Jani Scandura is Associate Professor of English and Co-Founder of the Space and Place Research Collective at the University of Minnesota. She is a co-editor of Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital.

DOWN IN THE DUMPS

PLACE, MODERNITY, AMERICAN DEPRESSIONBy Jani Scandura

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3654-9

Contents

IMAGES……………………………………………..xiACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………..xvINTRODUCTION A GEOGRAPHY OF DEPRESSION…………………11 RENO the divorce factory……………………………302 KEY WEST the nation and the corpse…………………..703 HARLEM blue-penciled place………………………….1224 HOLLYWOOD(LAND) wax, fire, insomnia………………….186AFTERWORD THE PRISON AND THE PENTAGON………………….234Notes………………………………………………247WORKS CITED…………………………………………285INDEX………………………………………………303

Chapter One

Reno

THE DIVORCE FACTORY

AND MY MIND WHIRLED WITH FORGOTTEN STORIES OF MALE SERVANTS SUMMONED TO WASH THE MISTRESS’S BACK; CHAUFFEURS SHARING THE MASTERS’ WIVES; PULLMAN PORTERS INVITED INTO THE DRAWING ROOM OF RICH WIVES HEADED FOR RENO. –RALPH ELLISON, INVISIBLE MAN

IT IS A PLACE. IT STICKS. – SHERWOOD ANDERSON, “SO THIS IS RENO”

PART 1. THE WASTE OF PROGRESS

Divorces always arrived in Reno by train. They boarded the Twentieth Century at Grand Central in New York City, switched in Chicago to the Overland Limited, and three days later stepped out of their Pullman cars at the Reno Union Pacific Station, where fatherly divorce attorneys gathered them up “like great sheep dogs, shepherding their lambs.” Reno was the 1930s Mecca of the controversial “quickie” divorce, easy to be had on almost any grounds as long as one stayed in the state for six weeks.

That is how the story goes. And this is another story, a story that rereads those narratives of Depression-era Reno, a bricolage of a story that builds a text of the place. Reno is a wasteland, as we shall see, but it is a wasteland that subverts any pretensions to the universalized space that T. S. Eliot proposed. Reno is a peculiarly American wasteland, a wasteland of the feminine, of divorces and prostitutes, of private reminiscences and mass-produced tales. It is a nonelegiac wasteland that reveals the grotesque machinery of modernity in crisis and relies on the economically and ideologically beneficial mass production of trash. This is a story, then, about Reno and gender, but it is also a story about modern place.

For statistically, despite all the brouhaha, Reno divorces never amounted to much. During the seven years following Mary Pickford’s much-publicized 1920 Reno breakup with Owen Moore, Nevada courts granted about 1,000 divorces a year. In 1927, Nevada reduced its nineteenth-century residency requirement from six months to three months and increased its annual divorce count to 2,500. Three years later, in 1931, the year gambling was legalized, Nevada lowered its residency requirement to six weeks, again doubling its rate of divorce “production.” But in 1931, when an unprecedented 5,260 people got their decrees in Reno, divorces there still constituted less than 3 percent of divorces nationwide. Nonetheless, to most Americans, Reno meant divorce-as well as a number of other illicit vices. A 1933 article in the pulp magazine True Detective gushed, “Whatever you want-wine, women, or song-gambling, prostitution, marriage or divorce-Reno has it. And it’s legal. Reno’s motto is: You can’t do wrong-we’ll legalize it!”

Divorce and its by-products proved a lucrative industry. The Reno residency period was carefully designed to guarantee that divorces would pay several months’ rent and purchase a multitude of other necessary and luxury services during their stay. In his 1942 history of Nevada, Richard G. Lillard remarks that for the roughly eighteen thousand inhabitants in Reno in 1932, there were thirteen women’s clothiers, twenty-three beauty parlors, forty-three doctors, and sixty-two restaurants. A 1934 Fortune magazine article estimated that divorce brought in approximately $3 to $4 million in income to Reno and that individual divorce seekers spent an average of $1,500 during a six-week stay (although the writers suggest that exceptionally frugal women could get by on as little as $225).

Famous for attracting movie stars and socialites, Reno also became the temporary home of the divorcing literati. Over the years, Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, C. L. R. James, Clare Boothe (Luce), Mary McCarthy, Arthur Miller, Katherine Anne Porter, and the wives of Eugene O’Neil, Sinclair Lewis, Orson Welles, and Waldo Frank all came to Reno to get their decrees. By the 1930s, questing to Reno seemed almost inevitable in the lives of modern middle-class women-at least according to the plethora of Reno narratives that flooded popular culture. In the year following the 1931 change in Nevada residency laws, at least eight novels about Reno divorces were published. In fact, many of the period’s most popular writers of romance and detective fiction, including Faith Baldwin, Earl Derr Bigger, and Leslie Ford, penned Reno divorce novels. Hollywood followed suit, not only with a smattering of Reno references and a plenitude of divorce films (what Stanley Cavell calls the 1930s “films of remarriage”), but also with films in which the Reno divorce quest occupied center screen. MGM’s star-studded 1939 film adaptation of Boothe’s satirical play The Women is simply the most expensive and best known of a fairly rich genre of motion pictures. Yet it is this film that sums up the prevailing popular sentiment about middle-class marriage when thrice-married Countess DeLave (Mary Boland) laments, “No matter what you pick [your husbands] for where does it get you?” “On the train to Reno,” the soon-to-be-divorced Mary (Norma Shearer) and Miriam (Paulette Goddard) answer in refrain.

