The Tarnished Rainbow

Los Angeles, Hollywood and Southern California

By Richard Dowdy

Is it true what they say about Los Angeles, that Los Angeles is erratic,
That in the sweet national symphony of common sense Los Angeles is static?
Yes it is true. Los Angeles is not only erratic, not only erotic; Los Angeles is crotchety, centrifugal, vertiginous, esoteric and exotic.
Many people blame the movies and the moviemakers for Los Angeles’
emotional rumpus, but they are mistaken; it is the compass.
Certainly Los Angeles is a cloudburst of non-sequiturs, and of logic a drought,
But what can you expect of a city that is laid out east to west, instead of north and south?
—Ogden Nash

“Music, dancing, singing, slaughtering cattle, or gambling are the usual pastimes of the inhabitants.”
—John Ford after a visit in 1850

Chapter One
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA STYLE THROUGH A JAUNDICED EYE

In 1946, author Carey McWilliams surveyed Southern California, and particularly the Los Angeles area with a critical eye, beginning with its ecology and working his way down to the inhabitants and the newly arrived, and the incongruous architecture.

The region is a paradox. It is a desert that faces an ocean. Since it is desert or semi-desert country, maximum sunshine prevails most of the year, though it often must fight its way through the smog to reach the souls on the ground. The sunshine makes up for what the soils lack—a discovery that both Anglo and Hispanic settlers were slow to make. Before man completely changed the ecology of the region, the natural landscape was not particularly prepossessing. The native vegetation consisted of chaparral on the moist mountain slopes and bunch grass on the lowlands. The real richness of the land is not to be found in the soils but in the combination of sky and air and ocean breezes. The wisecrack that Los Angeles is half wind and half water describes a real condition. As a region, Southern California lacks nearly everything: good soils; natural harbors (San Diego has the one natural harbor); forest and mineral resources; rivers, streams and lakes; adaptable flora and fauna; and a sustaining back country. Yet the region has progressed amazingly by a succession of swift, revolutionary changes, from one level of development to another, offsetting natural limitations with an inventive technology. Its one great natural asset, in fact, is its climate.

The climate of Southern California is unmistakable; a commodity that can be labeled, priced and marketed. It is not something that you talk about, complain about, or guess about. On the contrary, it is the most consistent, the least paradoxical factor in the environment. Unlike climates the world over, it is predictable to the point of monotony. In its air-conditioned equability, it might well be called “artificial.” The climate is the region. It has attracted unlimited resources of manpower and wealth, made possible intensive agricultural development, and located specialized industries, such as motion pictures. It has given the region its rare beauty, for the charm of Southern California is largely to be found in the air and the light. Light and air are really one element: indivisible, mutually interacting, and thoroughly interlocked. Without the ocean breezes, the sunlight would be intolerable; without the sunlight and imported water, virtually nothing would grow in Southern California.

When the sunlight is not screened and filtered by the moisture-laden air, or the too-prevalent smog layer, the land is revealed in all its semi-arid poverty. The bald, sculptured mountains stand forth in a harsh and glaring light. But let the light turn soft with ocean mist, and miraculous changes occur. The bare mountain ranges, appallingly harsh in contour, suddenly become wrapped in an entrancing ever-changing loveliness of light and shadow; the most commonplace objects assume a matchless perfection of form; and the land itself becomes a thing of beauty. The color of the land is in the light and the light is somehow artificial and controlled. Things are not killed by the sunlight, as in a desert; they merely dry up. A desert light brings out the sharpness of points, angles and forms. But this is not a desert light nor is it tropical, for it has neutral tones. It is Southern California light and it has no counterpart in the world.

Geographers say that the quality of Southern California’s climate is pure Mediterranean—the only specimen of Mediterranean climate in the United States. But such words as “Mediterranean” and “sub-tropical” are misleading when applied to Southern California. Unlike the Mediterranean coast, Southern California has no sultry summer air, no mosquito-ridden malarial marshes, no mistral winds. A freak of nature—a cool and semi-moist desert—Southern California is climatically insulated, shut off from the rest of the continent. Thus isolated, an “island upon the land,” it is an island of sharp contrasts. To William Rose Benet, the land suggests “a flowing life circle cut into contrasting angles…hills change over a week from garish green to golden brown; days are hot in the sun and cool in the shade; dense fog and spotless sky; giant trees or bare slopes; burnt sand or riotous flowers.”

