Lionel Rolfe in AOL Video on the Llano Del Rio Socialist Colony
Lionel Rolfe is interviewed on AOL’s online local history video series What Remains. Rolfe is coauthor with Nigey Lennon of Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles, which offers a history of the utopian colony that flourished in the Southern California desert during World War I. His interview, interspersed with historic photos, shows us Job Harriman’s Llano Del Rio utopian socialist community, set in the Antelope Valley between 1915 and 1918. Harriman had run for U.S. Vice President on the Socialist ticket with Eugene V. Debs, and was narrowly defeated for Mayor of Los Angeles in 1911. His Llano Del Rio community at its height had some 1,000 residents who lived a communal life and had homes and jobs provided by the community. It was located in the desert east of Palmdale.
Watch the video here.
Residents of Llano Del Rio in its heyday.
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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.
