Manna From Hell: Petroleum and the Inscription of Angeleno World Power
Our story now turns to the first of the globalizing industries of Los Angeles: oil production, with a focus on the life and actions of Edward L. Doheny (1856-1935), Los Angeles's original Oil Baron, one of the wealthiest men in the world, and a major international force in the ongoing counter-revolution in the US-Mexican Borderlands. J. Paul Getty, son of Oklahoma-based Oilman George Getty, grew up in Los Angeles and cultivated its oil fields, leveraging them into a global empire, co-founding the Middle East petroleum industry, and becoming the "richest man in the world" in the early 1970s. They were only the points of a spear that pierced the Earth in the 20th Century and conjured Manna from Hell, unleashing endless industrial wars, shaping the politics of the United States and geopolitics into the 21st Century.
This essay begins a series that map the shape of this particular industry in the networks of power as they arose from the landscape of Los Angeles. Inscription is way institutions attach to the ground: their "footprint" in the space-time of society. Oil became the ultimate prize in the Age of Industry because it powers and makes industry itself possible. Oil Barons like Doheny and J. Paul Getty took their extracted profit-power from Los Angles and inscribed their global reach. Oil Companies like Occidental and UNOCAL, both LA-based, inscribed power in more regional and national ways. Oil Promoters/Swindlers like George W. Julian represent the broad mass base of middle-class investors and property owners in Los Angels who dreamed of oil riches, and the blue-collar "Oil Suburbs" that sprang up with oil fields or to provide the housing space for oil workers, inscribe yet another kind of footprint of the oil industry into Los Angeles. It was from many of these suburbs that the "Plain Folk" evangelical populism arose in the 1930s-60s, the "base" that Nixon learned to master with fear. Angeleno President Richard Nixon's leadership of the United States in the Oil Crisis of 1973-4, and his geostrategic support of profoundly reactionary Arab monarchies, climaxed a trajectory of petropolitics generations in the making.
Edward L. Doheny: Borderland Oil Baron
Edward Doheny exemplifies a major aspect of Los Angeles’s rise to globalism during the early 20th century: its leading role as a capital of the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. This extended story, which sometimes takes us far from Los Angeles, illustrates the process whereby the local resource of oil was converted into profit and power, power that was rapidly extended across regions and national boundaries. By the end of the 1920s, Doheny, working in concert with allies throughout the Borderland and in Washington, D.C. effectively annexed a huge territory of Mexico to Los Angeles and became a leader of the counterrevolutionary forces in the United States.
This essay begins a series that map the shape of this particular industry in the networks of power as they arose from the landscape of Los Angeles. Inscription is way institutions attach to the ground: their "footprint" in the space-time of society. Oil became the ultimate prize in the Age of Industry because it powers and makes industry itself possible. Oil Barons like Doheny and J. Paul Getty took their extracted profit-power from Los Angles and inscribed their global reach. Oil Companies like Occidental and UNOCAL, both LA-based, inscribed power in more regional and national ways. Oil Promoters/Swindlers like George W. Julian represent the broad mass base of middle-class investors and property owners in Los Angels who dreamed of oil riches, and the blue-collar "Oil Suburbs" that sprang up with oil fields or to provide the housing space for oil workers, inscribe yet another kind of footprint of the oil industry into Los Angeles. It was from many of these suburbs that the "Plain Folk" evangelical populism arose in the 1930s-60s, the "base" that Nixon learned to master with fear. Angeleno President Richard Nixon's leadership of the United States in the Oil Crisis of 1973-4, and his geostrategic support of profoundly reactionary Arab monarchies, climaxed a trajectory of petropolitics generations in the making.
Edward L. Doheny: Borderland Oil Baron
Edward Doheny exemplifies a major aspect of Los Angeles’s rise to globalism during the early 20th century: its leading role as a capital of the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. This extended story, which sometimes takes us far from Los Angeles, illustrates the process whereby the local resource of oil was converted into profit and power, power that was rapidly extended across regions and national boundaries. By the end of the 1920s, Doheny, working in concert with allies throughout the Borderland and in Washington, D.C. effectively annexed a huge territory of Mexico to Los Angeles and became a leader of the counterrevolutionary forces in the United States.
