L.A.’s puritan roots still show

IN 2002, when commissioners in Clark County, Nev., approved strict regulations on lap dancing, local newspaper editorials ridiculed them for wasting time on a trivial matter. This fall, when the Seattle City Council narrowly passed a similar ordinance, they heard plenty of jeering from their more socially liberal constituents.

But next year, when the L.A. City Council is to vote on the strictest strip-club regulation in the country -- which requires dancers to remain at least six feet away from their patrons -- the bill probably will win unanimous approval from the city’s legislators and its civic elite. Despite L.A.’s global, cosmopolitan pretensions, at heart, its civic culture makes it just another Midwestern Protestant town.

As the late, great sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote, institutions are largely “the shadows of their founders.” And the founders of contemporary Los Angeles were, in the words of one early 20th-century chronicler, “militant moralists” who had been “culled from the smaller cities of the Middle West -- ‘leading citizens’ from Wichita; honorary pallbearers from Emmetsburg; [and] Good Templars from Sedalia.” By 1906, 56% of Angelenos were Protestants, and the City of Angels had more churches for its size than any other place in America.

In 1907, the Rev. Dana Bartlett, a Methodist minister from Missouri, published a tract in which he envisioned Los Angeles as “a place of inspiration for nobler living.” He was not alone in thinking that L.A., which was receiving daily arrivals from the East, should become a model city. To that end, in 1908, Los Angeles established the first comprehensive zoning ordinance in the nation, one that encouraged the building of single-family homes and the creation of dispersed business districts.

Not only did Anglo newcomers hope to create an oversized Midwestern town, they also wanted to be governed like one. The Progressive reform movement, which swept through Southern California and Sacramento in the first two decades of the 20th century, drew much of its strength from the notion that progress and morality were inextricably linked. In addition to fighting government corruption and promoting direct democracy, the Progressives were fond of passing sumptuary legislation -- laws designed to curb immoral behavior. They sought to abolish prizefighting, gambling, prostitution and alcohol.

As early as 1899, the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance limiting the number of saloons to 200 and prohibiting their extension into residential districts. By 1910, the local Anti-Saloon League, an association of Protestant churches, had virtually suppressed public drinking in Los Angeles County. In 1917, three years before the start of national alcohol prohibition, Los Angeles officially became a dry city.

The success of the temperance movement in Los Angeles was in stark contrast to its utter failure in San Francisco. Neither Progressivism nor prohibitionism took hold in the city where foreign-born Catholics dominated the population. Indeed, before the Great Earthquake of 1906, San Francisco had the highest number of saloons per capita of any large city in the country. In 1899, in just the 64-square-block South of Market district, a largely Irish Catholic working-class neighborhood, there were no fewer than 400 saloons.

Of course, as populations changed, diversified and grew, local cultures absorbed and adapted. In Los Angeles, the power of Progressivism waned and the more permissive culture of Hollywood emerged. L.A. developed a reputation as the most sinful of cities

And yet, a significant puritanical strain persisted, particularly in government. Consider liquor licenses. If you crunch the numbers from the U.S. census and state liquor licensing boards, you’ll see that San Francisco, without that strong puritan influence, allows three times more liquor licenses per capita -- one for every 217 residents -- than Los Angeles, which has one for every 677. L.A. has fewer licenses per capita than the nation’s two other largest cities, Chicago and New York.

Clearly, Los Angeles is no longer dominated by Midwestern Anglos. Catholics now make up the largest religious group. And the financial elites are more likely to be Jewish than Protestant. By the 1970s, beginning with Mayor Tom Bradley’s liberal coalition, political life became heavily influenced by Jews and African Americans. Mexican Americans have emerged as political players over the last decade. The author of the new lap dance ordinance, Councilman Tony Cardenas of Sylmar, is of Mexican descent.

But even in their absence, the Midwestern Protestants, who did so much to establish contemporary L.A., still exert their influence, both through cultural precedent and in the very physical form of the city. While international immigration has transformed Los Angeles into an astonishingly polyglot place, for better or for worse, its political elites still sometimes behave as if L.A. were a white-picket-fence Midwestern town.