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.
Sometime between 1899 and 1903, Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law successor, Harry Chandler, led suffessful efforts at buying up cheap land on the outskirts of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. They then acquired control of the Ownens River and built an aqueduct, laregely 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 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.