Doheny, the son of an Irish immigrant laborer father and an Irish-Canadian schoolteacher mother was born and raised in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. By all evidence a man of iron will, Doheny learned the geology and law of mining, and then struggled to make a fortune prospecting in the silver and lead mines of New Mexico near the Mexican border beginning in the 1870s. But after nearly twenty years of sporadic success and failures, he finally gave up on that kind of hard-mineral prospecting and followed reports of potential oil fields in the heart of Los Angeles, moving his family there in 1892.[1]
Doheny’s accomplishment was not to “discover” oil in Los Angeles, nor to strike it rich by drilling the first gusher. There were at least a hundred wells in operation already by the time he entered the local market as a producer in 1892, and his first Los Angeles wells didn’t gush: they drooled.
Doheny applied his grim determination to the “city field,” gradually learning how to coax the rich reservoir of oil to the surface. Practically without capital, he and his partner actually dug their first well at the corner of Second St. and Glendale by hand—ore miner’s style—to a depth of 155 feet, and then rammed in a sharpened 60-foot telegraph pole to finish the job. This rustic well only produced about 4 barrels a day, but even this at first oversupplied the local market, where businesses had yet to learn the advantages of fuel oil over coal for operating boilers.
The City Field just west of downtown, bordered by Figueroa, First, Union, and Temple was notorious for overproduction relative to the regional demand. Gradually, however, Doheny converted local manufacturers such as brewers and even the City Hall to the use of fuel oil, as he slowly built regional dominance in oil production and refinement.[2]
Doheny realized his first fortune not from the bounty of Southern California geology, but from a shrewd alliance with the quintessential industry transforming the US-Mexico Borderlands: railroads.[3] When the Santa Fe railroad bought Doheny’s Petroleum Development Company in 1902 for $1.25 million, he was a genuine millionaire at last, but barely so, and still a midget compared with the east coast barons like Rockefeller. Nevertheless, he was ready to live like one, and in that same year he and his second wife, a former telephone operator named Carrie Estelle Betzold (known as Estelle) designed and built an enormous mansion at 8 Chester Place, in the most fashionable neighborhood of Los Angeles, the new “West Adams” district on the southern outskirts of the city. As one of the city’s wealthiest Roman Catholic families, the Dohenys became close socially with Bishop (later Archbishop, 1936) John J. Cantwell. Their donation of the elegant Church of St. Vincent’s de Paul at Figueroa and West Adams (A.C. Martin Associates, 1929) was even more impressive than their own adjacent mansion in the city’s most fashionable neighborhood.[4]
As a lone, hard-bitten entrepreneur, Doheny was only one of several types of “oil men” operating the Los Angeles Basin. Other individual entrepreneurs, like George Getty, were more established, and chose to enter the Los Angeles market only after others had opened it up. This industry in formation was also characterized by corporations, which ranged from sober and solid to fly-by night. The earliest oil corporation was Union Oil of California (later UNOCAL), incorporated by the State of California in 1890 by Lyman Stewart, Wallace Hardison, and Thomas Bard. Stewart and Hardison had sold their interests in the Pennsylvania oil fields, where they started their business, to John D. Rockefeller. Bard had started his oil operations independently. In 1901, with a capitalization of $10 million, they moved their headquarters to downtown Los Angeles.[5] Stewart, an evangelical Christian, lost no time putting his money to work for Jesus. He founded the Pacific Gospel Mission, later the Union Rescue Mission in 1901, and in 1908, when Union Oil’s market capitalization had reached $50 million, Steward teamedup with the Christian author T.C. Horton to found the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (later renamed Biola University).
