SIXTEEN
A New Way of Life
LIKE MANY HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS, Howard Ahmanson did not set out to be a philanthropist. “He got the notion that a very successful businessman ought to have great art,” Franklin Murphy explained. “From that point, he got interested in the possibility of a museum [LACMA]. Then he discovered a new dimension in life. That's when he started becoming charitable. In all fairness, when that door opened, he walked through it.”1
Ahmanson was not sure this was a door he wanted to open in the late 1950s. Prior to 1958, he had made no major philanthropic gifts. With high federal income and estate tax rates in place for the wealthy, Ahmanson protected himself by letting his assets appreciate (Home Savings, for example) without liquidating them and thus realizing taxable gains. To permanently avoid a potentially huge tax liability, he created the Ahmanson Foundation in 1952 and began contributing shares of appreciated stock.2 Following the path of a number of other very wealthy individuals, he put shares of Home Savings and Loan into the Ahmanson Foundation but stipulated that the shares could not be sold or transferred.3 This way, he maintained control for corporate purposes, but earnings and dividends didn't flow to his personal tax return. They could be distributed to charity.4
To govern the Ahmanson Foundation, Ahmanson created a board that included his closest family and friends: Dottie, his nephews Bill and Bob, Gould Eddy, and attorney Thomas Webster. Prior to the divorce, Howard did not even serve on the foundation's board, and Dottie was president. After the divorce, Howard became president, but Dottie remained on the board.5 The foundation was an extension of Ahmanson and his family.
Like most foundations established by very affluent Americans in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Ahmanson Foundation had no strategic framework for giving. Charitable organizations appealed directly to Howard, Dottie, or the nephews to support their annual giving or capital campaigns. The foundation gave modest amounts to nonprofits in Los Angeles and Omaha, including the Salvation Army, the Southern California Symphony Association, the Community Chest, and the UCLA Progress Fund, as well as the Dundee Presbyterian Church and other organizations in Omaha. The foundation also made contributions on behalf of Home's other executives. More focused giving was targeted toward medical research, often related to the conditions affecting Ahmanson's own health—gout and gout-related arthritis. He expressed interest in commissioning research on the purine content of foods, for example, since purine is a critical factor in gout.6 None of the foundation's grants in the late 1950s was larger than $10,000. Most were below $1,000. The assets of the Ahmanson Foundation were only $370,810 at the end of October 1960.7 As Ahmanson's wealth increased in the 1960s, however, he was incorporated into the circles of the civic elite in Los Angeles. And as in all major American cities, his philanthropy played a critical role in confirming his status.8
CULTURAL PATRON
Despite his late-night piano playing, Howard did not give generously to the performing arts prior to the 1960s. He once confessed to Los Angeles business leader John McCone that though he believed “opera is very, very important to culture, to be brutally honest, I find it far down on my list.”9 When Dorothy Chandler pressed him to contribute to the symphony, he responded: “I have been wrestling with my conscience. . . . My dilemma—to apportion my affections between the pleasure I get out of supporting any Buff Chandler enterprise and the vicarious thrill I get out of things well done—or to continue in my chosen path of supporting obscure medical research which basically thrills me more than culture.”10
Ahmanson's reticence reflects one way in which he was still outside the circles of the civic elite in 1958, despite his growing wealth. In the immediate postwar era, key leaders had come together to create an organization called Greater Los Angeles Plans Incorporated (GLPI) with an explicit ambition to “recenter” the region and revitalize the city center. They called for the construction of an opera house on Bunker Hill as a way to renew the neighborhood and create a new cultural anchor for downtown. Over the next decade, these civic elites, overwhelming the resistance of the low-income ethnic Mexican residents, sought to remake the neighborhoods of the Bunker Hill community into a modernist city center complete with high-rise corporate offices and monumental cultural institutions.11
