Modern history of Los Angeles

For the main article, see Los Angeles.

The history of Los Angeles, California, begins in the 18th century with a tiny Spanish settlement.

General history

Spanish and Mexican era 1769–1850

Main articles: Pueblo de Los Angeles and Los Angeles Pobladores

The "Old Plaza Church" facing the Plaza, 1869. The brick reservoir in the middle of the Plaza was the original terminus of the Zanja Madre.

Tradition has it that on September 4, 1781 the 44 pobladores gathered at San Gabriel Mission and, escorted by a military detachment and two padres from the Mission, set out for the site that Franciscan missionary and explorer Juan Crespí had chosen twelve years earlier. The small town received the name El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles sobre el Río Porciúncula, Spanish for "The Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels on the Porciuncula River." The name was derived from that of Santa Maria degli Angeli (Italian: "Holy Mary of the Angels"), a town near Assisi, hometown of St. Francis, and the location of his chapel, the Porziuncola. The Church of Our Lady Queen of the Angels would be the heart of the community.

Initial growth 1850-1913

Los Angeles was incorporated as an American city on April 4, 1850.

Some of the residents resisted the new Anglo powers by resorting to social banditry against the gringos. In 1856, Juan Flores threatened Southern California with a full-scale revolt. He was hanged in Los Angeles in front of 3,000 spectators. Tiburcio Vasquez, a legend in his own time among the Mexican-born population for his daring feats against the Anglos, was captured in what is believed to be present-day West Hollywood. He was found guilty of two counts of murder by a San Jose jury in 1874, and was hanged there in 1875. Los Angeles had several active Vigilance Committees during that era. Between 1850 and 1870, mobs carried out approximately 35 lynchings, more than four times the number that occurred in San Francisco.

An 1887 aerial photo of Los Angeles, taken from a balloon.

The thriving Chinatown was the site of terrible violence on October 24, 1871. A gunfight between rival Chinese factions over the abduction of a woman resulted in the accidental death of a white man. This enraged the bystanders, and a mob of about 500 Anglos and Latinos descended on Chinatown. They randomly lynched 18 Chinese men and boys, only one of whom may have been involved in the original killing. Homes and businesses were looted. Only ten rioters were tried. Eight were convicted of manslaughter, but their convictions were overturned the following year on a legal technicality. This was later referred to as the Chinese Massacre of 1871.

In the 1870s, Los Angeles was still little more than a village of 5,000. By 1900, there were over 100,000 occupants of the city. Several men actively promoted Los Angeles, working to develop it into a great city and to make themselves rich. Angelenos set out to remake their geography in order to challenge San Francisco with its port facilities, railway terminal, banks and factories. The Farmers and Merchants Bank was the first incorporated bank in Los Angeles, founded in 1871 by John G. Downey and Isaias W. Hellman.

Rail transportation

The first railroad in what is today Los Angeles was inaugurated in October 1869 and ran on a 21-mile stretch between the City of San Pedro and Los Angeles. But the town continued to grow at a moderate pace until it attained railway connection with the Central Pacific and San Francisco in 1876, and with the East by the Santa Fe system (through its subsidiary California Southern Railroad) in 1885. The completion of the latter line precipitated one of the most extraordinary of American railway wars and land booms, which resulted in giving southern California a great stimulus.

Phineas Banning excavated a channel out of the mud flats of San Pedro Bay leading to Wilmington in 1871. Banning had already laid track and shipped in locomotives to connect the port to the city. Harrison Gray Otis, founder and owner of the Los Angeles Times, and a number of business colleagues embarked on reshaping southern California by expanding that into a harbor at San Pedro using 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" investors in the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific. (The "Big Four" are sometimes numbered among the "robber barons" of the Gilded Age). The line reached Los Angeles in 1876 and Huntington directed it to a port at Santa Monica, where the Long Wharf was built.