J. Paul Getty: From USC to Oxford to Sutton Place.
“An oil man,” opined J. Paul Getty in 1963, “soon learns to think and measure in terms of millions.”[6] As a teenager, “Paul” Getty had arrived in Los Angeles with his wealthy family in 1906. George Getty had made a small fortune as an oil man in Oklahoma and the move to Los Angeles was the work of a nouveau riche seeking refinement in the pleasant Mediterranean setting that the L.A. Times and the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railway corporations had been promoting since the late 1880s. George Getty was decidedly old school in the culture of American capitalists, seriously believing that he was creating wealth for others. Their new home at 647 S. Kingsley Dr, near Wilshire, “a substantial frame-and-stucco mansion built in an English style, surrounded by eucalyptus trees,” was probably about as big as the frugal senior Getty thought he could afford.[7] In 1909 Paul enrolled at the University of Southern California, the most prestigious college in Southern California but, after a family trip to Europe, he found USC parochial and persuaded his parents to let him attend Oxford University, beginning in 1912. There he studied economics and diplomacy, earning his diploma in 1913.
J. Paul Getty clearly valued aristocratic refinement. At Oxford he became close friends with Albert, Prince of Wales, the future King George VI (1936-1952), and became a lifelong Anglophile, eventually settling permanently at Sutton Place, a manor house in Surrey built in 1525 by a courtier of Henry VIII, which he purchased in 1959 after concluding a major Saudi oil concession deal with Crown Prince ibn-Saud. But all that was in the future as young Paul returned from Oxford to build his own fortune, which he did by striking his own Oklahoma gusher in 1916, making him a millionaire in his own right. Although Edward Doheny had long earlier established the Los Angeles oil industry, the conservative Gettys held themselves aloof from drilling in their own hometown--preferring to risk their capital in the Oklahoma landscape they knew best. But when the Union Oil Company brought in a gusher at Santa Fe Springs in November of 1921, “Father decided the moment had come to give serious consideration to starting operations in California.”[8]
Bringing their decades of prospecting experience to the Santa Fe Springs field, the Gettys quickly identified pay dirt: Paul “noticed a slight rise in the land along Telegraph Ave.” and leased a tiny parcel at the crest of this rise. That 2/3rds of an acre lease alone yielded more than six million dollars over the next two decades. Encouraged by their first good luck, the Gettys moved rapidly into the local market, buying-up leases throughout Huntington Beach and Long Beach: the main site of the action during this, the region’s second oil boom.[9]
Although the oil of the Los Angeles Basin had been well known since the 1890s, industry, shipping, navies, heating and automobiles had created an unquenchable international thirst for fuel oil and refined gasoline during and immediately after the Great War. The oil that Doheny had begun to exploit in the 1890s suddenly gained a new demand and value, and the industrial infrastructure of Los Angeles enabled its exploitation. Exploration by a wide range of oil companies rapidly opened new oil strikes erupted in Culver City, Torrance, Dominguez, Santa Fe Springs, Whittier, and Montebello.
