L.A. County’s Vanishing Past

It should have been so easy. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors wanted to send its message of condolence to relatives of a former colleague, Baxter Ward. Ward, swept from his 5th Supervisorial District seat by conservative Mike Antonovich in 1980’s Reagan revolution, was famous for his politically premature devotion to rail transit and his otherwise cantankerous ways. One of the most colorful and memorable, if not exactly the most likable, men ever to sit on the board in its 150-year history, Ward made a lot of news in his day.

He had, presumably, been collecting county benefits until his death. Despite all this, the supervisors and board staff could find nowhere among the county’s files a record of his home address.

That raises an embarrassing question: If the top officials of the nation’s most populous county can’t find the address of one of their own former colleagues, what does that say about the accessibility of the rest of L.A. County’s history?

The county had already come under heavy criticism for what many scholars consider its Orwellian institutional memory hole. Particularly when it comes to maintaining documents that constitute our community’s factual recall.

“It simply hasn’t done a good job of keeping historical records,” says Roy Ritchie, director of research at the Huntington Library, perhaps Southern California’s premiere archives. At a symposium at the library last November, entitled the “Future of Los Angeles History,” many local historians seconded Ritchie’s complaint. Noting that the city of Los Angeles has an archivist, they singled out local--particularly county--government’s negligent record-keeping as a major stumbling block in the historian’s primary task of “finding out what really happened.”

In his keynote paper, George Sanchez, a USC professor of history and American studies, noted that “with a population greater than 42 states in the nation, and an annual budget of $16.2 billion, it is scandalous that L.A. County has no archives and no countywide archivist. Beginning researchers currently find out about the presence of documents through folklore passed on by more senior researchers, then have to negotiate ... to find [their] whereabouts.” Once the documents are found, Sanchez complained, it’s often difficult for researchers to get access or find a place on the premises to work.

Other historians offered their own archival tales of terror. One even recalled that, when she attempted to return county records she’d checked out, the agency’s clerk told her she could keep them since they weren’t needed any more.

Certainly, space requirements and perpetually strained finances are part of the problem. But the problem with county records seems cultural, too. No single standard of preservation exists, and there appears to be little institutional sensitivity to old documents’ value.

David E. Janssen, L.A. County’s chief administrative officer, was skeptical that money for a county archivist could be found in this year’s budget. “For the first time in four years, the county is facing a general-fund deficit of $60 million,” says Janssen. That means county officials are already looking at cuts in welfare, library, parks and mental-health services.

County records accrue the minutiae of our lives--birth, deaths and sickness; deeds, taxes and lawsuits; land boundaries, crimes and punishment. There are 37 county departments, including the big ones: the superior courts, assessor’s office, county registrar-recorder and Health Services Department. Each has its own procedures for record retention and disposal. There is no central agency responsible for all the millions of records.

County officials acknowledge that the situation worsened in the 1980s, when powerful and controversial Chief Administrative Officer Richard T. Dixon exiled crucial agencies like the registrar-recorder’s office from downtown to Norwalk and other far-flung locales. According to Ritchie, few departments meet more than the minimum legal requirements to hold records for a certain period of time.

“At one point,” he recalls, “they were ready to sacrifice all the county court records up to the 1890s. They were loaded on a skid, ready to be dumped” when the Huntington intervened to save them, Ritchie added. Other historians and officials have noted that countless old land maps, deed transfers, criminal and public-employment records--even records of changes in county government procedures--have vanished or been depleted.

Records such as these are crucial, many historians feel, to the understanding of the city’s tumultuous first half-century, in which Los Angeles exploded from a village to a town to a city. All with the concomitant exploitation, expropriation and even attempted extermination of various minority populations, as well as the stakeholders’ subsequent attempts to submerge these ugly facts into a fictional harmonious past.

“What we are losing are the statistics of life,” Ritchie says. And where those statistics belong is in one of the most vibrant and growing fields of local history in America--that of Southern California.

The very term “Los Angeles history” was long considered an oxymoron by Clio’s more staid devotees. Now, however, it’s attracted a growing batch of smart youngsters and not-so-youngsters who see the Southland prototype as a mode for, if not the forerunner of, patterns of social development elsewhere in America and all over the world.

“But historians remain tied to a very traditional research method,” notes William Deverell, an associate professor of history at Caltech who is on the board of the California Council for the Humanities. “If we don’t have the sources from the past, we cannot reconstruct it or interpret it. And if we can’t do that, we’ve lost the opportunity to draw knowledge, lessons and connections with our past.”

New York City, which has slightly less population than L.A. County, is contrastingly rich in archival institutions. At about the same time that this county launched its record diaspora, New York moved many of its own scattered older records to a central site, the old downtown Surrogate’s Court.

The New York Public Library and venerable private institutions such as the New York Historical Society and Brooklyn’s Long Island Rail Road Historical Society also record, accumulate and make available the minutiae of the nation’s greatest city. This county, obviously, has no comparable resources. Maybe, some speculate, that’s because our region hasn’t yet reached the critical mass of self-awareness, a sense that we all share a past, that the past has a record, and the record helps define who we are.

Not just, as Deverell notes, for the sake of scholars: “There’s a community, a big one, inside the jurisdictional entity known as the County of Los Angeles, and these [10 million] people deserve to have their community, their history and their lives taken much more seriously.”