Once Ignored : L.A. History: The Future Looks Good

It was one of California’s worst disasters--the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in northern Los Angeles County in 1928. At least 400 people were killed, rivaling the death toll of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Yet, history has not gone out of its way to preserve the memory of the tragedy. A 1931 book on water in Southern California, published three years after the dam broke, did not mention the dam.

Today, in the museum dedicated to the story of water in Los Angeles, there is a blank spot on the wall where an exhibit about the dam was planned but never hung. Officials of the city’s Department of Water and Power, which built the dam and paid for the museum, say they vetoed any reference to the St. Francis disaster as pointless.

Blank Spot

The blank spot on the museum wall says a lot about the history of Los Angeles, a long neglected subject that is beginning to arouse new interest as the city looms larger on the world’s landscape. For years, the city’s past received short shrift, not just from history books fixated on the East but from a forward-looking citizenry not above romanticizing the old days.

“Los Angeles lives in the present and dreams of the future,” writer Oliver Carlson said in 1941, describing a town that, like an aging starlet with an airbrushed past, does not readily give up her secrets.

Today, however, the city’s past is being scrutinized as never before. Los Angeles historians, accustomed to laboring in obscurity, are finding more opportunities to teach and write. In the works are a new architectural history of the city by UCLA history professor Thomas Hines, a study of early 20th-Century labor politics by writer Geoff Cowan and a book of essays by local historians Norman Klein and Martin Schiesl, tentatively titled “20th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion and Social Conflict.”

Survey Course

For the first time, UCLA is offering a survey course on the history of Los Angeles. Occidental College soon will offer a new course on local history, combining architectural, economic and literary themes. Public television station KCET is putting together four more documentaries in a $3-million series on Los Angeles history begun last year.

Even students on the East Coast are being offered opportunities to learn about Los Angeles history. A course on the history of the West at Yale University ranges from the mission period in early Southern California to the rise of Los Angeles’ multiethnic culture during this century.

Taking Los Angeles seriously can begin with the realization that the city was founded the same year, 1781, that the 13 colonies united under the Articles of Confederation or with the knowledge that by 1900 Los Angeles was an ethnic melting pot with a higher percentage of nonwhite residents than New York City.

“Los Angeles has become a symbol of American aspirations. In many ways, it is the most American city,” said Howard Lamar, the Yale history professor whose course looks at the city.

But Lamar admits it has been a struggle persuading academia to take his course seriously.

“When I first taught it in 1951,” he said, “the history department was so skeptical, they put an asterisk after the course, meaning that a student couldn’t get credit for it unless he had already taken the standard survey course on American History.”

For years, Los Angeles historians complained that to land a contract with a New York publisher, they had to write about Hollywood or do a picture book about Venice Beach or Forest Lawn Memorial-Park.

“Publishers wanted weirdness. Grandmothers on roller skates. You didn’t excite a lot of interest proposing a book on Phineas Banning and the building of the L.A. Harbor,” said Jon Wilkman, a local historian and film maker.

This city is famous for the scorn heaped on it by intellectuals.

“Los Angeles represents the ultimate segregation of the unfit,” philosopher Bertrand Russell said.

Author H.L. Mencken dubbed Los Angeles “moronia.” And, more recently, columnist George Will has described the city as “an untidy jumble of human diversity and perversity.”

But if Los Angeles was not taken seriously, if its past was not revered or at least considered worthy of academic review, the city was partly to blame.

Like much of the West, Los Angeles was developed by newcomers with no stake in the city’s past. They were motivated, historians point out, by dreams of El Dorado or oil or cheap land or stardom or simply a second chance, and for them, history was at best irrelevant, at worst painful, stirring memories of past failures.

“The past could betray the dream if you looked at it too closely,” Wilkman said.

There are numerous examples of the city’s disregard for its own history. It was more than a century ago that Los Angeles officials lost track of where the first settlers lived; the downtown plaza that commemorates the site may be a mile from the original location.

Officials at KCET said they had to shelve a proposed documentary on the city’s last Mexican governor, Pio Pico, who left office in 1846, because they could not find enough material to do the show. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office throws away records after 15 years, a practice that has frustrated research into historic cases, according to Paul G. Newman, the clerk in charge of those records.

Last Hanging

Newman said he has turned away inquiries about the famous 1926 disappearance of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson and about M.R. Lisenba, the man known as “the rattlesnake killer” who used a rattler on his victim and was the last person legally hanged in California.

“Compared to New York or Boston,” said Los Angeles City Clerk Elias Martinez, “our commitment to history is a drop in the bucket. Some of our municipal records are in Spain or Mexico. Others are lost.”

Historians say records are particularly difficult to track in a city where rapid growth has often led to a displacement of cultures. Mexican ranchos were taken over by Yankee pioneers in the mid-19th Century. The first Chinatown was moved to make way for Union Station in the 1930s. More recently, Latino neighborhoods in Chavez Ravine and Bunker Hill were bulldozed to make way for Dodger Stadium and downtown redevelopment.

Historians say they also face the challenge of separating fact from fiction in a city that engaged in myth-making decades before the movie industry came to town.

The trend was born in the late 19th Century, with the myth of Los Angeles as an earthly paradise--”the new Greece,” “the American Italy” and “the land of the sundown sea,” as it was described in promotional literature.

The town of Vernon, today a center of meat packing and heavy industry on the edge of downtown, was the object of one poetic rhapsody:

. . . As the universe spreads its flaming wall,

Take all the pleasures of all the spheres,

And multiply each through endless years,

One winter at Vernon is worth them all.

