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• 1 2013-07-14T14:11:54-07:00 Regime VIII -- U.S. Industrial Empire on the Porfirian Borderland, 1881-1940 25 image_header 2018-02-14T15:36:51-08:00 After 1880, we observe a dramatic shift toward Anglo domination of Los Angeles. Founding dynasties of their own, a new class of rulers with the names Otis, Chandler, Doheny, Huntington, and Getty moved into the region, operating huge landed estates and employing thousands of laborers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. Leading capitalists in Los Angeles participated in the rapid dislocation and exploitation of Mexico, which to the overthrow of Diaz and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Los Angeles then became a headquarters for both the Revolution and Counterrevolution, just as the Los Angeles elite were massively growing the LA metropolis.
  
  These new rulers aggressively recast the region as an emerging industrial powerhouse, invented Anglo-centric cultural traditions, and defeated labor-based challengers to their rule, all before the outbreak of the Great War. Anglo oligarchs, operating in concert though the Chamber of Commerce, the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, and other business-led networks, laid the groundwork for a mighty industrial metropolis by amassing property, planning the infrastructure, attracting capital, labor, and millions of settlers. During the 1920s, this infrastructure already enabled a massive boom in population, productivity, and most crucially, in technological and economic innovation. By the end of this period in 1940, three giant industrial sectors had made Los Angeles a global city: oil, aircraft production, and motion pictures. Through all three, the autocratic political culture of the previous regional regime was reinforced and magnified.
  
  How all these factors came together is a very large and complex story, but the single most important key to understanding the formation of the eighth regional regime is the influence of the preceding regional regimes and Los Angeles’s deep integration with the Borderland political culture, binding its destiny with that of Mexico. That political culture was characterized by the porfiriato—the rule of the Mexican dictator and modernizer General and President Porfirio Diaz (José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori, president almost continuously from 1876-1911), and by the Mexican Revolution (1910-1929), which was caused by the policies of the porfiriato and those of its allies in the United States, including prominently the Anglo elite of Los Angeles.  The counterpart of Porfirio Diaz in Los angels was the formidable General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, undisputed leader of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, and corporate magnate whose holdings included much of Northern Mexico. The porfiriato greatly enriched the Los Angeles Anglo ruling class, and the Revolution deeply threatened it.   Both reinforced the autocratic, reactionary nature of the eighth ruling regime.
  
  The Racial Coup D'Etat of the 1880s
  
  The 1850-1880 period of U.S. occupation of Alta California was one of relative conviviencia for those in Southern California. But in a concerted effort to re-define Los Angeles as a "white spot" (in their own words), an Anglo oligarchy seized economic, social, and political power from Californios in the 1880s, by imposing a variant on Jim Crow segregation.  This new Anglo ruling class appropriated a stylization of "hispanic" heritage as a thematic backdrop, while purging Latinos from the apparatus of power. During the 1880s, Mexican American office holding virtually ended, and, as indication of a hierarchy of legal rights, those with Spanish surnames were increasingly barred from jury service.[1] Integral to the Anglo consolidation of hegemony was the invention of traditions during the 1880s and 1890s that culturally “whitewashed” the Spanish-Mexican heritage of the region, re-casting the missions and ranchos as romantic symbols of a quaint but backward and inferior culture.[2] So successful was this new cultural hegemony in constructing narratives to support the Anglo right to rule, that subsequent historians have lost sight of the profound and ongoing Mexican shape of regional power. The Spanish-Mexican socioeconomic institutional influence was all too real, even while the Anglo-invented cultural heritage was fake, but historians of recent decades have been distracted from the former by debunking the latter.
  
  From the 1880s through the 1914 outbreak of the Great War, a peculiar combination of natural assets, labor relations inherited from the Spanish-Mexican periods, and a concerted lifestyle marketing campaign (touting the Hispanic “fantasy heritage,” Mediterranean climate, citrus culture, real estate opportunity, and health) literally prepared the ground of Los Angeles for its meteoric rise to globalism in the 1920s. A railroad rate war began in 1886 between the established monopoly, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the Santa Fe Railroad, which opened its Los Angeles service from points east in that year. Combined with massive advertisements about the utopian climate and cheap land, this rate war produced an instant flood of middle-class Anglo Americans eager to migrate to the region.[3]
  
  The Southern Pacific delivered 120,000 people to Southern California in 1887 alone, and the Santa Fe was arriving with as many as four passenger trains every day. Carey McWilliams called this the “Pullman Car Migration.” But the boom also led to a bust, so the region’s business leaders held an “Emergency Meeting” in October of 1888, during which General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, led the formation of the Chamber of Commerce and its battle plan for infrastructure development and aggressive promotion throughout the United States and the world. Typical of this plan’s audacity was the proposal (which instantly caused a diplomatic incident) for the United States to purchase Baja California from Mexico.[4]
  