The fantastic wealth of the Getty Oil Company was pumped from Los Angeles itself. By the time of George Getty’s death in 1930 and transfer of control of the family business to his son, the Getty Oil Company had practically started over again from a new foundation in Los Angeles. The Oxonian at the helm had decidedly global ambitions, taking the company’s new capital into ever-expanding markets, and enjoying a cosmopolitan life of luxury as he did so. He began to acquire important works of art during the 1930s, with a particular attraction to the decorative arts. Months after the Nazi invasion of Austria, Getty visited the home of Baron Louis de Rothchild, who was then a Nazi prisoner, to look over his antiques, then negotiated with the SS in Berlin for their purchase. A marble bust of J. Paul Getty, executed by P.G. Vangelli in Mussolini’s Italy in 1939 , stands today at the entrance of the Getty Museum, capturing a young millionaire at the top of his game. When the U.S. finally entered the war, the FBI found his Nazi and Fascist connections too strong to merit a commission in the U.S. Navy.[10]
The nationwide surge in automobile production created a huge market for gasoline and rubber tires, two new byproducts of petroleum. The presence of gushers and automobiles in the middle of a metropolis attracted the major auto and rubber manufacturers. Goodyear opened its plant in 1919, followed by Firestone, Goodrich, and U.S. Rubber. Ford built its first branch plant in 1917 and a much larger plant in Long Beach in 1927 (later moving to Pico Rivera), Willys-Overland built a plant in Maywood in 1929, and auto plants continued to open throughout the 1930s: Chrysler began production in the City of Commerce in 1931; Studebaker in Vernon in 1936; General Motors in South Gate in 1936.[11] By the end of the 1920s, Los Angeles boasted the highest per-capita rates of automobile ownership in the world, with one auto for every 3 persons.[12] Richard Nixon’s father Frank failed as a citrus farmer in Yorba Linda but succeeded with comfortable profits from 1921 onward selling gasoline and rubber tires at the Nixon Market on Whittier Boulevard at Leffingwell Ave.[13]
Oil of the People, by the People, and for the People: Petropolitical Schemes
The thirst for oil in Southern California spread far beyond the board rooms of big manufacturing corporations, for it lay underneath thousands of ordinary homes and held out the promise that every family plot potentially held hidden within it the keys to a Getty-like mansion of riches. The second oil boom of the 1920s became a mass phenomenon, with the massive Signal Hill field leading the way by example. Chicago novelist and socialist Upton Sinclair was caught up in the oil craze because his wife, May Craig, owned property near Signal Hill, overlooking Long Beach, where Shell Oil had drilled a gusher. Now the oilmen were rushing to sign leases and the homeowners were looking for the best deal. The couple attended raucous meetings with neighbors attempting to pool their land into a larger lease, and therefore better bargaining power. Sinclair, impressed by this spectacle, took notes and composed his 1927 novel Oil! In the opening scene, an oil man named J. Andrew Ross, a man “dressed like a metropolitan banker,” with the “calm assurance of a major-general commanding, and the kindly dignity of an Episcopal bishop,” speaks “not the English but the south-western American language,” trying to convince the wary, greedy and fractious homeowners to sign with him:
“you got a great chanct here, ladies and gentlemen; but bear in mind, you can lose it all if you ain’t careful. Out of all the fellers that beg you for a chanct to drill your land, maybe one in twenty will be oil men; the rest will be speculators, fellers trying to get between you and the oil men, to get some of the money that ought by rights be long to you.”[14]
Upton Sinclair’s Ross, a thinly disguised caricature of Edward L. Doheny, was right to warn the householders about speculators and swinders. Sinclair was also inspired to write his novel by the appalling example of Courtney Chauncey “C.C.” Julian, who fed on the savings of thousands of small investors to build the notoriously fraudulent Julian Petroleum, Inc. following his own lucky strike in the Santa Fe Springs rush of 1922. C.C. Julian was an instigator of the roaring twenties culture of stock speculation, luring those little means into the dream of an easy fortune. He advertised recklessly in the newspapers with folksy pitches: “Do You Hear Me Calling You to the Tune of Five Million Dollars?” As he burned-up the corporation’s cash hunting for big strikes, he hid his losses and raised more capital. Julian eventually tapped the city’s leading figures to form a “Million Dollar Pool” of investors, which included Harry Marsten Haldeman, the political reactionary and president of the Better America Federation (BAF), and grandfather of Harry Robbins “Bob” Haldeman, destined to become Richard Nixon’s chief of staff. Julian’s “Million Dollar” pool also drew-in the otherwise financially segregated Jewish elite, including Louis B. Mayer. When the watered stock was exposed in 1927, Julian fell hard in a spectacular 1928 trial, marked by a courtroom shooting and the embarrassing exposure of many “respectable” names.[15]
The four main types of oil footprint in LA's rise to globalism were: 1) Transnational Oil Barons; 2) Oil Corporation, operated bureaucratically, and more deeply involved in LA's regional political economy; 3) Huckster-Promoters tapping small investors; and 4) The Oil Suburbs, from Santa Fe Springs to Signal Hill to El Segundo, housed and employed thousands of oil industry workers, mostly at semi-skilled Blue Collar levels. These places, as Fred Viehe has observed, while humble, were residential fields of opportunity for a mass base of Angelenos. And, as Darren Dochuk has documented, those communities were fertile with "Plain-Folk" religion, brought with them form the US South and Southwest. Anti-union organizing by the Otis-Chandler-led Merchants and Manufacturers Association, helped combatted the unions that fought to take root in blue-collar in newly-minted blue-collar cities like South Gate.
