In the 1870s, Los Angeles was still little more than a village of 5,000. By 1900, there were over 100,000 occupants of the city. Several men actively promoted Los Angeles, working to develop it into a great city and to make themselves rich. Angelenos set out to remake their geography to challenge San Francisco with its port facilities, railway terminal, banks and factories. The Farmers and Merchants Bank of Los Angeles was the first incorporated bank in Los Angeles, founded in 1871 by John G. Downey and Isaias W. Hellman.
The Chinese Massacre of 1871
The first Chinese arrived in Los Angeles in 1850. The great majority came from Guangdong Province in southeastern China, seeking a fortune in Gum Saan, ("Gold Mountain") the Chinese name for America. Instead of finding fortunes, they were exploited for their labor in the gold mines and in building the first railroad into California. Henry Huntington came to value their expertise as engineers. He later said he would not have been able to build his portion of the transcontinental railroad without them.
After the transcontinental railroad was completed, the Chinese sought jobs in the burgeoning California cities, where they faced massive discrimination on the part of organized labor. As a result, they filled in where there was less competition, running laundries, restaurants, and vegetable stands.
In a time of great exploitation and monopoly by the railroad barons, the unions blamed Chinese for lowering the wages and living standards of Anglo workers. The newspapers of both Los Angeles and San Francisco were filled with anti-Chinese propaganda.
The thriving Chinatown, on the eastern edge of the Plaza, was the site of terrible violence on October 24, 1871. A gunfight between rival Chinese factions over the abduction of a woman resulted in the accidental death of a white man. This enraged the bystanders, and a mob of about 500 Anglos and Latinos descended on Chinatown. They randomly lynched 19 Chinese men and boys, only one of whom may have been involved in the original killing. Homes and businesses were looted. Only ten rioters were tried. Eight were convicted of manslaughter, but their convictions were overturned the following year on a legal technicality. This was later referred to as the Chinese Massacre of 1871.
The massacre was the first time that Los Angeles was reported on the front pages of newspapers all over the world, even crowding out reports of the terrible Chicago fire that had taken place two weeks earlier. While the racist Los Angeles Star went so far to call the massacre "a glorious victory," others fretted about the city's racist and violent image. With the coming economic opportunities of the railroads, city fathers set themselves to wipe out mob violence.
Their efforts, however, led to more restrictive measures against the Chinese. In 1878–79, the City Council passed several measures adversely affecting Chinese vegetable merchants. The merchants went on strike. Los Angeles went without vegetables for several weeks, finally bringing the city to the bargaining table. Historian William Estrada wrote: "This little-known event may have helped the Chinese to better understand their role in the community as well as the power of organization as a means for community self-defense. The strike was a sign that Los Angeles was undergoing dramatic social, economic, and technological change and that the Chinese were a part of that change."
The coming of the railroads
Historian Blake Gumprecht wrote, "The completion of a transcontinental railroad to Los Angeles in 1876 changed Southern California forever."
The first railroad, San Pedro Railroad, was inaugurated in October, 1869 by John G. Downey and Phineas Banning. It ran 21 miles (34 km) between San Pedro and Los Angeles.
The town continued to grow at a moderate pace until its connection with the Central Pacific and San Francisco in 1876, and more directly with the East by the Santa Fe system (through its subsidiary California Southern Railroad) in 1885.
The Central Pacific Railroad had a significant impact in the immediate growth of the City of Los Angeles. The Central Pacific Railroad owners could have chosen San Diego over Los Angeles to be their final freight destination but the owners and the City of San Francisco feared that San Diego would become a rival importing power with its large natural bay. Instead, Central Pacific picked Los Angeles to be their southern hub and prompted the rapid expansion of the city's economic growth and expansion. The completion of the latter line precipitated one of the most extraordinary of American railway wars and land booms, which resulted in giving southern California a great stimulus.
Phineas Banning excavated a channel out of the mud flats of San Pedro Bay leading to Wilmington in 1871. Banning had already laid track and shipped in locomotives to connect the port to the city. Harrison Gray Otis, founder and owner of the Los Angeles Times, and a number of business colleagues embarked on reshaping southern California by expanding that into a harbor at San Pedro using federal dollars.
