Talking About Her Family, Our History

“That is the craziest thing I ever heard of in my life,” Catherine Mulholland said in response to the sensitive question. “And where that got started, I have no idea. . . . “That poor man, he had a paralytic stroke.”

No shrinking violet, Catherine Mulholland was saying that the (recent) reports that her grandfather’s death in 1935 was by suicide are simply, utterly untrue. The notion that 79-year-old William Mulholland was that guilt-ridden over the St. Francis Dam disaster may make for a more melodramatic ending to his extraordinary tale. But as history goes, she said, this is just another myth--and more “vulgar” than most.

Mulholland, a 72-year-old Chatsworth resident, has heard this one before. Her crusade to free her grandfather’s memory from what she calls “the dime-novel-detective school of history making” was the subject of a recent column. That column, in turn, prompted a quick retort from Lionel Rolfe, a co-author of “Bread & Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles.” Rolfe, in Mulholland’s view, is one of those dubious detectives.

He, in turn, will make the obvious argument that Mulholland is biased, blinded by family loyalty. At any rate, it was Rolfe who first told me that old Bill Mulholland committed suicide, an assertion that can be found on Page 76 of “Bread & Hyacinths.”

If you expect a definitive autopsy here, 60 years after the man’s death, be prepared for a disappointment. Still, it’s interesting how feuds of long-ago Los Angeles inspire such contention and emotion today, and it’s instructive that people who portray themselves as historical authorities can have such profound disputes.

Catherine Mulholland, who is seeking a publisher for the biography she’s written about her grandfather, says she wants to set the record straight and protect her grandfather’s legacy from conspiracy-minded journalists and historians who’ve cast the builder of the Los Angeles Aqueduct as a heavy--a cog in the empire-building machinery created by Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, an early publisher of this newspaper.

Rolfe and co-authors Paul Greenstein and Nigey Lennon, meanwhile, say “Bread & Hyacinths” grew out of their desire to protect the memory of Job Harriman, the socialist labor attorney who in 1911 ran a strong but unsuccessful campaign for mayor of Los Angeles. Harriman, Rolfe explained in a letter, “has been mostly ignored by biographers and historians--not entirely by accident.”

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Catherine Mulholland, for one, doesn’t downplay Harriman’s role. Indeed, Harriman is a key figure in her own thesis about why her grandfather has been misunderstood.

Harriman’s primary rival, after all, was Otis, a fierce enemy of the labor movement. With famed attorney Clarence Darrow, Harriman unsuccessfully defended the McNamara brothers in the 1910 bombing of The Times that killed 20 people.

According to Rolfe, Harriman wasn’t opposed to the aqueduct, but argued that the citizens of Los Angeles who were paying for it should profit from it, rather than Otis, who was busy buying up land.

Catherine Mulholland said that her grandfather, a progressive in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, indeed built the aqueduct to promote the public good in Los Angeles. Otis was a businessman, she said, who promoted the aqueduct in his newspaper and later the city’s annexation of the San Fernando Valley, where he and associates expanded their holdings after voters approved the aqueduct construction.

Mulholland suggests that her grandfather’s historical role has been tainted by the biases of writers such as Carey McWilliams, who preferred Harriman’s conspiratorial view of L.A. history to a more complex interpretation.

Rolfe, for his part, by no means discounts the epic role that Mulholland played in the city’s history. Mulholland, in his assessment, is a far more admirable figure than Otis.

But I wouldn’t recommend inviting Catherine Mulholland and Lionel Rolfe to the same dinner party. Consider the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in 1928, the deadliest disaster in California history. Ask Catherine Mulholland the death toll and she’ll note that more than 400 were killed, while Rolfe will say the true toll probably exceeded 2,000 because Mexican migrant workers were not part of the census rolls.

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Mulholland also will point out that a recent study by geological engineer J. David Rogers concluded that, given the science of geology at the time, her grandfather could not have anticipated the dam’s collapse. Rolfe contends that Mulholland ignored a cautionary study conducted before the dam was built.

“Bread & Hyacinths” states:

After the dam collapse, Mulholland . . . comprehended the enormity of his arrogance. Not too much later, he committed suicide, perhaps realizing his dream of an eternal monument had been mortal folly.

So William Mulholland’s death, as Rolfe tells it, had Shakespearean dimensions.

Hogwash, says Catherine Mulholland. First, she pointed out that her grandfather, though he felt profound guilt and sadness over the tragedy, died seven years later. She was 12 years old and remembers that a cerebral hemorrhage and the stroke put him in bed “for months” before his death.

“It really illustrates the shoddy quality of much that’s been written about Southern California history,” she said. “Does he have a coroner’s report? A death certificate? It’s crazy. . . . It’s what you do on a schlocky TV show.”

Rolfe and his co-authors say their research is in storage, and “if it becomes a big spitting match,” he’ll dig it out.

The first time, he said, he and his colleagues had a hard time nailing the suicide story down. Back then, Rolfe suggested, there’d been something of a cover-up.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.