Abstract
Los Angeles history has blossomed in the past twenty years, with hundreds of books, theses, and articles debating the causes, effects, novelties, and shortcomings of the largest city on the West Coast. Little consensus exists on the state of the field, beyond noting the continuous flow of newly published material. But the sense that this city is still rich with scholarly potential keeps pushing historical work in new directions, especially that of cultural politics, urban planning, and global urbanism. 1 Multiple approaches have shaped the field, from the comprehensive sweep to the personal biography. Welcome to the discussion are works that expand the conversation about “city” to that of “region” which, in the context of southern California, is no mere semantic slip; it is really the way people who live here understand their lived environment. 2 Municipalities are often less meaningful than neighborhood associations, county affiliations, and regional attachments (“the desert,” “the hills,” “the Valley,” Orange County, Venice Beach, South Bay, Echo Park, etc.), film and television’s influence notwithstanding. Regionalism is not new for those studying the West but scholars are increasingly returning to it as a framing device to contain Los Angeles’s unwieldy scale.
One of the reasons for why Los Angeles may have lost (or never actually earned) a coherent urban identity is that its modern industrial growth, spectacular in its pace and magnitude, was effectively packaged in the guise of a natural, pastoral garden. 3 Well documented in the southern California literature, booster interests did a superb job of selling the region in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth as an uncrowded garden of modern conveniences lacking the problems of urban industrial centers elsewhere. 4 A complex system of industrial development, social relations, and cultural representation evolved to support such an image of southern California, its concomitant economy, and the surrounding built environment.
The six books under review here each contribute an important chapter to the history of southern California’s cultural and economic development. What unites these narratives, which range from Mexican agricultural labor struggles to suburban middle-class claims to a white, rural heritage, from the prowess of the Southern Pacific railroad to the building of the Los Angeles harbor, is the contradictory process of modernizing the region. In each work, a tension exists between popular representations of southern California and the machinery of urban development—much of the region’s rapid industrial and agricultural growth is ironically premised on selling nostalgia for an Edenic, premodern landscape. Even the works that do not explicitly address regional boosterism nevertheless articulate competing, and often conflicting, ideas of what modern southern California means.
Douglas Cazaux Sackman’s marvelous Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden approaches the history of southern California as a treatment of nature, in the untouched, pastoral sense of “nature” and the essential, biological sense of the “natural.” In examining the cultural and social politics of the orange industry, Sackman reveals the heightened degree to which concepts of “nature” played a role in an inherently unnatural, modern landscape. This is not a capricious position to be taking. As Sackman writes, “from the 1880s through World War II, the citrus industry was the primary engine of the growth machine in Southern California” (p. 5). Yet this machine, which corporatized agriculture, created modern commercial advertising, and shaped regional labor practices, had a significant stake in upholding an image of itself as merely cultivating the fruits of abundance that nature lay in its path. The reason for such “ideological slights of hand” was to obscure the human labor that harvested the fruit and to naturalize the inequitable social relations that relegated a majority Mexican and Mexican American labor force to the fields for life. The effects were twofold: (1) to render an exploitative labor system, and its workers, invisible to a growing white majority and (2) construct an image of southern California as wealthy, leisurely, abundant in resources, and free of the troubles of eastern industrial centers, namely mass immigration and labor strife.
Such obvious contradictions between representation and reality precipitated crises and schisms that even Sunkist’s masterfully produced propaganda could not hide or resolve. Sackman spends a good bit of time in Orange Empire laying out the mechanism by which the agricultural advertising cooperative founded in 1893 as the California Fruit Growers Exchange and renamed Sunkist in 1905 spread news of its wares: “Its iconography appeared almost everywhere: on the picturesque labels of the forty million crates of citrus shipped each year; on the sides of speedboats; on billboards, street cars, and railroad cars; in school curricula; in essay contests; in retail outlet displays; in pamphlets distributed by doctors; on the pages of America’s most popular magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post; and on the radio airwaves” (p. 96).