The San Pedro forces eventually prevailed (though it required Banning to turn his railroad over to the Southern Pacific) 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, using a long, narrow corridor of land to connect them with the rest of the city.

Oil discovery

Oil was discovered by Edward L. Doheny in 1892, near the present location of Dodger Stadium. Los Angeles became a center of oil production in the early 20th century (by 1923 the region was producing one-quarter of the world's total supply, and it is still a significant producer).

Water from a distance

In order to sustain future growth, the city needed new sources of water. The only local water in Los Angeles was the intermittent Los Angeles River and groundwater replenished by the area's minimal rain. Legitimate concerns about water supply were exploited to gain backing for a huge engineering and legal effort to bring more water to the city and allow more development. 250 miles (400 km) northeast of Los Angeles in Inyo County, near the Nevada state 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 eastern Sierra Nevada that collected in the shallow, saline Owens Lake, where it evaporated.

Photograph of Bunker Hill in 1900, looking northeast from today's Pershing Square

Sometime between 1899 and 1903, Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law successor, Harry Chandler, engaged in successful efforts at buying up cheap land on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. At the same time, they enlisted the help of William Mulholland, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Water Department (later the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power or LADWP), and J.B. Lippencott, of the United States Reclamation Service. Lippencott performed water surveys in the Owens Valley for the Service while secretly receiving a salary from the City of Los Angeles. He succeeded in persuading Owens Valley farmers and mutual water companies to pool their interests and surrender the water rights to 200,000 acres (800 km²) of land to Fred Eaton, Lippencott's agent and a former mayor of Los Angeles. Lippencott then resigned from the Reclamation Service, took a job with the Los Angeles Water Department as assistant to Mulholland, and turned over the Reclamation Service maps, field surveys and stream measurements to the city. Those studies served as the basis for designing the longest aqueduct in the world.

By July 1905, the Times began to warn the voters of Los Angeles that the county would soon dry up unless they voted bonds for building the aqueduct. 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, and with a special Act of Congress allowing cities to own property outside their boundaries, the City acquired the land that Eaton had acquired from the Owens Valley farmers and started to build the aqueduct. On the occasion of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct on November 5, 1913 Mullholland's entire speech was five words: "There it is. Take it."

Pacific Electric Railway

The growth of Los Angeles in this period, and the initial establishment of suburbs, transportation corridors and commuting patterns, was influenced to a great extent by the Pacific Electric Railway, the electrically powered passenger and freight railway established by Collis P. Huntington's nephew, Henry Huntington, in 1901. The Pacific Electric was the largest electrically operated railway in the world at its peak, with over 1,000 miles of trackage, and passengers could take interurban trains from locations as far afield as San Fernando, Santa Monica, San Bernardino, Long Beach, and Newport Beach to central Los Angeles, with destinations over three counties.

Boom town 1913 - 1941

Wilson Block, Spring & First Streets, 1920

Notable events

The first round-the-world trip by airplane began on March 17, 1924 in adjoining Santa Monica. Four open cockpit planes built by Douglas Aircraft Company took 175 days to travel more than 26,000 miles before returning (one was destroyed in a crash, but the crew survived). Another round-the-world attempt also began locally, but ended in tragedy. On May 21, 1937 Amelia Earhart began her final, fatal trip at nearby Burbank Airport.

Los Angeles hosted the 1932 Summer Olympics. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which had opened in May, 1923 with a seating capacity of 76,000, was enlarged to accommodate over 100,000 spectators for Olympic events. It is still in use by the USC Trojans football team. Olympic Boulevard, a major thoroughfare, honors the occasion.

The devastating Griffith Park Fire on October 3, 1933, killed 29 and injured another 150 workers who were clearing brush in Griffith Park.