  In short order, this business-industrial oligarchy successfully planned and realized massive infrastructural projects: the federally-funded dredging of a deep-water port at San Pedro, and the bond-funded construction of the Owens Valley Aqueduct—still the longest aqueduct ever constructed in human history.  While all city boosters have been stricken with grandiose dreams, the Los Angeles oligarchs actually succeeded in laying the foundations, in these massive infrastructure projects, for a megacity. Once the liquid assets of water and oil began to flow, this Mediterranean landscape simultaneously bloomed fragrant orchards and belched the smog of industrial progress.[5]
  
  Several great migrant population streams ran to Los Angeles between the 1880s and the Crash of 1929. The first, composed of relatively affluent Anglos from the Midwest, overwhelmed the resident Mexicanos and Californios. Highly visible among the newcomers were thousands of affluent Iowa farmers looking for a place to insert their surplus wealth, leading to the joke that Los Angeles was the “sea coast of Iowa.”[6] These Pullman Car Anglos largely drove in the stakes and set the agenda for those who followed: founding more new cities and hiring the incoming workers. After the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910-11, ten percent of the entire Mexican population moved north of the border, and Los Angeles became the most important portal for this flow (El Paso/Ciudad Juarez being the second). With the concurrent regional industrial boom, the Los Angeles population became dramatically more working-class and non-Anglo. By 1930 about 100,000 Mexican immigrants, 30,000 Japanese, Chinese, and Korean immigrants, and 40,000 African Americans had settled in the city of Los Angeles. But it is very important to remember that the majority of the much larger Anglo population of about one million persons were working- and lower-middle-class migrants.[7] Citrus, the first of the major new productive sectors developed by Anglo leadership, grafted easily onto the rancho territories and labor system. Eventually, the citrus belt “stretched sixty miles eastward from Pasadena, through the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Valleys, to the town of Riverside.” By 1946, about 40,000 workers toiled in the orange and lemon groves of Southern California. The growth of this agribusiness deepened the Mexican communities eastward across this belt, laying the groundwork for the massive Latinization of the San Gabriel Valley decades later. The citrus labor force decidedly was mixed: Mexican, Filipinos, Japanese, and Chinese, as well as “Whites.” As historian Matt Garcia recounts, as the workforce became more nonwhite, wages dropped, to about $13 per week during the late 1920s and 1930s.[8]
  
  The citrus industry was only one of many race-specialized productive sectors as the new Anglo overlords magnified the racial hierarchies of the Spanish-Mexican periods. When Simons Brick Company opened a new worksite in Montebello in 1907, the owners supplied barrack housing for Mexican workers and their families, on-site housing that recalled the former rancheria of the San Gabriel Mission, which lay within sight just to the north.[9] Gradually at first, and then rapidly after 1910, the older sedentary, landholding Mexican elite that had mentored the new Anglo elite was lost in a sea of Mexican immigrant laborers, who arrived to take an increasingly racialized position in a fixed social hierarchy.
  
  Mexicanidad of Southern California
  
  The key to understanding the rise of Los Angeles to globalism in the 1880s-1930s is its relationship to Mexico. Don Porfirio Diaz, who ruled almost continuously from 1876 until his ouster at the onset of the Revolution in 1911, set out to modernize Mexico through partnerships with foreign investors, who poured a staggering $1.2 billion into Mexico, building its railroad infrastructure, developing its mines, and agricultural estates. “Diaz’s policies of keeping down popular protest, muzzling the opposition press, preventing the formation of labor unions, and not allowing strikes,” writes Friedrich Katz, “greatly contributed to this enrichment”[10] The porfiriato also sharply centralized political power, in the hands of local caudillos and the wealthy beneficiaries of foreign investment.[11]
  
  The new industrial elite of Los Angeles, Edward Doheny, Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, were among the major porfirian capitalists in Mexico. Although not a permanent Los Angeles resident, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst founded the city’s second-largest newspaper, the Los Angeles Examiner, in 1903 and joined this elite as an eccentric but powerful force in the political public sphere. His father had purchased the giant 1,000,000-acre Rancho Babicora in Chihuahua in the 1880s. In 1899 Harry Chandler bought an option on 862,000 acres of land in the Colorado River drainage and formed the California-Mexico Land and Cattle Company (its U.S. name) and the Colorado River Land Company, S.A (its Mexican name), which became the largest cotton plantation in the world, employing 8,000 Mexican peasants and yielding in one year alone $18 million in cotton.[12] “Ultimately,” writes John Mason Hart, “Americans came to own the majority of land along the Mexico’s entire periphery.”[13]
  
