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seminal influence on McWilliams, as well as upon Nathanael West, who in The Day of the Locust (1939), would further develop Adamics image of Los Angeless spiritually and mentally starving little people, the Folks. Also impressed was writer and satirist Morrow Mayo, who paraphrased and amalgamated Adamics Outlook and McNamara pieces in his own Los Angeles (1933). Although Laughing in the Jungle was the incomparably more powerful work, Mayos lurid, vignette-style history (for example, from HellHole of the West to The Hickman H orror) scored its own points against the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Mayo was particularly effective in reworking Adamics enormous village theme: Here is an artificial city which has been pumped up under forced draught, inflated like a balloon, stuffed with rural humanity like a goose with corn . . . endeavoring to eat up this too rapid avalanche of anthropoids, the sunshine metropolis heaves and strains, sweats and becomes pop-eyed, like a young boa constrictor trying to swallow a goat. It has never imparted an urban character to its incoming population for the simple reason that it has never had any urban character to impart. On the other hand, the place has retained the manners, culture, and general outlook of a huge country village.25 Not all debunking of the enormous village was merely literary. The Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles, who held their first exhibition in 1923, represented an analogous, even earlier, critical current in local art. A united front for the New Form, including Cubism, Dynamism, and Expressionism, they attacked the landscape romantics - the Eucalyptus painters, Laguna seascape painters, Mission painters, and so on - who perpetuated Helen Hunt Jackson in watercolor. Dominated by the Synchromist painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who had caroused with the Cubists in Paris before World War One, and the radical Lithuanian exile Boris Deutsch, the Group of Independents were transformed by their encounter with revolutionary Mexican muralism in the late 1920s.26 David Siquieros, who passed through Los Angeles in the early Depression, contributed a famous lost work that was roughly the equivalent of Adamics Dynamite in its Marxist view of Los Angeles history. Commis sioned in 1930 to decorate Olvera Street - the contrived Mexican tourist precinct next to the old Plaza-w ith a gay mural, Siquieros instead painted Tropical America: a crucified peon under a snarling eagle evokes the imperial

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