There's no indication that Ahmanson had a strong connection to this effort. In fact, with the completion of Sheets's building for National American Fire Insurance, Ahmanson participated in the migration to Wilshire Boulevard, where a number of other savings and loan executives would establish their headquarters. But he remained close to many of the people playing a prominent role in this downtown project, including architect William Pereira, who had done some of the initial planning work for Bunker Hill's redevelopment.12
Like Howard, voters showed little interest in opera. They rejected a proposal for municipal financing of the opera house project three times between 1951 and 1954, even after backers enhanced the project's populist appeal by including an auditorium for sporting events and an exhibition hall for trade shows. Despite these losses at the polls, in February 1955, days after Howard Ahmanson helped convince the Republican National Committee to hold the 1956 convention in San Francisco, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors revisited the idea of building a large auditorium downtown.13 Fans of the opera and the symphony went back to the drawing board as well. Re-framing their concept, the city's leaders offered a plan that involved a mix of public and private financing. Dorothy Chandler emerged as the project's spiritual leader and relentless fund-raiser.14
As writers Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt first pointed out, Chandler's efforts to fund the construction of Music Center represented an important turning point in the social dynamics of the civic elite in Los Angeles. Instead of relying on the city's long-established white Protestant families to provide the funds and the vision for the project, Chandler reached out to the growing community of affluent Jews, including Mark Taper, and to the nouveau riche, like Howard Ahmanson, to play a major role in sponsoring the Center.15 Chandler's efforts helped forge a cohesive and powerful civic elite that shaped the development of leading cultural institutions like LACMA, the Music Center, and UCLA, as well as lesser entities like the Museum of Science and Industry and the County Art Institute.16
Led by this civic elite, the various campaigns to build or support these institutions were buoyed by a rising tide of cultural expression in postwar Los Angeles and America. The GI Bill helped to create a large, upwardly mobile, college-educated sector in society that had the time and money to appreciate the arts.17 New cultural institutions also addressed cold war insecurities that suggested that Russia—with its classical composers, painters, and ballet—was more sophisticated and sensitive than the United States, where a crass materialism dominated the culture.18 And, increasingly, performing arts centers and art museums became critical ingredients to urban renewal.
Ahmanson's role in this collective effort began with his relationship with Millard Sheets and his service on the board of the Los Angeles County Art Institute. Over time, his fellow board member Dorothy Chandler pressed him to take a bigger part and to open his checkbook to a grander vision of L.A.’s cultural life. Ahmanson's pivotal $2 million gift to LACMA in 1958 marked the beginning of this transition. Joining LACMA's board in March 1960 represented a next step. Months later he was elected to the USC Board of Trustees in December 1960.19 He also became involved with the Music Center's Building Fund Committee.20 All of these experiences strengthened his connections within the community of civic elites. Starting in 1963, however, he had the opportunity to consider the role of culture from a much larger vantage point.
NATIONAL CULTURAL CENTER
During the crisis of the Great Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt and others discussed the creation of a massive theater and arts complex on Capitol Hill in Washington. Congress held hearings, but nothing came of the plan until 1958, when it approved the creation of a National Cultural Center.
As supporters were quick to say, the project was not a local urban renewal project. It was intended to provide a venue for performances that would celebrate the artistry of the nation. Edward Durrell Stone was chosen to design the center. A board appointed by President Eisenhower set out to raise money to match a congressional appropriation, but over the next three years the board made little progress.
