Siphoned water encouraged far-flung real estate development, priming Los Angeles for an automotive takeover. The country’s first filling station appeared there in 1909, the same year that California authorized the first bond issue for a paved state highway system. Cars accelerated the process of decentralization that Huntington began. In the 1920s builders developed some 3,200 new subdivisions with 250,000 new homes in outlying areas. Los Angeles, quipped Carey McWilliams, has from its beginnings been “a collection of suburbs in search of a city.”23
Early twentieth-century L.A. served as the urban hub of a booming agricultural hinterland. Citrus fruit orchards, for example, covered the foothills and valleys throughout the southland, but the association that organized the picking, packing, and national distribution of Sunkist oranges was located in the city. “The center of power in the industry is not to be found in the elegant residences on Smiley Heights in Redlands,” wrote McWilliams, “but in the offices of the California Fruit Growers Exchange in Los Angeles.” Real estate and tourism provided other sources of economic vigor. But L.A.’s industrial sector was remarkably anemic in the early twentieth century. James M. Cain, who moved to the area in the 1920s to work as a Hollywood screenwriter, was appalled by “the piddling occupations” of his neighbors, and in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), his classic noir novel of southern California, one of his characters remarks that the “whole goddam country lives selling hot dogs to each other.” Yet the future belonged to the peddlers of services, including food, tubular or otherwise. Southern California would cultivate many of the ideas and economies that would make the West a national trendsetter.24
. . .
The West led the way as the United States moved from a rural to an urban nation in the second half of the nineteenth century. The movement from farm to city defined industrial America. Farmers sought to increase their productivity through mechanization. Economic development in the countryside inevitably meant depopulation. Compare this to the pattern of the cities, where innovations in manufacturing led to the creation of new jobs through what economists call a “multiplier” effect. Rural townships in the Midwest had begun to lose population by the 1880s, and over the next half-century most of the rural West was overtaken by this trend. For every industrial worker who became a farmer, twenty farm boys rushed to the city to compete for his job.
Less well known is the fact that for every twenty farm boys, as many as twenty-five farm girls moved from the rural West to the cities. This migration reversed the gender blueprint of western movement, which featured young, unattached men rushing about, with single women conspicuous in their absence. Now rural men stayed put while young women took off. One historical study of rural households in late nineteenth-century Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota details the “defeminization” of the countryside, with six in ten daughters of typical families leaving the area while seven in ten sons remained. Many of these young women married farmers from other communities, but even more headed for cities. There is evidence for this at the urban end of the trail where, by the 1880s in most western cities, American-born young women had begun to outnumber American-born young men. Over the next half-century, the proportion of young women in the urban population continued to rise.25
What explains the greater rates of female migration to the city? In the opinion of many contemporaries, young women were pushed out of the countryside by the lingering legacy of patriarchy. “I hate farm life,” declared a disillusioned bride in Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads (1891). “It’s nothing but fret, fret, and work the whole time, never going any place, never seeing anybody but a lot of neighbors just as big fools as you are. I spend my time fighting flies and washing dishes and churning. I’m sick of it.” In 1913 the Department of Agriculture, seeking an answer to perceived rural decline, surveyed several thousand farm wives. The results confirmed the worst. The consensus among women was that they were overworked, that they had limited educational and vocational options, and that “old fashioned” male attitudes kept them at home and prevented their full participation in public and community life. “Isolation, stagnation, ignorance, loss of ambition, the incessant grind of labor, and the lack of time for improvement by reading, by social intercourse, or by recreation of some sort are all working against the farm woman’s happiness,” wrote one woman. Daughters fled farms for better lives.26
A young Colorado emigrant in Los Angeles, c. 1925. Author’s collection.
