as that of the eighties. Office buildings sprang up throughout the down-
town section, and over the ever-expanding area of the city, residences
of every architectural style were hastily put up. The peak of the build-
ing boom came in 1923 with the construction of 800 mercantile build-
ings, 400 industrial buildings, 60 hotels, 130 schools, 130 warehouses,
700 apartment houses and 25,000 single- and double-dwellings. As the
boom reached its dizziest heights, foot frontage prices doubled, tripled
and quadrupled. In 1923 alone, 1,057 tracts were put on the market
and 1 1, 608 acres were subdivided in the city. Similar booms hit sur-
rounding communities. Thousands of people became quickly and
often only temporarily wealthy.
With its population doubled in a little more than five years, the city
annexed one community after the other, most of them induced to come
in through their need of the water Los Angeles could supply. The
original twenty-eight square miles of the town, multiplied thirteenfold
by 1920, when the city stretched over a vast area from the Harbor to
San Fernando Valley, now was to leap forward to its present area of
450 square miles. In 1923, twelve annexations brought in 19,000 acres
of new city territory.
Accompanying the advertising campaigns of the booster organiza-
tions, the rapid influx of population and the building boom, industry on
a large scale began to come to Los Angeles after 1919. The county
had entered the manufacturing market with a $25,000,000 output in
1899, but by 1919 the annual production of $417,000,000 entitled it
to twenty-seventh rank among the Nation's industrial counties. The
only large industry had been motion pictures, already producing 80
per cent of the world supply. Now new and larger industries entered
PUEBLO TO METROPOLIS 57
the city, attracted by the cheap and abundant water, power, and natural
gas and oil, the excellent transportation facilities, the harbor, and the
large growing local market. One of the first large industries to come
was the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, which built a $6,000,000
plant in 1919. Throughout the twenties others followed, and in 1922
the Central Manufacturing District was formed in the city of Vernon,
previously incorporated for industrial purposes exclusively. In 1924,
the growth of new industry fell off, yet 700 new industries were estab-
lished in that year. With the coming of the Firestone and Goodrich
Tire companies in 1927, Los Angeles became the country's second rub-
ber center. Later came the aircraft and automobile assembly plants.
Established industries expanded enormously. Oil production in the
county rose from 38,000,000 barrels in 1922 to 176,000,000 barrels
in 1929. Numerous new oil refineries were built, including Pan-
American Petroleum's $18,000,000 tank farm and refinery near the
harbor, and the Shell Oil Company's $10,000,000 plant. The Santa Fe
Springs oil field was developed successfully in 1919; the Huntington
Beach section was discovered in 1920, and the Signal Hill bonanza the
following year.
Los Angeles also became not only the richest agricultural county in
the United States, but one of the most diversified agricultural regions
as well. By 1935 every twenty- four hours saw at least one of the
county's 150 commercial crops being harvested and shipped. This agri-
cultural diversity gave the region a large degree of economic stability,
despite heavy citrus losses in 1937. The agricultural wealth for that
year was divided as follows: fruits and nuts, $39,927,207, livestock,
$35,195,895, truck crops, $10,398,035, and field crops, $7,055,215. The
total of all crops in Los Angeles county in 1939 was $76,074,000.
Citrus crops account for nearly one-third of the county's agricultural
income; there are nearly 45,000 acres of oranges, 12,000 acres of
lemons, and a smaller grapefruit acreage. In addition, Los Angeles
County is a leading producer of walnuts and avocados. There are
130,000 acres of field crops chiefly hay, grain, and beans and 50,000
acres producing twenty-four different truck crops, mainly green beans,
cabbage, cauliflower, celery, lettuce, and tomatoes.
Although Los Angeles has a success story that makes it the envy
of other aspiring communities, it has not entirely escaped misfortunes.
Development and growth of the region have been slowed down several
times by disaster, but in each case the interruptions have been only
temporary.
