Upton Sinclair's Los Angeles

In City of Quartz Mike Davis characterized Los Angeles as a city born not of governmental convenience, utility as a transport hub or the growth of the local industrial base, but rather real estate boosterism centered on promises of a healthful climate and right-wing political appeals. As it happens, Upton Sinclair, who moved out to L.A. early in this process in the first years of the twentieth century, presents the same image in his writing about the place in The Brass Check.

Sinclair also has something to say of the resulting demographics and their implications. Largely peopled by sellers of "climate," and those who have been their customers, buying climate from them ("retired elderly . . . whose health has broken down, and who have come here to live on their incomes"), the place is "a parasite upon the great industrial centres of other parts of America" as a practical matter--though the term "parasite" may still imply a place with a fuller existence than it actually merits. As Sinclair remarks, all the newcomers "have no organic connection with one another; each is an individual, desiring to live his own little life, and to be protected in his own little privileges."

Of course, Los Angeles did not remain what it was in his day. The city eventually became a great industrial center in its own right--and in the process lost its reputation for "climate" as its pollution trap geography made it as famous for smog as for Mediterranean-style warmth. The city's political image also changed--the place no "liberal" paradise (as Davis' writing about it makes clear), but the right sneering at a city in a state it increasingly associated with its nightmares of what a Blue State is. Still, prior to that it can seem that Los Angeles, as it seemed to many a domestic and foreign onlooker, represented something of "the future" of the country in the attributes Sinclair focused on--a non-community of atomized, aged, real estate-obsessed people living on money and goods that for the most part come from very far away, and pay for what they consume on the basis of past accumulation rather than current production.