Michael Ryan Davis (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022) was an American Marxist historian, public intellectual, urban theorist, and writer based in Southern California. He was best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts, which connected political economy to social crises. His last two non-fiction books were Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (February 2022).
Growing up in Fontana and Bostonia in California, Davis left school at age 16 to support his working-class family after his father suffered a heart attack. He later graduated as a valedictorian and won a scholarship to Reed College. There he struggled academically, but became heavily involved in student civil rights activism as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He spent a decade working as a truck driver and a organizer of left-wing political activism before returning to study economics and history at the University of California, Los Angeles on a union scholarship. He later worked at the Getty Research Institute and began writing seriously in the late 1990s.
Davis would later teach as Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. He was an editor of the New Left Review, and wrote for a variety of British and American journals, including The Nation, the New Left Review, Jacobin, Socialist Review and the New Statesman. He won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007.
Contents
Biography
Early life: 1946–1964
Michael Ryan Davis was born in Fontana, California, on March 10, 1946, to Dwight and Mary (Ryan) Davis. Dwight was from Venedocia, Ohio, and was of Welsh and Protestant background. He was a trade-union Democrat and an "anti-racist," which Davis attributed to his ancestors, Welsh abolitionists and Union soldiers who had settled in the Black Swamp of Ohio. Mary was an Irish Catholic from Columbus, Ohio, and the daughter of Jack Ryan, a veteran of the Spanish–American War. Both parents hitchhiked to California during the Great Depression and came to the El Cajon Valley, but moved to Fontana for a brief period during the Second World War and after.
Returning to San Diego County in 1953, Davis was raised in a tract home in the community of Bostonia. His father Dwight worked in the wholesale meat industry for the Superior Meat Company in downtown San Diego and was a member of the meat cutter's union, and his uncle ran a wholesale meat company. The nearly all-white neighborhood of Davis's childhood was populated by refugees of the Great Depression, mostly Southern Baptist families from Oklahoma and Texas, and had a country-western ballroom and rodeo. Davis identified with his community as a "redneck" and a "Westerner" in opposition to the "surfer" beach culture held by the wealthier, Methodist neighborhoods south of El Cajon's Main Street. Racism and anti-communism were endemic in the town, but Democrats held the dominant political role in the community due to the influence of the Machinists Union.
Dwight Davis was an amateur geologist, and would bring the young Davis with him on frequent excursions in the Colorado Desert to search for uranium deposits, abandoned mines, geodes, and petrified wood. The favorite stop in the desert for the two was the Ocotillo Wells gas station and café, owned by an eccentric elderly proprietor who would debate baseball with Dwight. In 1955, the young Davis was curious about several photos of cadavers taken by the proprietor and posted on the bulletin board in the café. The proprietor explained to Davis that the bodies were of young Mexican men, all executed in arroyos along the border by being shot in the back. Davis remained haunted by the photos of the corpses, and the experience would influence his ideas on the border for the rest of his life.
Davis described the family home as absent of books save for the Vulgate Bible, but his parents were avid readers of newspapers and Reader's Digest. The family were among the few Catholics in the neighborhood, and the young Davis often found himself in fistfights with his fundamentalist neighbors, which contributed to him renouncing religion at the age of 10 and gravitating towards science with the advent of Sputnik. Davis was a patriotic and conservative pre-adolescent, enlisting in the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton's "Devil Pups" program, and until he was 15, had a picture of Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb" on his wall.
Young activist: 1964–1968
At Reed College, Davis was overwhelmed, alienated by the hippy culture and struggling academically. He joined the Portland, Oregon chapter of CORE, which included the labor historian Jeremy Brecher, who at the time was one of few members of the nascent Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the Pacific Northwest. Living "drunk" in the dorm of a girlfriend for five weeks, Davis was expelled from Reed for intervisitation. Davis was eligible for the draft after his expulsion and passed the physical, but he was rejected after he insisted to the personnel at the induction center he belonged to several subversive organizations. After reading the Port Huron Statement, and at the recommendation of Brecher, Davis boarded a Greyhound bus to New York City to join the national office of SDS, arriving in November 1964. In 1964 and 1965, Davis worked in the national office of SDS, which was becoming overwhelmed by the growing number of chapters. The national council meetings gave the office the responsibility to organize two major demonstrations, an Anti-Apartheid sit-in and the first march on Washington in protest of the Vietnam War.
Davis was one of the chief coordinators behind the anti-Apartheid sit-in at Chase Manhattan Bank. In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre, Chase Manhattan had led a consortium of international banks that bailed out the Apartheid government of South Africa. The chief ally and tactical organizer to the sit-in was the New York chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), headed by Betita Martinez (then Elisabeth Sutherland), who Davis became acquainted with. Other supporters included exiled members of the African National Congress and young members of the Tanzanian mission to the United Nations. On the Friday afternoon of March 19, 1965, some 600 demonstrators marched on Chase Manhattan's offices, with 43 arrested, in what was SDS's first act of civil disobedience.