More than simply advertising citrus, Sunkist played a role in creating the modern urban consumer experience. Oranges were not, of course, only marketed in southern California. The point of all the pictures of bloated, succulent fruit and radio jingles was to create a national, urban market for a West Coast product. In one of the many ironies outlined in the book, the effort to sell Americans on “nature” and “natural health” was grounded in a pronounced Sunkist presence in urban environments. Thus, orange neon lights illuminated the Sunkist name over millions of Coney Island visitors; in 1932, more than a thousand billboards were plastered over eleven cities; street car passengers could read Sunkist advertising while they rode to their destination; and elaborate displays in store windows sold oranges to urban foot traffic. As Sackman puts it, “competing with other advertisers, Sunkist tried to dominate the process through which city dwellers made their urban jungles into a forest of symbols, implanting a diverse crop of signs showing the way to those sites—the soda fountain and the grocery store—where wages could be exchanged for golden treasures” (p. 102). These advertising campaigns were no benign visual pleasure; Sunkist effectively colonized urban spaces, marketing consumer goods as key to social progress and “by using legitimating stories of medical science and playing on cultural fears of disease, Sunkist configured nature’s oranges as a vital ingredient for the health and growth of the nation” (p. 114).
Southern California’s citrus workers certainly understood the conflict between the nature in which they worked (soil, water, sun, crop) and the naturalizing social processes that kept them tied to the land and unable to easily move up the socioeconomic ladder. Sackman convincingly traces the physicality of work in the orange empire, from the climbing up and down of ladders, the stooping to pick fallen fruit, the waxing of the orange peel to preserve its “natural” look, and the care in packing the oranges in individual twists of tissue paper to ensure safe delivery to the urban marketplace. Racist concepts of the organic relationship of worker to crop pervaded the industry, nowhere more obviously than managers’ preference for white women handlers of the finished product to assuage concerns “that a perception of Mexicanas handling the fruit might spoil the image” (p. 146). This “image,” of course, might literally be a milk-skinned maiden pasted to the side of a produce crate but what really needed careful preservation was the aura of sun-kissed natural bounty barely touched by human hands.
The protective bubble of Sunkist’s carefully manufactured imagery was ultimately punctured by the Great Depression when striking workers were violently harassed by law enforcement, Dorothea Lange published devastating images of conditions in the fields, and Upton Sinclair’s EPIC gubernatorial campaign to socialize the California economy challenged the hegemony of agribusiness. The contradictions of citrus capitalism were too pronounced to stay forever hidden but it was not the challenges of labor and cries for social justice that brought down the orange empire; it was the machine of urban development that paved over thousands of acres of orange groves to make way for subdivisions and highways.
The citrus workers whose laboring bodies are so central to Sackman’s Orange Empire are given voices and souls in José M. Alamillo’s Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880-1960. Here, Alamillo relays the story of Corona, a suburb of Los Angeles, and historically an Inland Empire company town. Rather than replicate the broad sweep of Sackman’s work, Alamillo focuses on the social and cultural system that emerged from a type of land speculation called “colony settlement,” in which wealthy investors shared an agricultural tract, subdivided it among themselves, and created an economy that supported the growth of entire towns. Demographically homogenous, these colony settlements defined much of the southern California citrus belt. One of the effects of such a close-knit infrastructure was an ability to make real the racial fantasies portrayed on the citrus labels. For example, Corona aggressively excluded the Chinese labor force that fueled the economies of other citrus towns, proclaiming a “‘white’ racial identity and [seeking] to create a community that reflected their deeply rooted Protestant Christian mores and temperance beliefs” (p. 15).
The modern lemon industry emerged from this highly racialized, capitalist venture. The climate of Riverside County proved especially amenable for lemon cultivation and by the late 1880s, the Santa Fe Railroad had extended its line to Corona, opening up the region to eastern markets. Once the refrigerated boxcar was introduced, an innovation that also revolutionized the orange industry, Corona growers could ship large quantities; by 1916 Corona was the leading U.S. shipper of lemons, with more than four thousand carloads a year (p. 17). The big difference between the orange and lemon industries, of course, was that it was much harder to market a bitter fruit as a daily consumable. And, in fact, lemons were sold more for citrus pectin (used as a jelling agent), flavoring, and beauty products than for juice. Nevertheless, Sunkist went to work sexing up lemon fruit with “dancing senoritas wearing low-cut dresses or short skirts and sporting wide lipstick smiles who resembled the stereotypical spicy, hot-blooded, untamable Latin temptress” (p. 22). Whereas Sunkist oranges were to be handled by white nymphets, lemons, it would seem, were to be subject to more tawdry treatment.