“We were in the remote parts of the earth, on an almost desert coast, in a country where there is neither law nor gospel.”
—Richard Henry Dana
After a visit in 1835

From Mt. Wilson, late at night, one can look down on a vast pulsating blaze of lights, quivering like diamonds in the dark. Here, as Frank Fenton notes, the land does not hug the sky; it is the sky that is solid and real and the land that seems to float. At times you feel as though you were far away “on the underside of the earth.”

Most people believe that there are only two seasons in Southern California: “the wet” and “the dry.” But this crude description fails to take account of the imperceptible changes that occur within the two major seasons. Actually, Southern California has two springs, two summers and a season of rain. The first spring—the premature spring—follows closely upon the early rains in the late fall. In November the days shorten; the nights become cooler; the atmosphere clears (except when brush fires are burning in the hills); the air is stilled; and the land is silent. By November people have begun to listen for rain. The land is dry and parched and the leaves of the trees are thick with dust. The dry season has now begun to fray nerves, to irritate nostrils and to bear down on the people. When the wind blows, it is full of particles of dust and dry leaves, of sand and heat. The Santa Anas, which every fall and winter come calling down the canyons to the sea, rev up as the interior’s cold, heavy air flows downhill toward the Southern California coast. As this air loses elevation, it compresses, heats up, dries out and roars ferociously through the passes behind L.A. and San Bernardino. Cajon Pass and Soledad Canyon are two main routes, although the wind is named for Santa Ana Canyon. When the Santa Ana wind hits the Los Angeles basin, it’s so hot and dry that it desiccates plants…and people.

The harsh and burning winds rip off palm fronds, snap branches, topple eucalyptus trees and carry off unsecured roofs. The mountains stand out in sharpest detail, so clear you can see the rocks and boulders, so close you can almost touch them. These infrequent winds, once called “northers,” were called “santannas” by the Spanish. Dona Magdalena Murrillo, born on the Las Bolsas Rancho in 1848, said that the winds were called “Santa Anas” because they came down the Santa Ana Canyon. They were always very hot, she said, and stirred up a polvareda grande.

And then come the first rains, drifting in long graceful veils, washing the land, clearing the atmosphere: the most gentle baptism imaginable. The people have known to a moral certainty that these rains would come; they have been expecting them; and, yet, they are forever delighted and surprised when they appear. The Earth is reborn; the year starts anew, with the rains. In January, February and March come the real rains: heavy, torrential, soggy. These rains do not slant in from the sea, but, like empty buckets of water, fall straight and level on the earth. The arroyos race with rainwater; the dry riverbeds overflow; the floods have arrived. The earth now smells wet and the chaparral begins to brighten. The last rains come in April—”grasshopper rains” they were once called—showers and squalls, fitful and intermittent. Before last rains have fallen, the real spring has arrived. There is a sudden blaze of color on the land. The green has changed from its early vividness to the heavier dense green of the rains, and, as the season advances, the green begins to bleach and fade. This second spring is really an aborted summer.

June is cool and gray, with daylong overcast hugging the coast and bumping the foothills. The lawns are damp and fragrant; leaves shimmer and dance in the air. By late May it is already fall in the hills; away from the fountains and the sprinklers. The hills are tawny and the black shade of the live oaks is dense and heavy. The full blaze of summer color has gone by July, except in the heavily tended artificial gardens of the suburbs, and the summer that follows is the long summer of the dry season, when the hills are brown as umber. August is “only the long-lingering afternoon of a long-lingering summer day.” In late August and on into September, the sea breeze dies and once again the desert winds sweep across the land. This is the hottest spell of the year: baking-hot, desert-hot, oppressive. Brush fires break out in the foothills just as they often do when the Santa Anas come. Heat from the brush fires, smoking and blazing in the foothills, makes the inland districts writhe and burn.

“Where there had been a lush thicket of ferns,” wrote Stewart Edward White, “now the earth lay naked and baked, displaying unexpected simplicities of contour that had before been mysteriously veiled. So hard and trodden looked this earth that it seemed incredible that any green thing had ever, or could ever again, pierce its steel-like shell. The land was stripped bare. In the trees the wind rustled dryly. In the sky the sun shone glaringly.”

