los Angeles riders returned with a renewed vigor, "eager to unleash non-violent direct activeness on a new scale in Los Angeles." Four years later, CORE stood on the precipice of internal collapse after the passage of Suggestion 14 invalidated the fair housing provisions of the Rumford Act, a law only recently passed and which had demanded CORE to lay proverbial siege to the legislature for years.
The more radical Black Panthers characteristic prominently equally the 2 authors certificate its demise under the combined weight of trigger-happy and extralegal harassment by the LAPD and internal fratricide fueled by regime sabotage. In "sinister fashion, with police frame-ups and internecine murders incited past the FBI, the time of the Panthers concluded," Davis and Wiener conclude, but not before exploring the Panthers' role throughout much of the book and their human relationship to other radical movements in the region. This comparison reveals the kind of nuance that critics argued remained absent-minded fromQuartz; the Panthers were actually relatively moderate when juxtaposed with other radical groups of the era. For example, they were 1 of the just Black Ability organizations willing to work with white activists.
Such alliances or relationships did non e'er conduct fruit. The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) scored a historic victory by registering nearly xl,000 voters for the 1968 election and earning the party a place on the ballot. The PFP correctly gauged discontent with LBJ and Vietnam even before the failed Tet Offensive and the Autonomous Convention the same year, only its leaders failed to execute its goal of establishing a legitimate left leaning electoral option. Instead, the PFP nominated Eldridge Cleaver as its presidential candidate over Dick Gregory, then allied with the Black Panthers, a partnership that concluded poorly. "The effect was tragedy concealed inside farce," find the book's authors. Cleaver threw his support behind Pigasus, the candidate of Jerry Rubin and the Yippies, fled to Cuba and then Algiers, before returning to the United states of america equally a right-wing, bible-thumping conservative several years later. "[F]rom the perspective of building a 3rd party, I reckon nosotros did everything wrong," one of the PFP's leaders, Jack Weinberg told Wiener in 2018.
External forces oft intervene to limit radical organizing. Readers volition exist unsurprised to learn throughout the volume that the LAPD really isn't much of a friend to most Angelenos, particularly those of color. "They're rude, overbearing, and they make the simple act of giving you lot a ticket an exercise in the deprival of your dignity and adulthood,"California Eagle announcer Almena Loman wrote in 1962. The militaristic and extralegal tactics of the city'due south police serpent their way throughoutGear up the Dark on Burn.
The book'due south activists are not without victories. The Free Dispensary, the second of its kind in the nation when it opened in late 1967, became "one of the counterculture's biggest and virtually successful institutions in L.A." Its institution helped to foment the thought that health intendance existed equally "a right not privilege" while providing health care to thousands of immature people dealing with sexually transmitted diseases, drug abuse, pregnancy, and contraception. The Dark-brown Berets, Blackness Panthers, PFP, and others followed suit with their own health services, expanding health care for undeserved communities and resulting in the creation of the 1971 Southern California Quango of Costless Clinics.
Often in histories of the era, land universities similar Berkeley garner all the attending, simply inPrepare the Dark on Fire Davis and Wiener recalibrate to draw readers' attending to junior high and high school, community college, and Cal Land campuses where black and brown activists demanded better educational resources, expanded curricula, and protested for the creation of Black and Chicano Studies Departments.
If inSuburban Warriors Lisa McGirr revealed middle and high schools equally a means by which the New Right organized in Orange County, Davis and Wiener excavate the activism of the urban center's Black and Latino youth in L.A. County. "In fact the seventh-to-twelfth grade and junior college protests were arguably the most original and populist social movement of the unabridged decade in Southern California especially when considered in their full multiethnic spectrum." In detail, the volume acknowledges the role these protests played for Black youth, an aspect frequently ignored or obscured when discussing the loftier schoolhouse "Blowouts" of the belatedly 1960s, which often focus on the Chicano Move.
Protest spilled out in parts of 50.A. County where i might least expect information technology, such as at Valley State in San Fernando Valley, today Cal State Northridge. A 1969 protest led to the largest mass arrest on any campus in Southern California during the 1960s. The protests, the results of white, Blackness, and Latino activism, eventually led to the cosmos of both Chicano and Black Studies Departments at the university. Withal, the authors are besides careful to annotation that though the movement grew out of anti-war protests, race intervened between the largely white SDS members, Black Student Spousal relationship (BSU) activists, and those belonging to the Chicano MECHa ("El Movimento Estudiantil Chicanos de Aztlán") organisation. The latter ii, fence Wiener and Davis, "didn't share the SDS goal of transforming the system; instead, they wanted a share of the benefits of the system, which they had never had—a college pedagogy that served the needs of their communities."