Annexations and consolidations

Christmas in downtown LA, 1928

Walkway and front façade of Los Angeles Public Library's Central Library, circa 1935

The City of Los Angeles mostly remained within its original 28 square-mile (73 km²) landgrant until the 1890s. The original city limits are visible even today in the layout of streets that changes from a north-south pattern outside of the original land grant to a pattern that is shifted roughly 15 degrees east of the longitude. The first large additions to the city were the districts of Highland Park and Garvanza to the north, and the South Los Angeles area. In 1906, the approval of the Port of Los Angeles and a change in state law allowed the city to annex the Shoestring, or Harbor Gateway, a narrow and crooked strip of land leading from Los Angeles south towards the port. The port cities of San Pedro and Wilmington were added in 1909 and the city of Hollywood was added in 1910, bringing the city up to 90 square miles (233 km²) and giving it a vertical "barbell" shape. Also added that year was Colegrove, a suburb west northwest of the city near Hollywood; Cahuenga, a township northwest of the former city limits; and a part of Los Feliz were annexed to the city.

The opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct provided the city with four times as much water as it required, and the offer of water service became a powerful lure for neighboring communities. The city, saddled with a large bond and excess water, locked in customers through annexation by refusing to supply other communities. Harry Chandler, a major investor in San Fernando Valley real estate, used his Los Angeles Times to promote development near the aqueduct's outlet. By referendum of the residents, 170 square miles (440 km²) of the San Fernando Valley, along with the Palms district, were added to the city in 1915, almost tripling its area, mostly towards the northwest. Over the next seventeen years dozens of additional annexations brought the city's area to 450 square miles (1,165 km²) in 1932. (Numerous small annexations brought the total area area of the city up to 469 square miles (1,215 km²) as of 2004.)

Most of the annexed communities were unincorporated towns but ten incorporated cities were consolidated into Los Angeles: Wilmington (1909), San Pedro (1909), Hollywood (1910), Sawtelle (1922), Hyde Park (1923), Eagle Rock (1923), Venice (1925), Watts (1926), Barnes City (1927), and Tujunga (1932).

Annexation references: Municipal Secession Fiscal Analysis Scoping Study www.valleyvote.net, Annexation and Detachment Map (PDF) lacity.org.

World War II and postwar 1941 - 1950

Listening post and air raid lights, Pershing Square, 1941

"Fifty years ago this house at 201 N. Flower St. was offered for rental at $20 a month. Today [1946] its four apartments are bringing in $70 monthly. -- LA Times, 5-7-46

During World War II, Los Angeles grew as a center for production of aircraft, war supplies and ammunitions. Thousands of African Americans and European American 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.

The famed urban sprawl of Los Angeles became a notable feature of the town, and the pace of the growth accelerated in the first decades of the 20th century. The San Fernando Valley, sometimes called "America's Suburb", became a favorite site of developers, and the city began growing past its roots downtown toward the ocean and towards the east.

This is also the time when General Motors persuaded most urban regions in North America to shut down their light rail street car systems and replace them for more flexible, but polluting and inefficient, bus systems. This drastically changed growth and travel patterns in the city in subsequent years and contributed to the severe air pollution events that Los Angeles became famous for.

The years 1950-2000

Beginning November 6, 1961, Los Angeles suffered three days of destructive brush fires. The Bel-Air—Brentwood and Santa Ynez fires destroyed 484 expensive homes and 21 other buildings along with 15,810 acres (64 km²) of brush in the Bel-Air, Brentwood, and Topanga Canyon neighborhoods. Most of the homes destroyed had wooden shake roofs, which not only led to their own loss but also sent firebrands up to three miles away. Despite this, few changes were made to the building codes to prevent future losses.

The repeal of a law limiting building height and the controversial redevelopment of Bunker Hill, which destroyed a picturesque though decrepit neighborhood, ushered in the construction of a new generation of sky scrapers. Bunker Hill's 62-floor First Interstate Building (later named Aon Center) was the highest in Los Angeles when it was completed in 1973. It was surpassed by the Library Tower (now called the U.S. Bank Tower) a few blocks to the north in 1990, a 310 m (1,018 ft) building that is the tallest west of the Mississippi. Outside of Downtown, the Wilshire Corridor is lined with tall buildings, particularly in the vicinity of Westwood. Century City, developed on the former 20th Century Fox back lot, has become another center of high-rise construction on the Westside.