Following his inauguration in 1961, President Kennedy sought to rein-vigorate the project. He recruited Roger L. Stevens to chair the board, and Stevens asked the first lady and former first lady Mamie Eisenhower to serve as honorary co-chairs. With the White House, Stevens recruited new board members, including Howard Ahmanson, the first trustee from California.21
For the announcement of his appointment on April 10, 1963, Howard and Steady flew to Washington. At the White House, Steady talked to the president about Civil War battles, and the president gave him a PT-109 Pin to remember his visit.22 Seven months later, the president was dead. Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to rename the cultural center as a memorial to Kennedy. To help ensure the completion of the project, he added more than a dozen new members, including members of the Kennedy family and some of the slain president's closest associates.23
On the board, Ahmanson once again witnessed the ways in which the development of a landmark public cultural institution could ignite controversy. The board proposed locating the Kennedy Center along the Potomac River. Urban planning advocates wanted a site on Pennsylvania Avenue closer to the heart of the city. Edward Durrell Stone defended the site on the river and compared it to London's Parliament on the Thames or Paris's Louvre on the Seine. In the end, the Potomac site won out.24
The argument over the site was also closely connected to the nature of the institution and a growing debate across the country. According to critics, the Kennedy Center, with its imposing white marble walls and expensive seats, would serve the elite rather than the ordinary citizens of Washington and the nation. Similar criticisms had been leveled in New York and Los Angeles, where urban redevelopment went hand in hand with the erection of downtown cultural facilities like Lincoln Center and the Music Center. Roger Stevens, the chairman of the Kennedy Center's board, pledged to address these concerns by keeping ticket prices affordable and promoting programming that would have a broad appeal.
By the end of June 1965, fund-raising for the Kennedy Center had topped the goal and Ahmanson and his fellow trustees voted to proceed with construction. In the meantime, the board's efforts to recruit an artistic director were protracted and highlighted the fears of many performing artists that politics would infect the programming of the Kennedy Center.
Ahmanson did not play a leading role on the board, which was dominated by insiders from the Kennedy circle and family, but he was exposed to the debate over the role of culture in representing the identity of a community and a people. He also grew comfortable with the idea of government involvement in the arts. “Thirty years ago, I would have been horrified,” he told a reporter after President Johnson had signed the bill creating the National Endowment for the Arts and appointed Kennedy Center board chairman Roger Stevens to chair the new agency. “However, during the Depression, the government supported hundreds of creative artists in all the crafts.” No doubt remembering Millard Sheets's work with the Works Progress Administration, he continued, “Some marvelous things came out of those grey years, and subsequently some very fine, talented, useful people.” Too much government interference could be extremely harmful, he conceded. “In Russia, the decline of contemporary art can be traced to excessive, totalitarian control. Properly administered this aid can be of great benefit to the cultural life of the nation.”25 It was obviously good for the metropolis as well.
LACMA REDUX
Just as the city of Los Angeles manifested the vitality of an America free from Depression and world war, the dedication of the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art on March 30, 1965, was a crowning cultural achievement in the postwar era. It was the largest museum of art to be built in the United States since construction of the National Gallery of Art on the eve of World War II.26 It was absolutely the largest in existence west of Chicago.
As a major donor, Howard basked in the accolades of powerful friends. Ernest Debs, a member of the Board of Supervisors, congratulated everyone who had helped to make the museum a reality. “All of us and all our children and children's children will forever be in your debt for this magnificent achievement,” he said to Ahmanson.27
After the opening, Howard embarked on a five-week summer tour of great cities of Europe, including cold war Moscow and Leningrad.28 When he returned, tensions between Howard and LACMA's director Ric Brown grew worse. Throughout the process of construction, the board had exerted its authority and individual members had pushed their personal agendas. Plans for the theater were made, revised, and revised again because board members argued over the size. Bart Lytton wanted a second story for the gallery to be named in his honor.29 David Bright “rode herd on contractors, subcontractors, carpenters, locksmiths, guards, everybody.”30 As director, Ric Brown tried to assert his leadership. Ahmanson felt he was in over his head. Brown said later he was increasingly at odds with board members, particularly Ahmanson, who wanted him to exhibit the pictures they owned, whether or not they were genuine.
