A few posts down, I mentioned Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and noticed that I did not have a tag for him, which makes me think that dropping his name there might have been confusing.  So let me explain his connection.

As far as I know, LaVey was not a Fortean, at least not explicitly.  But, he did have a collection of the works of Ben Hecht, a writer who ran in Tiffany Thayer's circle and was a founding member of the first Fortean Society.

By itself, that doesn't say much: lots of people read Hecht.  But, LaVey was also in San Francisco by the 1950s and spent time with George Haas, Robert Barbour Johnson, and Clark Ashton Smith.  There's a semi-famous picture of them together, which LaVey titled, "Headmasters in a School for Ghouls."  By the 1960s, Haas told Ashton Smith's wife that he no longer heard from Lavey--"since he became Satan."

But, it's clear there was a substantive connection between LaVey and the Bay Area Forteans and so understanding something about LaVey--who has more written about him--helps explain the Forteans.

My last post made a passing reference to the second gold rush.  Apparently, there’s some controversy over whether this name fits really well what was going on in California during World War II.  On the one hand, it is clear that lots of people flooded into the state in order to take up war-related work: by 1959, the State received about 40% of defense spending, and something around 1 in 15 residents—total, including women and children—worked in defense-related industries.  And certainly, there were some changes in demographic patterns: African Americans had been a relatively small part of California’s urban environment before World War II, brought to the area mostly by railyard work, but that number exploded—at the same time that Japanese internment decreased the Asian presence across the West.  But, it is not clear how much of these changes were revolutionary, or dramatic—in the sense of the first Gold Rush, when San Francisco was built almost overnight—versus brief exaggerations of long term trends.  The State had been militarizing since around World War I (Roger Lotchin calls it “Fortress California”), and many other demographic factors remained returned to antebellum ratios after the war.  Rather than creating something new, then, World War II drew on the latent capacities of California—its prison population, for example, was put to war-work—and so was affected by California as much (or more, or less) than California was affected by it.

Still, there is no doubt that World War II made the experience of living in the Bay Area different, and it was one of the foundational events that all the Forteans would have experienced; as well, they were largely organizing in California in the few years just after the War—there number and significance seemed to dim rather quickly once into the 1950s.  So, let’s look a bit more about how what we already know about California changed—or stayed the same—during and after the war.

San Diego: San Diego continued the process—begun during World War I—of leveraging defense dollars into prominence, eventually becoming one of the ten most populous cities in the country.  The power, though, was controlled by a small oligarchy associated with the military.  It was—and remains—a conservative town.  Which makes me wonder how some of the early Fortean work of N. Meade Layne and Mark Probert faired in the area.

Los Angeles: Since Los Angeles grew up slowly, it came to be dominated by a small, conservative elite, and in the years around World War II, this elite attempted to renew its power.  The War produced some Fortean effects: for example, Hollywood set designers painted giant canvasses to look like tract homes, and then hung these over air bases, so that planes seemed to be heading for homes and then suddenly disappeared.  But, there were also strong pushes for community—the black outs, for example—that enjoined people to pull together and remember what made them distinctly American.

As it turned out, though, the conventional forces could not constrain the centrifugal forces of the region.  Unlike Eastern cities, a single political machine never came to dominate.  And the Catholic Church’s attempts to make the Los Angeles Diocese as powerful as its brethren in New York ultimately failed, undone by, inter alia, nuns and a preference for psychotherapy over conventional Catholic catechisms.  Unlike San Francisco, the Los Angeles area was not broken into neighborhoods but was defined by boulevards, which tended to focus people on their own needs, their own blocks, and not so larger units, preventing cohesiveness and allowing space for things such as Forteanism (and later Dianetics) to flourish.

