History of Los Angeles, California
The recorded history of Los Angeles, California is a complicated one, going back to the 16th century and a tiny Spanish settlement sometimes called BahÃÂÃÂa de los fumos ("Bay of the Smokes"). L.A. was smoggy from the get-go:
Early history
Although the Spanish began the conquest of Mexico in 1519, they did not launch a land expedition into Alta (upper) California until 1769, when explorer Gaspar de PortolÃÂá reached this part of California. In 1771 the Spaniards returned and founded the Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, one of eight missions established by the Franciscans in Southern California.
On September 4, 1781 44 "pobladores", recruited from northern Mexico to help cement Spain's control over Alta California, founded the town. Only two of these settlers identified as Spaniards; the rest came primarily of African or Indian descent. The small town received the name El Pueblo de Nuestra SeÃÂñora Reina de los ÃÂÃÂngeles de la Porciuncula, "The Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of the Small Portion". Located on the Los Angeles River, the town became a cattle ranching center.
Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821 did not change life in Los Angeles, other than to allow the secularization of the missions: land grants distributed the mission properties to rancheros.
Manifest Destiny reached California at the time of the Mexican-American War (1846 - 1848). On 18 June 1846 a small group of Yankees raised the California Bear Flag and declared independence from Mexico. United States troops quickly took control of the presidios at Monterey and San Francisco and proclaimed the Conquest complete. In Southern California, the Mexicans for a time repelled American troops, but Los Angeles eventually fell to Lieutenant Colonel John C. FrÃÂémont. The United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Capitulation at Cahuenga Pass on January 13, 1847.
April 4, 1850 saw the incorporation of Los Angeles as a city. At the same time, the old landowners started to lose their lands. Compelled to secure confirmation of their land grants in U.S. courts, ten percent of the bona fide land owners of Los Angeles County had to move off their land and became reduced to bankruptcy. The more fortunate rancheros finally lost their special status as "Californios" and became absorbed into other communities, depending on their wealth or color.
Other Mexican residents resisted the new Anglo powers by resorting to social banditry against the gringos. In 1856 Juan Flores threatened Southern California with a full-scale Mexican revolt. He was hanged in Los Angeles in front of 3,000 spectators. Tiburcio Vasquez, a legend in his own time among the Mexican population for his daring feats against the Anglos, was captured and hanged on La Cienega Boulevard in 1874.
Los Angeles grows
The arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876 and the discovery of oil in the early 1890s had stimulated expansion in the last decades of the nineteenth century. But Los Angeles was still smaller and less prominent a city than San Francisco.
Angelenos set out to remake their geography in order to challenge San Francisco with its port facilities, railway terminal, banks and factories. Harrison Gray Otis, founder and owner of the Los Angeles Times, and a number of business colleagues embarked on reshaping southern California by creating a harbor at San Pedro with federal dollars.
This put them at loggerheads with Collis P. Huntington, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and one of California's "Big Four" robber barons, who was pushing for a port at Santa Monica. The San Pedro forces prevailed and work on the San Pedro breakwater began in 1899 and was finished in 1910. Otis Chandler and his allies secured a change in state law in 1909 that allowed Los Angeles to absorb San Pedro and Wilmington.
In order to sustain this and future growth, Los Angeles sought out new sources of water. Two hundred and fifty miles northeast of Los Angeles in Inyo County, near the Nevada line, a long slender desert region known as the Owens Valley had the Owens River, a permanent stream of fresh water fed by the melted snows of the high Sierras that terminated in a saline lake.
''Oil rigs in early L.A.
(
)Sometime between 1899 and 1903, Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law successor, Harry Chandler, led successful efforts at buying up cheap land on the outskirts of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. They then acquired control of the Owens River and built an aqueduct, largely designed by William Mulholland to bring the water from the Owens Valley over the intervening mountains and desert to the San Fernando Valley. J.B. Lippencott of the United States Reclamation Service (who was also secretly receiving a salary from the City of Los Angeles) succeeded in persuading Owens Valley farmers and mutual water companies to pool their interests and surrender the water rights to 200,000 acres of land there to Fred Eden, Lippencott's agent and a former mayor of Los Angeles. Eden then resigned from the Reclamation Service, took a job with the Los Angeles Water Department as assistant to William Mulholland, Chief of the Department, and turned over all maps, field surveys and stream measurements developed by the Service to the city.