This put them at loggerheads with Collis P. Huntington, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and one of California's "Big Four" investors in the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific. (The "Big Four" are sometimes numbered among the "robber barons" of the Gilded Age). The line reached Los Angeles in 1876 and Huntington directed it to a port at Santa Monica, where the Long Wharf was built.
April 1872, John G. Downey went to San Francisco and was successful in representing Los Angeles in discussions with Collis Huntington concerning Los Angeles’s efforts to bring the Southern Pacific Railroad through Los Angeles.
The San Pedro forces eventually prevailed (though it required Banning and Downey to turn their railroad over to the Southern Pacific). Work on the San Pedro breakwater began in 1899 and was finished in 1910. Otis Chandler and his allies secured a change in state law in 1909 that allowed Los Angeles to absorb San Pedro and Wilmington, using a long, narrow corridor of land to connect them with the rest of the city. The debacle of the future Los Angeles harbor was termed the Free Harbor Fight.
In 1898, Henry Huntington purchased the Los Angeles Railway (the 'yellow cars') and two years later founded the Pacific Electric Railway (the 'red cars'). Los Angeles Railway served the city and the Pacific Electric Railway served the rest of the county. At its peak, the Pacific Electric was the largest electrically operated interurban railway in the world. Over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of tracks connected Los Angeles with Hollywood, Pasadena, San Pedro, Venice Beach, Santa Monica, Pomona, San Bernardino, Long Beach, Santa Ana, Huntington Beach, and other points and was recognized as best public transportation system in the world.
Oil discovery
Oil was discovered by Edward L. Doheny in 1892, near the present location of Dodger Stadium. The Los Angeles City Oil Field was the first of many fields in the basin to be exploited, and in 1900 and 1902, respectively, the Beverly Hills Oil Field and Salt Lake Oil Field were discovered just a few miles west of the original find. Los Angeles became a center of oil production in the early 20th century, and by 1923 the region was producing one-quarter of the world's total supply; it is still a significant producer, with the Wilmington Oil Field having the fourth-largest reserves of any field in California.
Winds of revolution
The immigrants arriving in the city to find jobs often brought the revolutionary zeal and idealism of their homelands. These often included anarchists such as Russian Emma Goldman and Ricardo Flores Magón and his brother Enrique of the Partido Liberal Mexicano. They were later joined by the socialist candidate for mayor Job Harriman, Chinese revolutionaries, the novelist Upton Sinclair, "Wobblies" (members of the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW), and Socialist and Communist labor organizers such as the Japanese-American Karl Yoneda and the Russian-born New Yorker Meyer Baylin. The Socialists were the first to set up a soapbox in the Plaza, which would serve as the location of union rallies and protests and riots as the police attempted to break up meetings.
Class conflict surges
At the same time that the L.A. Times was whipping up enthusiasm for the expansion of Los Angeles it was also trying to turn it into a union-free or open shop town. Fruit growers and local merchants who had opposed the Pullman strike in 1894 subsequently formed the Merchants and Manufacturers Association (M & M) to support the L.A. Times anti-union campaign.
The California labor movement, with its strength concentrated in San Francisco, had largely ignored Los Angeles for years. It changed, in 1907, however, when the American Federation of Labor decided to challenge the open shop of "Otis Town."
In 1909, the city fathers placed a ban on free speech from public streets and private property except for the Plaza. Locals had claimed that it had been an Open Forum forever. The area was of particular concern to the owners of the L.A. Times, Harrison Grey Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler.
At the turn of the century, Otis and Chandler as part of a syndicate had acquired thousands of acres of farmland in Baja California that stretched across the border into Imperial County. It was called the California-Mexican Land and Cattle Company, or the C-M Ranch.
In exchange for favorable reports about the presidency of Porfirio Diaz in Mexico, Otis and his associates enjoyed unfettered business freedom in Baja California. Under Diaz, American capitalists bought millions of acres of Mexican land, mines, factories, banks, oil rights (Doheny), public utilities, and most of the nation's railroads. The Diaz regime was marked with increasing poverty, violent political repression, and the support of President Wilson.
The Otis-Chandler plans for both their Mexican holdings and the city required a steady supply of cheap labor and keeping the unions from succeeding as they had done in San Francisco.