In the following essays, Ghost Metropolis explores how these levels of social action interact, from leaders in oil and military production shape the big institutions and also how masses engage with the politics made by the major developments of the American empire, and Los Angeles as part of it.
[1] This and the following three paragraphs draw heavily on Ansell (1998: 7-22).
[2] Margaret Leslie Davis (2001).
[3] By the end of the 1890s, Doheny won a contract with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, to supply 30,000 barrels per month, to fuel their Mohave-toSan Francisco line, for 96 cents a barrel, which cost him less than fifteen cents a barrel to produce. Ansell (1998: 23-51).
[4] Ansell (1998: 47-8); Starr (1991: 125-8).
[5] Unocal, as it eventually was known, remained headquartered in Downtown Los Angeles until its sale in 2005 to Chevron Corporation.
[6] Getty (1963: 9).
[7] Miller (1985: 26-7, 47); Getty (1963: 79).
[8] Getty (1963: 77).
[9] Getty (1963: 77-8).
[10] Yergin (1991: 140-41).
[11] Pitt and Pitt (1997): 31.
[12] The rate in 1930 for the United States was one automobile for every 5 persons. The United Kingdom had the second-highest national rate in that year, with 1:32 ratio, and the ratio in Germany—in third place—was 1:54. (Jackson 1985: 165; Bottles 1987: ***).
[13] Ambrose (1987): 34-5.
[14] Sinclair, Oil! ([1927] 1997): 37.
[15] Tygiel (1994).
The thirst for oil in Southern California spread far beyond the board rooms of big manufacturing corporations, for it lay underneath thousands of ordinary homes and held out the promise that every family plot potentially held hidden within it the keys to a Getty-like mansion of riches. The second oil boom of the 1920s became a mass phenomenon, with the massive Signal Hill field leading the way by example. Chicago novelist and socialist Upton Sinclair was caught up in the oil craze because his wife, May Craig, owned property near Signal Hill, overlooking Long Beach, where Shell Oil had drilled a gusher. Now the oilmen were rushing to sign leases and the homeowners were looking for the best deal. The couple attended raucous meetings with neighbors attempting to pool their land into a larger lease, and therefore better bargaining power. Sinclair, impressed by this spectacle, took notes and composed his 1927 novel Oil! In the opening scene, an oil man named J. Andrew Ross, a man “dressed like a metropolitan banker,” with the “calm assurance of a major-general commanding, and the kindly dignity of an Episcopal bishop,” speaks “not the English but the south-western American language,” trying to convince the wary, greedy and fractious homeowners to sign with him:
“you got a great chanct here, ladies and gentlemen; but bear in mind, you can lose it all if you ain’t careful. Out of all the fellers that beg you for a chanct to drill your land, maybe one in twenty will be oil men; the rest will be speculators, fellers trying to get between you and the oil men, to get some of the money that ought by rights be long to you.”[14]
Upton Sinclair’s Ross, a thinly disguised caricature of Edward L. Doheny, was right to warn the householders about speculators and swinders. Sinclair was also inspired to write his novel by the appalling example of Courtney Chauncey “C.C.” Julian, who fed on the savings of thousands of small investors to build the notoriously fraudulent Julian Petroleum, Inc. following his own lucky strike in the Santa Fe Springs rush of 1922. C.C. Julian was an instigator of the roaring twenties culture of stock speculation, luring those little means into the dream of an easy fortune. He advertised recklessly in the newspapers with folksy pitches: “Do You Hear Me Calling You to the Tune of Five Million Dollars?” As he burned-up the