Further research has turned up more material on Kenneth MacNichol.  I have spoken with one of his descendants, the grandson from a relationship which Kenneth did not formalize with marriage.  The woman in question was named Dorothy, and she may have been the woman for whom Kenneth left Louise.  At any rate, they were a couple in the 1920s and, according to the grandson, part of the “Bloomsbury Set.”

“The Bloomsbury Set” was a loosely allied group of artists, writers, and thinkers—including Virginia Woolf and J. M. Keynes—who met around Bloomsbury, London, during the first part of the twentieth century.  It’s not easy to distill a single vision—or even say if the group cohered enough to be taken together—but there is a sense of Bohemianism about them, as they argued about the limits of domesticity, the place of women in society, and the problems with capitalism and imperialism.  If MacNichol was indeed part of this set, he would have felt at home, as it had echoes of his time in Carmel and foresaw his time in San Francisco (as well as New York, perhaps.)

But it’s not clear that MacNichol actually belonged to this group.  Certainly, he lived in the area—his flat at 120 Clapton Common, where he and Dorothy held soirees, was only a few miles from Bloomsbury.  But MacNichol’s grandson remembers the stories of the set revolving around George Bernard Shaw, DH Lawrence, and HG Wells (and his father—Kenneth’s son—remembers meeting Shaw), none of whom are usually included in the Bloomsbury Set.  Indeed, Woolf was partially writing against the realistic style of Wells.

At any rate, it seems fair to say that Kenneth probably fell in with a crowd of London thinkers that influenced him to—as he said—take on more serious material, economics and sociology, and got him thinking about how to relate writing and advertising.

At some point in the late 1920s, MacNichol and Dorothy broke up and he married again, this time, according to his grandson, a woman named Olga.  That marriage lasted only a short time before he married Netta in 1930.

There was also one other marriage not yet mentioned, Susan, whom he married in 1944.  That gives a total of 6 wives, plus one other long term relationship. 

I'm still reading through material on northern California's post-War (and earlier) Bohemia.  And I found a couple of interesting nuggets.  This one comes from Franklin Walker's very good The Seacoast of Bohemia about the Boehmian community that developed around poet George Sterling in Carmel during the early part of the twentieth-century, after the fire and earthquake had driven him from The City.

On page 64, Walker mentions that in late 1908 Carmel was home to "Kid MacNichol," a poor writer and wanderer. Combining this note with a contemporaneous article in the San Francisco Call, I'm thinking that this was probably Kenneth MacNichol.

Further evidence comes from Walker's (thin) description of Kid MacNichol  He notes that MacNichol had "lived among the Navajos reputedly as an 'adopted 'son," which is a description that has been repeated by people who know MacNichol.  I have tried to verify the connection by contacting the Navajo Nation, but have not discovered any records to prove the claim one way or another.  Nonetheless, this strongly suggests that Kid MacNichol was the Kenneth MacNichol who later led the San Francisco Fortean Society.

It also shows MacNichol's developing interest in what might be called metaphysical religion.  He and Mike Williams--who had come to Carmel with Upton Sinclair--planned a six month horseback adventure into the Utah and Arizona desert to hunt gold, find ideas for stories, and study 'primeval mysticism' (although this trip may never have happened).  MacNichol was also writing plays with Williams and his wife Peggy.

Another discovery from around this time further suggests both MacNichol's connection tot he community and American metaphysical religions.  The June 1907 issue of  Swastika: A Magazine of Triumph featured an article by MacNichol.  [Note that at the time Swastikas had no associations with Nazism, which had not yet been invented, but instead were connected to Eastern and Native American religions--indeed, Swastikas are still used in the East to mark the plce of Buddhist temples on maps.]  This was a magazine dedicated to what today would be called New Age items--Eastern mysticism, and the like--put out from Denver, Colorado.  MacNichol's article was on "New Thought."

Others in Carmel were interested in New Thought and mysticism.  Sinclair Lewis, for example--who had also come West with Upton Sinclair--published at least one story in the New Thought journal The Nautilus according to Walker on page 69.

As well, there was a general progressive dislike of prison conditions, which may have foreshadowed MacNichol's involvement with Louis Eytinge.

Finally, Google News Archives recently put up a novel by MacNichol that was syndicated by the Sloan Syndicate.  This was from August 1919, three months after he was discharged from the war and a year after his infidelity in France. 