During the latter decades of the 20th century, the city saw an increase in gang warfare. At the same time, crack cocaine became wildly available during the 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the city saw a decrease in crime and gang violence through the process of gentrification and urban development in many neighborhoods.

A subway system, developed and built through the 1980s as a major goal of mayor Tom Bradley, stretches from North Hollywood to Union Station and connects to light rail lines that extend to the neighboring cities of Long Beach, Norwalk, and Pasadena, among others. Also, a commuter rail system, Metrolink, has been added that stretches from nearby Ventura and Simi Valley to San Bernardino, Orange County, and Riverside. The funding of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority project is funded by a half cent tax increase added in the mid 1980s, which yields $400 million every month. Although the regional transit system is growing, subway expansion was halted in the 1990s over methane gas concerns, political conflict, and construction and financing problems during Red Line Subway project, which culminated in a massive sinkhole on Hollywood Boulevard. As a result, the original subway plans have been delayed for decades as light rail systems, dedicated busways, and limited-stop "Rapid" bus routes have become the preferred means of mass transit in LA's expanding series of gridlocked, congested corridors.

The 1995 murder of Stephanie Kuhen in Los Angeles led to condemnation from President Bill Clinton and a crackdown on Los Angeles-area gangs.

Economic changes

In the last fifty years, Los Angeles has lost much of the industry it developed earlier in the 20th century. The last of the automobile factories shut down in the 1990s; the tire factories and steel mills left earlier. Most of the agricultural and dairy operations that were still prospering in the 1950s have moved to outlying counties while the furniture industry has relocated to Mexico and other low-wage nations. Aerospace production has dropped significantly since the end of the Cold War or moved to states with better tax conditions, and the entertainment industry has found cheaper areas to produce films, television programs and commercials elsewhere in the United States and Canada. However, many studios still operate in Los Angeles, such as CBS Television City at the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard, 20th Century Fox in Century City, NBC-Universal and Disney in Burbank, Universal Studios in Universal City, and Burbank Studios on Olive Avenue in Burbank, as well as other films that use Los Angeles for certain parts. While Los Angeles remains a major center for garment production, it has become far more dependent on the service sector.

Those macroeconomic changes have brought major social changes with them. While unemployment dropped in Los Angeles in the 1990s, the newly created jobs tended to be low-wage jobs filled by recent immigrants and other exploitable populations; by one calculation, the number of poor families increased from 36% to 43% of the population of Los Angeles County during this time. At the same time, the number of immigrants from Mexico, Central America and Latin America has made Los Angeles a "majority minority" city that will soon be majority Latino. The unemployment rate dropped from 6.9% to 6.8% in 2002, and is around 6% currently.

The desire for residential housing in the downtown area has been noticed, and several historical buildings have been renovated as condos (while maintaining the original outside design), and many new apartment and condominium towers and complexes are being built.

On 10 November 2004, the Daily News reported plans to turn the north-east San Fernando Valley into an industrial powerhouse, which would provide new and more jobs.

Demographic changes

Many communities in Los Angeles have changed their ethnic character over time. Before the 1970s, the city was overwhelmingly white but had become increasingly diverse in recent decades. Watts, which started out as an Anglo community but then became predominantly black, is now mainly Latino. Compton, which lies outside of the City of Los Angeles, but within the County of Los Angeles, and which has gained a certain notoriety through rap music from N.W.A. and other groups, is also increasingly Latino. While the Latino community within the City of Los Angeles was once centered on the Eastside, it now extends throughout the city. The San Fernando Valley, which represented a bastion of white flight in the 1960s and provided the votes that allowed Sam Yorty to defeat the first election run by Tom Bradley, is now as ethnically diverse as the rest of the city on the other side of the Hollywood Hills.