There was, as well, something else in LA that provided room for Forteanism.  The area was best known, of course, for producing movies, but its literature was also well renowned, and in both cases LA adepts blurred the previous boundaries between high and low culture.  That was certainly true in the case of detective stories, with Chandler profligately mixing high and low, writing to an aesthetic standard and turning out boilerplate for Hollywood.  The same could be said of the pulp science fiction community, in which Forteanism ran strong, with the authors writing for low-grade magazines, but with firmly established ideas about the function of literature that would be borne out over the coming decades.    Fort appealed to this sentiment, I think, because he was doing something very similar: mining high-culture for ideas that undermined high-culture.

The Bay Area: Like the first Gold Rush, the war initially saw the immigration of a large number of single men into the Bay Area.  But, unlike the migration of 1840s, the migration of the 1940s contained a large number of southerners, especially from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana (including the in-migration of Okies from the Central Valley).  And, after a time, whole families came, too.  In the end, because of the draft and the moving of single mothers, the migration came to be led by females: 100 to every 94 men.

The influx of Southerners and blacks brought an evangelist tradition to the region that had been largely missing before.  But, this formed an excluded subculture, at least early on—Southern whites, for example, blanched at the fact that different races worked together.  They formed their storefront churches and country-music clubs, but these did not dominate.  Rather, they were just part of a complex and non-integrated patchwork of boomtowns that surrounded San Francisco.  In these places, housing was short, work was long and hard.  Traditional patterns were disrupted: employees of the ship yards worked three shifts and so businesses started staying open twenty four hours per day.  Hell-raising and prostitution increased.  So did promiscuity in general, and divorce rates.  This was the permissiveness of which Anton LaVey spoke: in the face of death, with social structures straining, in areas of anonymity, it became easier to flout conventional rules.

There were other forces, too, that worked to create a more liberal atmosphere.  The  labor shortage helped Chinese workers break out of the China Town Ghetto.   Corporate welfare also encouraged good health care, and integrated working environments.

At the center of all this activity was San Francisco.  The City won a lot of defense spending and continued to grow, but in comparison to the rest of California actually lost power: between 1939 and 1947, it lost 182 manufacturing jobs.  Still, there was enough there to make the City livable for lower white collar workers—city, county, and state government, financial institutions—as well as blue collar workers—about 1/5 of the jobs were still in manufacturing.

San Francisco was also redefining itself during the 1940s and 1950s as Baghdad by the Bay: A city of beauty and enchantment, a place for sophisticates.  (The Okies and residents of other cities were derided as hicks, although they usually were skilled workers from small towns, not farmers).  Upwardly mobile single women were lionized.  San Francisco was a town for good times: in 1950, there were 3000 restaurants, 1330 bars, 438 churches.

Although the public art scene in San Francisco was poor—the vital art was abstract expressionism, which remained avant-garde—the City had a definite aesthetic sense, which matched with the Fortean ideal.  Kenneth Starr distills it as “imagination transforms experience.”  Williams-Sonoma transformed the mundane act of cooking and eating into an art.  The bohemians and hips imagined the old places of San Francisco as full of mystery and beauty, while the more traditional powers wanted to redevelop by leveling the past and building big new modernist skyscrapers and freeways that killed the waterfront.  Lenny Bruce did stand-up here, mocking the pretensions and hypocrisy of Eisenhower’s America, just as the Forteans mocked the pretensions and hypocrisy of science.

In the later 1950s, while San Francisco in many ways retained its image as the Baghdad by the Bay, the demographic situation changed.  Many whites—including this evangelical group—moved to suburbs, making the interior of California conservative, leaving downtowns to impoverished blacks.  There were few jobs in these areas, which furthered the spiral of poverty.  As well, the separation of the races splintered formerly progressive causes such as labor organizing along racial lines.

The Cold War Campus: Historian Roger Lotchin makes the case that these changes can be subsumed into the more general process of the fortification of California.  Whether one wants to think of the Second World War as a Second Gold Rush as well, or not, his analysis still seems compelling. He argues that the huge amount of defense spending fundamentally shaped California.  The state had the wherewithal to undertake massive water projects, the building of freeways, and the creation of a world class university system.  People came to California—drawn by the promise of jobs and the California dream—and were able to settle into new suburbs made possible by defense spending and public works.  The three counties that did 90% of this defense business were San Diego, Los Angeles, and Santa Clara (which benefitted from the outmigration of manufacturing from San Francisco).  Thus, the state was dominated by science and engineering just at the time when a critique of science and technology was brewing among the Forteans.