It's called "Plenty is Enough."  The Google version comes from the Pittsburgh Press, and is not the world's best copy, but good enough.  It concerns the investigation of a Mexican sheepherders death in the Southwest against the back drop of a struggling romance, a battle over water rights, and the range war between cowboys and sheepherders.  The story feels especially compressed at the beginning and drags in the middle, but it is serviceable and diverting--if you can ignore the casual racism (against Mexicans) and sexism.  It's also notable for combining Westerns with the procedural detective kind of story made famous by Poe.

Philip K. Dick is best known as the author of science fiction classics such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Man in the High Castle, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which became the movie “Blade Runner.”)  But he also wrote a number of mainstream novels that went unpublished until his science fiction made him famous.  One of those novels is Puttering about in a Small Land; it’s not a great novel, but it is diverting—about Roger Lindahl, who feels constrained by his cold wife and colder mother-in-law, has an affair with a woman who represents all the best in women (freedom, connection to life), is caught, constrained even more, and ends the story by lighting out for Chicago.

Puttering was written in 1957 (but not published until 1985) and set in Los Angeles, mostly, with glances at Washington, DC.  But, Dick’s biographer, Lawrence Sutin, suggests that the novel was really about Berkeley in the 1950s, and this seems true.  And so the book might be useful for getting sense of the area—not only because Dick was a local (he was), but because he frequented the Bohemian fringes.  I don’t know that he was a Fortean, per se, but he certainly ran with some of the same crowd.

One theme that runs throughout the book is the increasing importance of technology and consumerism to everyday life.  In the aftermath of the War, Americans had to re-adjust and re-build a society that was oriented not around manufacturing so much as selling services.  Roger epitomizes this by opening a radio—later, radio and television—shop, which evolves from a place the offers repairs (a small land where he can putter bout) into a an appliance store that runs on sales—a store that no longer had a place for Roger.

Interestingly, hanging over much of the novel is not the joyous effusion that is usually associated with the end of War, but a sense of displacement and depression.  That probably reflects Dick’s own vision—a record store played an important role in his life and shows up in much of his fiction, for instance—and is certainly necessary to the story—this is not a comedy—but also gives a glimpse into the sense of dislocation that was there at the time, but is often not remembered.  For example, Dick makes a point of mentioning the EC comics, then popular among children, and seems to suggest that consumerism was corrupting youth.  He does cut against this somewhat, though, suggesting that the horror and stories—though mass produced—might create a world where magic remained, and the mundanities of a consuming life was kept at bay.

Some vignettes:

82-3: “It seemed to her that the long hours of work at the aircraft plant [read: docks] made both of them excessively tired.  They became quarrelsome, like the people in the bars.  Both of them became thin—they had arrived thin enough as it was—and somber.  Most of their free time was spent lined up at the supermarket, buying groceries, or at the launderette waiting for their clothes.  In the evenings they listened to the radio or walked down to the corner for a beer. ….

The war came to an end by stages; the aircraft plants began to discharge groups of employees and cut down the number of shifts, the overtime, the seven-day week. ….

Near their wartime housing village a colony of stores had come into existence, clustered around the supermarket.  First, after the launderette, appeared a shoe repair shop, then a beauty parlor, a bakery, two bar-and-grills, a real estate office.”

84-5: “They had finished the war in a sprint, an ordeal lasting night and day, without humor and certainly without idealism.  Now it had come to an end; they lay on the couch or washed a few things, or sat around discussing what to do with their money, which opportunity to take advantage of.  They had earned their money.  The servicemen had begin to return; they had little or no money and many of them wanted to go to school on the G.I. Bill or they wanted to get their old jobs back—saved for them by law—or they spent that time with their wives and children, glad to be able to do that and nothing else.  For the warplant workers something more was required, something tangible.  They had got used to having something in their hands, some real object. …..

How high property prices had gone in the last year.  A house that had sold for five thousand dollars now sold for ten.  New tracts, subdivisions they were called, had started to advertise; each had a picturesque name.”