Central to Alamillo’s analysis, however, is not the representation of Mexican workers but the world they eked out for themselves amid an exploitative labor system and a paternalistic social structure. The industrial agricultural growth of the Inland Empire was based on the sweat of mostly Mexican and Italian immigrants. Southern California had long relied on immigrant workers from south of the U.S. border but the influx of Italians was directly related to lemon cultivation. Sicily had been one of the largest exporters of lemons in the world until the United States cut off Italian imports in the early 1900s. Soon thereafter, Italian lemon workers left their homeland to seek work in the fields of Riverside County. These two groups lived and worked together although acrimony erupted during especially contentious strikes in the 1930s.
The most fascinating part of Alamillo’s book is his recovery of the cultural world of the agricultural company town. Situated in the middle of Progressive Era efforts to forge assimilation through play, growers encouraged the formation of sports leagues and recreational activities as a way to mold their workforce and undermine any emergent activist impulses. He writes that “as militant labor unions made inroads among immigrant workers during World War I, industrial and agricultural companies stepped up efforts to counter labor unions by offering recreation programs. One of the leading producers of agricultural fruit in the country, [Sunkist], organized a sophisticated corporate welfare system that included Americanization classes, a housing program, recreational facilities, and sports clubs. Sunkist officials encouraged growers to organize baseball clubs to improve workers’ physical fitness and mental preparedness for arduous, backbreaking field work” (p. 101). So while organized leisure activities, and especially baseball, were intended as manipulative social tools on the part of a paternalistic boss, the baseball diamond and the dance hall ultimately served as places where workers organized themselves, no mean feat given the lengths growers would go to disrupt labor activism.
After the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, agricultural workers were reclassified as industrial labor, facilitating organization efforts. Sunkist and other large agribusiness interests promptly formed company “unions” and used coercive tactics to keep citrus workers outside federal protection. Alamillo tells the riveting story of the 1941 strike in which lemon workers, some of whom “were seasoned baseball players who became labor organizers [and] activated their sporting networks for strike support” (p. 129). After weeks on the picket line, striking workers were subjected to mass arrests, crippling the strike and ending Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unionism in Corona. Despite this unsuccessful bid to unionize, Alamillo argues, the lemon workers used the networks they had created to fight for civil rights in the 1940s and 1950s and to ultimately gain a foothold in local politics. At the same time that Mexican Americans moved into city council positions and a stronger political role in the 1970s, the Corona area changed tremendously, evolving from a small, insular, agricultural town into yet another overdeveloped suburban bedroom community. The Exchange Lemon Products plant closed in 1982.
While neither Sackman nor Alamillo suggests that the citrus industry would have succeeded to the extent that it did without trains to move the fruits of immigrant labor, it is nevertheless startling to read such a celebratory account of the Southern Pacific Railroad as Richard J. Orsi’s epic, Sunset Limited. This massive six-hundred-page history based on three decades of research represents a magnanimous effort to examine “the complex impact of a large, powerful business corporation on the process of settlement, economic development, and environmental change in a frontier region” (p. xiii). Because he pointedly does not examine the labor struggles, politics, or tariff scandals that provoked much of the criticism of the Southern Pacific, Sunset Limited reads as a rather boosterish tome, particularly in the hundred or so pages dedicated to dispelling the “myths” of land grabs and credit scams. Instead of a predatory corporation that monopolized freight lines and controlled vast land holdings, Southern Pacific emerges a forgiving lender of farm loans and employer of lenient land agents who tirelessly worked to “forgive interest payments and grants extensions on mortgages and leases” (p. 83). Readers may be further surprised to learn, later in the book, that the railroad was also intrinsic to the creation of wilderness protection policy in the West.