They may also have been fleeing male violence. Historian David Peterson del Mar has found a good deal of provocative evidence in the records of divorce courts in rural Oregon. One man, defending himself against the charge of battering his wife, explained to the judge that he beat her because “a man should rule over his wife in everything except religion.” Another man argued that he had used only the violence “necessary and reasonable to enforce rightful obedience” and swore that he would hit his wife again “if she did not do to suit.” A father, testifying on behalf of his daughter, told the court that he had seen evidence of her husband’s abuse many times: “I saw her with a very black eye.” She told him, “Pa, the world will never know what trouble I have seen.” Del Mar concluded that “husbands commonly used physical force on their wives.” His documentation comes from only a single state, and divorce records typically emphasize the worst, but other kinds of evidence suggest that domestic violence was commonplace in the West. Readers of Mari Sandoz’s biography of her homesteader father, Old Jules (1935), are shocked at his violent treatment of women. When Sandoz’s mother asks Jules to help her with the work around the farmyard, he rages—“You want me, an educated man, to work like a hired tramp!”—and throws her against a wall. Yet Sandoz makes it clear that her father was not different from the other men she knew growing up in Nebraska.27
According to historian Joanne Meyerowitz, the records of welfare agencies in early twentieth-century Chicago are filled with stories of rural women who came to the city to escape abusive male relatives. One such girl sought protection from Travelers Aid when she arrived at Union Station late one evening in 1912. “Her stepfather had been making improper advances toward her for some time,” reads the case record, “but so far she had been able to resist them. Her life was threatened if she told her mother. But the importunities of the man had become so insistent that the girl was afraid to remain longer and she fled.” Another young migrant reported heated arguments with her father about dating. She resolved to leave home when her father threatened to whip her. “I was always willing to stand up for my rights,” she told the social worker.28
Hope combined with fear to motivate women to leave rural homes for city opportunities. One rural mother wrote that her country daughter left the countryside in pursuit of greater economic freedom. “She isn’t going to ‘stay put,’ but will get out where she can earn some money of her very own, to buy little things so dear to the hearts of girls.” The city pulled rural women. Urban employment offered them independence, incomes of their own—which were hard to come by in the country, where just about the only paid work available was teaching school. As early as the 1890s there were reports of working women in western cities spending substantial sums on clothing, makeup, and amusements. After a ten-hour day working in shops, restaurants, or factories, young women sought recreation in dance halls, the theater (or movies a few years later), or simply strolling the streets with the companions of their choice. “Dallying in front of display windows, women announced themselves as independent wage-earners and consumers,” writes Mary Murphy, who studied young women in early twentieth-century Butte, Montana. “Their dress, their assertive presence on the sidewalk, and their flirtatious manners proclaimed their right to share the street—and by extension movie theaters, dance halls, restaurants, and nightclubs—with men and do so on their own terms.” Urban working women, many fresh from the farm, charted a course for economic independence and the possibility for life apart from family. They deserve a featured spot in American frontier history, for they as muc
h as the forty-niners or the families rolling overland in their Conestoga wagons made the case for associating personal freedom with western locales. And they found their unfettered range in cities.29
. . .
From many vantage points, western cities were hardly unique. They were transportation crossroads, industrial hubs where people could find work. As such they drew immigrants from near and far. Western cities differed from their eastern counterparts only in the intensity of their diversity. A third or more of the populations of Salt Lake City, Portland, Sacramento, and Omaha were foreign-born in 1880. These were immigrant cities on par with Cleveland, Buffalo, or Scranton. In 1880 San Francisco had the highest proportion of foreign-born (45 percent) of any city in the nation, more than either New York (40 percent) or Chicago (42 percent). An early visitor was struck by the astounding ethnic diversity: “French, Germans, Mexicans, English, Americans, Irish, and even Chinese, white, black, yellow, brown, Protestants, Catholics, atheists, thieves, convicts, assassins—behold the population of San Francisco.” Immigrant groups carved out neighborhoods along the crowded, hilly streets. Several thousand French residents lived on or near Commercial Street. Up Montgomery, beyond Pine, resided the Germans, and a few blocks farther north was a substantial neighborhood of German Jews. The Irish, the city’s largest ethnic group, lived on the slopes of Telegraph Hill along with many Mexican and African Americans, while the Italians clustered along Broadway and in North Beach.30
In a city with little manufacturing, the Italians moved into fishing, skilled craft-work, and small business. Italian workers rose to leadership in the city’s labor movement as well as the business community. Amadeo Peter Giannini spent his early years in the family wholesale produce business, selling crates of lettuce and peaches in San Francisco’s foggy predawn. But in his thirties he switched to banking, opening Banca d’Italia in North Beach. After the devastating 1906 earthquake, he carted eighty thousand dollars out of the burning city hidden in fruit crates from his old produce business. While the city smoldered, he reopened for business. In an era when banks were austere places frequented only by capitalists and businessmen in the dark suits and starched shirts, Giannini pitched his services to consumers, offering small loans to ordinary people at reasonable rates of interest and opening friendly “branch banks” in urban and ethnic neighborhoods. In 1930, the year he renamed his institution Bank of America, he claimed some 280 branches scattered throughout the West.
The most distinctive of San Francisco’s ethnic communities—and the one most characteristically western—was Chinatown, a place the English writer Oscar Wilde described as “the most artistic town I have ever come across.” Chinatown bustled with tenements, boardinghouses, small factories, restaurants, and shops, “stocked with hams, tea, dried fish, dried ducks, and other Chinese eatables,” wrote one visitor. “Suspended over the doors were brilliantly-colored boards covered with Chinese writings, and with several yards of red ribbon streaming from them; while the streets thronged with Celestials, chattering vociferously as they rushed about from store to store.” In the 1880s approximately twenty-five thousand Chinese, nearly 2 percent of the city’s population, squeezed into Chinatown’s eight to twelve city blocks in the shadow of the millionaire enclave on Nob Hill.31
By custom, San Francisco’s Chinese were not permitted to live outside Chinatown. “If you passed the boundaries,” wrote a longtime Chinatown resident, “the white kids would throw stones at you.” In 1868, while walking home with a basketful of crabs, one Chinese man was attacked by hooligans who beat him with hickory clubs, branded him with a hot iron, and left him to die. Yet, as bad as it got in San Francisco, Chinese immigrants preferred cities to rural towns. They concentrated in Chinatowns where at least they could practice their own customs, speak their own languages, and find security in numbers. They were protected (and exploited) by the powerful Six Companies, a merchant-dominated directorate of clan associations that governed the Chinese community.32
San Francisco’s Chinatown before the earthquake, c. 1898. From Arnold Genthe, Pictures of Old Chinatown (New York, 1908).