100-1: Roger “had a vision of crooks, swindles of every kind; he saw up into the office buildings and the crooked activity going on, the wheels, the machinery.  Loan offices, banks, doctors and dentists, quack healers preying on old women, Pachucs smashing store windows, defective equipment, food with filth and impurities in it, shoes made of cardboard, hats that melted in the rain, clothes that shrank and ripped, cars with broken motor blocks, toilet seats running with disease[,] germs, dogs carrying mange and rabies throughout the city, restaurants serving rotted food, real estate under water, phony stock in nonexistent mining companies, magazines with obscene pictures, animals slaughtered in cold blood, milk contaminated with dead flies, bugs and vermin and excretion, rubbish and garbage, a rain of filth on the streets, on the buildings and houses and stores.  The electric machines of the chiropractors crackled, the old ladies screamed, the patent medicine bottles boiled and exploded . . . he saw the war itself as a stupendous snow-job, men killed for fat bankers to float loans, ships built that went right to the bottom, bonds that could not be redeemed, Communism taking over, Red Cross blood that had syphilis germs in it.  Negro and white troops living together, nurses that were whores, generals who screwed their orderlies, profits and blackmarket butter, training camps in which recruits died by the thousands of bubonic plague, illness and suffering and money mixed together, sugar and rubber, meat and blood, ration stamps, V-D posters, short-arm inspections, M-1 rifles, USO entertainers with corks up their asses, motherfuckers and fairies and niggers raping white girls . . . he saw the sky flash and drip; private parts shot across the heavens, words croaked in his ears telling him about his mother’s monthlies; he saw the whole world writhe with hair, a monstrous hairy ball that burst and drenched him with blood . . .”

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.

I’ve been doing some reading on San Francisco geography, as well—soon to be supplemented by reading on LA geography—to get a sense of how the city (and Bay Area more generally) is organized and try to fit that in with what I know of the California Forteans.  And some interesting patterns have emerged.

Berkeley geographer Richard A. Walker recognizes four residential types.   He writes, “This civic landscape springs from the distinctive class, political and cultural nature of the Bay Area—relatively wealthy, petty bourgeois, bohemian, cosmopolitan, labourist, environmentalist, egalitarian, anti-modern—and embodies the contradictions of the libertine capitalism that is a local trademark.”

The first, and most iconic, category is the Victorian homes.  These resulted from the work of middle class reformers in the 1850s and 1860s, who saw San Francisco as too raw, too libertine, and sought to impose a more appropriate look for the city.  These were not the “modern” buildings of, say, Los Angeles.  Rather they were ornate and gaudy—Thorstein Veblen was thinking of them when he was at Stanford and writing the Theory of the Leisure Class.  Many of these were burned in 1906.  But the rich never abandoned downtown San Francisco as they did so many other inner cities, and so they remained as a tribute to the class identity of the nineteenth century rich.

A second category is what Walker calls ecotopian suburbs.  This is composed of the mock cabin and craftsman houses tucked into hills and surrounded by oaks, redwoods, and eucalyptus.  These areas, although they look natural, were made: the coast range of the Bay Area was mostly grass, and so homeowners and developers had to plant all the trees, as well as building the houses.  The inspiration for these places, Walker argues, is Yosemite and Big Trees.  Ecotopian suburbs can be found in parts of San Francisco, in the Oakland Hills, in Berkeley, and Marin.  These are the homesteads of the libertarian, bohemian middle class.  They combine mysticism, Romanticism, and Masonic ideals and stand in opposition to LA, once again: there the wave of modernist architecture expunged the arts and crafts movement.  In San Francisco, there was a conscious anti-modern movement.

A number of Bay Area Forteans are associated with this ideal.  Polly Lamb lived in Oakland; Anthony Boucher was in Berkeley—both in just these kinds of spots.  Most prominent, probably, is George Haas.  He idealized Big Trees State Park.  He built organic gardens around his Oakland home.  There were certainly anti-modern strains to his thought.

The third category is the suburb proper.  Oakland does not fit into this category because in the late nineteenth century that city wrestled with San Francisco for industrial dominance, and soon developed its own urban infrastructure: it was its own city, taking advantage of new sectors that developed after San Francisco came of age, especially food canning, auto building, and electrical manufacturing.

San Francisco did try to push South but was stopped by the presence of many elite estates in San Mateo County, which prevented the movement.  This fits into the Fortean story, too, for their developed a Bohemian connection between the Bay Area and less developed places to the south, especially Carmel, but also San Mateo.  These places retained their Bohemian, mystical vibe.  Marin did, too: remember, the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t completed until 1936, and for many seemed unnecessary.

Instead, development marched East, and the Bay Area did well: even as San Francisco’s manufacturing declined, around 1910 the region was only outpaced by Detroit (cars!), Cleveland, and its competitor to the South, LA.  Again, new sectors allowed the outlying areas to compete with their older neighbors, food processing, oil, and chemical work, especially.  Good wages and an extensive trolley system allowed workers to move East and North into new tract homes.

Past Alameda county, Contra Costa county developed its suburbs more slowly.  Places like Hercules and Rodeo were essentially company towns, with workers shacking up on business property.  (San Francisco financiers had a level of control this far out that they did not have in the East Bay, as much of the money for Contra Costa’s development came from the City.)  To tie in with the earlier connections, these suburbs also came to be supported by defense procurements as fortress California also built out in this direction.  But there is still some connection to Forteana even here, as Jack Parsons, the occultist rocket-developer from LA came north to work at Hercules Powder Company.