Conciliatory tone aside, the work is magnificent in its scale. What emerges from Orsi’s years of work is the big-picture story of southern California’s modern settlement and infrastructural development. The advertising, for example, that Sackman and Alamillo analyze for its cultural and political implications, here is a force of colonization but also of modernization and entrepreneurial chutzpah. Orsi writes that to minimize the effect of land speculation outside the auspices of the Southern Pacific corporation, the railroad in the 1880s “coupled its expanded advertising with more effort to colonize lands, promote higher-density settlement, and modernize agriculture on the lands it sold. In response to widespread complaints that some of its buyers were slow to improve or subdivide their lands, the company in 1884 adopted new sales policies to encourage even more the rapid settlement and cultivations by actual farmers” (p. 111). These sales policies, of course, would be entwined with other corporate, development, and political interests. In his section on partnerships with other booster groups, Orsi explains how reliant the railroad actually was on the State Board of Trade, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, various California newspapers, as well as its own monthly publication, the still popular lifestyle magazine, Sunset. Meanwhile, the citrus industry, in particular, grew especially reliant on Southern Pacific in the 1880s to move and market its harvest once thousands of acres began to produce fruit far more quickly than it could be sold, outstripping demand and causing prices of a formerly precious commodity to tumble. To make citriculture profitable “required the development of an unprecedented marketing apparatus: complex, interlocking technological systems for processing, storing, refrigerating, and shipping; advertising strategies and mechanisms to cultivate, change, and then manage consumer tastes; and perhaps most important, new types of organization necessary to ensure efficient, profitable shipment and marketing and to coordinate the many, often divergent interest groups involved—growers, shippers, transportation companies, ice and equipment manufacturers, distributors, advertisers, and consumers. And all this apparatus had to operate over great distances and a wide geography to handle massive amounts of produce and at costs that made it accessible and profitable to all” (p. 318).
Beyond marketing and land sales, perhaps Southern Pacific’s most important effect on the built environment of the American West was water development and infrastructure. Orsi reminds us that the Southern Pacific crossed a great arid frontier that “abounded in soil, forest, and mineral resources, but popular growth and economic development, and hence railroad profits, hinged on water diversion, storage, and redistribution projects of unprecedented magnitude” (p. 170). Water, of course, was and remains the limited resource that challenges the developer’s dream of endless urban growth in the American Southwest and troubles the environmentalist’s hope for nature conservation. Orsi recounts how the Southern Pacific constructed its earliest waterworks in northern California in the late 1860s and, through the employment of the newest engineering innovations, dug deeper wells and built larger and larger pipelines until the railroad emerged in the 1920s as one of the largest and most organized water utilities in the West. Equally interesting sections on federal land reclamation and scientific agriculture round out the story of the railroad’s immense influence on the industrial, agricultural, and demographic development of the region. Ultimately, the Southern Pacific emerges from this narrative a hugely successful investor and triumphant innovator of modern corporate practice.
Another triumphant industrial dynasty is at the forefront of Tom Sitton’s new book, Grand Ventures. In a beautifully printed edition by the Huntington Library Press, this biography of Phineas Banning and his family weaves together a personal tale of entrepreneurial savvy with the economic development of southern California. One of the most striking features of this work is the author’s ability, despite the large amount of published material on southern California, to make the story new. Reminders of mid-1850s regional characteristics such as the vast undeveloped expanse of Los Angles County (more than 34,000 square miles!) and the recurrent problem of vigilante justice help us appreciate Banning’s ability to envision a modern urban future.
Banning settled in San Pedro but founded “New San Pedro” as a harbor interest in 1858 (naming it Wilmington, for his Delaware hometown, in 1863). Unlike many speculators, Banning staked less in real estate for its own sake than in the transportation of goods and people that made land valuable. His early investment in harbor development was cunning and he had every intention of dominating the shipping and transit industry from the start. He would “beat out his transportation competitors by offering a shorter and faster route from the harbor to Los Angeles. He further hoped, with the help of government grants, to create a more sheltered harbor than San Pedro by partially enclosing the inner harbor and then dredging it to accommodate larger ships. The expanding maritime trade lured by these improvements would, he predicted, enhance the value of land and facilities along the waterline, and further development would increase the price of lots in the surrounding subdivisions of commercial and residential real estate. Thus, the venture held the promise of vast profits from trade, transport, and real estate alike” (p. 63).