In 1910, the century's first full-scale revolution took place in Baja California, led by two factions, wealthy landowner Francisco Madero and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). The PLM was based in the L.A. Plaza and led by anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, a talented journalist and charismatic speaker who occupies a special place in the story of Los Angeles. He is the prototype of the 20th-century Mexican-American political and social activist.
Publishing the popular bi-lingual Regeneracion newspaper in Los Angeles, Magon's movement posed a direct challenge to Otis and Chandler's hold on the border region. The paper not only reported on the revolution in Mexico, but also social and political conditions in the U.S. It examined the U.S. penal system, the plight of agricultural workers, child labor, Margaret Sanger's crusade for women, and most of all the battle against the open shop in Los Angeles. The paper also connected readers with the social services and cultural happenings available in the expanding Plaza area.
Magon wrote: "We do not struggle for abstractions, but for materialities. We want land for all, bread for all. Inevitably blood must run, so that conquests obtain benefits for all and not for a specific social class."
The insurgents of the Baja Revolution consisted of no more than 200 anarchists, socialists, and Wobblies. Their basic goal was the redistribution back to Mexican peasants of Baja California land, of which 78 percent was owned by foreign interests.
The owners of the Times drew the conclusion that the Mexican rebels and union organizers in L.A. were connected. This conflict came to a head with the bombing of the Times in 1910, which killed 10 people, and injured 17. Two months later, the Llewellyin Iron Works near the plaza was bombed. A meeting was hastily called of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufacturers Association. The L.A. Times wrote: "radical and practical matters (were) considered, and steps taken for the adaption of such as are adequate to cope with a situation tardily recognized as the gravest that Los Angeles has ever been called upon to face.
The authorities indicted John and James McNamara, both associated with the Iron Workers Union, for the bombing; Clarence Darrow, who had successfully defended Big Bill Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone in Idaho, represented them.
At the same time the McNamara brothers were awaiting trial, Los Angeles was preparing for a city election. Job Harriman, running on the socialist ticket, was challenging the establishment's candidate.
Harriman's campaign, however, was tied to the asserted innocence of the McNamaras. But the defense was in trouble: the prosecution not only had evidence of the McNamaras' complicity, but had trapped Darrow in a clumsy attempt to bribe one of the jurors. On December 1, 1911, four days before the final election, the McNamaras entered a plea of guilty in return for prison terms. The L.A. Times accompanied its report of the guilty plea with a faked photograph of Samuel Gompers trampling an American flag. Harriman lost badly.
The Otis-Chandler interests were further challenged when Madero became President of Mexico in 1911. Commercial interests in L.A. felt radical measures had to be taken. Mexican and labor organizers were scapegoated.
In June 1911, the police raided the offices of Regeneracion. Magon and his younger brother Enrique were arrested with two others and charged with conspiracy to lead an armed expedition against a "friendly nation." The trial was a great media event and drew great crowds. Among those who showed up to speak on behalf of the brothers were socialist labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, American anarchist Emma Goldman, and Eugene V. Debs.
The four were convicted and sentenced to 23 months at the federal prison in Macneil Island, Washington.
On Christmas Day, 1913, police attempted to break up an IWW rally of 500 taking place in the Plaza. Encountering resistance, the police waded into the crowd attacking them with their clubs. One citizen was killed. In the aftermath, the authorities attempted to impose martial law in the wake of growing protests. Seventy-three people were arrested in connection with the riots. The City Council introduced new measures to control public speaking. The Times scapegoated all foreign elements even calling onlookers and taco venders as "cultural subversives.
In 1916, the Magón brothers were arrested on charges of defamation and sending indecent materials through the mail. Ricardo was able to get released on bail. He gave a rousing speech at Italian Hall to 700 of the International Workers Defense League. He called Mexican President Carranza a "lackey of President Wilson" and Wilson "the bandit of Wall Street." The speech was given wide circulation in the press throughout the Southwest and in Mexico.
Ricardo was convicted and sent to Leavenworth. In 1922, he died in his cell, maybe murdered by a guard. His body was returned by train to Mexico City, where he was given a hero's welcome by a crowd of thousands consisting of workers, labor organizers, and government officials singing La Marsellaise and the Internationale.