By the end of the 20th century, some of the annexed areas began to feel cut off from the political process of the megalopolis, leading to a particularly strong secession movement in the San Fernando Valley and weaker ones in San Pedro and Hollywood. The referendums to split the city were rejected by voters in November 2002.

Population growth

The population of Los Angeles reached more than 100,000 with the 1900 census (Los Angeles Evening Express, October 1, 1900), more than a million in 1930, more than two million in 1960, and more than 3 million in 1990.

Year	Population
1790	131
1800	315
1810	365
1820	650
1830	1,300
1840	2,240
1850	1,610
1860	4,385
1870	5,730
1880	11,200
1890	50,400
1900	102,500
1910	319,200
1920	576,700
1930	1,238,048
1940	1,504,277
1950	1,970,358
1960	2,479,015
1970	2,816,061
1980	2,966,850
1990	3,485,398
2000	3,694,820

The 2006 population estimate for Los Angeles by the U.S. Census Bureau is 3,849,378.[1]

Sources: Historical Population Data of California; Historical Resident Population of Los Angeles during the Spanish & Mexican Period, 1781 to 1840

Special topics in Los Angeles history

African-Americans in Los Angeles

Los Angeles had 2,100 African-Americans in 1900, according to census figures, and by 1920 approximately 15,000. In 1910, the city had the highest percentage of black home ownership in the nation, with more than 36 percent of the city's African-American residents owning their own homes. Negro leader W.E.B. Dubois wrote in 1913 that "Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed."

In the 1940s, a booming defense industry, and the need for additional workers, brought increasing numbers of African-Americans to the city, and by 1965, the black population had multiplied ten times since 1950.

The Watts riots of 1965 began with a minor traffic incident and lasted four days. Thirty-four people were killed and 1,034 injured at a cost of $40 million in property damage and looting. So many businesses burned on 103rd Street that it became known as "Charcoal Alley."

While the city and county did take some steps to deal with the lack of social services for the black community after the Watts riots — most visibly by building a county hospital to serve the community — in many ways things only got worse over the next quarter century as the drug trade and gang warfare increased.

In 1992, a jury in suburban Simi Valley acquitted Los Angeles city police officers involving in the beating of a motorist, Rodney King, the year before. After four days of rioting, more than fifty deaths, and billions of dollars of property losses, mostly in the Central City, the National Guard and the police finally regained control.

Since the 1980s, more middle-class black families have left the central core of Los Angeles to settle elsewhere. In 1970, blacks made up 18 percent of the city's population, but in 2000 they made up 11 percent.

Mexicans, Pachucos, Chicanos and Latinos in Los Angeles

Template:Totally-disputed-section A steady migration of Mexicans to California from 1910 to 1930 expanded the Mexican and Chicano population in Los Angeles to approximately 200,000. In 1930, the United States began expelling them, deporting over a half a million Mexicans and Chicanos from California and 13,332 from Los Angeles County in the 1930s. At the same time, the city celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1931 with a grand "fiesta de Los Angeles" featuring a blond "reina" in an historical ranchera costume.

During World War II, hostility toward Mexican-Americans took a different form, as local newspapers portrayed Chicano youths, who sometimes called themselves "pachucos" as barely civilized gangsters. Anglo servicemen attacked young Chicanos dressed in the pachuco uniform of the day: long coats with wide shoulders and pleated, high-waisted, pegged pants, or zoot suits, in 1943. Twenty-two young Chicanos were convicted of a murder of another youth at a party held at a swimming hole southeast of Los Angeles known as the "sleepy lagoon" on a warm night in August 1942; they were eventually freed after an appeal that demonstrated both their innocence and the racism of the judge conducting the trial.

In the 1990s, redistricting led to the election of Latino members of the City Council and the first Latino members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors since its inception. With the growth of the Latino community, primarily immigration from Mexico, but also from Central America and South America, it is now the largest ethnic bloc in Los Angeles. City Council member Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor in 2005, the first Latino elected to that office since the 1872.

