Review: In Pursuit of Utopia: Los Angeles in the Great Depression, by Errol Wayne Stevens

Abstract

Historians of Los Angeles and Southern California have long observed that the region was an extraordinary place during the 1920s and 1930s. The region’s population and economy grew at a phenomenal rate. Evangelists called new arrivals to megachurches created by Hollywood set designers. Hundreds of thousands of Iowans flocked to annual picnics in Long Beach to celebrate their midwestern roots. Hucksters sold stocks for sham companies on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. As the Depression took hold and regional economic prospects spiraled downward, seemingly equally strange proposals and movements to solve the economic crisis and its corollary human suffering emerged and gained popularity, from the Ham and Eggs pension movement to Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign.In this carefully researched and thoughtfully written book, Errol Stevens asks the familiar question of why Los Angeles saw so many radical movements take hold in the 1930s. Over ten readable chapters, he rejects the common argument that Angelenos, many of them new migrants from the Midwest, naively fell for the impractical schemes of radicals and con artists. Instead, Stevens argues that Southern Californians, many of them desperate for feasible solutions to their abysmal economic situations, were willing to consider creative, even unusual, social and economic proposals to address personal and regional economic woes.As Stevens narrates, these programs and proposals varied widely. They included widespread agricultural self-help cooperatives that grew and distributed foodstuffs to thousands of members and those in need from Compton to El Monte. The Communist Party built a dedicated membership from its headquarters in Boyle Heights and in defiance of the Los Angeles Police Department’s “Red Squad.” Members of the newly formed Utopian Society advocated for a radical rethinking of the nation’s economic structure, a transformation that they believed could come about without revolution and would restore a solid middle class. Physician Francis E. Townsend proposed a wildly popular program of universal lifetime pensions of $150 a month for those over sixty or unemployed with the one stipulation that the money be spent in its entirety by the end of each month in order to stimulate the economy and end the Depression. At the urging of some prominent California Democrats, Sinclair, a longtime socialist, changed his party affiliation and announced his campaign for governor. His campaign, known as End Poverty in California (EPIC), organized over two thousand clubs across the state and helped add 350,000 new registered Democrats to the state’s voter rolls. Sinclair enjoyed tremendous popularity but state conservatives waged “one of the dirtiest campaigns in California history” against him and his Republican opponent won (p. 168).Ultimately, In Pursuit of Utopia explores why California’s “aging, churchgoing, largely conservative, midwestern” population flocked to “movements that advocated programs that would change the very nature of the capitalist system” (p. 197). Stevens finds that the region’s older midwestern transplant population turned to long-established midwestern agricultural traditions of communalism to make ends meet. They also responded to the real threats of homelessness and starvation, a complete absence of a federal social safety net, and the refusal of local officials to provide adequate relief by supporting novel and innovative proposals. As Stevens observes, “thousands of Southern Californians rushed to support these movements because there were no alternatives…in retrospect, it is clear that they were not pursuing utopia, just trying to survive” (p. 200).A historian and an archivist, Stevens spent the final two decades of his career as the director of the Department of Archives and Special Collections at Loyola Marymount University. While there, he also administered the Center for the Study of Los Angeles Research Collection. His training as an archivist is evident in this deeply researched and carefully sourced book. Sadly, the community of Los Angeles archivists and historians lost Stevens in 2020, but his contributions to the field live on in this finely researched and written book and in his stewardship of regional archival materials.