Toward the end of the long summer, when the non-irrigated sections of the land are a gray, sun-baked tan, one can see, as James M. Cain has observed, that “the naked earth shows through everything that grows on it.” It is then that one notices the sparseness of leafage in relation to the land. The earth is naked and exposed in Southern California. It is like the skin of a suntanned body with the few indigenous trees standing out sharply, like the hairs on the body, and not, as in other areas, like a thick mat of hair on the head. There is no carpet on the earth. Everywhere exposed, the earth is brown and gray and only seldom green. Today the appearance of the region is deceitful and illusory, for essentially it is a barren, semi-arid land.

The only true style in Early California was the Spanish ranch house. Prior to this, shelter was rudimentary, solely built for functionality without any concern for stylistic considerations. With its interior patio, low-pitched roof, its kitchen removed—in many instances—from the house itself, and with its wide verandas extending around the house (will all rooms opening on the veranda and patio), it was certainly a comfortable and livable home. The Spanish ranch house, however, largely vanished in the decade after 1880 (26 dilapidated structures are all that existed in the Los Angeles of 1938). The low adobe houses in the towns, with their flat asphalt roofs, were quickly replaced by “elegant and substantial dwellings”: the Mansard-roofed monstrosities of the ’70s. Churches, hotels and office buildings of the boom years were all don in the most florid taste of the period. In many cases, the effort to eradicate the past as completely as possible was based upon a studied attempt to make the new land look as much like the East as possible. A Santa Barbara historian wrote that the boosters “apparently proceeded on the theory that the Eastern visitors would be made happiest by finding things here, excepting the climate, as much as possible like what they had left back east.” To make these newcomers feel at home, and to minimize their confusion, even the names of the streets were changed, with Calle de Estado becoming Main Street.

It was not only the architecture that was changed. Los Angeles was not like some midwestern city that sinks its roots in a strategic area of earth and goes to work there. Even the trees and plants did not belong here. They came, like the people, from far places, some familiar, some exotic, all wanderers of some sort or another seeking peace or fortune or the last frontier, or a thousand dreams of escape.
The physical environment underwent a kind of face lifting. Since almost any flower, shrub, or tree would grow in Southern California, the boosters went to the far corners of the earth and imported the most heterogeneous assortment of ornamental plants, shrubs, trees and flowers ever assembled in an environment to which they were not native. By 1880 there was scarcely a town in the region that did not have its particular showplace, an exotic privately owned garden, in which plants, flowers and shrubs of all varieties had been planted side by side for the enjoyment of the newcomers. Since the environment is highly versatile, many of these imports seemed to fit the landscape. For example, the eucalyptus, although not native, is, next to the live oak, the loveliest tree to be found in Southern California today. But other imports, have always been an abomination, a blot on the landscape, hideous beyond description. Today, some two hundred and seventy varieties of trees are planted along the streets of Los Angeles, of which fully fifty percent are Blackwood acacias, a tree not particularly adapted to the environment.

As Frank Lloyd Wright said, “The people got busy with steam shovels, and began tearing down the hills to get to the top in order to blot out the top with a house.” Today the hills around Los Angeles are scarred with roadways, cuts or gashes, forming a crazy zigzag pattern, with most of the damage beyond repair.

One of the first things newcomers do in Southern California is to make themselves feel at home. “We are beginning to feel quite at home,” says a character in a novel by Sidney Burchell, “having all our things around us. This morning when I woke up and saw the old bureau and toilet glass beyond the foot of the bed, and the window chintzes, I thought for a moment I must be back in Maine.”
When the Iowa brigade began arriving in Los Angeles, every family, writes Harry Carr, had a home “with a living room that took the place of our Iowa parlors.” The Iowans had pleasant visions of sitting on the front porch during the long tropical evenings. The new residents soon discovered that night followed day as suddenly as the dropping of a curtain, without a romantic twilight, and that the evenings, even in summer, were so could that they had to muffle themselves in their buffalo overcoats.

With no architectural tradition in the region save for the meager fragments from the Spanish period, it is not surprising that the newcomers should have imported the style of house then prevailing in the region from whence they came. Since many were from New England, they dotted Southern California with typical New England homes, with steep roofs to shed the snow that did not fall, with dark interiors that contrasted nightmarishly with the bright outdoors, and with deep cellars built for needless furnaces.