Asians in Los Angeles

Less than a century after the founding of Los Angeles, Chinatown was a thriving community adjacent to the downtown railroad depot. Thousands of Chinese came to northern California in the 1850s, initially to join the Gold Rush and then taking construction jobs with the railroads. They began moving south as the transcontinental railroad linked Los Angeles with the rest of the nation. The town’s continuous Chinese presence dates from 1850, when two house servants, Ah Luce and Ah Fon, appeared in the census. The Chinese population increased to 16 in 1860 and 178 in 1870. At that time, eighty percent of the Chinese residents were male, and most worked as launderers, cooks and vegetable peddlers.

Later, Chinese workers who helped to build the aqueduct to the Owens River and worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley spent their winters in a segregated ethnic enclave in Los Angeles. In 1871, eleven years before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a violent anti-Chinese demonstration swept through Los Angeles' Chinatown killing Chinese residents and plundering their dry good stores, laundries and restaurants.

The labor vacuum created by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was filled by Japanese workers and, by 1910, the settlement now known as "Little Tokyo" had risen next to Chinatown. By the eve of World War I, many Japanese farm laborers had saved sufficient funds to purchase or lease vegetable and fruit farming lands in such outlying areas as Gardena, Beverly Hills and San Gabriel.

During the years between the two world wars, Los Angeles' Asian American community also included small clusters of Korean Americans and Filipinos, the latter filling the void which followed the exclusion of the Japanese in 1924.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government authorized the evacuation and incarceration in concentration camps of all Japanese living in California irrespective of citizenship. The Japanese in Southern California were to report to temporary barracks located at the Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, just east of Pasadena. Nearly 20,000 of the state's 93,000 Japanese Americans were confined in these quarters before being taken farther inland to the internment camps.

Since World War II, immigration from Asia and the Pacific has increased dramatically. The influx of immigrants from the Philippines, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia has led to the development of identifiable enclaves such as Koreatown in the central city, a Cambodian community in Long Beach, Samoans in Compton, Hawaiian Gardens and Wilmington, a Thai neighborhood in Hollywood, Vietnamese in Westminster (known as Little Saigon) and in Garden Grove in Orange County, Chinese in Monterey Park and nearby parts of the San Gabriel Valley and Japanese in Gardena.

Asian-Americans are now the third largest racial-ethnic group in Los Angeles, with Latinos and non-Latino whites being first and second, respectively.

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 changed, 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 1,200 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, Upton Sinclair 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.

Today, the ethnic makeup of the city and the politically progressive views of surrounding West Hollywood and Hollywood have made Los Angeles a strong union town. Still, many garment workers in central LA, most of whom are Mexican immigrants work in sweat shop conditions.

See also

• List of Registered Historic Places in Los Angeles

Other articles which contain relevant history sections.

• History of Southern California freeways
• Los Angeles Times
• History of the Los Angeles Police Department
• Los Angeles Fire Department History
• Port of Los Angeles
• History of Santa Monica
• History of Glendale
• History of Beverly Hills
• History of Long Beach

Articles on specific events in Los Angeles history

• Battle of Los Angeles
• California Water Wars
• Los Angeles mayoral election, 2005

Sources

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
• Spanish and Mexican history Source: University of Southern California Project: Los Angeles: Past, Present, and Future, 1996. Adopted by the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument.

Further reading

• Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso, 1990.
• Smith, Catherine Parsons. Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. (A social history covering c. 1887-1940)

External links

• Los Angeles in the 1900s, a collection of newspaper articles and illustrations from 1900 through 1909
• Famous Fires of the LAFD
• Historic Cemeteries of Los Angeles
• Wilshire Wonders: A History of Wilshire Boulevard (kcet.org)
• 1947 project After one year dedicated to 1947, the "1947project" blog shifted its focus to 1907 in L.A..