LAT Magazine: Promised Land

[ellisonz]

Once a utopia for Socialist visionaires, century-old Llano Del Rio is now just dust in the High Desert wind.
By Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson
May 2012

As one travels east into the desert on Pearblossom Highway, just past rickety towns and careworn ranches, the spectral remains of a utopian colony called Llano del Rio appear through a haze of dust. Two river-rock chimneys, positioned like faceless Moai, and an eerie length of wall are all that are visible from the road.

The stone edifices break up the scrubby surfaces of a landscape interspersed with cairns of trash, buckwheat and sage. A confluence of politics, economics and human frailty generated the rise and fall of what used to stand here, and it has sparked enough interest to fill at least one book and countless chapters in others.

Utopias are propelled by political motivation; their creation is a moral judgment on the existing state of affairs. California, always at the cusp of reinvention, responded to the chaos of the dawning of the industrial age by spawning the largest number of utopian colonies in the country. One of the most celebrated was Llano del Rio, brainchild of Indiana-born Job Harriman, who arrived in San Francisco in 1886 a minister and lawyer seeking both a higher moral ground and the ability to make a substantive change. Instead, he evolved into a vocal agnostic and Socialist.

Harriman was not a gentle theorist but an activist in the truest sense, embodying a muscular idealism in response to an economic system so anarchic an estimated 40 percent of the U.S. population had been abandoned to extreme poverty and another 40 percent to conditions just a notch above. His journey to the colony’s creation as an answer to the era’s pitiless capitalism was as epic as his biblical namesake’s.

More: http://www.latimesmagazine.com/2012/05/promised-land.html

[HiPointDem]

1. ..

[ellisonz]

2. I think some socialist-realism would have been more appropriate...

...than a product of monarchy and serfdom.