Los Angeles is a City of Contrasts, according to Mike Davis

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What is the point of learning about L.A.’s past? Because history repeats itself unless we inform ourselves.

“…Los Angeles in the 1920s was in many respects a de facto dictatorship of the Times and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, as the LAPD’s infamous ‘red squad’ kept dissent off the streets and radicals in jail.”

In 2016, it sounds like it’s straight out of a Hollywood script: a newspaper and an Association forming two parts of a ‘dictatorship’. But Los Angeles in the 1920s wasn’t the megalopolis it is today. If one can imagine it, in 1900 L.A. barely had over 100,000 people living in it.

By 1910, the city population more than doubled to over 300,000, but was still smaller than Long Beach (+400,000) today. And though by 1920 the city grew to a population of over 576,000 people, it was still only the tenth largest city in the United States, behind Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (+588,000) of all places.

New York, by contrast, counted over 5,620,000 people in 1920.

In other words, L.A. was still just another town out west in California, leaving room for just a few major ‘players’.

Davis goes on to describe how the Times and the Association’s reign took place at the time of a great internal migration in the U.S. from the the early twentieth century up to the mid-1920s, when ‘middle America’ came out to the West coast and made L.A. a particularly white, Anglo-Saxon protestant town supported by a Mexican underclass.

“…the new WASP ascendancy found its essential economic support in the arrival of Mexican labor in massive numbers after the fall of the Porfiriato in 1910.”

The Porfiriato was a thirty-five year dictatorship in Mexico from 1875 – 1910. Headed by President Porfirio Diaz, his rule by force made significant developments for the state and relative stability of Mexico, but also violently suppressed the poor or lower classes.

In the end, Diaz’s rule came to a violent demise when a revolutionary war ravaged the country. Diaz would die in exile in France, as war for his succession ravaged Mexico for the next ten years and saw many leave their homeland with dreams of a better life en el Norte.

As such, it’s easy to see how Los Angeles was a prime destination for a new beginning for Mexican laborers in the 20s, as well as how their desperation for a decent living would make them great workers for a city in need of building.

It also makes sense how a newspaper and its printing power at the time could command far more power. There were only half a million people in its beat, then.

And when considering that the Manufacturer’s Association was one of its kind as industry was still lacking in Los Angeles, the state of The City in the 1920s becomes clear: it wasn’t anything but a few people’s stomping grounds.

Yet even with this relatively ordinary backdrop, there was still a shift in power taking place. In Davis’s words:

One of the first casualties of this recomposition of demography and power was the integrated social status of Los Angeles Jews. By the early 1900s elite Jews, including the pioneer dynasties of the 1840s and 1850s, were being excluded from the corporate directorships, law firms, philanthropies and clubs that in many cases they had helped to establish.

When I read this, it was as fascinating as it was problematizing, as I realized that if the “upper classes” weren’t all just one united front but a series of different actors, then surely they aren’t now, which makes the entire notion of power far more complex than what meets the eye. It’s not just a city, but a world of contrasts.

With more soon,

J.T.

Los Angeles: Origins

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Question: tell me again, what a city is?

From The Free Dictionary:

cit•y

(ˈsɪt i)

n., pl. cit•ies.

1. a large or important town.
2. (in the U.S.) an incorporated municipality, usu. governed by a mayor and council.
3. the inhabitants of a city collectively: The entire city is celebrating.

A follow-up question: What is the point of a city? I mean, what is its mission or objective?

From City of Quartz:

 
“The mission literature [of Los Angeles] depicted the history of race relations as a pastoral ritual of obedience and paternalism: ‘graceful Indians, happy as peasants in an Italian opera, knelt dutifully before the Franciscans to receive the baptism of a superior culture, while in the background the angelus tolled from a swallow-guarded campanile, and a choir of friars intoned the Te Deum.‘ “

In other words, the early players of ‘L.A.’ cast the city as a place where history just failed to take place as it did in the rest of the ‘free world,’ or as a place where fairy tales proved the rule rather than the exception of the land; certainly the image of graceful Indians ready to serve their Franciscan masters invokes the sense of an idyllic place to be. That is, if you’re in the position of the Franciscan master.

