Multicultural Visions in Postwar Los Angeles: The ‘Monument to Democracy

When and Where

Thursday, March 28, 2019 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
HW525C
H-wing
1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON M1C 1A4

Description

In September 1952, one of Los Angeles’ leading white liberals unveiled his vision of a multiracial democracy:  a plaster model of a proposed 480-foot-tall “Monument to Democracy,” made up of three massive figures representing the world’s races – white, black, and yellow – and together holding aloft an illuminated globe.  John Anson Ford never got to build this West Coast “companion” to the Statue of Liberty, but his extended campaign for it reveals how some Southern Californians in the 1940s and 1950s were hammering out regional variants of what would come by the 1970s to be called multiculturalism.  Ford’s plans drew on a welter of pluralistic ideologies that emerged in Los Angeles during and after the Second World War, that had deep roots in the local Anglo left and in Mexican-American, Japanese-American, and Black civil rights mobilizations, and that ultimately helped move American pluralist thinking beyond an earlier, Eurocentric focus to encompass notions of “diversity” tied to multiple categories of color.

All are welcome, but RSVP’s are requested to sharma@utsc.utoronto.ca  by March 25.

PDF iconMulti-Cultural Talk Poster.pdf

Map

1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON M1C 1A4

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