Fortunately, the absence of durable materials, such as marble and stone, prevented most of these structures from becoming lasting monuments to the prevailing cultural confusion. But they have survived in sufficient numbers to give the region an odd appearance of being both old and new, West and South, North and East. Once can still encounter ancient derelict frame structures in older sections of Los Angeles positively fascinating by their incongruity. For in this environment, they are probably the oddest-looking houses in America. They look as old as time, as old as the iron hills. A New England colonial structure built in 1997 actually appears modern, in its environment, by contrast with the gingerbread homes of the 1870s that survive in Los Angeles.

Around the turn of the century, however, experience with the environment had produced a new and livable home: the California bungalow. In part the bungalow was an outgrowth of what had earlier been called “the California house”: a simple structure built of rough redwood boards. As finally developed, it was based upon the bungalow or “bangla” which is Hindi for Bengali that in turn was a term for “in the Bengali style.” The English colonists adapted the design and called it a bungalow. In a tropical environment, the English found it to be reasonably comfortable and being inexpensive, it appealed to them. It was precisely these qualities that appealed to newcomers in Southern California. A low, spacious, airy house, the bungalow could be built by people of moderate means and informal tastes, who were not quite sure that they intended to remain in the Southland and therefore did not want to invest a considerable sum in a dwelling. The great merit of the bungalow was that it minimized the distinction between exterior and interior walls—it tended to merge the house with the landscape to which it was definitely subordinated.

Between 1900 and 1915, a few Southern California architects, in particular the firm of Greene & Greene, began to adapt the bungalow form in an interesting way, making it into a year-round home, and giving it a more substantial character while retaining its essential simplicity and sense of decoration. Universally built of redwood, these bungalows are among the few homes in the region that fit the environment. To encounter one today is still a delight. As the form became more popular, however, a certain amount of gingerbread began to be added. Imitators of the Greene & Greene bungalow began to use cobblestones for the purpose of converting the bungalow into a “Swiss chalet,” while others began to give the style an Oriental appearance by adding upturned roofs and Japanese storm porches.

Unfortunately, the bungalow was literally engulfed by the “rash of stucco” that swept Southern California after 1915. The San Diego Panama-California Exposition was planned several months before San Francisco decided to have in the same year, it’s Panama-Pacific Exposition. Learning that San Francisco intended to have a similar fair, San Diego first considered abandoning its plans. Direct competition was unthinkable. Then architect Bertram Goodhue suggested that San Diego give its exposition a special character by designing their buildings in Spanish Colonial style. There had been “Spanish,” “Mission” and “Moresque” structures in Southern California before the Exposition, but the appearance of these buildings had never assumed the proportions of an epidemic. After the San Diego Exposition, all Southern California “went Spanish.”

The so-called Spanish Colonia home that came out of the Exposition, with its walls of white stucco and roof of red tile, was a model easily imitated by commercial contractors. It had the merit of looking a little more like the environment than the models they had been using for years. Furthermore, it was called Spanish, and could be related to the Mission background, and it was simply constructed. It did have one or two definite merits: a considerable amount of plain surface and low lines. By 1920 this neo-Spanish stuccoed home was the building model almost universally used by large contractors. Southern California was Hispanicized in appearance as quickly as, at an earlier date, it had been Anglicized. The style was used for residences, apartments, flats, store buildings, post offices, public structures, filling stations, roadside huts and mortuaries. Most of Santa Barbara was built in this style after the earthquake of 1925, and, still later, Ole Hanson, an ambitious promoter, built an entire village (San Clemente) in the same style. Even with the growth of shrubbery and trees, the glare from the town is still blinding for a distance of several miles.

The beginnings of a real architecture in the region date from the work of Irving Gill, a neglected figure of Southern California design. Rebelling against all gimcrack ornament, cheap construction and false effect, he built, in the face of much opposition, the first modern homes in Southern California. Later he took over the idea of the bungalow court, a Southern California innovation, and by designing the houses so that each had separate entrances, exits, halls and gardens, created some structures, such as the Bella Vista Terrace in Sierra Madre, that have remained wholly charming through the years. Gill used interior walls to capture the exterior light. In all his work, he sought to give real permanence, so as to avoid, as he put it, the appearance of structures erected like sets in a motion picture studio.