Others on the board felt Brown did not have the interpersonal skills to build and lead a team. Meanwhile board and director continued to struggle over the boundaries of their respective roles.31 In the months that followed the opening, despite the obvious success of the museum, people sensed “administrative chaos and impending doom.” Some members of the board wanted to hire an administrator to lead the institution and supervise Brown.32 Brown resisted this plan. When Brown was offered a position at the new Kimbell Art Foundation in Fort Worth, the board suggested he should take the job.33
The announcement of Brown's departure in November 1965 sparked an uproar in Los Angeles. Bitter over the way he had been treated, Brown issued a public statement criticizing the board's constant interference in the day-to-day activities of the museum. In an editorial, the Los Angeles Times sided with Brown. In a public rebuttal, Ed Carter noted that “the Museum's trustees are among the most experienced and successful managers of both profit and non-profit enterprises in the west.” They were devoted to Los Angeles and had spent hundreds of hours on the museum's management issues. “I respectfully suggest, therefore, that they are in a better position to make judgment of Dr. Brown's adequacy than the editorial writers of the Los Angeles Times."34
Among the cultural cognoscenti in Los Angeles and across the country, Ahmanson's role in pushing Brown out reinforced a popular narrative that businessmen didn't know anything about art or about running arts institutions. The Nation magazine editorialized that Howard was still angry that his name hadn't been affixed to the entire museum complex, that Brown had resisted “Mr. Ahmanson's pet architect (a man noted for gold-leaf bank facades) and had refused to hang in the museum Mr. Ahmanson's collection of dubious old masters.” The editorial went on to suggest that Brown and the people of Los Angeles were “victims of cultural ‘explosion.’ Culture has become ‘big league,’ ‘big money,’ a bandwagon phenomenon. And men who have prospered by grabbing front seats on bandwagons are jumping aboard the art wagon.” The editors concluded with the hope that rich men in America would eventually learn “to support creative excellence without assuming that they can buy it.”35
The criticisms that followed Brown's dismissal failed to dissuade Ahmanson from continuing his civic patronage. In December 1965, Dorothy Chandler announced that the Ahmanson Foundation would give $1 million to fund completion of the Center Theater at the Music Center complex. The gift raised Ahmanson's total contribution to the project to $1.5 million.36 And shortly after making his gift, Ahmanson joined the Music Center board, where he was once again teamed up with Dorothy Chandler and Franklin Murphy, as well as Walt Disney and nine other Los Angeles power brokers.37
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors named the facility the Ahmanson Theater. When Ahmanson wrote to Supervisor Kenneth Hahn to express his gratitude, he also noted “the ‘explosion’ in cultural affairs in Los Angeles County” and suggested that it was due, to a great extent, “to the benevolent county government under which we live.” He affirmed his sense that government and elected leaders had played a key role in the development of L.A.’s cultural landscape. LACMA and the Music Center embodied a partnership between private philanthropy and public works. This shared responsibility was a familiar concept to an entrepreneur like Ahmanson whose great wealth derived from the social contract implicit in the managed economy. “When all other things are forgotten,” he wrote to Hahn, “it is probable that history will record that five wise and farsighted public servants were the major force in making all these things possible in our time. I think this has occurred no place else in America.”38
With the completion of the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum in the spring of 1967, the Music Center scheduled a weeklong celebration of performances and speechmaking. Zubin Mehta conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Metropolitan Opera National Company sprinted through performances of La Traviata, La Boheme, Marriage of Figaro, and Rape of Lucretia on successive nights. The Center Theater Group staged the West Coast premiere of The Devils, a play by John Whiting based on the book by Aldous Huxley, in the Mark Taper Forum.39
Unintentionally, the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Association chose an appropriate script to open the Ahmanson Theater. Based on the classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes, Man of La Mancha showed Don Quixote pursuing an impossible romantic dream. Colored by his delusions, his chivalrous actions and strategies made audiences laugh. At the end of the play, Don Quixote awakes from his insanity only to realize the nobility of the dream. Though he drew no allusions to the play, Ahmanson often liked to portray himself in a similar way, as a bemused and lucky businessman who had happened into a great fortune.
