Saving Utopia : Neighbors Want to Spare What’s Left of Defunct Colony

Two men, father and son, make their way through a strange desert landscape of vegetation, garbage and stone.

Tony Vacik and Tony Vacik Jr. stop at the squat stone towers that dominate the horizon near Pearblossom Highway in Llano del Rio, an unincorporated hamlet of 1,500 in the Antelope Valley. The crumbling, 15-foot-high cobblestone pillars and chimneys resemble the abandoned temple of some desert god.

Twenty miles west are the Antelope Valley boom towns of Palmdale and Lancaster. Each day, bulldozers extend the conquest of the desert by housing developments and shopping malls, sprawling monuments to the power of capitalism.

Different Tradition

The ruins on Pearblossom Highway are monuments to a different tradition. They are what is left of the Llano del Rio cooperative colony founded in 1914 by Job Harriman, a socialist lawyer who ran for vice president of the United States and governor of California and won about 35% of the 137,000 votes cast in the 1911 Los Angeles mayoral election.

“Socialism didn’t rub off much on us kids that was at Llano,” says Tony Vacik, 79, one of the last survivors of Llano del Rio. Vacik’s father brought him to the colony as a boy of 6; Vacik has spent the last several decades farming land with his son in nearby Littlerock. Although Tony Vacik Jr. has heard countless Llano stories, he grins patiently as his father expounds.

“But socialism sure rubbed off on the government,” the elder Vacik continues. “Now you got old-age pensions, keeping care of the poor and handicapped, unions, Social Security. That’s all they was squawkin’ about at Llano.”

Harriman’s attempt at a model cooperative community attracted nearly 1,000 people to its 2,000 acres and lasted four years.

Today, 75 years after Llano was founded, scholars and many Antelope Valley residents are afraid that its vestiges will disappear. The ruins have been looted, vandalized and allowed to decay. Moreover, a Los Angeles County proposal seeking $100,000 in state grant funds to preserve the historic site was rejected last month.

“It was the most important non-religious utopian colony in western American history,” said Knox Mellon of the Mission Inn Foundation, former head of the state Office of Historic Preservation and an expert on Harriman and Llano.

Said UC Riverside’s Robert Hine, a historian of American utopian experiments: “The myth of the West is the myth of the individual. But the West produced an awful lot of communitarian experiences, a warm, cooperative spirit. We’ve turned our backs on that part of the western experience.”

A plaque designating the site a California Historical Landmark was stolen two weeks after it was erected in 1982. Constellations of broken glass cover the floor of the former hotel where fires once blazed in the cobblestone hearths during Saturday night dances. Rusted cans choke the cavity of a water storage tank. There is automobile debris everywhere.

County officials and Llano residents have proposed a county park that would preserve the site and provide a community center and a historical display. But a park would cost half a million dollars. And the land where the most substantial ruins are concentrated is owned by two doctors in Illinois.

One of them, Dr. Supachai Pongched of Forest Park in suburban Chicago, said in a telephone interview that he and the other owner are not interested in a sale or a trade.

As a result, Jim Park, the county parks planning director, said: “Right now it’s going to continue to languish in its current state.”

Tony Vacik professes indifference: “Some historic outfit could do something if they wanted to. I don’t give a darn.”

Nonetheless, Vacik’s reminiscing is affectionate. He recalls baseball, fistfights, rattlesnake bites, bronco busting under the tutelage of the Llano blacksmith, a “half-breed Cherokee” named Bigelow. He grouses about the monotonous diet forced by Llano’s isolation.

“No ‘frigeration in them days,” Vacik said. “Beans’d keep. Spaghetti’d keep. Too much spaghetti, I hope to tell ya.”

Tony Vacik’s father was an avowed socialist who came to California from what is now Czechoslovakia. Anton Vacik befriended Harriman, the Socialist Labor Party’s California gubernatorial candidate in 1898 and labor leader Eugene Debs’ running mate on the Socialist Party presidential ticket in 1900.

Harriman built strong socialist and labor union support in Los Angeles. According to Mellon, Harriman’s ideology was a kind of “right-wing socialism. He saw a fusion between socialism and trade unions.”

Harriman’s legal and political careers fused during the celebrated McNamara case in 1910 when a bomb killed 20 men in the alley behind the Los Angeles Times, which was a leading opponent of organized labor at the time. Harriman aided Clarence Darrow in defending John and Joseph McNamara, two Midwestern union organizers charged in the bombing.

Abrupt Confession

Harriman also mounted a strong campaign for mayor of Los Angeles. But the abrupt confession of the McNamara brothers shortly before the election was decisive in his loss to George Alexander in December, 1911.

Harriman’s politics shifted to the economic arena. He envisioned a community that would exemplify a socialist triumph of cooperation over capitalistic competition. Llano del Rio--a barren area near Big Rock Creek, which Harriman and five partners purchased for about $80,000--would be a “gateway to the future.”

A collection of left-wing activists, farmers and union members made the arduous trek to the Antelope Valley. New members were initially required to buy 2,000 shares of the Llano Del Rio Corp. with a $500 cash minimum up front. They earned $4 a day, one dollar going toward unpurchased stock and the other three to be paid if the colony realized a profit. As time passed, the colony accepted more members unable to pay up front, and the wage system dissolved.

Families lived in homes of wood or adobe, or in tents. One of the two Llano newspapers, Western Comrade, published in 1917 a list of 60 departments within the colony, including agriculture (alfalfa, corn, pear orchards), a dairy, a lime kiln, a post office, a printing press, three schools and a sawmill.

There has been a good deal of discussion about the factors contributing to Llano’s fall. Vacik gives this analysis: “It’s hard to get people to cooperate, y’know. . . . You’ve always got loafers and deadbeats, they had them there like you have them everywhere.”

Hine and Mellon say the difficulties of cooperative life produced debilitating disputes and challenges to Harriman’s leadership.

In Llano, Hine said, “the problem was that they weren’t looking for people who had a commitment that transcended self or community. They were looking for people who wanted to live a better life, get out of the city, find a job.”

Other problems came from outside: a water shortage and harassment by Llano’s numerous enemies. Colonists discovered that their calculations of available water were incorrect because an earthquake fault was diverting part of the supply. And neighboring ranchers hit Llano with numerous lawsuits over water rights.

By 1918, Harriman found a new site for utopia in Leesville, La. Most of the colonists moved to “New-llano,” which endured into the mid-1930s.

Harriman’s longtime affliction with tuberculosis worsened in the dampness of Louisiana. He returned to California and died in 1925.

Tony Vacik’s family returned to the Llano area. Until World War II, Vacik said, he would periodically stop to talk to groups of former colonists holding reunions at the deteriorating site. He says the memories remain stronger than the ideology.

“I wasn’t much of a socialist, y’know. Had a little bit in me, but not much. Didn’t use to think some guy ought to own land and do nothing with it.”

Vacik does not think a Llano-like experiment would work today. “Not enough cooperation,” he said.

Mellon, Hine and others hope cooperation will prevent Llano from fading away. Ideology aside, they say, the basic goals of the colony remain relevant.

“The whole world is looking for that kind of thing, isn’t it?” Hine said. “In this age, when we’re looking at community and how we preserve community in the face of all the threats, we’ve got to start looking back at these communities that were efforts to do just that.”