Why did the early players in L.A. do this, however? Or, with what objective?

Again, from Professor Davis:

“With sunshine and the open shop as their main assets, and allied with the great transcontinental railroads (the region’s largest landowners), a syndicate of developers, bankers and transport magnates led by Otis [Chandler, of The L.A. Times] and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, set out to sell Los Angeles – as no city had ever been sold – to the restless but affluent babbitry of the Middle West.”

So what’s Mr. Davis saying about The City, then, that its only purpose was to be sold?!

So many questions, and so little time. But we’ll find a way.

With more soon,

J.T.

Sincerely,

J.T.Leave a comment

Sometimes I can only feel gifted to walk through the world as I do, as somewhere along the way all of the people I come across craft a place for themselves in my heart. Whether we walk shoulder to shoulder or across from each other doesn’t matter. The point is that we all just found ourselves here one day, and that we’re all still trying to figure out just why. I’m grateful to get lost in the question with all of the so-called strangers of the world, and even more so, to find myself with them.

City of Quartz: On the “Idyllic” life

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So from its beginnings, L.A. after it was forcibly brought into the union was a place for the rich, by the rich, all of whom wanted to sell Los Angeles to…the rich. Mike Davis examines a couple of major institutions and their forerunners as follows:

“I begin with the so-called ‘Arroyo set’: writers, antiquarians, and publicists under the influence of Charles Fletcher Lummis (himself in the pay of the Times and the Chamber of Commerce), who at the turn of the century created a comprehensive fiction of Southern California as the promised land of a millenarian Anglo-Saxon racial odyssey. They inserted a mediterraneanized idyll of New England life into the perfumed ruins of an innocent but inferior ‘Spanish’ culture. In doing so, they wrote the script for the giant real-estate speculations of the early twentieth century that transformed Los Angeles from small town to metropolis. Their imagery, motifs, values and legends were in turn endlessly reproduced by Hollywood, while continuing to be incorporated into ersatz landscapes of suburban Southern California.”

Here, I don’t have to look far to find the ‘comprehensive fiction’ Davis describes, as memorabilia of L.A.’s “idyllic” lifestyle are abound:

la-07
bytrain
glorious


Free Harbor and Glorious Southern California are brought to you by the L.A. Public Library, while California this Summer was found through the California State Library.

In Free Harbor (1899), the L.A. ports of 1899 are overseen by a flock of little white angels, who promise great things to come for the land neighbored by the ocean and overseen by triumphant sunlight. In similar fashion, Jubilee‘s trumpet signals the rise of an American dream in California’s ports, from which freedom and eloquence naturally follow.

California This Summer (1934) makes similar gestures, as the poster captures a world with a little bit of everything, including a state of beaches, lush and green hills, and even mountaintops to quietly conquer as the fair lady with the sunhat does. Life in the portrait looks simple and untainted by the dirt of cities and the congestion of crowds. A perfect summer vacation. Never mind the Native people who once made their lives amid such mountains.

Glorious Southern California (1907) exhausts the point. On one side, the ocean waves signal the life of unchartered waters, while below, the life of cacti and other plants serve to welcome dreams of real estate and other property in an open frontier.

As Davis notes, all of the posters promise Anglo-saxon or white purity, making no allusion or reference to the Spanish-speaking brown cultures which gave California its name, nor the pockets of indigenous civilizations throughout the state which were pushed out to make way for the influx of newcomers. Instead, real estate moguls figured out that depicting a world of endless sunshine and openness would be a draw, and they were absolutely right. As Quartz reveals, such images of Southern California would be endlessly reproduced in Hollywood throughout the decades that’d follow, and well into the present.

It reminds me of a similar trend in my neighborhood at the moment, where apartments are sold as real estate agencies as being based in Silver Lake, when in fact they’re actually located in ‘East Hollywood.’ As a neighbor pointed out to me recently, “when out-of-towners arrive into their new apartments from Seattle and other parts of the country, they’re surprised: there’s no lake, and the apartments are much smaller than they thought, so they just leave, and the cycle starts all over again.”

With more soon,