The region has been affected by earthquakes, some of which have
resulted in loss of life and damage to property. The average Angeleno
regards an earth tremor with less apprehension than persons elsewhere
regard a severe electrical storm or a tornado. Of the quakes that have
58 LOS ANGELES
visited southern California during recent years, three have been severe
enough to result in loss of life and in property damage. In 1920 a
tremor struck Inglewood, and part of the business district was damaged.
Probably the most severe quakes experienced in this region were those
of 1925, in Santa Barbara, and 1933 in Long Beach, Compton, and the
surrounding cities.
The Long Beach-Compton tremor, in which 118 people were killed,
resulted in changes in the Los Angeles County building code ; even more
drastic restrictions now govern construction throughout the area. Other
southern California counties adopted similar measures. Laws enforcing
a height limit of 150 feet for buildings in Los Angeles proper have long
been in effect and represent an added safeguard against earthquake
damage.
The Los Angeles area has also had serious floods. Three of them,
separated by long periods of years, came after exceptionally heavy rain-
fall in the semiarid region and resulted in great damage. In 1914,
when precipitation reached record figures, the flood waters confined
themselves in most cases to the natural stream beds and damage was
small except to bridges and territory along stream beds. Damage was
much greater in 1934, when the waters rushing down the mountain
canyons swept over the La Crescenta Valley and the Montrose terri-
tory. Forty-five persons were drowned at this time. Four years later
heavy rains again fell in the region and the storm waters backed into
San Fernando Valley, causing heavy losses.
Perhaps the district's greatest disaster at least that in which the
largest loss of life was recorded occurred when the St. Francis Dam,
a unit of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, broke in 1928, .and released a wall
of water that swept down the Santa Clara River through Los Angeles
and Ventura counties, leaving 451 dead and $12,000,000 worth of
damage in its wake.
TROUBLE AHEAD
Los Angeles rushed through the decade of 1920-30 as a lushly pros-
perous, spectacular city. It was enjoying not only the nation-wide
prosperity of the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover era, but the prosperity of
a boom within a boom. Its prodigious motion-picture industry, the rise
of industry and building, its sensational real estate values, and the rush
of tourists and new residents, made it a mecca to workingmen and
businessmen alike. Los Angeles not only had an assessed valuation of
$2,000,000,000, bank debits of $14,000,000,000, and a harbor commerce
of approximately $1,000,000,000 in 1929; it was also gifted with a pros-
perity which touched most of its citizens. Investments with high re-
turns were available to all; nearly everyone had an automobile (there
PUEBLO TO METROPOLIS 59
were more motor vehicles per capita than in any other American city) ;
everybody was able to enjoy the sun, the climate, and the scenery.
As the prosperity wave reached its peak there were unrecognized
hints that Los Angeles, in common with the rest of the United States,
was to face bad times. Stock exchange transactions jumped from
27,000,000 shares in 1927 to 67,000,000 shares in 1928, and a series
of financial crashes began.
The first phase of the depression after the 1929 stock crash affected
Los Angeles much as it did other cities. Business slumped disastrously
and thousands lost their livelihood. Economic discussion came to the
fore. Public and private charities were swamped under demands for
help. By the spring of 1932, with relief utterly inadequate, the unem-
ployed in southern California began to respond to the depression in an
unusual manner.
The first development was the self-help movement, which began in
Compton when the unemployed went to the fields to harvest crops the
farmers could not sell. Within a few weeks a self-help association had
been formed to give farmers labor in exchange for surplus crops, and to
swap labor with businessmen for surplus goods. The co-op members
gathered and distributed among themselves surplus vegetables, milk,
bread, gasoline, household goods, old clothing, and services. The move-
ment spread with astonishing speed, and by the spring of 1933 it was
enabling more than 200,000 persons to maintain themselves. Their
central organization operated fishing boats, lumber yards, canneries,
bakeries, repair plants, and other facilities. When Federal work relief
started, the jobless largely abandoned the co-operatives though some
small-scale production co-operatives, receiving state aid, survived for a
few years. By 1939 most of them had died out.
