PR O L O G U E

and the so-called brush gang, the colony was assailed from the outside by creditors, draft boards, jealous neighbors, and the Los Angeles Times. After the loss of Llanos water rights in a lawsuit - a devastating blow to its irrigation infrastructure - Harriman and a minority of colonists relocated in 1918 to Louisiana, where a hard-scrabble New Llano (a pale shadow of the original) hung on until 1939. Within twenty-four hours of the colonists departure, local ranchers (who precariously represented capitalism in the wilderness) began to demolish its dormitories and workshops, evidently with the intention of erasing any trace of the red menace. But Llanos towering silo, cow byre, and the cobblestone foundation and twin fireplaces of its Assembly Hall, proved indestructible: as local patriotic fury subsided, they became romantic landmarks ascribed to increasingly mythic circumstances. Now and then, a philosophical temperament, struggling with the huge paradox of Southern California, rediscovers Llano as the talisman of a future lost. Thus Aldous Huxley, who lived for a few years in the early 1940s in a former Llano ranch house overlooking the colonys cemetery, liked to meditate in the almost supernatural silence on the fate of utopia. He ultimately came to the conclusion that the Socialist City was a pathetic little Ozymandias, doomed from the start by Harrimans Gladstone collar and his Pickwickian misunderstanding of human nature - whose history except in a purely negative way . . . is sadly uninstructive.1 3 Llanos other occasional visitors, lacking Huxleys vedic cynicism, have generally been more charitable. After the debacle of 1960s-70s communitarianism (especially the deadly trail that led into the Guyanese jungle), the pear trees planted by this ragtime utopia seem a more impressive accomplishment. Moreover, as its most recent historians point out, Huxley grossly under estimated the negative impact of wartime xenophobia and the spleen of the Los Angeles Times upon Llanos viability. There but for fortune (and Harry Chandler), perhaps, would stand a brave red kibbutz in the Mojave today, canvassing votes for Jesse Jackson and protecting Joshuas from bulldozers.1 4

THE DEVELOPERS MILLENNIUM? But, then again, we do not stand at the gates of Socialisms New Jerusalem, but at the hard edge of the developers millennium. Llano itself is owned by

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