During the first three decades of San Francisco’s history, whites excluded Chinatown’s children from city schools. “The prejudice of caste and religious idolatry are so indelibly stamped upon their character,” declared the city’s school superintendent, that educating them was “almost hopeless.” Then in 1884 a Christian Chinese couple, Mary and Joseph Tape (themselves educated in foreign mission academies), sued the board of education to admit their daughter to the local elementary school. “Is it a disgrace to be born Chinese?” Mary wrote in a letter to the board. “I will let the world see, sir, what justice there is when it is governed by the race of prejudice men!” The Tapes won their suit, the court deciding that discrimination in education was unconstitutional, but the city circumvented the ruling by establishing a separate school for Chinese children in Chinatown. Educational discrimination would continue to harm them for decades to come. Esther Wong, a Chinatown schoolgirl in the 1920s, remembered a time when her teacher instructed her to read aloud. “Well, I read for her, and there were no mistakes,” Wong told an interviewer, and then the teacher said, very slowly, “Well, you read all right, but I don’t like you. You belong to a dirty race.”33
During the late nineteenth century, San Francisco’s immigrant working class succeeded in organizing one of the most powerful labor movements in the country. Secure jobs and good wages lifted working-class families up, and they used their rising incomes to move out of old ethnic communities and into new neighborhoods on the west side of the city or into newly developed suburban towns to the south. The workers, however, rejected and vilified the Chinese. One of the fundamental principles of western labor solidarity was the exclusion of the Chinese from unions. And because many of the male workers in Chinatown had been fraudulently admitted to the country as the “paper sons” of wealthy merchants (the only group allowed to bring over family members by the Exclusion Act), they found themselves without legal protection and became prime targets for exploitation and abuse by those same businessmen. Representatives of the Six Companies cut deals with city officials that allowed them to circumvent zoning and labor laws. About half of the city’s manufacturing labor force was Chinese, but Chinatown was the center of the city’s sweatshop district. Segregated and excluded, the Chinese workers in San Francisco could have used some help from fellow laborers, but the unions defended their turf by tossing rocks at nonwhites.
. . .
In contrast to San Francisco, few European immigrants settled in early twentieth-century Los Angeles. The white population filtered in from the Midwest and plains, from the farms and small towns of Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas. This was a gray wave, made up largely of the elderly, “retired farmers, grocers, Ford agents, [and] hardware merchants,” wrote Louis Adamic, author of an early debunking history of the City of Angels. “They sold out their farms and businesses in the Middle West or wherever they used to live, and now they are here in California—sunny California—to rest and regain their vigor, enjoy the climate, look at the pretty scenery, live in little bungalows with a palm-tree or banana plant in front, and eat in cafeterias. Toil-broken and bleached out, they flocked to Los Angeles, fugitives from the simple, inexorable justice of life, from hard labor and drudgery, from cold winters and blistering summers of the prairies.” Go west, old man.34
“As New York is the melting-pot for the peoples of Europe,” wrote novelist Sarah Comstock, “so Los Angeles is the melting-pot for the peoples of the United States.” Actually, there was little melting. Many transplants, lonely for their old homes, joined the several dozen state societies of southern California. Thousands joined the Pennsylvania Club and the Illinois Association, and crowds estimated at 150,000 people or more attended the annual Iowa Society picnic.35
Los Angeles rapidly industrialized after World War I and began attracting a different, more diverse crowd. Stimulated first by the enormous expansion o
f the federal government during the war, industrial development took off with the discovery of vast local petroleum fields. Oil was discovered in the 1890s, but the really big strikes took place after the war, the first in 1920 at Huntington Beach (one of Henry Huntington’s many developments), followed by several more in quick succession. Almost overnight the region was supplying nearly 10 percent of the nation’s fuel oil and gasoline. In California, as in Texas, local capital financed petroleum development, supplying one of the most important early examples of western industrial development. California overtook Texas and Oklahoma as the largest oil-producing state during the 1920s, and by 1930 refining was the state’s largest industry. Between the wars, Los Angeles rose to become the West’s largest industrial center—the nucleus of the nation’s oil equipment and service industry, the second largest tire-manufacturing center, and the largest producer of steel, glass, chemicals, aircraft, and automobiles in the West. Perhaps the most visible sign of the region’s growth was the motion picture industry, which by the end of the 1920s employed more than fifteen thousand people.
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