Los Angeles' next reaction to the depression was to originate pana-
ceas and movements, and turn to them with a zeal that astonished the
country. Late in 1933 Upton Sinclair, the author-Socialist, announced
his candidacy for governor in his EPIC (End Poverty in California)
platform, which proposed liberal pensions for the needy, high taxes on
wealth, and a "production for use" plan of putting the unemployed to
work on idle land and in idle factories "to take the unemployed off the
backs of the taxpayers." By August there were 2,000 EPIC clubs and
a weekly paper averaging 500,000 copies; more than a million copies of
Sinclair's leaflets were in circulation. After Sinclair was nominated
on the Democratic ticket, there broke forth one of the most furious
attacks ever leveled at an American political candidate. Sinclair was
defeated and the EPIC movement soon disintegrated.
Simultaneously with EPIC there sprang up the Utopian Society, a
secret organization whose members were initiated by "cycles." After
Sinclair's defeat the Utopian movement also died out. Technocrats
6O LOS ANGELES
flourished at about the same time, but never enlisted the wide support
of the other panacea promoters. In Long Beach Dr. Francis E. Town-
send started his transactions-tax pension scheme, and it, unlike the other
local movements, soon spread throughout the country.
THE FIFTH CITY
By 1935 Los Angeles was recovering economically. The county had
risen to fifth rank among industrial counties in the United States. More
than 140,000 workers were producing 2,300 classified products with an
annual value of more than $1,000,000,000. Los Angeles County led
the Nation in motion-picture production, oil refining, airplane manu-
facture, and secondary automobile assembly. It was second in the pro-
duction of tires, fourth in furniture, and fourth in women's apparel.
As in agriculture, industry was highly diversified; there were thirty
types of industrial plants, each with an annual production volume valued
at more than $5,000,000. Production of motion pictures remained the
chief industry. All of the "big four" rubber companies Goodyear,
Goodrich, Firestone, and United States Rubber operated plants in
Los Angeles, and assembly plants were operated by General Motors,
Ford, Chrysler, Studebaker, and Willys-Overland. Los Angeles air-
craft plants, newest of the industries and next to motion pictures the
largest employers of labor, turned out more than half the total value
of the Nation's airplane construction.
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Education
UNTIL after the American Occupation in 1847, tne Los Angeles
area had few schools. Education had no part in the coloniza-
tion policies of the Spanish or Mexican governments. The
purpose in establishing the first missions was twofold. The Spanish
Crown, customary with its policy throughout New Spain, sought to
elevate the native Indians of California from a state of savagery to
that of peaceful, law-abiding, and, more particularly, tax-paying and
revenue-producing subjects. The Franciscan fathers, while in accord
with this program, were interested primarily "in saving the souls of the
unfortunate benighted heathen."
At no time during the occupancy of the Province by the Spaniards,
nor to the end of the Mexican reign in 1847, and the first period of
American occupancy, was there a well-established system of schools.
Such instruction, other than teaching the Indians to tan hides, make
soap, weave, and harvest grain, was given by orders of succeeding gov-
ernors, only a few of whom were sincere in their efforts to educate the
inhabitants. But even this was spasmodic and short-lived. Not only
were the colonists, mostly of mixed blood and drawn from the humbler
ranks of Spanish colonial society, unable to read or write, but a similar
condition existed among those of the highest rank in officialdom down to
the noncommissioned officers and privates in the various presidios. The
sole school of mission days in the pueblo of Los Angeles, which had been
opened for a short time in 1817-18 by the last of the Spanish governors
but had fallen into disuse, was reopened in 1828. Governor Echeandia,
at the same time, ordered a similar school started at nearby San Gabriel
Mission. Governor Figueroa, his successor, inaugurated the first normal
school, and levied a tax to finance it. Governor Micheltorena instituted
compulsory school attendance for young children, also a school for girls.
With the American Occupation local public education really began.
Wherever he settled, the American pioneer installed "the little red
schoolhouse" and the cradle wherein modern California had its birth.