By July 1905, the L.A. Times began to warn the voters of Los Angeles that the county would soon dry up unless they voted bonds for building an aqueduct and getting water from the Owens River. Artificial drought conditions were created when water was run into the sewers to decrease the supply in the reservoirs and residents were forbidden to water their lawns and gardens. On election day, the people of Los Angeles voted for $22.5 million worth of bonds to build an aqueduct from the Owens River and to defray other expenses of the project. With this money, the City acquired the land that Eden had acquired from the Owens Valley farmers. Mulholland then started building the longest aqueduct in the world.
Los Angeles, around 1908.
Los Angeles as an Open Shop town
At the same time that the L.A. Times was whipping up enthusiasm for the expansion of Los Angeles it was also trying to turn it into a union-free or open shop town. Fruit growers and local merchants who had opposed the Pullman strike in 1894 subsequently formed the Merchants and Manufacturers Association (M & M) to support the L.A. Times anti-union campaign.
The California labor movement, with its strength concentrated in San Francisco, had largely ignored Los Angeles for years. It decided, in 1907, however, when the American Federation of Labor decided to challenge the open shop of "Otis Town." The culmination of this bitter struggle occurred on October 1, 1910 when a bomb destroyed a good part of the L.A. Times publishing plant.
The authorities indicted John and James McNamara, both associated with the Iron Workers Union, for the bombing; Clarence Darrow, who had successfully defended Big Bill Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone in Idaho, represented them.
At the same time the McNamara brothers were awaiting trial, Los Angeles was preparing for a city election. Job Harriman, running on the socialist ticket, was challenging the establishment's candidate.
Harriman's campaign, however, was tied to the asserted innocence of the McNamaras. But the defense was in trouble: the prosecution not only had evidence of the McNamaras' complicity, but had trapped Darrow in a clumsy attempt to bribe one of the jurors. On December 1, 1911, four days before the final election, the McNamaras entered a plea of guilty in return for prison terms. The L.A. Times accompanied its report of the guilty plea with a faked photograph of Samuel Gompers trampling an American flag. Harriman lost badly.
The open shop campaign continued from strength to strength, although not without meeting opposition from workers. By 1923, the Industrial Workers of the World had made considerable progress in organizing the longshoremen in San Pedro and led approximately 3,000 men to walk off the job. With the support of the L.A. Times, a special "Wobbly squad" was formed within the Los Angeles Police Department and arrested so many strikers that the city's jails were soon filled.
Some 1200 dock workers were corralled in a special stockade in Griffith Park. The L.A. Times wrote approvingly that "stockades and forced labor were a good remedy for IWW terrorism." Public meetings were outlawed in San Pedro, Sinclair Lewis was arrested at Liberty Hill in San Pedro for reading the United States Bill of Rights on the private property of a strike supporter (the arresting officer told him "we'll have none of 'that Constitution stuff'") and blanket arrests were made at union gatherings. The strike ended after members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion raided the IWW Hall and attacked the men, women and children meeting there. The strike was defeated.
Los Angeles developed another industry in the early 20th century when movie producers from the East Coast relocated there. These new employers were likewise afraid of unions and other social movements: during Upton Sinclair's campaign for Governor of California under the banner of his "End Poverty In California" (EPIC) movement, Louis B. Mayer turned MGM's Culver City studio into the unofficial headquarters of the organized campaign against EPIC. MGM produced fake newsreel interviews with whiskered actors with Russian accents voicing their enthusiasm for EPIC, along with footage focusing on central casting hobos huddled on the borders of California waiting to enter and live off the bounty of its taxpayers once Sinclair was elected. Sinclair lost.
Los Angeles also acquired another industry in the years just before World War II: the garment industry. At first devoted to regional merchandise, such as sportswear, the industry eventually grew to be the second largest center of garment production in the United States.
Unions began to make progress in organizing these workers as the New Deal arrived in the 1930s. They made even greater gains in the war years, as Los Angeles grew even further.
Los Angeles during and immediately after World War II
During World War II, Los Angeles grew as a center for production of aircraft, war supplies and munitions. Thousands of African Americans and white Southerners migrated to the area to fill factory jobs.