During the Civil War, Banning and his older brother, William, supported the Union army. Ever true to his own self-interest, Phineas never saw combat but contributed to the war effort through his business connections. He helped move army supplies along his various transportation conduits and secured building contracts that proved personally lucrative long after the war was over. While pitched military battles focused much of the nation’s attention elsewhere, he embarked on what has to be one of the earliest petroleum extraction enterprises in California. Forming the Los Angeles Pioneer Oil Company in February 1865, the venture proved unsuccessful as they drilled in all the wrong places. The effort, however, was not in vain as Banning’s group of investors helped lay the groundwork for future oil enterprises.
Railroads too caught Banning’s eye as key to growing his transportation dynasty and, while he would never become one of California’s great magnates, he stood to gain as long as trains ran near his corporate ventures. He initially invested heavily in the successful Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad, following it with a narrow-gauge steam railroad intended to run between Wilmington and Arizona. This second venture did not come to fruition, mostly because of Southern Pacific’s plan to run a rail along a similar path and to build southward from the Central Valley over the Tehachapi and into Los Angeles County. Along with other wealthy civic leaders, Banning had a vested interest in getting that line as close to the city of Los Angeles as possible. In a friendly rejoinder to Orsi’s depiction of the Southern Pacific, Sitton reminds his readers that the railroad demanded hefty local subsidies if cities along the route were not to be bypassed. Thus Banning and a “Committee of Thirty” rallied support for a huge Los Angeles payday for Southern Pacific including stocks, land for a depot, a spur line, and additional pricey perks. Loud opposition from rich taxpayers was soon heard but once San Diego put in a respectable bid that, if accepted, would have relegated Los Angeles to second-city status, the pieces fell into place. The money was coughed up and Southern Pacific agreed to extend its line to Los Angeles, completing construction in 1876 just in time, it seems, for the citrus groves to bloom. While boosters argued that the railroad was well worth the taxpayers’ subsidy, “the Southern Pacific would refuse to pay its fair share of taxes in the coming years and would offend, among others, many of its 1872 supporters. The Southern Pacific’s interference in local and state politics for decades to come would reveal all of its economic and political power, and its arrogance in using it” (p. 113). In Sitton’s account, the Southern Pacific loses the beneficent qualities that Orsi’s Sunset Limited generously imbues the railroad.
After Phineas’s death in 1885, his sons continued to lead the Banning harbor interests, helping to lay the foundations of what would become one of the busiest ports in the world. Here, Sitton focuses attention on the Bannings’ shift toward a new enterprise: tourism. Purchasing Santa Catalina Island in 1892, they developed a high-end resort that attracted both health seekers and rich globetrotters. The objective in developing Catalina was less to profit directly from resort expenditures and the service industry than to make money shuttling visitors and residents to and from the island. Monopolizing the transit end of an industry again proved highly lucrative although family squabbles and a disastrous fire led the Bannings to eventually divest their interest in the island, selling it to the chewing-gum magnate, William Wrigley Jr., in 1919. While little attention is paid to the cutthroat wheeling and dealing of such a successful entrepreneurial family, including the Bannings’ stalwart support of the open-shop and aggressive antiunion tactics, Grand Ventures tells the story of how key parts of the modern industrial economy of southern California were put in place. Phineas Banning’s understanding of transit’s value was certainly prophetic given the global significance of the port today and our contemporary transportation concerns in the Southland.