He had a full appreciation of the value bound between the covers of the
primer, grammar, and arithmetic, as the majority of his predecessors
had stressed the worth of spiritual development, contained in the doc-
tr'ma cristiana, to the exclusion of almost any intellectual advancement
beyond its crudely bound and well-worn pages. The first schoolmaster
was an army hospital steward, Dr. William B. Osborn, but the school
61
62 LOS ANGELES
was soon closed by the gold rush exodus. When the new state con-
stitution made provision for a public school term of three months, Los
Angeles undertook to establish one even before the state was able to
assist financially. Francisco Bustamente, the first teacher employed by
the city council, taught reading, writing and "morals" in Spanish; and
as other teachers arrived, English, along with supplementary subjects
for which the parents paid, was added. Schools taught by private
tutors, subsidized by the city, gave way to schools financed entirely by
the city. The first of the public schools opened in 1855, and had
separate classrooms for boys and girls. At first, the term was occa-
sionally shortened by lack of money. Later, the system of fees payment
by parents was gradually eliminated by the increase in state aid for city
schools.
After state law ended public support of parochial schools, the
Catholic clergy opened a collegiate school that was the first of many
denominational institutions of higher education to be established locally
within the next few years. St. Vincent's College, the nucleus of the
present Loyola University, was opened in 1865 and received a state
charter in 1869, the year in which the University of California was
opened. A public high school was established in 1873 and the Methodist
University of Southern California in 1879. With the waves of immi-
gration in the eighties and the growth of large private fortunes, sec-
tarianism in education receded and new institutions of higher learning
were established with private aid and few denominational ties. In
1887 men of wealth but no particular religious bias aided Presbyterians
to found Occidental College and Congregationalists to establish Pomona
College. In 1891 Whittier College was founded by Quakers, La Verne
College by the Church of the German Baptist Brethren and the Im-
maculate Heart College by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart.
The depression of the nineties hit these and other private institutions
severely, and caused them either to shut down or sharply to curtail their
operations. The state, which had been assisting the city schools to make
reasonable if less lavish progress, stepped into the breach. A Los An-
geles branch of the state normal school had been opened in 1883.- Laws
were now revised to permit communities to open high schools.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the Los Angeles school
system was not only adequate but well financed. Commercial and
industrial activity, moreover, steadily increased the demand for semi-
professional training. By 1911 post-high school courses precursors to
the junior college were offered in at least one secondary school. In
1919 a Los Angeles branch of the University of California was opened,
to offer a two-year liberal curriculum in addition to courses previously
given at the local normal school. Since the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury few private institutions of higher learning have been established,
EDUCATION 63
though in numerous communities of the county academies and other
private schools of various types have been opened.
The general public school system has expanded rapidly in the last
decade. In 1929 the first junior college was opened on the old campus
of the local branch of the University of California, which in that year
became the University of California at Los Angeles with a campus at
Westwood.
In 1938 there were approximately 400 public schools in the Los
Angeles school district, ranging from kindergartens to a city college.
State laws requiring minors to attend school have resulted in high school
education for nearly all the city's youth to the age of eighteen. In 1938
there were 23,047 children in kindergarten, 198,976 in 293 elementary
schools, 79,988 in 27 junior and senior high schools, and 5,197 in the
Los Angeles City College. The school plant in 1938 consisted of 931
permanent buildings and 1,647 tents, wooden bungalows, and other
temporary structures. During the period 1905-1937 inclusive, $94,-
213,000 in bonds was voted for new school buildings. In the county
there were a total of 739 public schools with an approximate enrollment
of 675,000.
The public schools of the Los Angeles school district are controlled
by a Board of Education composed of seven elected, unsalaried members.
The district today embraces a score or so of neighboring communities
and includes the western part of the county, with a population of ap-
proximately 2,000,000.
The Board of Education is entirely separate from the city govern-
ment, the school district being a governmental subdivision of the state.
The board has the power to levy taxes for financing the system and
manages all administrative and curricular matters, subject to state laws
and supervised by the State Superintendent of Education. A super-
intendent of schools, appointed by the board, in 1939 directed the
17,000 employees, which include 11,000 class-room teachers. The 1938
annual budget was approximately $41,000,000, of which about $17,000,-
ooo came from the State.