As Gill noted in 1916, “Houses here spring up faster than mushrooms, for mushrooms silently prepare for a year and more before finally raising their house above ground. People pour out here as on the crest of a flood and remain where chance deposits them when the rush of waters subside, building temporary shacks wherein they live for a brief period while looking about for permanent anchorage.”
Nowadays the seeds of integrity sown by Gill and Wright, fertilized by influences from Japan and Europe, have begun to bear fruit in some real homes in Southern California. The first of the modern architects to reach Los Angeles was R.M. Schindler, who arrived from Vienna around 1922, after a short period spent in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright. Richard Neutra, another Viennese, who also had been first attracted to Chicago by the work of Wright and Sullivan, followed him a few years later. Both Neutra and Schindler have been greatly influenced by Wright, and in turn have had an important influence on others in the region.
As writer Max Miller observed, “Each decade the previous residents are once again outnumbered by a new cyclonic invasion bringing its own ideas of how California should be remodeled.”

“Nothing is wrong in Southern California that a rise in the ocean won’t cure.”
—Ross McDonald

Chapter Two

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IN THE REALM OF PRETENSE

No matter how depressed the public might be over high prices, strikes, employment or shoddy homes, there always was the consolation provided by entertainment to ease the cares of the day. Movies, which had gathered in their highest profits in 1946, selling 95 million tickets a week, were the primary choice of entertainment. Hollywood was riding high, and so, too, Los Angeles, despite the housing crunch and the region’s loss of defense jobs following reconversion. Optimism in the Golden West was boundless. By 1948 employment in L.A. County exceeded wartime levels, spurred by automobile assembly plants, agriculture, oil, film production, tourism and building construction.

That Los Angeles would rebound from the effects of the war’s end, (unemployment, scarcity of necessities and living quarters), was never doubted by the boosters, those souls who continually trumpeted the benefits of living on the edge of the continent, on “an island on the land.” Indeed, geographically, Southern California sits isolated from the rest of the contiguous United States by a range of mountains and desert to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. This feeling of isolation has given the inhabitants a sense of individualism as evidenced by their demeanor and attitudes.

Los Angeles had a reputation, gained back before the turn of the century; it was described as “a place without a past” and often attracted settlers who had a past. The boosters who advertised Southern California as a place of “sunshine and wealth” didn’t trumpet such distinctions. Their job was to extol the climate, the citrus groves and the land of the “sundown sea” where your “cares float away borne on the gentle sea breezes.”

Southern California’s flip side was illustrated by Kate Bell: “In Los Angeles you are conscious only of the present tense; there is no flavor of the past, no feeling for the future.” In the mid-forties, Paul Schrecker wrote in Harper’s: “The city seems not like a real city resulting from natural growth, but like an agglomeration of many variegated movie sets, which stand alongside one another but have no connection with one another. Hardly anything looks as if it had struck roots under the surface.”

At the end of World War I, inflation hit Los Angeles, as it did in most large cities in America. The L.A. Times took to printing the names of landlords whose prices caused them to be suspected of gouging the tourist trade. One woman who found her name in the paper charged into the office of editor Harry Chandler and insisted she had to charge more during the winter tourist months to cover her expenses during the summer when no tourists came west. Impressed with what she had to say, Chandler called some friends together and the result was the All-Year Club.

If the city had somehow gotten the reputation for having unbearable summers, that was a misunderstanding that had to be corrected. The Club’s big advertising ploy was its statement: “It is even possible to guarantee summer visitors that they will sleep under blankets at least nine nights out of every ten that they spend in Southern California.”

The All-Year Club was no sedate public relations office. Funded by county government and interested businessmen, it functioned like a ministry of information, its basement engines working overtime to get out the message that Los Angeles was the most favored spot on earth. Beginning with a modest $40,000 budget in 1921, the Club told the world: “No ordinary vacation will do—this summer. You’ve earned, you need, a real vacation.” Next came the “Nights under blankets” promotion. And twice each year thereafter, the Club developed a new theme in its ceaseless drumming of the good life to be experienced in Lost Angeles: health (“A new man in two weeks!”), cost (“$70 for 11 days in California!”) and climate (“Exchange your winter for the smiles of spring!”). In the 1920s, Club advertisements were appearing in 50 daily and 20 Sunday papers. By 1930 that was up to 79 dailies. In 1926 alone, the Club contacted 12 million people, and 800 to 1,500 of those personally visited the Club’s headquarters on West Adams each day. The Club missed no trick. Thousands of photographs were distributed gratis to newspapers across the country. More than 2,000 copies of the publication Pictorial California were sent each month to travel agents.