The open shop campaign continued from strength to strength, although not without meeting opposition from workers. By 1923, the Industrial Workers of the World had made considerable progress in organizing the longshoremen in San Pedro and led approximately 3,000 men to walk off the job. With the support of the L.A. Times, a special "Red Squad" was formed within the Los Angeles Police Department and arrested so many strikers that the city's jails were soon filled.
Some 1,200 dock workers were corralled in a special stockade in Griffith Park. The L.A. Times wrote approvingly that "stockades and forced labor were a good remedy for IWW terrorism." Public meetings were outlawed in San Pedro, Upton Sinclair was arrested at Liberty Hill in San Pedro for reading the United States Bill of Rights on the private property of a strike supporter (the arresting officer told him "we'll have none of 'that Constitution stuff'") and blanket arrests were made at union gatherings. The strike ended after members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion raided the IWW Hall and attacked the men, women and children meeting there. The strike was defeated.
Los Angeles developed another industry in the early 20th century when movie producers from the East Coast relocated there. These new employers were likewise afraid of unions and other social movements: during Upton Sinclair's campaign for Governor of California under the banner of his "End Poverty In California" (EPIC) movement, Louis B. Mayer turned MGM's Culver City studio into the unofficial headquarters of the organized campaign against EPIC. MGM produced fake newsreel interviews with whiskered actors with Russian accents voicing their enthusiasm for EPIC, along with footage focusing on central casting hobos huddled on the borders of California waiting to enter and live off the bounty of its taxpayers once Sinclair was elected. Sinclair lost.
Los Angeles also acquired another industry in the years just before World War II: the garment industry. At first devoted to regional merchandise such as sportswear, the industry eventually grew to be the second largest center of garment production in the United States.
Unions began to make progress in organizing these workers as the New Deal arrived in the 1930s. They made even greater gains in the war years, as Los Angeles grew even further.
Today, the ethnic makeup of the city and the politically progressive views of surrounding West Hollywood and Hollywood have made Los Angeles a strong union town. However, many garment workers in central LA, most of whom are Mexican immigrants, still work in sweat shop conditions.
The battle of the Los Angeles River
The Los Angeles River flowed clear and fresh all year, supporting 45 Gabrielino villages in the area. The source of the river was the aquifer under the San Fernando Valley, supplied with water from the surrounding mountains. The rising of the underground bedrock at the Glendale Narrows (near today's Griffith Park) squeezed the water to the surface at that point. Then, through much of the year, the river emerged from the valley to flow across the floodplain 20 miles (32 km) to the sea. The area also provided other streams, lakes, and artesian wells.
The problem with the river was not too little water but, occasionally, way too much..
Early settlers were more than a little discouraged by the region's diverse and unpredictable weather. They watched helplessly as long droughts weakened and starved their livestock, only to be drowned and carried off by ferocious storms. During the years of little rain, people would build too close to the riverbed, only to see their homes and barns later swept out to sea during a flood. The location of the Los Angeles Plaza had to be moved twice because of previously having been built too close to the riverbed.
Worse, floods would change the river's course. When the settlers arrived, the river joined Ballona Creek to discharge in Santa Monica Bay. A fierce storm in 1835 diverted its course to Long Beach, where it stays today.
Early citizens could not even maintain a footbridge over the river from one side of the city to the other. After the American takeover, the city council authorized spending of $20,000 for a contractor to build a substantial wooden bridge across the river. The first storm to come along dislodged the bridge, used it as a battering ram to break through the embankment, and scattered its timbers all the way to the sea.
Some of the most concentrated rainfall in the history of the United States has occurred in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles and Orange Counties. On April 5, 1926, a rain gauge in the San Gabriels collected one inch in one minute. In January, 1969, more water fell on the San Gabriels in nine days than New York City sees in a year. In February 1978, almost a foot of rain fell in 24 hours, and, in one blast, an inch and a half in five minutes. This storm caused massive debris flows throughout the region, one of them unearthing the corpses in the Verdugo Hills Cemetery and depositing them in the town below. Another wiped out the small town of Hidden Springs in a tributary of the Big Tujunga River, killing 13 people.