At least as a matter of research protocol, I am approaching the various Fortean groups geographically—concentrating right now on the San Francisco Bay Area, but collecting information on Southern California, the Midwest, New York, Great Britain, and hoping to find sources on Philadelphia, Dallas, and New Mexico, where there were also (supposedly) groups.  This approach may or may not make it to the final product—other arrangements may make for better narratives—but it helps organizing the material right now, and raises some questions that need to be answered.

Most obviously, why did Fortean groups appear where they did?  Why San Francisco?  Or New York?

This question is a tricky one—because answers are too easy.  The fact is, the Fortean groups did appear in these places, and one can then find any number of ways to explain these appearances.  But that doesn’t mean they are right or even persuasive.

Still, the question should be asked.  Answering it may not be more than a tautology—the Fortean groups appeared in San Francisco because they appeared in San Francisco—but they can also point toward connections between Forteans and society more generally.  For instance, Forteanism proliferated in Bohemia, and this raises questions about the structure and culture of American Bohemia in the middle of the twentieth century and why Bohemians would be attracted to Forteanism.  Such a question is a better one than why San Francisco—but it is arrived at by asking that first question.

And so, I need to explore San Francisco regional history to understand more about the development of Forteanism there and how it connected to local, national, and international trends.

Today, a consideration of California’s spiritual frontiers, based on Sandra Frankiel’s brilliant book of that name and Glenna Matthews’s essay, “Forging a Cosmopolitan Civic Culture.”

Both begin  by noting that California—and the Bay Area especially—is markedly different from other parts of the country in its liberalism and openness to religious experimentation, and ask why.  Both find the answer in the Gold Rush.

In 1848, San Francisco was home to a few hundred people.  By 1865, it had a population of over 100,000.  The assemblage of the San Francisco Bay Area prevented any one group from becoming too dominant.   Men flooded the region from all over the world, in huge numbers, making the city (or, as local prefer, The City) cosmopolitan in a sense unknown elsewhere.  By 1880, the City had over 230,000 residents, the ninth largest city in the country, and the highest percentage of foreign-born residents, just shy of 50%.

So, unlike other regions that developed slowly, there was no major power.  By 1906, barely 14% of the population was Protestant.  Catholics had dwindled from 30% of the population in 1850 to 20%.  About 3% of the population belonged to some smaller group.  Sixty-five percent was unchurched.  San Francisco was the first large American city to elect an Irish mayor, a Jewish mayor, labor-leader mayor, and an Italian mayor.  The first Jewish synagogue was founded only three years after the first Protestant Church; Buddhists churches opened in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Now that doesn’t mean all was peaches and cream.   Discrimination against Asians and Mexicans and Native Americans was often harsh.  The Vigilante Committees of the 1850s often deployed racist rhetoric.  The Know-Nothings had a presence, as did white supremacists.  But, discrimination between white groups was comparatively mild—one reason the labor movement did so well—and even the oft-despised Chinese were enough of a presence to organize and have their interests protected.  Matthews wrote, “San Francisco was not born enlightened—far from it—but it was born in such a way that many groups could contend in its public sphere.”

The Gold Rush contributed to San Francisco’s cosmopolitanism in other ways, too.  The men who came to the region were suspicious of evangelism, emotional religions, and denominationalism, for those things were leading the country into civil war.  They preferred a gentle denominationalism, one that was not unified, but respective of other traditions.  The Evangelism of the era—which was very important in other regions—also did not work in San Francisco because there were already well-established secular entertainments—rodeos and bullfighting—because the men were focused on material things—gold!—and because the people of San Francisco were men—about 90% of the population.  Evangelism worked primarily through women, who were supposed to be the moral centers of their families.  But there were no families.  The men of San Francisco were not actively hostile to traditional Protestantism—they encouraged churches for the sense of social order they brought—but also found little in them that appealed.  An image of California was taking shape which they supported, one that turned away from traditional Protestantism: an image of California as open, tolerant, a natural aristocracy.  This image helped attract to the town a number of Bohemians—and San Francisco was famous for its Bohemians.