The opening of LACMA and the Music Center reflected a remarkable development in the cultural life of Los Angeles and the pattern of philanthropy among the city's wealthiest individuals. Bringing the region's old money and its new tycoons to the table, Dorothy Chandler and Ed Carter, working with Howard Ahmanson as a leading donor, managed to make philanthropy “a sport,” in Ahmanson's words, and in the process transformed a community that until the mid-1950s, according to the New York Times, had been “distinguished mainly for its cultural miserliness.”40
LACMA and the Music Center grabbed headlines, but myriad other cultural institutions were blossoming as well. Fund-raising was under way for a projected $80 million CalArts campus. The Los Angeles Opera Company had presented its first two performances at the Music Center. Chamber music had blossomed to the point where more than five hundred concerts were performed annually. Private collections of art were growing and becoming more well known, chief among them the collection amassed by Norton Simon. The commerce of culture was growing as well. In the mid-1960s, Los Angeles surpassed Chicago as the nation's second-largest book market. Commercial art galleries were expanding.41
With all of this expansion, Ahmanson talked about the need for a cultural plan for the city and the region. “I've been thinking of having [the Ahmanson Foundation] join with other foundations to sponsor an objective inventory of cultural needs,” he said. This survey would be analogous to work done by health care leaders to determine where hospitals and other medical facilities needed to be located. “In the same way, we have to find out how many art galleries we're going to need,” he said, “how many symphony orchestras and theaters.” Ahmanson was politically sensitive enough to suggest that this should be a collaborative effort but said it should be centrally coordinated. Done community by community, “local pride may cause us to waste a lot of time, energy and money.”42
This idea of cultural leadership had become so important to Ahmanson that he urged civic leaders in Omaha to undertake a similar effort. Noting that in Los Angeles “we just sat around out there for 25 years” before civic leaders began an aggressive campaign to build a major art museum, concert hall, and zoo, Ahmanson said during a visit to his hometown in 1961, “You have the means now to start the next step in the town's growth—a step toward the cultural life.”43
Without a doubt, when Ahmanson talked about nurturing cultural expression, he focused on elite institutions that would bring prestige—major museums, symphony halls, and the like. With ethnic and racial pride movements developing around the city in the late 1960s, he paid no particular attention to this kind of culture. Yet his long association with Sheets and Home's support for the annual county art show also reflected an old-fashioned populist sensibility that transcended his integration into the region's civic elite. Asked to comment on the propriety of exhibiting Ed Kienholz's controversial Back Seat Dodge ‘38 at LACMA in 1966, for example, he said the work was clever but didn't rise to the level of great art. “But it doesn't really make any difference whether I fancy it or not. A public institution should have something for everybody.”44
A VISION FOR LOS ANGELES
By the mid-1960s, with Ahmanson's name etched in several major cultural institutions, journalists began to wonder about the man and whether he had a plan for the future of Los Angeles. “Let's start with the idea that we are building a new way of life out here,” Howard told a reporter in January 1967.45 He didn't describe this new way of life. No doubt he felt he didn't have to. The idealized view was everywhere in magazine ads, billboards, and the movies. A temperate climate combined with mountain and seaside living enabled a casual indoor-outdoor lifestyle focused on swimming pools, tennis courts, golf courses, and beach clubs. To cover the distances between these outdoor destinations, “mobility” was central—thus the need for automobiles and freeways.46 Market forces ensured that real estate agents, architects, furniture companies, clothing designers, moneylenders, and hundreds of other entrepreneurs responded to and cultivated the demand for the goods and services associated with this Southern California way of life.
To be sure there was a dark side to this dream. An epidemic of personal bankruptcies seemed to suggest that the region's reputation for crass materialism and self-indulgence had a social cost.47 Riots in Watts and growing unrest in the Hispanic neighborhoods in East L.A. drew attention to the fact that employers, lenders, and real estate companies had long excluded many people from these material dreams. Exhaust from automobiles and factories fouled the air, and rampant development left little room for parks and other public amenities. Meanwhile, a heightened desire for privacy, which Los Angeles Times columnist Art Seidenbaum said was at the heart of Southern California culture, seemed to undermine a sense of community and inhibit collective action.48
Ahmanson's philanthropic investments reflected a desire to cultivate a greater sense of community through art. This was, after all, the “new way of life” that Millard Sheets had given him in the 1950s. At the same time, he and Home Savings increasingly searched for ways to develop community from the ground up.