By 1950 Los Angeles was an industrial and financial giant created by war production and migration. Los Angeles assembled more cars than any city other than Detroit, made more tires than any city but Akron, made more furniture than Grand Rapids, and stitched more clothes than any city except New York. In addition, it was the national capital for the production of motion pictures, radio programs and, within a few years, television shows. Construction boomed as tract houses were built in ever expanding suburban communities financed by the largess of the Federal Housing Administration.
Los Angeles continued to spread out, particularly with the development of the San Fernando Valley and the building of the freeways launched in the 1940s. When the local street car system went out of business Los Angeles became a city built around the automobile, with all of the social, health and political problems that this dependence produces.
The famed urban sprawl of Los Angeles became a notable feature of the town, and the pace of the growth accelerated in the first decades of the 20th century. The San Fernando Valley, sometimes called "America's Suburb" became a favorite site of developers, and the city began growing past its roots downtown toward the ocean and towards the east.
In the last fifty years Los Angeles has lost much of the industry it developed earlier in the century. The last of the automobile factories shut down in the 1990s; the tire factories and steel mills left earlier. Most of the agricultural and dairy operations that were still prospering in the 1950s have moved to outlying counties while the furniture industry has relocated to Mexico and other low-wage nations. Aerospace production has dropped significantly since the end of the Cold War or moved to states with better tax conditions, and the entertainment industry has found cheaper areas to produce films, television programs and commercials elsewhere in the United States and Canada. While Los Angeles remains a major center for garment production, it has become far more dependent on the service sector.
Those macroeconomic changes have brought major social changes with them. While unemployment dropped in Los Angeles in the 1990s, the newly created jobs tended to be low-wage jobs filled by recent immigrants and other exploitable populations; by one calculation, the number of poor families increased from 36 percent to 43 percent of the population of Los Angeles County during this time. At the same the number of immigrants from Mexico, Central America and Latin America has made Los Angeles a "majority minority" city that will soon be majority Latino.
Many older boundaries have changed over time. Watts, which once was predominantly black, is now mainly Latino. Compton, which lies outside of the City of Los Angeles, but within the County of Los Angeles, and which has gained a certain notoriety through rap music from N.W.A and other groups, is also increasingly Latino. While the Latino community within the City of Los Angeles was once centered in East Los Angeles, it now extends throughout the city. The San Fernando Valley, which represented a bastion of white flight in the 1960s and provided the votes that allowed Sam Yorty to defeat the first election run by Tom Bradley, is now as ethnically diverse as the rest of the city on the other side of the Hollywood Hills.
Rather than feeling closer, however, the opposite seems to have occurred. By the end of the 20th century, some of the annexed areas began to feel cut off from the political process of the megalopolis, leading to a particularly strong secession movement in the San Fernando Valley and weaker ones in San Pedro and Hollywood. The referendums to split the city were rejected by voters in November 2002.
That changed in the 1920's, when racial restrictions in housing, originally aimed at Asians, Mexicans and Jews, were applied to blacks. Blacks were confined to Watts and other communities in South Central Los Angeles, which received far fewer services than other areas of the city.
These policies led to housing problems in the 1940's as growth in the defense
industry brought increasing numbers of African-Americans to the city.
Efforts to provided integrated housing were turned back under a barrage of red-baiting directed at the public housing authorities in the 1950s.
Watts also had chronically high unemployment, but no employment agencies; three separate bus lines, but no direct lines to major centers of employment. Its schools were substandard and the nearest hospital was two hours away by bus. Watts was a small core of poverty in a city where, by 1965, the black population had multiplied ten times since 1950.
The Watts riots of 1965 nonetheless surprised the powers-that-be. The riot began with a minor police incident and lasted four days. Thirty-four persons were killed and 1,034 injured at a cost of $40,000,000 in property damage and looting. So many businesses burned on 103rd Street, the people called it "Charcoal Alley."
While the City and County did take some steps to deal with the lack of social services for the black community after the Watts riots - most visibly by building a County hospital to serve the community - in most ways things only got worse over the twenty-five years after the riots. De-industrialization closed all of the automobile and tire factories and the only steel plants and shipbuilding sites in the area stripped Los Angeles of the high-paying industrial jobs that had opened up for Africa-american and Latino workers. At the same time the drug trade and gang warfare reached crisis levels. The LAPD, which had followed a militaristic model since Chief Parker's regime in the 1950's, had become even more alienated from and hated by the minority communities it was supposed to protect and serve.