The Club estimated that 272 million people were reached each year by their advertisements. As a result, by 1930 tourism was the second largest industry in Southern California. The increase in human traffic had a downside. City fathers realized that California attracted as many undesirables as it did good citizens (i.e., those with cash in their pockets). In Chamber of Commerce publications at the turn of the century, people were warned not to come unless they had funds, since jobs, particularly unskilled and semiskilled, were hard to come by. It got worse in the ‘20s and, in 1929, the mayor warned that the “attractiveness of our climate created a winter unemployment situation which is never easy to meet.”
James E. “Two Gun” Davis, the city’s spit-and-polish police chief, had a solution. It was to post men at the border and deny entry to those who didn’t have liquid assets. It was doubtless an idea born of the auto blockage staged within the city, where officers routinely questioned and inspected all cars for little or no reason. Davis voiced the opinion that the purpose of such searches was to had crime and that law-abiding citizens would welcome them.

L.A. cops were assigned to the state’s far-off borders and were deputized by local authorities. All cars were halted, and all persons having no “definite purpose in coming into the state” couple with no means of support, were offered a choice: either to turn around and go back where they came from or to serve a prison term with hard labor for vagrancy.

The ACLU’s reaction was predictable, asserting that if the Second Coming occurred, Jesus wouldn’t be able to get past Davis’ goons. One newspaper said the blockade “violates every principle Americans hold dear.” The LAPD was thrown out of one county for roughing up local citizens. Chief Davis, of course, insisted that, since the blockade had begun, there had been a dramatic decrease in crime. The Times supported the blockade eloquently.

The All-Year club was caught in the middle, and embarrassed by the blockage, tried to ignore it. In an internal memorandum, the Club related one local businessman’s word that “Chief Davis is doing a wonderful thing in stopping transients at the border.” But, the businessman worried, he had a letter from a friend back East who owned a $22,000 house and wondered if he’d be stopped at the border. The solution the businessman had to offer was “increased financial support to the All-Year Club…to offset the misconception, which Eastern states are placing on our border activities.”

The most famous case associated with the Bum Blockade was that of mining man and former motion picture director John Langan. He had been working in Arizona and, when he tried to cross back into California still wearing his dirty clothes, the LAPD turned him around. He was angry enough to file a suit against Chief Davis. But when the suit came before a judge, Langan suddenly asked that it be dropped. He had a change of heart he said. His lawyer said the change of heart had come after police harassment of Langan and his wife. The man who seems to have presented the police point of view personally to Langan was Lieutenant Earl Kynette, who later on figured in the “$30-Every-Thursday” scheme, was sent to San Quentin for planting a bomb in a car in an effort to discourage an investigation of official corruption. The Langan case was sticky indeed, generating considerable ill press for the Department, and eventually helped convince the LAPD to fight crime closer to home.

Los Angeles and the Southern California region have long been a lightning rod for criticism and controversy. Do the critics harbor envy of Southern California’s unique geography and temperate climate? The inhabitants’ lifestyles? Or is it a reaction to the pretense built upon false fronts that mask the true underbelly of a region that has more than its share of creeps, confidence men, gypsters, gangsters and downright weirdos? Most likely it is a potent mixture of all these attributes. And despite the brickbats and mud slinging, there has never been a slackening of immigrants pouring into the state from all sides.

“When the Oakes left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the I.Q of both states.”
—Will Rogers

In Los Angeles’s early settlers, a curious phenomenon was noted. Generally speaking, the first wave of American migration into the region was made up of wealthy people, the second of people in medium circumstances (1900-1920), the third of lower middle class elements (1920-1930) and the fourth of working-class people (1930-1945). Reversing what had been the usual process of western settlement, each successive wave of migrants to Southern California has consisted of people less important economically and socially than the one, which preceded it. The basic explanation of the reversal of migration pattern is that people have always been attracted to Southern California for reasons other than to better their economic position.

The influx of well-to-do individuals who brought intelligence and money with them meant rapid development of the region. This accounts for the curious circumstance that Southern California skipped the frontier phase altogether (or at least passed through it with astonishing swiftness).