The fourth category is multi-family housing.  The university in Berkeley and the industrial areas in Oakland—especially with the coming of World War II—supported such dwellings, but the center for this residential type was San Francisco.  Apartments and residential hotels came into their own during the 1890s—before that, the need was taken care of by boarding out rooms.

The small rooms pushed people into the community: in places dominated by apartment buildings and residential hotels there was more life on the streets.  People ate out.  They went to coffee.  They went to movies.  These zones of dense dwelling, cheap entertainment, and public life are where experimental lifestyles took root.  This was the natural habitat of Bohemians, beats, hippes, gays: political rebels and public intellectuals.  (San Francisco was rich in such areas and so has a rich history of experimentation, with the Barbary Coast of the mid-nineteetnh century, the turn of the century Bohemianism, as well as the more obvious later manifestations.)

The Fortean connections here are obvious.  Miriam Alan de Ford lived in a hotel for most of her life, within walking distance of the library (urbanism made Forteanism easier, as there were vast collections of facts to study).  One thinks, also, of Kenneth MacNichol with his writers studio in the heart of one of San Francisco’s art districts, and Robert Barbour Johnson living in a little apartment and making appearances at the literary hotspots—indeed, it was this scene that drew him to San Francisco in the first place.

With the depression, and the drying up of investments, these areas began to decline.  Jobs moved to the suburbs, leaving the area old, infirm, and with decreasing political clout.  In the late 1940s and 1950s, the rich began to see these areas as blights in need of redevelopment.  And so there were fights between them and the remaining rebels, especially the beats in North Beach—what Kenneth Starr says was a battle between Provincials and Baghdadders.  Some of Old San Francisco was saved, and freeways were not allowed to cut through the old downtown.  But, the most iconic Bohemian place was lost.  This was the Montgomery Block, a warren of rooms housed by artists and such.  (Likely, a number of the people who attended MacNichols’s Fortean meetings lived here.)  In 1959, the structure—which had survived the 1906 fire—was bulldozed for a parking lot.  Later, the Trans-America Building was built there.  

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.)   

I'm doing the MS walk this spring in Sacramento.  My wife has the disease.  I'd love to see her cured or, barring that, the disease to afflict no one else in the world.  Join me, please.

Guest-post at a WaPo Blog, by me.

I finished reading The Compleat Boucher, a collection of al of Anthony Boucher’s short fantasy and science fiction.  It helps give a sense of the man.  There are some references to liberal politics, for example, and a lot of complaining against tyranny—which was relatively common during this era of science fiction.  There’s also a fair amount of Christian references—the story of Balaam seems to have been a favorite—and some light mocking of Catholicism.  Of course, there are many references to Berkeley and to academia, as well as Sherlock Holmes: “The Greatest Tertian” imagines a Martian anthropologist sifting through the ruins of Earth after the fourth planet had invaded and deducing that Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare were the same person, the greatest of humans, and surely would have prevented the invasion if he had been alive.  (For Baker Street Irregulars, he rewrites some of the Holmesian cannon so that the master’s failures are explained by the action of Martian spies.)  The Manana Club makes an appearance, as does Dr. Deringer, the Holmesian character from Rocket to the Morgue.

Two themes predominate.  First, Boucher was inordinately fond of stories about time travel and its paradoxes.  He also dealt with the trouble that came from magic—in these cases magic being an obvious stand in for scientific and technological advancement.   In all but one story, magic created more problems than it solved—in fact, it was usually the decision to conjure where the protagonist went wrong.  The magicians or demons or fairies or other creatures called upon to perform the magic also warned their masters that there was no way to specify their wishes clearly enough to avert catastrophe, but they never listened.  And so the hero of “The Scrawny One” is transformed intot he richest man in the world—just as he asked—by being put inside the dying body of the world’s richest man, while the demon took over the old body.  The one force in the world that could obey magic was love, as was the case in “Nellthu,” a short short story from 1955.  The woman in the tale—the only one in all of Boucher’s stories to have magic work for her—wished that the demon she invoked would fall totally and unselfishly in love with her—which meant that the demon kept her well, made her beautiful and good in bed, and let her fool around, serving her all day every day.  Love, too, was the one force that could undue time paradoxes, as was the case in “Transfer Point” (1950).