That a railroad quest set Reno production in motion seemed to underscore the ideological import of the destination-and of this means of getting there. “Railroads were the referent, and progress the sign, as spatial movement became so wedded to the concept of historical movement that these could no longer be distinguished,” writes Susan Buck-Morss in her reading of Walter Benjamin. If Marx, perhaps optimistically, used the locomotive as a metaphor for revolutionary progress, Benjamin suggested instead that “perhaps revolutions are the reaching of humanity traveling in this train for the emergency brake.” Social revolution, Benjamin implies, necessitates a slowing down or stopping of modernist progress. (At the very least, a price must be paid to race through time en route to Somewhere.)

In contrast to monumentalist narratives of competitive capitalism and imperialism, those allegorized by the train, Benjamin insisted on focusing on the “small, discarded objects,” the waste products of progressive narratives of history. The dialectical relationship between allegories of trains and those of trash seems abundantly clear. Not only do trains produce trash, the waste and refuse of fuel, machinery, and bodies in transit, but trash itself implies movement, history, and labor. Trash is the exhausted material of “no worth or value,” the abject defilement that “is jettisoned from the symbolic system[s]” of modernity. It is the mess that spews forth from historical gaps, which narratives of progress have thrown out, ridden over, stitched between, glossed. And it defines its own mode of production. “To trash,” according to the 1911 Century Dictionary, is to “walk or run with exertion, to fatigue, to labor a point”; while “to be trashed” is to be worn out, “bungled, spoiled; ill-treated or injured; run down” and, implicitly, to have had a past when one was new, healthy, cherished, and whole.

It is therefore telling that the Divorce Special to Reno was a train filled with trash, the rejected partners and families who refused-or were refused by-the impositions of American progressive modernity. Nor is it surprising that 1930s Reno was largely narrated by trash-the pulp novels, sensation magazines, cartoons, and B-films that collectively made up the formulaic rubbish that was hungrily devoured by the voracious American masses. Aptly, the train station at Reno materially performed the metaphoric intersection between progressive narratives of modernity and those “small, discarded objects” left in their wake. Reno flaunted its trash at the tracks. “Reno throws its worst face directly at the station,” wrote Max Miller in his 1941 cultural history on the city, and it “appears to take pleasure in doing so, appears to take pleasure in indicating a turmoil of shack-stores, cheap saloons, a burleycue of gambling houses, even a tattoo shop, tough alleys-and a blur of constant excitement.” By legalizing gambling as a way for divorces to pass time during their enforced residency, Reno relied on an economy that simultaneously enforced and alleviated the boredom of waiting, literally wasting or discarding time, which, according to Benjamin, is another by-product of modern life.

Certainly, divorce, particularly a Reno divorce, can be considered a product of modernity as well as its sign. It seemed to redo and renew the institution of marriage. “But you will divorce, nicht wahr?” Susan Hale’s German friend asks her in Half a Loaf, Grace Hegger Lewis’s roman clef about her breakup with Sinclair Lewis. “It is so easy I am told in America in this place so funnily named Renoo. You have also the word ‘renew’? Renoo, renew-the same thing?” Divorce itself seemed to modernize Reno. In John Hamlin’s 1931 novel The Whirlpool of Reno, stodgy Minnie Brooks exclaims, “Why Reno is a real up-to-date town now, thanks to our divorcees.” A fellow permanent resident, Jane, snaps back the plaint of many critics of modernity in its Depression-era guise: “A shame we’re not as we used to be…. Far better to be provincial and pure than up-to-date and corrupted.”

covering tracks

Landing in Reno one October night in 1994, I saunter blindly past the airport slot machines, rent a silver Cavalier, and drive to Circus Circus, a gigantic, cut-rate casino decorated with a neon clown-faced facade that dominates Virginia Street. Almost no one takes the train to Reno anymore; few of the unhappily wed need travel here for their decrees. (Still, the tradition holds somewhat. The next day, in the midst of all the takeout wedding chapels, I spot a small brick office with window signs that proclaim, “Divorce Made Easy. Papers while you wait”).