Many of the early settlers were people of enterprise, talent, intellect and culture. Filled with civic vision, they brought wealth into the country to give it realization. The strata of people of means was paradoxically more noticeable in rural rather than in urban communities in Southern California. Unlike the typical Western settler, few early immigrants were farmers. Quoting from a tourist book of 1883: “Ordinarily the men who reclaim a land, subdue nature and lay the foundation of new communities are a hardy and muscular race; quite different from these were the pioneers of Southern California. The greatest number of them came from the stores, counting-houses, shops and offices of their homes in the eastern states…comprised almost altogether the people who here took upon themselves the labor and privations of founding a new community.”

By 1913 the character of Los Angeles had been formed by the “rural pietist obsessed with the spirit of village fellowship, of suburban respectability. Hypocrisy, like a vast fungus, had spread over the city’s surface.” This development was due to the fact that the “inhabitants of Los Angeles are culled largely from the smaller cities of the Midwest—’leading citizens’ from Wichita; honorary pallbearers from Emmetsburg; Good Templars from Sedalia—all commonplace people, many of them with small competencies made from the sale of farm lands or from life-long savings of small mercantile business. These good folks brought with them a complete stock of rural beliefs, superstitions, morals and habits, including a complacent and intransigent aversion to late dinners, malt liquors, grand opera and hussies. There are other evidences of the village spirit in Los Angeles: everyone is interested in everyone else. Snooping is a popular pastime, gossiping a popular practice. Privacy is impossible. This village democracy naturally invades the social life of Los Angeles.”

It is noted that this transformation occurred in the middle period in the growth of Los Angeles, a period usually marked in the growth of large cities by the rise of industry, the arrival of foreign immigrants and the spread of tenderloin districts. But the evolution of Los Angeles has never followed the general pattern. The more it grew in population between 1900 and 1920, the more it resembled a village.

After 1920 a new heterogeneous tide of migrants brought still further cultural changes to Los Angeles. According to Carey McWilliams, writing in Southern California Country, “The motion-picture industry attracted odd and freakish types: dwarfs, pygmies, one-eyed sailors, show people, misfits and 50,000 wonder-struck girls. The easy money of Hollywood drew pimps, gamblers, racketeers and confidence men.”

While many wealthy people came with this latest wave of migration, a majority of the migrants were lower middle class: the Okies of Bell Gardens, the Arkies of Monterey Park. All the while, the steady flow of retired Midwesterners continued.

By 1925 Los Angeles was still the enormous village, but it had begun to change. The “Big Men,” as McWilliams has said, “are the ones on top in Los Angeles. The businessmen, the Babbitts. They are the promoters, who are blowing down the city’s windpipe with all their might, hoping to inflate the place to a size that will be reckoned (as) the largest city in the countryÖin the world…these men are the high priests of the Chamber of Commerce whose religion is Climate and Profits. They see a tremendous opportunity to enrich themselves beyond anything they could have hoped for ten or even five years ago, and they mean to make the most of it…and trailing after the big boys is a mob of lesser fellows…thousands of minor realtors, boomers, promoters, contractors, agents, salesmen bunco men, office holders, lawyers and preachers—all driven by the same motives of wealth, power and personal glory. They exploit the ‘come-ons’ and one another, envy the big boys…while their wives gather in women’s clubs, listen to swamis and yogis and English lecturers, join ‘love cults’ and the Coue clubs (named after Emile Coue, a French psychotherapist who specialized in autosuggestion, the primary mantra being repeated over and over: ‘Everyday in every way I am getting better and better’) in Pasadena and Hollywood. Then there are the folks…the retired farmers, grocers, Ford agents, hardware merchants and shoe merchants from the Midwest and other parts of the U.S. who sold out their farms and businesses and…live in California—Southern California—to rest and regain their vigor, enjoy the climate, live in little bungalows with a palm tree or banana plant out in front, and eat in cafeterias. Toil-broken and bleached out, they flock to Los Angeles, fugitives from the simple, inexorable justice of life, from hard labor and drudgery, from cold winters and blistering summers on the prairie.”

With the increased industrialization after 1920, and more notably after 1940, came still another tide of migrants: Negroes from the Deep South, industrial workers from the Midwest and East and Far West, sharecroppers from Oklahoma and farmhands from Texas. They were younger, had less means and were far more malleable than the waves of migrants who had preceded them. By 1940 Los Angeles began to assume the form and structure of a city—159 years after its founding. Migrants began to be fitted into various niches and pigeonholes, to be sorted out by the processes of an urban industrial community. The village began to disappear and a city, at long last, to emerge.

To be continued…