Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood

677
Los Angeles in the 1930s is the stuff of Noir legend: mean streets, militant unions, corruption from the mayor to the beat cops, breadlines.  But it was also a booming metropolis, building shopping centers, of all places, during the Great Depression.  How to explain all that?  This essay maps Hollywood movie production as part of the struggles for control over the future of the United States, and the world.  Very much at stake was the menace of fascism, which found a very receptive base in a region already producing pulp fascist entertainment.  How Angelenos participated in fascism and how they resisted it is a major subject of this essay. But it was also, paradoxically, a story of populism and consumerism.

The cross-currents of mass allegiences in the Great Depression were very strong because they formed at the point of intersection between the ideologies and entertainment, and that intersection is the individual self in lived experience. As in other essays of Ghost Metropolis, this one traces the pathways between the configuration for radicalized metropolis and the cultural production by a creative class of "whites" who share an interest in the proud and cruel white supremacy of its movies.

This essay is a story of mass media, communist labor organizers, strikes, repression and a proliferation of fascist and Nazi organizations.  Resistance to actual fascism on the streets of LA ultimately took the upper hand, no thanks to the LA law enforcement authorities, who either sympathized with the far right and cheered the anti-communism and anti-semitism of the Nazis and fascists in LA.  Resistance ultimately succeeded thanks instead to such Popular Front groups as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and, although little-known at the time, a network of anti-fascist spies. 

But pulp fascism outlived the Nazis and Silver Shirters and Klansmen whose plots were defeated by Leon Lewis and Joe Roos after Pearl Harbor.  In fact, the Hollywood movie industry became a giant propaganda machine, incapable of escaping the visual ideologies of of race and a consumerist capitalism in the Will Rogers formula and Frank Capra's everyman movies, reflected and stood as role models for the plain folk evangelical suburban southlanders who Nixon whipped-up against communism in the late 40s and throughout the 50s.

This page has paths:

  1. Pulp Fascism: Hollywood's White Hunters, 1920s-1930s Phil Ethington
  2. White Shadows: The Rise of Mass Media and Racial Propaganda, 1890s-1930s Phil Ethington
  3. Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
  4. Shadows: The Metropolis of Visual Culture, Mass Media and Global Power Phil Ethington
  5. Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles and Its Places in Global History, From the Pleistocene to the Present Phil Ethington

Contents of this path:

  1. Depression as a Breadline Musical: Gold Diggers of 1933
  2. Fake News: M-G-M, Hearst, and the LA Times Versus Upton Sinclair’s EPIC Campaign, 1934
  3. Mobsters, Radicals, Pulp Populism in the 1930s
  4. Pulp Populism: William Randolph Hearst as 1930s Movie Mogul
  5. The Gathering of LA's Demons: Nazis, Fascists, and Ku Klux Klan
  6. Resistance to Nazism and Fascism in Los Angeles, 1933-1941

This page has tags:

  1. Mass Media Phil Ethington
  2. 1930s Phil Ethington