The authors do non ignore issues of sexuality and gender inSet the Night on Fire, merely they receive far less attention than race and class. Accordingly, the chapters on the latter are stronger and more prominent than the quondam. Within race, Asian Americans prove they are the exception. They function equally a spectral presence throughout, actually actualization but in 1 of the capacity in the volume'southward final section entitled: "Other Liberations." At times, the flow of the volume can feel as well episodic, an boosted criticism that some have raised with Davis's larger body of piece of work.
The two authors take likewise attempted to infuse more cultural history into the book than is usual for a Davis text; the history ofThe Freep, Ash Grove,Gidra, KPFK, and the cultural resistance in Watts that followed 1965 all receive coverage. Ultimately, though Davis and Wiener cling to a certain Marxist outlook,Set the Night on Fire clearly engages the issues that Avila and others accept raised with Davis, notably the greater focus on place and more prominent part attributed to civilisation, race, gender, sexual orientation, and other factors that mediate and impact people's lives.
In regard to the volume's last department, one wonders if the final chapter on Wattstax, or "L.A.'s Black Woodstock," in 1972 is meant to close the narrative loop or insist that no such closure exists. It ends with a get-go, every bit Davis and Wiener describe the opening scene from the concert film, which features a group of Blackness men debating Watts's fortunes since the 1965 unrest. Almost the end, an older man provides his own conclusion. "They've inverse some for the best; in an awful lot of cases, for the worst and some they have non changed at all. There's no difference in Watts now than Watts '65."
A fitting coda for a book that seems equally much about the possibilities and long term contributions of radical Los Angeles every bit it is the difficulties and struggles it encountered, overcame, or in many cases to which it succumbed. To Davis and Weiner these movements planted the necessary seeds, or as the quote attributed to former Doors drummer John Densmore opens the volume: "They are big seeds. Perhaps they have fifty or a hundred years to achieve fruition. So stop complaining, and become out your watering can."
As this opening aside suggests, if Davis has been defendant of cynicism over the years,Set up the Dark on Fire feels different. Perhaps it's the moderating influence of age, the collaboration with Wiener, a combination of both, or a set of wholly unrelated factors that explicate the optimism that closes this volume. Undaunted by historical revisionism, the ii authors point to a new generation of activists who remain unbowed by conservative historiographies. They suggest that the volume exists, in part, to unite the activism of today with that of the past or as they put it: "To keep that circle unbroken…" Published just months before George Floyd and the national protests that followed, Davis, once again, seems to write the futurity even every bit he and Wiener swoop into the by.
Ryan Reft is a historian for the Library of Congress' Manuscript Partition where he oversees its collections regarding domestic policy (Congress, law, journalism, and LGBTQ holdings) and curated the 2017-2018 exhibit: Echoes of the Great State of war: American Experiences of Earth State of war I. He is also senior co-editor with Avigail Oren of The Metropole and writer for KCET. His work has appeared in the Periodical of Urban History, Boom California, California History, Southern California Quarterly, and Souls among others. Along with Romeo Guzman, Carribean Fragoza, and Alex Sayf Cummings, he co-edited and contributed to the edited book East of E: The Making of Greater El Monte (Rutgers Press, 2020).
Featured prototype (at top): Miracle Mile in the early on 1960s. Postcard of Wilshire Boulevard, ca. 1960s. Ellis-Sawyer, Wikimedia Commons.
[1]Gustavo Arellano, "Revisiting Mike Davis' Case for Letting It Burn,"Los Angeles Times, Nov 14, 2018.
[two]Eric Avila, "Essaying Los Angeles," inThe Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R. McNamara, (New York, Cambridge Academy Press, 2010), 187-188.
[3]Mike Davis,Metropolis of Quartz: Excavating the Hereafter in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 2006), 47, 51.
[4]Michael J. Dear, "Preface," inChicago to L.A.: Making Sense of Urban Theory, ed. Michael J. Dear (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002), vii.
[5]Gustavo Arellano, "Revisiting Mike Davis' Case for Letting It Burn,"Los Angeles Times, Nov 14, 2018.
[6]Mike Davis,Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage, 1998), 97.
[7]Mike Davis,Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the City (New York: Verso, 2000), eight.
[eight]In the interest of brevity, I've ignored numerous other works such asUnder the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Will Never See (2003) written with Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew,Planet of Slums (2006), and most 10 other non-fiction works either written or co-authored by Davis.
[9]To their credit, Davis and Wiener also mine recent dissertations past Emily Strauss, Alisa Kramer, Rebecca Theresa David, and Andrea Gibbons among others, several of which have since been published equally books. Established historians become their due as well—Vicki Ruiz, Mario T. Garcia, Lillian Faderman, Stuart Timmons, Laura Pulido, and Rudolfo F. Acuño—as do newer authors such as Widener, Jean Paul De Guzman, Daniel HoSang, and Shana Bernstein among others.
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