Not far below the surface of all this industrialism is a cronyism that corrupted politics at all levels and contributed to the socioeconomic inequality that defined the lives of most southern California residents. The specifics of this corruption are not explicitly addressed in any of these books but the effort to clean it up is the subject of Sitton’s earlier work, Los Angeles Transformed. The old political system first met resistance from the progressive reformers of the early twentieth century and then encountered the more strident urban reforms of Fletcher Bowron’s administration in the 1930s and 1940s. Framing the narrative as Los Angeles’s great modern moment, Sitton explores Bowron’s struggles to reshape the city for the public good. Mayor during the Great Depression, World War II, and through the postwar period of enormous industrial, demographic, and suburban growth, Bowron “bridged the gap in the development of Los Angeles from a regional center to a national powerhouse, helping to transform its politics from a personal style to a modern form” (p. xv). Sitton recounts the reform objectives of the early twentieth century, when progressives sought to wrestle control of utilities away from private interests and place them under municipal auspices. The reformers were unsuccessful in gaining public ownership of gas and telephone systems but they did gain control of waterworks, the harbor, and hydroelectric power. Previous mayor Frank Shaw, a centrist Republican, brought the New Deal to Los Angeles but was still too much a part of the old system of city bosses and too friendly with the notoriously corrupt Los Angeles Police Department for many local residents. Sitton argues that a much stronger leftist coalition of political interests emerged in the late 1930s, one that was powerful enough to recall Shaw and replace him with the CIO-backed Bowron. All of the hallmarks of Sitton’s scholarship are present here: meticulous research, careful weaving of a historical narrative that draws connections between individual characters and the broader political context, and crisp prose. Sitton portrays Bowron as a sympathetic character who, while unable to usher in the big plans he sought, such as creating a borough system of government and protecting public housing for the working poor, cleaned up the vestiges of the old boys network, modernized the city, and implemented plans for future growth. The problem, of course, is that Los Angeles grew far beyond anything that Bowron, or any other mayor, could possibly imagine.
No matter how much southern California grows, or how (post)modern a society it becomes, the nostalgic pastoral retains a hold on the collective imagination. Fifteen years ago, William Fulton observed the irony that Los Angeles’s immense growth was premised on Angelenos’ antigrowth fantasy: “to fulfill their anti-urban dream, they relied on the growth machine to continue manufacturing faux-rural suburbs. But as new suburbs were created, the metropolis grew bigger and more unmanageable, further and further from the ideal most residents carried in their heads while driving their pick-up trucks to work.” 5 In her provocative book, Making the San Fernando Valley, Laura Barraclough dubs this idea “rural urbanism” and applies it to the possessive investment in whiteness that accompanied a cloying concept of western heritage and private home ownership that shaped suburban settlement in the farthest reaches of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. 6
A sociologist well versed in the vocabulary of human geography and political economy, Barraclough argues that “seemingly mundane land-use practices such as zoning, community plans, infrastructure development, and heritage designations actively construct racial categories by producing unequal places and systems of places into which phenotypically distinct bodies are sorted” (p. 15). In historical terms, this means that over the last hundred years or so, as southern Californians have taken up residence in the San Fernando Valley, many have staked their claim to a piece of the American frontier experience. In campaigning to protect horse trails, putting wagon wheels on their lawn, and running around in cowboy boots, Valley dwellers not only cling to the fantasy that they are truly living outside an urban environment they also, according to Barraclough, build an impenetrable wall of white racial identification that excludes minorities while propping up land values. She traces the history of conservative whiteness in the San Fernando Valley from the gentlemen farmer “Little Landers,” an early twentieth-century agricultural cooperative, through the so-called Tax Revolt of 1978, and ending with contemporary efforts to protect ranchers’ land rights. Barraclough is persuasive that calls to protect the rural, “western” nature of the Valley camouflage a malevolent impulse to exclude racial minority groups and, even worse in the minds of investors, renters from single-family residential neighborhoods with eye-popping real estate values. Echoing urban theorists’ case for the spatial reproduction of racialized economic relationships, she argues that “majority-white neighborhoods, through their concentration of wealth and other privileges, ensure that future generations of white children and young adults will continue to benefit from the range of opportunities and resources available to their parents” (p. 188). Barraclough’s work, while fascinating, will possibly frustrate urban historians because it characterizes only one aspect of the San Fernando Valley experience. What about the crass consumer capitalism for which the region is so famous? (“Valley Girl,” anyone?) The multibillion-dollar pornography industry that places the Valley at the center of a global sex trade? The vast tracts of subdivisions, “dingbats,” or cheap apartments, and strip malls that are not white and rich? While the San Fernando Valley perhaps does reveal a uniquely southern California form of regional racism, the account told here of the relationship between private home ownership and white constructions of citizenship will sound very familiar to scholars of American suburban history.
Together, these works reflect the tremendous economic and cultural influence of this part of the country and the immense physical and ideological labor that it took to build it. They contribute varied methodological approaches to U.S. urban history and gesture toward a broad urban studies scholarship that can incorporate the municipal into the regional with losing touch of the subtleties that make place meaningful.