L.A.: Another High-Minded Experiment About to Fail?

I do most of my work sitting at the three-drawer oak library table I use as a desk. It was built shortly after the turn of the century by Gustav Stickley in his famous Craftsman Workshops in central New York.

By some standards, it’s an austere--even severe--piece of furniture--spare, uncompromising and utterly unadorned. But I’ve always thought its broad top, dove-tailed joints and hand-hammered pulls compose a sort of model of useful beauty. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat and wished to write just one sentence half as solid.

Lately, though, I’ve found it hard to shake the memory that the table at which I sit is not simply a piece of furniture. It is the relic of a failed utopian ideal that once inspired tens of thousands of people around the world.

The Arts and Crafts movement of which Stickley was one of the leading American exponents began with the Englishman William Morris in the 19th Century and, ultimately, spread to four continents. Its organizing principle was the notion that simple, functional design, executed as much as possible by hand, could restore the lost unity between work and craftsmanship. In the process, so the theory went, much of the damage done to the human spirit by the Industrial Revolution might be healed.

Stickley, who began his career as a hack manufacturer of Victorian furniture, became an idealistic convert to Morris’ cause. One of the drawers of my table bears not only his hallmark--a joiner’s compass--and signature but also the motto he adopted for his firm: Als ik Kan, which in Flemish means “as well as I can.”

He not only made furniture and housewares according to arts and crafts principles but also published a magazine, The Craftsman, whose mission was to promote “a simple, democratic art” that would provide Americans with “material surroundings conducive to plain living and high thinking.”

It was that kind of movement--sincere and high-minded in the best sense. And, in the end, it failed utterly. Today, the artifacts produced by Stickley and his comrades around the world are functional relics, prized by a handful of antiquarians and collectors.

Recent history is littered with such failures--from the Shakers to the Bauhaus--people who believed that the right sort of material environment might somehow contribute to the formation of better men and women. In the end, the ideals faded and the objects remained, simply one more thing to be coveted by the wealthy and acquisitive.

Their failures have come to mind more frequently over the past month or so, because of my participation in a number of documentary films about life in Los Angeles. Two of the productions are by British television, one by America’s Public Broadcasting System. In all three instances, I have been asked to explain to one degree or another what happened here in Los Angeles last April, and how we Angelenos have come to understand it since.

The answer, unfortunately, is dimly, if at all.

Again and again, I have been asked in various ways: What is being done about it?

The answer, unfortunately, is not much, if anything. And in that inaction the seeds of our own particular failure are being sown.

Los Angeles long has congratulated itself on its success as an experiment in human living. Here--the theory went--space, prosperity and tolerance had created a physical environment in which there was emerging a new man and woman, free not only of the material cares but also the passions of the older, tragic world.

Well, the space filled up, the prosperity collapsed and what looked like tolerance turned out to be the vacuum of indifference--a void that quickly is being filled with suspicion and mutual anxiety.

“How would you say,” a British producer asked me not long ago, “that people in Los Angeles now understand the riots and what has occurred since?”

I thought for a moment, and what came to mind were these lines from Yeats’ “Meditations in Time of Civil War”:

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed or a house burned,

Yet no clear fact to be discerned.

In fact, the one clear response to last spring’s troubles that today can be discerned in every one of Los Angeles communities is the rush acquire guns. Not long ago, I was in a gun store in the San Fernando Valley, one of the largest gun stores in the city. The proprietor told me that, since last April, his store has sold 65,000 firearms. It is one of those stores that stocks very few sporting guns; most of its firearms are of the paramilitary variety designed to provide what we have euphemistically come to call “personal security.”

On the night I visited, the store was packed with men and women of every race and ethnic group. For one brief moment they were united in their resolution that “next time,” they’re going “to blow somebody away.”

Fear of the sort that was palpable in that store is easy to discern. Today, as you move around this city, the other emotion to be found everywhere is anger. From Boyle Heights to the Palisades, from South-Central to Pico Union and out to the Valley, people are gripped by a deep and burning anger. They are angry because they believe all this city’s institutions of communal justice and security have failed them.

And, with a few inconsequential exceptions, they are right.

The challenge now is to prevent that anger from hardening into hatred. There is a way. Late in his life, Yeats was reproved by a correspondent for his bitter criticism of the new Irish state’s failures.

“You say that we must not hate,” he wrote in reply. “You are right, but we may, and sometimes must, be indignant and speak it. Hate is a kind of passive suffering, but indignation is a kind of joy.”

Truthful indignation over injustice and insecurity is what we owe to one another at this moment. Unless we begin to express it honestly to one another, we may indeed fail.

A personal note: This is my last column. For the next year or so, I will be on a special writing assignment for The Times. Over the past two years, I have incurred numerous debts of gratitude. Some are owed to the many readers who took the time to send long and thoughtful responses to my columns. Most of all, I am indebted to the men and women who opened their lives and hearts to me in the full knowledge that they were about to become “material.” If this column occasionally transmuted the leaden facts of daily life into the precious metal of understanding, that alchemy was accomplished under the spell of their kindness.

Thank you all very much.