Davis returned to California in early 1965, arriving in the Bay Area during the transformation of the Free Speech Movement into the Vietnam Day Committee. His only subsistence for the next six months was money earned by selling literature sent to him by the SDS national office. The demand for radical literature by students in the Bay Area was enough that Davis could afford to rent a derelict house with no electricity. While couch surfing in the homes of academics, he became aware of Herbert Marcuse, who was lauded by the organizers of the Free Speech Movement. Davis had struggled to understand any of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, but opted to write a letter to the respected academic about the accomplishments and motives of SDS. Marcuse responded, but was critical, suggesting that SDS was only serving to advance Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, and that the organization should seek a more oppositional approach. While in Oakland, Davis burned his draft card in protest of Johnson's intervention in the Dominican Republic.
Career
Davis was a 1996–1997 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute and received a MacArthur Fellowship Award in 1998. He won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007.
Davis was Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor of the New Left Review. Davis taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and at Stony Brook University before he secured a position at University of California, Irvine's history department. He also contributed to the British monthly Socialist Review, the organ of the British Socialist Workers Party. As a journalist and essayist, Davis wrote for a number of well-known publications, including The Nation, the New Left Review, Jacobin, and the UK's New Statesman.
Davis was a self-defined international socialist and "Marxist-Environmentalist". He wrote in the tradition of socialists/architects/regionalism advocates such as Lewis Mumford and Garrett Eckbo, whom he cited in Ecology of Fear. His early book, Prisoners of the American Dream, was an important contribution to the Marxist study of U.S. history, political economy, and the state, as well as to the doctrine of revolutionary integrationism.
Davis was also the author of two fiction books for young adults: Land of the Lost Mammoths and Pirates, Bats and Dragons.
Reception
Reviewers have praised Davis' prose style and his exposés of economic, social, environmental and political injustice. His book Planet of Slums inspired a special issue of Mute magazine on global slums. The Los Angeles Public Library described him in an obituary as a "towering left-wing polemicist... most closely associated with a synthesis of urbanism, political theory, and historical materialism with an acid tongue".
A real estate agent from Malibu named Brady Westwater waged a crusade against Davis, which resulted in critical articles in the Downtown News, New Times, Salon.com, The Economist and the Los Angeles Times. Several of these authors were civic boosters upset that the city was getting a negative reputation.
According to Todd Purdum in the New York Times, Davis "acknowledged fabricating an entire conversation with a local environmentalist, ...for a cover story he wrote for L.A. Weekly a decade before (in the late 1980s); he defended it as an early attempt at journalistic scene-setting." However, in his October 2004 Geography article, "That Certain Feeling: Mike Davis, Truth and the City," Kevin Stannard held that this "controversy is explained by Davis's ambiguous balancing of academic research and reportage".
Jon Wiener has defended Davis in The Nation, maintaining that his critics are political opponents exaggerating the significance of small errors.
Some academic leftists have also criticized Davis's focus on modern urban structures. In a review essay on City of Quartz, geographer Cindi Katz criticized its apocalypticism as masculinist and tied it to the flattening of people's subjectivity as they are made into "characters" more than social actors. Citing Jane Jacobs' attacks upon Lewis Mumford in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, Andy Merrifield (MetroMarxism, Routledge 2002) wrote that Davis' analysis was "harsh" (p. 170). Davis' work, particularly Planet of Slums, has been criticized by Merrifield and urban studies professor Tom Angotti as "anti-urban" and "overly apocalyptic".
These critics charge that Davis failed to focus on activist groups among the poor and working class in solving problems—as advocated by Manuel Castells and Marshall Berman.
Personal life and death
Davis was married five times. His first four marriages ended in divorce. Davis met his first wife in SDS, who had returned from the 1964 "Freedom Summer" in Mississippi trying to organize tugboat crews. Davis's final marriage to Mexican artist and professor Alessandra Moctezuma lasted until his death. Davis and Moctezuma lived in San Diego, California. He had one child with his third wife Brigid Loughran, one child with his fourth wife Sophie Spalding, and two children with Moctezuma.
Davis was diagnosed with cancer in 2020. In a July 25, 2022, story in The Los Angeles Times, Davis said, "I'm in the terminal stage of metastatic esophageal cancer but still up and around the house...I guess what I think about the most is that I'm just extraordinarily furious and angry. If I have a regret, it's not dying in battle or at a barricade as I've always romantically imagined — you know, fighting." He died from esophageal cancer on October 25, 2022, at age 76.
Awards and honors
1991: Deutscher Memorial Prize, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
1996–1997: Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute
1998: MacArthur Fellowship
2002: World History Association Book Prize, Late Victorian Holocausts
2007: Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
Works
Books
Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (1986, 1999, 2018)
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990, 2006)
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998)
Casino Zombies: True Stories From the Neon West (1999, German only)
Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (2000)
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001)
The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas, edited with Hal Rothman (2002)
Dead Cities, And Other Tales (2003)
Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, with Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew (2003); (2nd ed, 2026)
The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005)
Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class (2006)
No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, with Justin Akers Chacon (2006)
Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007)
In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (2007)
Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk (2007)