By the mid-1960s, Ahmanson believed the era of inexpensive, mass production housing was over. “I don't like tracts,” he told a reporter.49 He was not alone. Despite the popularity of television shows anchored in the suburban ideal like Donna Reed, Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, a broad critique of mass-production postwar housing tracts was under way. Critics charged they were ugly, promoted cultural conformity, led to social isolation, and degraded the environment.50
Several market forces combined to respond to this criticism and led to the development of a new kind of builder. The introduction of mass-production techniques into the residential construction market inevitably led to the development of larger firms. These firms needed greater management capacity to organize a larger workforce and investments in materials and land. Increases in the scale of the business also increased the need for working capital. Some companies relied on credit relationships with companies like Home Savings; others increasingly turned to the equity markets, and in the mid-1950s a growing number of residential construction companies began selling stock in the equities markets. With more capital and management talent in areas like marketing and planning, as well as basic construction, these large companies were able to look at the development process more comprehensively.51
These new building and development companies were uniquely positioned to respond to market conditions in the 1960s.52 After fifteen years of postwar construction in the suburbs surrounding America's largest cities, large tracts of land were less available, and they were expensive. The government's construction of interstate highways opened new tracts to development, but to induce central city workers to make the long commute, developers had to offer lifestyle amenities that went beyond those that could be incorporated into the individual home. Buyers wanted environmental amenities and a sense of community.53
Community builders responded to these challenges. Borrowing from European and especially British new town traditions, a new group of developers in the United States planned on a much larger scale—ten thousand acres, for example, with housing and employment opportunities for communities of fifty thousand to one hundred thousand people—far beyond the scale of the operative builder erecting seven hundred to one thousand homes in a single year. These developers built on earlier traditions, the New Deal projects of the Resettlement Administration in Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills near Cincinnati; and Greendale in Milwaukee, for example. They also extended the strategies of postwar developers like Burns and Kaiser who sought to create new decentralized, regional cities that included a mix of land uses, were close to emerging regional employment centers, and incorporated rationalized community building amenities like schools, churches, and recreation facilities.54 As one writer put it, this new breed of community builder “fastens his eyes on the social objective of a self-sufficient community, and hopes that good planning will make good money.”55
In new towns like Columbia, Maryland, or Reston, Virginia, these developers experimented with a new paradigm. They planned for open space, employment centers, retail, schools, and public services. They included walking paths to separate pedestrians from vehicular traffic. In Columbia, developer James Rouse, like Ahmanson, believed that capitalism could respond to meet the consumer or home buyer's need for more than shelter and build successful communities.56 Rouse aspired to create an inclusive community that would include African Americans as well as whites, and low-income as well as middle- and upper-middle-income residents.
Ahmanson evidenced no desire to shape the market to similar social objectives, but he did want to build whole communities complete with parks, shopping, and cultural amenities.57 In many ways, his embrace of community development supplanted his earlier focus on home ownership. But it also reflected his famous ability to read the market.