The county Board of Education administers schools in incorporated
and unincorporated areas outside the Los Angeles school district. The
members are named by the county Board of Supervisors, which also
must approve the county school budget.
The Los Angeles school system is yet in a transition stage and suffers
from various handicaps : the conservatism of some officials and of teachers
long in the service, lack of equipment, and large classes resulting from
very rapid increases in population. But the foundations of a sound
system have been laid. The schools have been largely freed from politi-
cal control and many of the sounder principles of modern education
have been adopted. Serious efforts are being made to replace the tents
64 LOS ANGELES
used in more congested districts with permanent buildings, despite the
diversion of funds for replacing and repairing buildings damaged by
the 1933 earthquake. The economic depression has also slowed up
progress; funds which would have been available for plant expansion
and salaries have been used to some extent to supplement philanthropic
donations for meals, and medical and dental care for pupils whose
parents were unable adequately to provide for them. In spite of these
impediments, the ideal of the system is to train children according to
their economic and social needs and their physical and mental abilities.
Contemporary education "seeks to be as informal as living and to
achieve a successful foundation for living." Serious attempts are made
to interest children in learning and to adapt instruction methods to
their interests ; in place of the old-fashioned competitive system has been
substituted one that grades the pupil on whether his ability and talents
are developing satisfactorily. Los Angeles schools also teach much that
was formerly acquired at home home-making, physical development,
and social responsibilities and relations.
Public education in Los Angeles now begins very early. Starting in
nursery schools and kindergartens, in the early grades there is directed
play and the children are made acquainted with such everyday subjects
as printing and gardening; at an early stage girls have the same oppor-
tunities as boys to learn about the world. In early grades girls may
design dresses, but in later grades they join the boys in discussing current
civic problems and local politics, and in visiting tire, airplane, and other
factories to learn industrial problems and processes. In junior and
senior high schools education is adapted to the needs of the students; a
school in a district where few go on to college offers trade and agri-
cultural training in place of the classics, dramatics, or highly specialized
"majors" taught in a Hollywood school. There are also special voca-
tional schools and schools for the mentally and physically handicapped.
Adult education in Los Angeles is not based on general theory but
upon local needs and desires. Except among those seeking high school
or junior college diplomas, there is little attention to terms and credits.
That these educational facilities are appreciated is attested by the enroll-
ment in 1938 of around 200,000 persons in adult classes at the 24
evening schools maintained by the Board of Education and in 12 similar
schools maintained with Federal aid. Day classes are attended by
15,000 persons, mostly women.
The courses are highly diversified: elementary subjects are offered
for those who desire them. Americanization courses for aliens seeking
citizenship, college preparatory and other high school work, and numer-
ous special courses ranging from those teaching short story writing to
those giving the theory and practice in automobile repairing. The
courses in the evening schools are adapted to the needs of the com-
EDUCATION 65
munities where they are held; the schools in Van Nuys, Gardena, Bell,
and other rural areas stress agricultural training; Huntington Park and
San Pedro emphasize mechanical and trade subjects; Hollywood and
Los Angeles offer a general educational program, including art, litera-
ture, public speaking, commercial subjects, trade instruction, and college
preparatory work. Vocational training, the largest field, is particularly
stressed in such places as the Frank Wiggins Trade School.
The Adult Education Program employs several hundred teachers
under WPA in conjunction with the Adult Evening College at City
College. In 1938, 150 courses were offered, as well as classes in numer-
ous evening schools and in nearly 50 welfare and community and church
centers. The curriculum is similar to that of the regular evening
schools.
The number of private schools has greatly increased since 1910;
there were at least fifty in the Los Angeles area in 1939. Their curric-
ula are similar to that of the public schools, except for specialization in
subjects such as music, arts and crafts, languages, or physical education
emphasized by the founders. The private institutions range from ele-
mentary to college preparatory schools and most of them, excluding a
few boys' military academies and girls' preparatory schools, are coeduca-
tional. The private schools in Los Angeles, like those in other parts of
the country, have the advantages of greater financial resources. Their