This was brought home in 1992, after a suburban jury in Simi Valley, located in Ventura County, acquitted the police officers who beat Rodney King the year before. After four days of rioting, more than fifty deaths, and billions of dollars of property losses later, the National Guard and the police finally regained control. It remains to be seen if there has been adequate change or if the pattern is destined to repeat itself.
During the Second World War, hostility toward Mexican-Americans took a different form, as local newspapers portrayed Chicano youths, who sometimes called themselves "pachucos" as barely civilized gangsters. Anglo servicemen attacked young Chicanos dressed in the pachuco uniform of the day: long coats with wide shoulders and pleated, high-waisted, pegged pants, or zoot suits, in 1943. Twenty-two young Chicanos were convicted of a murder of another youth at a party held at a swimming hole southeast of Los Angeles known as the "sleepy lagoon" on a warm night in August 1942; they were eventually freed after an appeal that demonstrated both their innocence and the racism of the judge conducting the trial.
Los Angeles-Latino community was largely disenfranchised until the 1990s, when redistricting led to the election of Latino members of the City Council for the first time since the 1950s and the first Latino members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors since its inception. With the tremendous growth of the Latino community, primarily from immigration from Mexico, but also from Central America and South America, it is now the largest ethnic bloc in Los Angeles. While Antonio Villaraigosa lost in his race for Mayor in 2001, Latino political leaders are likely to come to the fore in the next decade.
Later, Chinese workers who helped to build the aqueduct to the Owens River and worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley spent their winters in a segregated ethnic enclave in Los Angeles. In 1872, eleven years before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a violent anti-Chinese demonstration swept through Los Angeles' Chinatown killing Chinese residents and plundering their dry good stores, laundries and restaurants.
The labor vacuum created by the Chinese Exclusion Act was filled by Japanese workers and, by 1910, the settlement now known as "Little Tokyo" had risen next to Chinatown. By the eve of World War I, many Japanese farm laborers had saved sufficient funds to purchase or lease vegetable and fruit farming lands in such outlying areas as Gardena, Beverly Hills and San Gabriel.
During the years between the two world wars, Los Angeles' Asian American community also included small clusters of Korean Americans and Filipinos, the latter filling the void which followed the exclusion of the Japanese in 1924.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government authorized the evacuation and incarceration in concentration camps of all Japanese living in California irrespective of citizenship. The Japanese in Southern California were to report to temporary barracks located at the Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, just south of Pasadena. Nearly 20,000 of the state's 93,000 Japanese Americans were confined in these quarters before being taken further inland to the internment camps.
Since World War II, immigration from Asia and the Pacific has increased dramatically. The influx of immigrants from the Philippines, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia has led to the development of identifiable enclaves such as Koreatown in the central city, a Cambodian community in Long Beach, Samoanss in Compton, Hawaiian Gardens and Wilmington, a Thai neighborhood in Hollywood, Vietnamese in Chinatown and in Garden Grove in Orange County, Chinese in Monterey Park and nearby parts of the San Gabriel Valley and Japanese in Gardena.The suburbanization of the city
The last 50 years
African-Americans in Los Angeles
Despite the fact that Los Angeles is the country's only major city founded by settlers who were predominately of African descent, it had only 2,100 African-Americans in the 1900 census; by 1920 there were approximately 15,000. In 1910 the city had the highest percentage of black home ownership in the nation, with over 36% of the city's African-American residents owning their own homes. W.E.B. Dubois wrote in 1913, "Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed."Mexicans, Pachucos, Chicanos and Latinos in Los Angeles
A steady migration of Mexicans to California from 1910 to 1930 expanded the Mexican and Chicano population in Los Angeles to approximately 200,000. In 1930 the United States began expelling them, deporting over a half a million Mexicans and Chicanos from California and 13,332 from Los Angeles County in the 1930's. At the same time the city celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1931 with a grand "fiesta de Los Angeles" featuring a blond "reina" in a historical ranchera costume.Asians in Los Angeles
Less than a century after the founding of Los Angeles, Chinatown was a thriving community adjacent to the downtown railroad depot. Thousands of Chinese came to northern California in the 1850s, initially to join the Gold Rush and then taking construction jobs with the railroads. They began moving south as the transcontinental railroad linked Los Angeles with the rest of the nation.