Gloria Lothrop, the Whitsett chair in California history at Cal State Northridge, focuses on the trends and characters of Los Angeles history. A native Angeleno, Lothrop received her doctorate in the history of the American West and California from USC in 1970. She is a fellow of the Southern California Historical Society and the California Historical Society. Lothrop also is past president of the Los Angeles City Historical Society. She spoke with a group of Business Journal reporters and editors about the evolution of wealth during the 1900s.
Ann Donahue
Question: What are the commonalities between the L.A. moguls of a century ago and the rich we’re seeing today?
Answer: I think, first of all, there’s the self-selection factor. The people who come here choose to come here. Secondly, there is the prospect of it being an open canvas. The West, historically, has not been as constrained and as limiting. Traditions are not as rigid and there’s openness to new ideas. There is a characteristic tolerance for difference, and people let people do their own thing. The people who came here were more enterprising, more risk-taking, and they reveled in the fact that they were free from the constraints they had in the more tradition-bound Europe or Eastern Seaboard.
The movies create this dream world over and over again. Look at the movies of the 1930s Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing in Never-Never Land. Look at the glamour in those movies. And what were we going through in the 1930s? Bread lines. Hooverville. Hollywood existed as the manufacturer of dreams. So in a sense, that reinforces the expectation of being able to live in a good way here.
Q: How and when did wealth begin accumulating in Los Angeles?
A: You really have to go back to the boom of the 1880s. The important economic base then was the agricultural use of the land, going from cattle to citriculture to deciduous fruits. Then, in 1886, this dramatic event occurs. The Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe railroads go into a rate war and by January of ’86 the rates (for passenger travel) fall to $1. The result is that in the decade of the 1880s, the population of Los Angeles city triples, to 50,000.
Q: But mere population growth doesn’t necessarily create wealth.
A: True, but the most important thing is the kind of people who come. What you have up to that point, from the Spanish occupation in 1769 to the 1880s, is generally a Spanish and Latino dominance. But then, suddenly, Los Angeles is cosmopolitan. Not like San Francisco it’s not the Gold Rush mix that you have there. It’s largely Midwestern. For the first time there was no need for the leadership of old L.A. to form coalitions to outnumber the Spanish.
The coalitions that had been most common up until that time had been Anglos and Jews, people like Harris Newmark. They had been part of the political leadership. Newmark was one of the founders of the California Club, only to find that his relatives subsequently would not be admitted to the California Club.
Q: How did the Midwesterners get so much power in L.A.?
A: In the years before 1886, they had a very fat time. Agriculture had been good and there were stable railroad rates for shipping their wheat. For some reason, real estate was selling very well. They called Kansas a hotbed of real estate speculators. There was money in the Midwest and that allowed these people to come out here, retire, buy land and in some cases go into citriculture, which was considered the wealthy retirees’ clean agriculture. This becomes a dominant Midwestern community, with the values of the temperance persuasion and the Protestant ethic of the Midwest.
Q: How long did the boom last?
A: It was from 1886 to late ’87, ’88. It was very short, but the boom left its impact. Look at how many colleges were started in the 1880s: USC, Occidental, and Pomona. College Heights was the name of the area around Occidental. The real estate developers wanted to tell people, “We have a college here.”
All these little communities also bust into the boom of the ’80s. Towns like Azusa and Glendale had institutions, infrastructure, sidewalks, streets and water. The population between 1890 and 1910 grows again, by six times, to 319,000.
Q: There were a lot of snake-oil salesman here at the turn of the century.
A: Keep in mind this was the time of the “coughing pilgrims.” Tuberculosis was a big disease in the late 19th century. Even Harry Chandler came here coughing blood.
People came here because of the salubrious climate and because of the outdoors, and it was hoped you could even take the waters. Water (from local springs) was said to have purgative qualities.
Some of these people didn’t make it, and then you have a very large population of grieving widows. And so then you have a booming mortuary business. You also have thriving activity among mediums, spiritualists, seances, a means of having contact with the beyond. Then, of course, there were any number of health preservation, food fads, fitness experts to promote the health of those who remained.
Q: What is growing on the land during this time?
A: Cattle is supplanted by more-intensive agriculture by the 1870s. Pomona is rich in various kinds of fruits. There are canning plants and dried-fruit plants. At one point Pomona is the olive capital of California. Over in the San Fernando Valley there were olives, fruit trees, chickens.
In the 1870s, there’s experimentation in citriculture and various kinds of oranges. Most of the Valencias and Malta Reds, these are all summer-ripening oranges. Out in Riverside, farmers had been nurturing a special hybrid sent to them by the Department of Agriculture. These became known as Washington Navel oranges. They ripen in the wintertime and this made citriculture an all-year production. You can get Valencias and most of the others in the summer and now, as you and I know, we can go to Vons in the winter and there are the wonderful navel oranges, which also ship much better.
Q: After citriculture, what came next?
A: The real jolt that the economy gets are the oil strikes. Imagine the area between Dodger Stadium and MacArthur Park, a half-mile swath, with over 1,000 oil wells. People were putting oil wells in their back yards and front yards.
By 1920 there are three major oil strikes. One was in Santa Fe Springs, which had been a resort community set up by Santa Fe Railroad, and suddenly it became an oil town. The other strike in the ’20s was in Huntington Beach. I remember not wanting to go to Huntington Beach as a little girl because invariably you’d get oily guck on your feet. It was just like a forest of derricks. The third strike was Signal Hill.
While this was going on, there were also strikes in Ventura County. We were producing so much oil in the 1920s, black gold, that it became the No. 1 economic export of California 230 million barrels a year. At first, people didn’t know what to do with the oil. They tried to put it on the dirt streets of Los Angeles to settle the dust not a good idea. But in 1909, suddenly we have the car and then we have a use for gasoline, in trucks and in cars. In 1910, the Dominguez Air Race would usher in an entirely new mode of transportation that will consume oil and gasoline.
Q: How about the movie industry?
A: That would become one of our major economic triumphs. There were film studios downtown, on Bunker Hill, on Glendale Boulevard. The lynchpin for movie making was 1912 “Squaw Man.” That’s the first feature-length film. On the heels of that was “Birth of a Nation.”
By then, movie making had grown up. World War I gave us a tremendous inflow of talent because prior to that, movie making had been much more advanced in Europe. They were making longer features, and here we were still doing “Bronco Billy” Westerns and little nickelodeons.
You have the industry really developed here by a group of men who had been born within 500 miles of each other in Eastern Europe. It was a new industry that hadn’t set up the elite exclusivity and protocols, so a group discriminated against (Jewish immigrants from Europe) could go in at the ground floor and not be limited.
Q: And aerospace?
A: We wouldn’t have had the development of aviation without the climate. It had to be here, where there was a safe and predictable climate where you could fly planes without too many problems.
Then, you wouldn’t really have had a space program without Southern California. Think about all the subcontractors we had for the moon walk. I think the reason we were and are so much a part of this kind of technology is that we built and brought together aviation and we were developing the science of rocketry.
We also became very much a center for the electronics industry. There’s a natural pool of educated workers, engineers and technicians. I love that synergy of electronics, the rocketry and the aviation coming together.
