When L.A. Blocked the Borders

The city of Los Angeles, a creation of continuing migrations, has not always welcomed the tired and the poor, the travelers seeking to breathe free and work in the warmth of Southern California.

A half-century ago, on Feb. 3, 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department, on its own initiative, deployed 136 officers on the borders of California to turn back migrants with no “visible means of support.”

The “bum blockade,” Supervisor John Anson Ford called it, established at 16 major points of entry on the Arizona, Nevada and Oregon borders. City powers, beset by thousands of their own unemployed, saw the police wall as a way to stem a tide estimated as high as 100,000 Los Angeles-bound transients a year--the vast influx immortalized in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Blockade procedures called for halting all would-be railroad-fare evaders, hitchhikers and, in the Los Angeles Times’ words then, “all other persons who have no definite purpose in coming into the state.” Families arriving in operational automobiles, paying railroad passengers, “anyone who can show he or she has good reason for entrance” and, of course, arrivals by sea or air were not denied entry.

Railroad companies obligingly halted freight trains near the police outposts. The companies also pledged to return undesirables to other states. The unwanted transient, in custody, was offered a simple choice: either leave California or serve a 30-to-80-day term at hard labor on charges of evasion of railroad fare or vagrancy.

Los Angeles policemen, operating hundreds of miles away from the city, did not have clear authority or complete cooperation in all the border counties. Police Chief James E. Davis, alert to some of the complexities, claimed his men needed no special approval for their new roles, since “any officer has the authority to enforce the state law.” Nevertheless he asked border-county sheriffs to deputize his men for service in the distant areas.

In some cases the wrong “bums” were turned away. Modoc County asked the city police to leave, after they turned back local residents returing home from out of state. Incidents at the border checkpoints were often tense and pathetic. The Travelers’ Aid Society reported that young boys and girls were part of the migration, and that the girls were no longer heading west “eager to break into the motion pictures.” Economist Paul S. Taylor witnessed a family being asked to pay $3 for a California auto-license fee: “A mother with six children and only $3.40 replied, ‘That’s food for my babies.’ She was allowed to proceed without a license.”

Chief Davis reported that in the first week his men had stopped 1,000 “penniless winter visitors”: 662 crossing from Arizona border, 51 from Nevada and 312 from Oregon. There were claims that some wanted criminals were captured and that there had been a 25% drop in burglaries, robberies and purse snatching in Los Angeles. The chief asserted that $3 million in relief funds would be saved.

Though many considered the police action constitutionally dubious, the blockade was supported by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the Los Angeles Times, the city prosecutor’s office, some judges and public officials, railroad companies, the county Sheriff’s Department, the County Department of Charities and hard-pressed state relief agencies.

The Times, in answer to the charge that the blockade was an outrage, editorialized “Let’s Have More Outrages,” praising it as an answer to the waste of taxpayers’ “hard-got-tax money” and a way to keep out “imported criminals . . . radicals and troublemakers.”

Opponents of the blockade were not silent. Some City Council members demanded to know the chief’s authority and the council finally passed a motion asking the city attorney’s opinion on the law involved. The Los Angeles Evening News, now defunct, wrote that the police blockade “violates every principle that Americans hold dear . . . the right of any citizen to go wherever he pleases.”

From Sacramento came the deputy attorney general’s judgment that the patrol was an “illegal proposition.” Gov. Frank Merriam, an old-guard conservative, had no comment.

“If Jesus Christ were on earth today, he couldn’t get into California--he would be stopped by Chief Davis’ border patrol,” said an American Civil Liberties Union spokesman. The Municipal League, a civic organization, called for an end to California’s “foreign legion.” Muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens called the police operation “the clearest Nazi and lawless action yet perpetrated by law officials in California.”

The Times, in face of the criticism, reprinted anti-blockade editorials from across the nation. The San Francisco Chronicle called the problem national, “not to be solved by the arbitrary action of one city’s chief of police.”

By early April, just two months after the patrol was sent to the state’s frontiers, Davis ended the blockade. By then only few officers were involved, mainly in the southern counties. How effective was the patrol? The chief claimed some 11,000 people had been turned back between Feb. 6 and March 31, causing an “absence of a seasonal crime wave in Los Angeles.” The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in El Centro reported that eight aliens had been apprehended.

In December, 1936, the U.S. Department of Labor’s monthly review noted that the blockade’s effect “was to back up the refugees and delay them temporarily in states surrounding California,” and that the blockade was no “solution to the fundamental problems.” Florida had also tried the blockade idea, but told the Californians the “patrol doesn’t work . . . is too expensive . . . and brings an avalanche of criticism.”

Exclusion of citizens from any state was rejected, more than five years later, in a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision (Edward vs. California). The case dealt with a man who brought his indigent brother-in-law from Texas. Some 27 similar state laws fell at the same time.

The blockade failed on humane and constitutional grounds, no matter what small effects it had on crime and relief costs. And there was the unremarked irony of a city that had built itself on luring migrants from other states suddenly taking a contrary policy.

In the years since 1936, Los Angeles has accommodated streams of migrants from other parts of America and from foreign lands. In the last 50 years, the city has more than doubled its population, not always happily--but with far more understanding.