The greatest daily rainfall recorded in California was 26.12 inches on January 23, 1943 at Hoegees near Mt. Wilson in the San Gabriel Mountains. Fifteen other stations reported over 20 inches in two days from the same storm. Forty-five others reported 70 percent of the average annual rainfall in two days.
Quibbling between city and county governments delayed any response to the flooding until a massive storm in 1938 flooded Los Angeles and Orange Counties. The federal government stepped in. To transfer floodwater to the sea as quickly as possible, the Army Corps of Engineers paved the beds of the river and its tributaries. The Corps also built several dams and catchment basins in the canyons along the San Gabriel Mountains to reduce the debris flows. It was an enormous project, taking years to complete.
Today, the Los Angeles River functions mainly as a flood control. A drop of rain falling in the San Gabriel Mountains will reach the sea faster than an auto can drive. During today's rainstorms, the volume of the Los Angeles River at Long Beach can be as large as the Mississippi River at St. Louis.
The drilling of wells and pumping of water from the San Fernando Valley aquifer dried up the river by the 1920s. By 1980, the aquifer was supplying drinking water for 800,000 people. In that year, it was discovered that the aquifer had been contaminated. Many wells were shut down, as the area qualified as a Superfund site
Water from a distance
For its first 120 years, the Los Angeles River supplied the town with ample water for homes and farms. It was estimated that the annual flow could have support a town of 250,000 people—if the water had been managed right. But Angelinos were among the most profligate users of water in the world. In the semi-arid climate, they were forever watering their lawns, gardens, orchards, and vineyards. Later on, they would need more to support the growth of commerce and manufacturing. By the beginning of the 20th century, the town realized it would quickly outgrow its river and need new sources of water.
Legitimate concerns about water supply were exploited to gain backing for a huge engineering and legal effort to bring more water to the city and allow more development. The city fathers had their eyes on the Owens River, about 250 miles (400 km) northeast of Los Angeles in Inyo County, near the Nevada state line. It was a permanent stream of fresh water fed by the melted snows of the eastern Sierra Nevada. It flowed through the Owens River Valley before emptying into the shallow, saline Owens Lake, where it evaporated.
Sometime between 1899 and 1903, Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law successor, Harry Chandler, engaged in successful efforts at buying up cheap land on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. At the same time, they enlisted the help of William Mulholland, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Water Department (later the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power or LADWP), and J.B. Lippencott, of the United States Reclamation Service.
Lippencott performed water surveys in the Owens Valley for the Service while secretly receiving a salary from the City of Los Angeles. He succeeded in persuading Owens Valley farmers and mutual water companies to pool their interests and surrender the water rights to 200,000 acres (800 km²) of land to Fred Eaton, Lippencott's agent and a former mayor of Los Angeles. Lippencott then resigned from the Reclamation Service, took a job with the Los Angeles Water Department as assistant to Mulholland, and turned over the Reclamation Service maps, field surveys and stream measurements to the city. Those studies served as the basis for designing the longest aqueduct in the world.
By July 1905, the Times began to warn the voters of Los Angeles that the county would soon dry up unless they voted bonds for building the aqueduct. Artificial drought conditions were created when water was run into the sewers to decrease the supply in the reservoirs and residents were forbidden to water their lawns and gardens.
On election day, the people of Los Angeles voted for $22.5 million worth of bonds to build an aqueduct from the Owens River and to defray other expenses of the project. With this money, and with a special Act of Congress allowing cities to own property outside their boundaries, the City acquired the land that Eaton had acquired from the Owens Valley farmers and started to build the aqueduct. On the occasion of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct on November 5, 1913 Mullholland's entire speech was five words: "There it is. Take it."
All about Los Angeles:
- History of Los Angeles 3
- History of Los Angeles 2
- History of Los Angeles
- Geography of Los Angeles
- Climate of the Los Angeles
- Media in Los Angeles
- Economy of Los Angeles
- Religion in Los Angeles
- Sports in Los Angeles
- Demographics of Los Angeles
- Education in Los Angeles
- Transportation in Los Angeles
- Government of Los Angeles
- Crime in Los Angeles
- Culture of Los Angeles
- Los Angeles County, California
- Beverly Hills
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