Appealing to this tradition were more liberal ministers, one who drew from Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, and Spiritualism, whose preachings deemphasized sin and punishment to focus on personal growth and the powers of the mind.  This focus on social progress and lack of judgment became common, but never institutionalized, and so never challenged the power of the established religions.  It remained fringe, although powerful.

A second gold rush refreshed these tendencies during World War II, when the ship-building business pulled in tens of thousands of workers (and nearby farming similarly attracted Hispanics from the Southwest).  Thus, just at the time the San Francisco Forteans were organizing, the central planks of the California ideal, the cosmopolitanism and lack of a dominant religious tradition were again on everyone’s minds.  This made the San Francisco Bay Area of the forties liberal and open to experimentation and Bohemian ideas.  ``The Second World War and its permissiveness were not lost on me,'' Anton LaVey said. ``Prurience was the order of the day.''  Indeed, much of LaVey’s subsequent life was spent trying to recapture the spirit of the 1940s.

Southern California developed differently—or, more like other places, in that the development was gradual, that families moved to the area together, and that an Anglo-Protestant power structure was established.   Still, by the 1890s southern California was home to a burgeoning metaphysical tradition: Theosophy, New Thought, and Christian Science found southern California a welcoming home.  Why?

First, let’s put it into numerical context.   In 1890, there were about 25,000 practicing Protestants in Los Angeles; about 3,000 members of Metaphysical groups (this was the third largest center of Christian Science in the country, about 1/10th of the nation’s total—and it may have been higher than that, since many Christian Scintists registered with the home church in Boston, although they did not live there); and about 3,000 Protestants were reading in the metaphysical tradition.  Protestants were a clear majority, and the lack of institution-building by the metaphysicians meant that the Protestants social power was never seriously challenged, but the presence of so many interested in the metaphysical tradition meant that, of course, the Protestants had to respond, and often incorporated the liberal tradition of Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and Spiritualism into their practice.  So influential were the metaphysicians that the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco devoted an entire day to New Thought.

But why, given Southern California’s conventional development, did metaphysics gain such footing there?  Part of the explanation is the post-Civil War reaction against evangelism.  Part of it is migration patterns—about 1/5 of those coming to Southern California came from the northern plains where Christian Science and New Thought were then flourishing (although in lesser numbers than Southern California).

The main reason is the promise that Southern California held out to new arrivals, and the migrants who responded to it.  Southern California was not laid out like other areas, with churches and business centers integrated into towns.  Rather—even before the advent of the car—development separated suburban living spaces from other areas: suburbs with few communal areas beyond parks.  This was a response to what people wanted, as well as part of Southern California’s developing self-image.  People went to Southern California not for better business opportunities—as was the usual case for migration at the time—but for leisure and peace and relaxation, all very powerful motivators in the half century after the Civil War, the economic turmoil of the Gilded Age, and the depression of 1893.  Many retirees arrived, as well as many who planned to make money on speculation.  The East’s traditional cultural forms did not fit here.  The weather and natural environment were seen as special impediments, the climate encouraging leisure and not the Calvinist work ethic.

This Southern California vibe mixed with the Northern California ideology to create a California ideal of openness, leisure, and tolerance that stood against the dominant Anglo-Protestantism.  Southern California changed in the years after World War I, when an influx of traditional Protestants from the South migrated to the area, bringing more conservative ideas about religion and the social order.  By that time, though, the alternative religions had already gained a place.  It will be worth exploring, though, if Forteanism developed differently in the south than the north because of that more recent conservative tradition.  (It’s also worth noting that Forteanism, as best I can tell, did not find the Central Valley so receptive, and that area was—and remains—notably more conservative than the coast, especially the north coast.)