corporation’s cash hunting for big strikes, he hid his losses and raised more capital. Julian eventually tapped the city’s leading figures to form a “Million Dollar Pool” of investors, which included Harry Marsten Haldeman, the political reactionary and president of the Better America Federation (BAF), and grandfather of Harry Robbins “Bob” Haldeman, destined to become Richard Nixon’s chief of staff. Julian’s “Million Dollar” pool also drew-in the otherwise financially segregated Jewish elite, including Louis B. Mayer. When the watered stock was exposed in 1927, Julian fell hard in a spectacular 1928 trial, marked by a courtroom shooting and the embarrassing exposure of many “respectable” names.[15]
The four main types of oil footprint in LA's rise to globalism were: 1) Transnational Oil Barons; 2) Oil Corporation, operated bureaucratically, and more deeply involved in LA's regional political economy; 3) Huckster-Promoters tapping small investors; and 4) The Oil Suburbs, from Santa Fe Springs to Signal Hill to El Segundo, housed and employed thousands of oil industry workers, mostly at semi-skilled Blue Collar levels. These places, as Fred Viehe has observed, while humble, were residential fields of opportunity for a mass base of Angelenos. And, as Darren Dochuk has documented, those communities were fertile with "Plain-Folk" religion, brought with them form the US South and Southwest. Anti-union organizing by the Otis-Chandler-led Merchants and Manufacturers Association, helped combatted the unions that fought to take root in blue-collar in newly-minted blue-collar cities like South Gate.
In the following essays, Ghost Metropolis explores how these levels of social action interact, from leaders in oil and military production shape the big institutions and also how masses engage with the politics made by the major developments of the American empire, and Los Angeles as part of it.
[1] This and the following three paragraphs draw heavily on Ansell (1998: 7-22).
[2] Margaret Leslie Davis (2001).
[3] By the end of the 1890s, Doheny won a contract with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, to supply 30,000 barrels per month, to fuel their Mohave-toSan Francisco line, for 96 cents a barrel, which cost him less than fifteen cents a barrel to produce. Ansell (1998: 23-51).
[4] Ansell (1998: 47-8); Starr (1991: 125-8).
[5] Unocal, as it eventually was known, remained headquartered in Downtown Los Angeles until its sale in 2005 to Chevron Corporation.
[6] Getty (1963: 9).
[7] Miller (1985: 26-7, 47); Getty (1963: 79).
[8] Getty (1963: 77).
[9] Getty (1963: 77-8).
[10] Yergin (1991: 140-41).
[11] Pitt and Pitt (1997): 31.
[12] The rate in 1930 for the United States was one automobile for every 5 persons. The United Kingdom had the second-highest national rate in that year, with 1:32 ratio, and the ratio in Germany—in third place—was 1:54. (Jackson 1985: 165; Bottles 1987: ***).
[13] Ambrose (1987): 34-5.
[14] Sinclair, Oil! ([1927] 1997): 37.
[15] Tygiel (1994).
This page has paths:
- Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars Curtis Fletcher
- Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
This page is referenced by:
This page references:
- Santa Fe Springs Oil Fields: Rio Hondo and San Gabriel Rivers, and the towns of Downey and Whittier, California
- Bishop Cantwell, Edward L. Doheny, and Estelle Doheney, 1929
- Doheny Mansion, 8 Chester Place, West Adams Los Angeles c. 1920
- Sutton Place, built c.1525 by Sir Richard Weston (d.1541), courtier of Henry VIII.
- J. Paul Getty and His Treasures
- Ghost Neighborhood, Court and Beaudry, 1939 and 1997. Montage by Phil Ethington (1997)
- Rubber Tire Workers, 1930s, Los Angeles
- Signal Hill, 360-degree Panoarama, 1927
- The U.S.-Mexican Borderlands
