Honey Writes About Carey McWilliams
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
I debated with an acquaintance about where a very-well known writer, journalist, editor, activist, historian and lawyer lived in Echo Park, so I researched the question and found that he lived in several places in Echo Park and Silver Lake.
Carey McWilliams ‘ friends included Jake Zeitlin, John Fante, Robinson Jeffers and H.L. Mencken. His first published book was a biography of Ambrose Bierce (1929).
In the 1930s, he worked with the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild and represented workers, helped organize unions and guilds and served as a trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board.
His Southern California: An Island on the Land (revised edition 1973) is the seminal book on injustice in Los Angeles and inspired the screenplay for Chinatown. His Factories in the Field (1939) shattered myths about Central Valley agriculture. The book condemns the politics and consequences of large-scale agribusiness.
He never joined the American Communist Party; yet, the FBI denounced him as a known Communist. His Witch Hunt (1950) attacked the McCarthy era. J. Edgar Hoover placed him on his Custodial Detention List, which made McWilliams a candidate for detention in case of national emergency, although he was a prominent state employee at the time. (Peter Richardson, American Prophet: the Life and Times of Carey McWilliams, 2005).
Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990) — premised on the thesis that Los Angeles is both the utopia and the dystopia of advanced capitalism — relies in part on McWilliams’ work and sparked a renaissance of the older writer’s analyses and research.
Wikipedia lists the author/lawyer’s address as 2401 North Alvarado (built, according to the Los Angeles County website in 1920).
Glen Creason, map librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, (Los Angeles in Maps) researched for me where McWilliams lived.
According to voter registration records and the 1930 census, McWilliams lived on Sunset with his mother in 1930. In 1938, he lived at 4047 Berryman, in 1942 at 2250 Lake Shore, in 1944 at 3633 Carnation, and in 1948 and 1950, he is listed at 2041 North Alvarado.
Mr. Creason believed that North Alvarado was in the Silver Lake District. I sent him the link to the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council district map, which shows North Alvarado is in the Echo Park District.
The Los Angeles map expert wrote back in a message: “As far as Echo Park-Silverlake boundaries go, I have never been able to accurately figure it out. Once you go in those hills you never know where you will end up. I know I left a clutch on Baxter one day.” (January 12, 2012 email message)
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