I am not a divorce. I am not a gambler either, at least not of the monetary sort, and while there are many gamblers here, there are few of the high rollers who frequent Las Vegas, Reno’s twin city to the south. It feels incongruous to do archive research here amidst the neon and polyester crowd, a crowd that loses you in its girth and anonymity. Still, everyone seems familiar, as if you’d seen them on a rerun of Roseanne: white, over-weight, middle-aged, lower middle-class. It is not the Reno I have imagined for so many months. Yet it does possess the dim-lit tackiness coincident with tourism brochures. The next day, a woman at the Reno tourist bureau marks a street map to point out landmarks of Old Reno, a Reno of seventy years ago, a Reno of modern times.

The Art Deco facade of the El Cortez hotel, one of the few Depression-era hotels still in use, is majestic. But inside, the dingy, smoky lobby seems out of touch, pass, even seedy. On the wall of the bar next door, past rows of the omnipresent slot machines, are pictures of the Old Days, of women gambling and cowboys riding in the rodeo. That afternoon, I drive past the mansions that overlook Riverside Drive. Autumn leaves glow red, bronze, and brown against the late-afternoon sun, and the houses, formerly owned by Nevada governors, gamblers, and racketeers, are a bit imperial, if in cases somewhat run-down. Beneath them, by the Truckee River in Wingfield Park, three teenage boys toss around a basketball in the fading light.

I haven’t yet found what I am looking for. Embedded in my own Reno quest is the search for a private saga in a public tale, a missing piece of my family narrative that has been unwritten from our history. Once, over dinner, my mother divulged all she knew of a family secret: Long before he met my grandmother, my grandfather had married a woman who “ran around,” then ran off and killed herself in New Orleans. There were obvious gaps in this outdated Victorian narrative. Several years later, I discovered where my grandfather’s first wife ran off to-not to New Orleans, at least not at first, but to Reno. To get a divorce.

RENO-VATING THE PAST

It has been argued that modernity reduces “culture to the language of production.” In these terms, it might be said that Reno spoke a rather complicated tongue. The wordplay and puns popularly used to narrate the spaces and symbols of Reno during its heyday construct meaning by simultaneously building and unbuilding themselves. A few of these “high-comedy localisms” as defined by Lillard in his 1942 history of Nevada:

taking the cure (putting in six weeks’ residence), Alimony Park (the city plaza opposite the county courthouse), Bridge of Sighs (the Virginia Street bridge over the Truckee River), pouring a divorcee on the train (seeing her off after the decree), wash day (Monday, sometimes Tuesday, too, when default cases come up), the Separator (the courthouse), divorcee (meaning either man or woman, from arrival in Nevada until actually divorced), Divorcee Special (the noon train from the East), Dresden (a relatively sexless woman who lives to be looked at), six weeks’ sentence, the divorce business.

The wordplay largely relies on making absurd connections between divorce and the built environment-buildings, legislation, and time schedules. A building has agency, a bridge has emotions, and a person awaiting her divorce decree is always feminine (a divorce) and always already divorced.

Today, the overarching aesthetic of Reno is one of unbuilding and rebuilding monuments, of erasing the past while retaining its names. The famed Reno arch, at the gateway to the casino district on Virginia Street, inscribes in gaudy neon Reno’s self-proclaimed slogan, “The Biggest Little City in the World.” The arch that crosses Virginia Street today was built during the 1970s, replacing an earlier neon version built in 1964, which replaced an electrically torched gateway constructed in 1938, which replaced the first arch, a bulb-lit wrought iron structure that was designed for the Nevada Transcontinental Exposition in 1927 that celebrated the completion of the Lincoln Highway and the New Victory Highway (U.S. Route 40).

The Riverside Hotel, which housed many of the wealthier divorces in small apartments and adjoining suites, went through four complete reconstructions between 1872 and 1960, three of them between 1923 and 1951. The turreted Victorian hotel, built in 1872, burned to the ground in 1923. The lot was bought by the Reno financial luminary George Wingfield and reopened, rebuilt under the same name in 1927. At the height of the divorce boom in 1948, the architect of the 1927 structure, Frederic DeLongchamps, designed a massive renovation and expansion project that doubled the hotel in size and capacity. Yet by the mid-1990s, the Riverside stood in a liminal space. Asbestos-filled and too expensive to renovate, it was boarded up but not demolished, its plastic facade cracked and windows plastered with Do Not Enter signs. Throughout the 1990s, the building remained much the same, though eventually colorful signs emerged, which optimistically proclaimed the building’s future transformation into an artists’ cooperative. And, as these things happen in the odd liaison between artistic communities and gentrification, the Riverside Artist Lofts did finally open in October 2000. They include subsidized apartments and workspaces for artists, a gallery, and “arts friendly” commercial spaces. “You have to pinch yourself every morning,” the Artspace Website quotes a resident artist as saying.

(Continues…)

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