That and similar flights of fancy were the work of early real estate promoters who were trying to lure immigrants. They succeeded.

The city’s population multiplied by fivefold between 1880 and 1900. But the exaggerated imagery also helped shape public thinking about Los Angeles at a time when little was known about the place.

Later, Hollywood, along with novelists like Raymond Chandler and Nathaniel West, wove a darker spell, recasting the city as a fool’s paradise and a land of broken dreams.

“The relationship of myth and realty is a central theme in defining Los Angeles,” UCLA’s Hines said.

Added a UCLA colleague, history professor Thomas Sanchez, “Trying to make the place appealing to the people back East led to a continual reinvention of what L.A. was.”

As the old Mexican town, El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles, was repopulated by immigrants from Iowa and Kansas, changes were made. Bullfighting was banned and baseball encouraged in its place. Spanish street names were Anglicized.

Although a handful of the city’s first adobe dwellings were preserved, they were gentrified, furnished with four-poster beds, brick floors and corner fireplaces that did not exist in the early adobes.

“I don’t know of a single adobe that has not been over-decorated,” architectural historian Robert Winter said.

In pageants and parades, the city’s original settlers, many of whom were Indians, peasants of mixed blood and blacks, were portrayed as Spanish dons and high-born senoritas. A 1931 fiesta celebrating the city’s 150th birthday featured a blonde queen, the granddaughter of a Yankee banker and 44 white people playing the original settlers.

“There is a phony history we build on,” Winter said. “Part of it is the notion that the Hispanic history of Los Angeles was aristocratic, when in fact it was very poor.”

There has also been an inclination to whitewash unsavory moments in local history.

William Mason, curator of Southern California history at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, said 19th-Century histories routinely glossed over episodes of ethnic conflict and municipal corruption.

Something similar happens in journalist Harry Carr’s 1935 history of Los Angeles. When Carr comes to the subject of the labor unrest that erupted in the 1910 dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times, he simply refuses to discuss the matter.

“I am not going into the long and bitter labor fight that lasted 40 years and ended in the dynamiting of The Times building, in which disaster 23 innocent men who had nothing to do with it were burned to death. . . . I was on the inside of the whole story, but I have no desire to dig it up here,” Carr wrote.

Klein, at work on a history of social conflict, argues that “this city has never been comfortable facing up to the grimmer aspects of its past the way Chicago has faced up to its gangster era or New York has dealt with its history of political corruption.”

Today, ironically, the city’s problems contribute to its celebrity. Ethnic conflict, gangs, drugs, congestion and pollution are helping to make Los Angeles a magnet for intellectuals.

“Los Angeles is becoming more attractive to intellectuals elsewhere because the city no longer seems like an isolated phenomenon, you know the land of fruits and nuts,” Wilkman said. “People now talk about the Los Angelicization of their cities--the sprawl, the decentralization, the congestion, the arrival of the immigrant. They are interested in what happened to L.A. because they foresee it happening to them.”

But as the city is discovered by scholars from afar, Los Angeles historians labor to point out that many of the city’s current problems are not new.

“Our past can tell us a lot about how we got into this mess,” Klein said.

In 1890, for example, city officials warned that an inadequate sewer system was threatening to pollute Santa Monica Bay. In 1910, The Times wrote that “the traffic question has become a problem.”

By the late 1940s, destitute citizens were setting up housekeeping in abandoned street cars by the tens of thousands. Their plight led Rep. Helen Gahagen Douglas to tell Congress that “more families are homeless in Los Angeles today than after the San Francisco earthquake or the Johnstown flood.”

The history is not all so grim. In reexaming the myths of Los Angeles, historians are also finding that the city truly has fulfilled the dreams of some people.

For instance, black historian Lonnie Bunch, a curator at the California Afro-American Museum here, said he was surprised to find a thriving black middle class in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles that, by 1910, enjoyed the highest percentage of home ownership of blacks in the nation. Over 36% of the city’s black population owned their own homes compared to 2.4% in New York City.

In a recent essay, Bunch quotes W.E.B. DuBois, the pioneering civil rights advocate and black author, saying in 1913 that “Los Angeles is wonderful. No where in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed. . . .”

For Bunch, the challenge of history is reconciling the black Los Angeles of DuBois’ time with what he encounters today.

“I look at the black community of the 1920s. I see entrepreneurship. I see a rich intellectual life. I see many things I don’t see today, and I try to learn what happened,” he said.

Some historians say the story of Los Angeles can be best told in biographies of its most powerful figures.

Wilkman said he would like to see a major work on William Mulholland, the self-taught engineer whose monumental 233-mile aqueduct imported the water from Owens Valley that allowed Los Angeles to become a major city. Mulholland also built the St. Francis Dam and vouched for its safety just 11 hours before it collapsed.

The story of the aqueduct and the controversial expropriation of the Owens Valley water is part of the lore of Los Angeles. In movies and books, Mulholland has been variously portrayed as a dupe, an egomaniac and a flawed genius. But aside from a graduate student’s thesis in 1978, there has been only one book, which is now out of print, about the St. Francis Dam, and there is no biography of Mulholland.

“The great book about Los Angeles has yet to be written, the one that will write the city large in the mind of America, that will get us once and for all out of the cultural margins,” Schiesl said.

The fact that such a book is still to be written is what excites so many historians working in the city today.

Said Klein: “What holds me to Los Angeles, more than the city itself, are the stories to be told.”