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other in the proletariat - Adamic chronicled Los Angeles of the oil-and-Godcrazy 1920s. To him it was an incredible burlesque mirror of the philistinism and larceny of Coolidge America (additional proof of the accuracy of Marxs generalization that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce).22 As McWilliams recalled: He thrived on Los Angeles. He reveled in its freaks, fakirs, and frauds. He became the magazine biographer of such eccentrics as Otoman Bar-Azusht Ranish and Aime Semple McPherson. Lost in the files of the strange assortment of magazines published by R. Haldeman-Julius will be found a long list of Adamics contributions " J" X to Los Angeles. He was its prophet, sociologist and historian. Adamics most original contribution to the debunking of the Booster myth was his emphasis on the centrality of class violence to the construction of the city. Others had already attacked Los Angeless philistinism and skewered its apologists with Mencken-like sarcasm. (Indeed as early as 1913, Willard Huntington Wright was complaining in The Smart Set about the hypocrisy, like a vast fungus, [that] has spread over the citys surface.)24 In his historically interesting but vapidly written 1927 novel, Oil!, Upton Sinclair (who had been a leading participant in the IWW free speech fight at the Harbor) debunked the oil boom and evoked the oppression of labor in Los Angeles. But Adamic was the first to carefully chart the sordid, bloody history of the Forty Year War and attempt a muckraking reconstruction of its central events: the bombing of the Times in 1910 and the subsequent trial of the labor conspiracy led by the McNamara brothers. Dynamite: The Story o f Class Violence in America (1931), although scarcely flattering to the California labor bureaucracy, painted a demonic portrait of General Otis and the ruling-class brutality that had driven labor to desperation. Equally it warned readers in the early Depression years that until employers bargained with unions in good faiths outbreaks of violent class warfare were inevitable. Shortly after publishing the first version of Dynamite, Adamic syn thesized his various Haldeman-Julius ephemera and pages from his diary in a famous essay, Los Angeles! There She Blows! (The Outlook, 13 August 1930), later quoted in The Enormous Village chapter of Laughing in the Jungle. This essay was widely noticed by the critical literati, exerting a

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