Ahmanson's friendship with architect William Pereira was critical to this transition. In addition to his architectural practice, Pereira had developed a strong reputation for master planning in the 1950s. He and his partner Charles Luckman created the master plans for Cape Canaveral and the campus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in addition to the work they did on urban renewal in the Bunker Hill neighborhood.58 The opportunity to build on this practice area increased after 1954 when Congress added a provision to the National Housing Act allocating substantial grants to cities and counties that prepared general plans for future development.59 By the late 1950s, when he and Ahmanson were serving on the Art Institute board, Pereira had become Southern California's leading master planner.60
Developers hired Pereira to transform vast tracts of land into entirely new cities. “The resulting scale of Los Angeles in the 1960s was so staggering and unprecedented,” writes planning historian William Fulton, “that distinguished urban planners were left speechless.”61 By 1961, a number of Southern California projects reflected the scale of these new initiatives. Century City, a $500 million development on the west side of Los Angeles, was developed on what had once been the back lot of the 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation. Laguna Niguel, a seven-thousand-acre planned community in Orange County, included plans for single-family homes, apartments, a shopping center, industrial parks, a research center, and recreational facilities. In the Conejo Valley, the Janns Investment Company was developing ten thousand acres near Thousand Oaks. On the Irvine Ranch, Pereira was working on a massive community to be developed around a new campus for the University of California. But the largest development was California City, with nine thousand acres located twelve miles from Mojave in Kern County.
The scale of these projects often engendered resistance. Ahmanson acquired 260 acres owned by the Fox Hills Country Club near Culver City, for example, and hired Pereira to develop a master plan to include homes, apartments, office buildings, and shopping.62 The project was expected to provide housing for eight thousand people along with a hotel and other businesses. Howard grandly asserted that he planned to build the largest single apartment complex “anybody has ever had.” He envisioned moderately priced garden apartments surrounded by green areas with recreational space including swimming pools.63 Home Savings representatives said the development would surpass Century City in quality and character.64 But residents of the area complained that the project would result in less open space and would eliminate one of the few public golf courses from the area. The County Parks and Recreation Commission agreed and recommended that the Board of Supervisors buy the property for recreational use. The project was further delayed when the California State College system expressed an interest in locating a proposed “South Bay State College” on a one-hundred-acre portion of the site.65 For years the project was tied up in a series of hearings and quasi-judicial proceedings.
Meanwhile, Ahmanson and Home Savings ran into neighborhood resistance in other areas. When the company sought permission for a 670-unit development in Laurel Canyon in 1962, neighbors on Mulholland Drive protested plans to create a no-foot hill of dirt that would obstruct their views.66 Home also proposed to develop an 824-acre tract, part of the Morrison Ranch in Agoura, to accommodate eight hundred new homes and a shopping center.67 In the Baldwin Hills area, Home planned to build a 3,500-unit residential project around a 120-acre, eighteen-hole golf course between Slauson and Centinela Avenues. On this project opponents included neighbors and Howard Hughes, who feared that twenty-two-story apartment buildings would create a hazard for aircraft approaching or taking off from Hughes Airport.68
In West Covina, where Ahmanson had acquired four thousand acres, he proposed to build moderately priced homes with architectural variety, clustered units, roads that followed the contours of the land, playgrounds for children, and open space. Ahmanson hoped to offer all of these community amenities to buyers of homes priced between $17,500 and $20,000, well below the usual market price for this kind of development.69 Here again neighbors resisted and delayed construction for years.
All of these projects suddenly paled when Home Savings announced in June 1963 that it planned to develop the 6,300-acre Crummer Ranch on the border of Ventura and Los Angeles Counties into a community for fifty-three thousand people. Once again, Pereira was hired to develop the master plan, which would include homes, shopping, and a golf course.70 “I imagine this is part of the fulfillment of the prediction that some day all the area from Santa Barbara to San Diego will be one big city,” commented the head of the Valleywide Better Government Committee. The mayor of Hidden Hills, adjacent to the Crummer Ranch, bemoaned the fact that he would lose his pastoral view of cattle grazing peacefully on the hillsides. “But this is progress,” he said, “and how are you going to stop progress even if you're against it—which I am.”71
In fact, citizens were increasingly successful when it came to blocking large-scale developments, and many of the new communities envisioned by Ahmanson were never built because new voices challenged the old pattern of local land use decision making. Home Savings struggled to accommodate the new voices entering the conversation—local property owners who resisted development in their backyard, consumers who were increasingly concerned about the quality of the homes and communities that were being built, and people of color who insisted that with this next chapter of the American Dream they should not be left out.