  Los Angeles became a key contested space within the emerging revolutionary / counter-revolutionary dynamic of the Borderlands. Drawn by the expatriate community of Mexican workers, the revolutionaries Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón had made Los Angeles their frontier headquarters during much of the first two decades of the century, where they were constantly harassed by the Los Angeles Police Department’s “Red Squad,” frequently imprisoned and threatened with extradition. But the political Left was very strong in Los Angeles as well, at least until 1911—with unionist and socialists very active among the burgeoning working classes of the industrializing city. The Magonistas were successfully defended in court by Socialist attorney Job Harriman, avoiding extradition and a firing squad.[14]
  
  Indeed, the spectacular Mexican events of 1910-1911 were paralleled by the near-overthrow of the Otis-Chandler regime in Los Angeles, in one of the true “turning points” of history, as Harriman ran a nearly-successful campaign for Mayor in 1911. That election outcome would be determined by the course of the trial of John and James McNamara, accused of plotting the October 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building at First and Spring Streets. Harriman officially joined the McNamara brothers’ defense team headed by Clarence Darrow and backed by union leaders across the country. But when the McNamaras confessed their guilt on the eve of the election, Harriman was disgraced, and lost the election. His defeat on December 6, 1911 “aborted the labor movement in Los Angeles” in the words of McWilliams. Otis was vindicated as the righteous defender of “industrial freedom” and the middle classes, whose loyalty was at stake, was easily persuaded to back the forces of security.[15] With firm control of the local political apparatus lasting through the 1950s, the Otis-Chandler oligarchy headed a pro-growth coalition to promote an “open shop” (non-union) landscape that attracted major established industries, like rubber and automobiles, and also incubated brand-new, leading-edge industries—principally motion pictures and aircraft.
  
  The great burst of population growth took off after the Great War (1914-1918). A staggering volume of materials and human labor was required to achieve the building boom of approximately 600,000 new homes during the 1920s, necessitated by the migration of 1.2 million new residents to the county in that decade. Port activity at the twin harbors of Long Beach/San Pedro increased from 2.4 million tons in 1917 to 27 million tons just five years later.[16] Investors poured billions of dollars into the region and in turn, hundreds of thousands of workers migrated to Los Angeles.
   
  --- --- ---

  
  By the time of the United States entry into World War II, the eighth regional regime (1881-1940) of Los Angeles had produced a mighty regional metropolis with wide global reach, a major seaport, an extensive transportation system, and two new world-transforming industries: motion pictures and aircraft. The city achieved major global recognition in hosting the 1932 Olympics in its purpose-built Coliseum south of downtown. The Otis-Chandler oligarchy had also magnified the racial-caste labor system of the Borderlands political economy. They had organized an interlocking directorate of reactionary economic and political leaders.
  
  This leadership had been mentored in the ways of exploitive labor relations by their predecessors the Mexican Rancheros; their ally and benefactor had been the dictator Porfirio Diaz, and their counter-revolutionary zeal against democratic movements was reinforced by the autocratic structure of their new industries, especially oil and motion pictures. Those leaders now became the mentors to an even mightier generation of leaders, who remade Los Angeles as an exporter of its regional political-economic regime, a global city of truly world-historic proportions.
  
  NOTES
  
  [1] Griswold del Castillo (1982: 117).
  
  [2] Deverell (2005).
  
  [3] McWilliams (1980); Starr (1991: 45-64).
  
  [4] McWilliams (1980: 113-137).
  
  [5] Deverell (1996); Erie (2004).
  
  [6] McWilliams (1980 [1946]: 164).
  
  [7] Romo (1983: 3-11); Laslett (1997); Sabagh and Bozorgmehr (1997).
  
  [8] Garcia (2001: 19, 38-9, 49).
  
  [9] Deverell (2005: 135).
  
  [10] Katz (1998: 15-6).
  
  [11] Coatsworth (1974); Hart (1987).
  
  [12] McDougal (2001: 73-5).
  
  [13] Hart (2002: 170-172).
  
  [14] Escobar (1999: 53-76).
  
  [15] McWilliams ([1946]1980: 281-3).
  
  [16] Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce (1928): pp. ***
  
  [17] Ansell (1998); Davis (2001).
  
  [18] Getty (1963: 9, 77-8); Miller (1985: 26-7, 47).
  
  [19] Pitt and Pitt (2000): 31; Bottles (1987); Ambrose (1987: 34-5).
  
  [20] Ross (2001: 258).
  
  [21] Ross (2001: 260-62).
  
  [22] Ross (2001); Sedgwick (2002).
  
  [23] Horne (2001).
  
  [24] Davis (1990: 91-150).
  
  [25] Lotchin (1992: 108-110, quotation at 109).
  
  [26] Hise (1997: 127-8).
  
  [27] Scott and Mattingly (1989: 49).
  
  [28] Keane (2001: 251n7).
  
  [29] Hise (1997: 123).
  
  [30] Scott and Mattingly (1989); Hise (1997).