Boucher’s most widely acclaimed story is “The Quest for St. Aquin,” (1959), but I don’t think it his best.  Indeed, he had dealt with similar themes in the 1954 story “Balaam,” which is tighter.  In my estimation, he produced his best works in the early 1940s, with the stories published in 1943 and 1945 having the most to recommend them: “Pelagic Spark,” “Expedition,” and “Sanctuary,” all from 1943, and the weird tales, “The Pink Caterpillar” and “Mr. Lupesco” from 1945.  (It’s no surprise that his best work would have been produced relatively early, since this would have been when he was most under the influence of the Manana Club.)  He published his best potential story in 1943, “We Print the Truth,” which only failed because at certain moments Boucher chose not to tell his story but to comment on it as a story.   This . . . tweeness, I guess is the word, seems common to mystery writing of the time, and it unfortunately infected a lot of his writing.  “St. Aquin,” I think, was sometimes played for jokes—especially insiderish jokes—at the expense of the story.  Naiveté also marred much of his science fiction.  He imagined aliens from other planets as mammals or insects, for example, which while not as clichéd as BEMs was still uninspired.

What was inspired, I would argue, was his attempts at mixing the genres of mystery and science fiction.  John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, famously said at about this time that the two could not be mixed, because science fiction allowed one to play too much with the premises and so cheat the reader.  Asimov later took up the challenge and proved that one could write a science fiction mystery, and he’s widely credited with creating the new form, but I think in that Boucher is poorly served.  He seems to have been reluctant to completely take on Campbell—even referencing approvingly his statement in one story—and his mysteries did not always use as well worked-out science fiction as Asimov’s but he was clearly doing science fiction mysteries.

And this mixing, I think, had a lot to do with Fort.  The classic mystery is composed in the Holmesian fashion, to show that what was improbable was possible—was in fact the truth.  Boucher’s mysteries are meant to prove that some parts of the impossible are possible—just as he said in Rocket to the Morgue.  The mysteries, for instance, prove that time travel is possible.   There’s a connection here, too, with weird tales, in that Boucher sometimes does not allow himself a simple, rational explanation for the weirdnesses at the heart of the stories—but shows that the supernatural, too, is alive in the human world.

That weird tales and Fort were in his mind is unmistakable.  He wrote a number of stories for Weird Tales, which meant he was keeping up with that market.  His stories also referenced Fort.   In “The Chronokinesis of Jonathan Hull,” for example, a man of the future writes “The Co-ordinating Concordance to the Data of Charles Fort,” which implies that Fort’s ideas were later confirmed.  More subtly, “The Tenderizers,” posits—in a classic Lovecraftian manner—that there are some msyerious “they” controlling weird writers, making them tell of horrors so that the “they” can savor the fine bouquet of our fear.  And after they have been used up, the writers are harvested—which accounts for Ambrose Bierce’s mysterious disappearance in Mexico.  Any reader of Fort would remember that he suggested—jokingly—some cosmic force was collecting Bierces.  The stories “Sanctuary” and “The Pink Caterpillar” reverse the tale, reporting on mysterious appearances.  Another of Boucher’s stories plays with the classic Fortean maxim, “I think we are property.”  In “Conquest,” humans ingratiate themselves with a race of alien giants by becoming their pets—and thus will be able to sabotage the giants when galactic destroyers show up.

For the current purpose of understanding the San Francisco Forteans, another of Boucher’s Fortean references may be most useful.  In 1952’s “The Anomaly of the Empty Man,” Lamb, private detective who thrives on bizarre cases is bamboozled by his current one and so goes to the “Monkey Block”—Montgomery Block, an artist’s enclave on the edge of China Town and North Beach—right near where Robert Barbour Johnson and some others lived.  He is looking for a particular studio, “Verner’s Varieites,” which is run by the eccentric Dr. Verner, who oversees singers and sculptors and writers.   Verner is “Half Robert Burton and Half Charles Fort.”  He had been a world traveler and lover of many women and now stood at a lectern, writing—with a quill pen—The Anatomy of Nonscience, a sequel to Fort’s four books.  In general, Boucher suggests that Forteanism was common in the arts community of San Francisco—an expected part of the weirdness, maybe affected, maybe not.  But, I think that Kenneth MacNichol may also have been a model for Dr. Verner.  We know that Boucher was fond of using real people as models, that MacNichol had traveled the globe and gone through many loves, and was a dedicated Fortean.  He also worked right near the Monkey Block.  This San Francisco Fortean again connects mystery and science fiction writing.  He is related to Sherlock Holmes—they are supposed to be cousins—but uses the more Fortean mantra, that some part of the impossible must be possible.

It’s impossible that Boucher got this idea from the San Francisco Forteans—he was using it when he was in LA—but it captures nicely what he got out of Fort.