COMMUNITY AND GOVERNMENT
Ahmanson's experiences from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s no doubt gave him confidence that a power elite existed to constructively guide civic change in Los Angeles if others would simply get out of the way. But others were not so sure. Francis Carney, a professor of political science at University of California-Riverside noted in 1964 that Los Angeles suffered from “the absence of a subjectively coherent upper class. There are ‘old families’ and the ‘very rich’ and a world of ‘celebrities,’ and their bazaars, cotillions, balls, hunts, and betrothals are duly chronicled on the society pages, most especially of the Times. But nobody really cares what this stratum does and no one is under the illusion that it constitutes a powerful class.” Most important to Carney, there was no evidence that the city's rich and famous “provide Los Angeles with a corps of disinterested leadership dedicated to civic betterment and the common interests.”72 Arguably, one could look at LACMA, the Music Center, or a dozen other institutions in Los Angeles and suggest that Carney was wrong.
Carney's description of the new business elite, however, shed light on changing attitudes among the power elite. At its base, much of the new great wealth in Los Angeles was dependent on the federal government. In industries ranging from aerospace to savings and loans, federal contracts or insurance guarantees played a critical role in economic success. As a result, the leaders of these new industries were far less parochial than earlier generations. “[They] look outward, to Washington and New York for capital, for ideas, for stimuli,” Carney wrote.73 Republican or Democrat, these leaders tended to be pragmatists who believed in the role of experts and expressed a basic faith in the managed economy.74 But as Carney suggested, their local leadership was diffused. They acted in civic arenas in ways that appealed to them personally, but rarely in a coordinated fashion, leaving a power vacuum at the heart of the region.75
Ahmanson sensed this vacuum. Moreover, he had grown increasingly frustrated with the parochialism of local government, Ahmanson favored a time-honored tradition in American business—elevate planning and rule making to the federal government and give greater power to elite experts and power brokers. “Federalism in urban affairs is a necessary evil,” he said. “Local government simply doesn't have the tools to supply all the services people need.”76 Ahmanson talked of the need for a super-regional government that would address problems at a system level. Although local governments had banded together in 1965 to create the Southern California Association of Governments, this was not what he had in mind. He believed local elected officials, protecting their parochial interests, would block the path to a more rational planning system. To bring about change, “We have to take the initiative out of political hands,” he said, “and not be afraid to step on some political toes.”77
Working with the federal government, smart, powerful elites were the key to making good public policy, Howard suggested.78 In his mind, “We'll only get [a regional government] when a strong bunch of civic leaders sits down around a table and says, this has got to be done.”79 Franklin Murphy agreed. “It doesn't take a lot of people to trigger citizen action,” Murphy told Los Angeles Magazine in 1966, “just three or four knowledgeable, visible people who make a commitment.”80 In this sense, Ahmanson's ideology did not differ dramatically from the elitist Progressive framework that he had grown up with in the 1910s and 1920s. In an era dominated by large-scale corporations, big government, and the military, he believed, the power elite naturally coordinated the resources of civil society.81 To a longtime political entrepreneur like Howard Ahmanson, this made infinite sense. To those outside the networks of power, it undermined the promise of American democracy.
Although he said that Los Angeles could not look to older cities in the East to model the new way of life under construction in the West, Ahmanson personally looked to New York for role models. The Rockefeller family in particular evidenced the ways in which great wealth and the power elite could work with government and the people to foster the civic culture of a great city. In October 1967, Ahmanson announced that he would tear down the first building that Millard Sheets had built for him. In its place, he would develop a massive $75 million office and commercial complex to be known as the Ahmanson Center that would occupy the entire 3700 block on Wilshire Boulevard. Ahmanson directed that this new structure, like Rockefeller Center in New York, would include a great plaza with fountains and sculptures. According to architect Edward Durrell Stone, Ahmanson wanted this space to be “in the tradition of some of the great plazas of Europe” and serve as a public gathering space.82 Undoubtedly, it would also be a monument to all that he had accomplished.