Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Los ^Angeles — T{eligions interlude Mexican plays were given. Here during the week Mexicans, Chinamen, some Japanese, and a few Americans who appreciated the vagabond life, lounged in the warm air under the shadow of the trees. But on Sunday it became the Los Angeles substitute for Hyde Park. Preachers of all kinds clustered along its pavements. Strange religions and strange nationalities contrasted, Mexican revivalists, Japanese revivalists, and negro revivalists, Baptists, Catholics, a strange white-whiskered old negro with an eye-shield, brandishing a Zoroastrian chart, atheists, debunkers. ... A shouting, exhorting, blaspheming, crazy crowd, crazier even than the Holy Rollers. As in Hyde Park, they could say almost what they liked as long as they did not touch on one subject — labour. If one speaker among the 80,000 workless men dared to stand up and proclaim his sense of wrong the police fell on him at once, and he was rushed off to gaol. In the central square of Pershing Park the old idealists held daily meetings. Here one could view the strange ancestors of the city, bent, withered, whiskered, bearded, hatted like Southern gentlemen of past days, one even in a toga and sandals, the old idealists disputed interminably in the sun. The poorer searched the big paper-bins for the newspapers that the richer threw away. But this pleonasm of talk did not please the police, and one day they arrested the whole squareful, and carried them all to gaol, whence they had to be rescued by the Civil Liberties Association. There is little doubt that, from the point of view of a benighted European, this living in a land which spells Liberty with a capital L has its drawbacks. [267]