1913 Read online

  But this was not all. There were pruning knives, hunting knives, imported German knives and the full range of Wilbert pocket knives, including the Cowboy knife and the Teamsters’ knife. Before the cigarette had become the nation’s preferred means of consuming tobacco Sears offered sixty types of smoking pipe, including carved Meerschaum pipes in the popular Hungarian shape. For one’s leisure and for the home, one could buy boats, curtains, fishing bait, reels and rods, hammocks, tents, dog muzzles, baseball horns, college pennants, tennis rackets, roller skates, pedometers, and traps for otters, deer and vermin with such names as Kill-Um and The Sure Death Trap. Bullets, axes, gun stocks, air rifles, pistols and revolvers were all on offer, alongside cuckoo clocks, rosary beads, crucifixes, fountain pens, pins of all types for every lapel, pocket watches (including the interstate chronometer for $17.45), telegraph transmitters, adjustable electric shock providers (for 80 cents), Westinghouse fans, telephone switchboards, binoculars, telescopes, automobile goggles, postcard projectors, a full range of cameras (including those for just a few dollars), metronomes, gramophone players, guitars, rugs, dresses, suits, hats – and a United States flag with forty-eight stars.

  Some in America worried about the health of a society based on consumption – just as they did in Berlin, Paris or Vienna. In Philip Dru, Colonel House wrote of ‘unhappiness for all and disaster for many’, which would follow a society of competitive consumerism. Woodrow Wilson had been elected while criticising American society’s growing materialism. Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero saw mass consumption and mass production as America’s challenge to civilisation: the victory of quantity over quality.28 But ultimately any fears about consumerism were outweighed by the market imperatives of American business. The logic of Henry Ford was the logic of the twentieth-century economy.

  As a rash of consumer choice spread across America, it spread across an increasingly Americanised world. As early as 1901 W. T. Stead quoted an English account of the new world being built by American business in Europe:

  The average man rises in the morning from his New England sheets, he shaves with ‘Williams’ soap and a Yankee safety razor, pulls on his Boston boots over his socks from North Carolina, fastens his Connecticut braces, slips his Waltham or Waterbury watch in his pocket and sits down to breakfast. There he congratulates his wife on the way her Illinois straight-front corset sets off her Massachusetts blouse, and he tackles his breakfast, where he eats bread made from prairie flour … tinned oysters from Baltimore, and a little Kansas city bacon.29

  In the 1901 version of this account of global Americanisation, the Londoner proceeds to go to work by tramway, and by American electric railway. Perhaps, twelve years later, he would venture out by car, and probably a Model T.

  Woodrow Wilson, who had criticised the automobile in 1906, was won over to it by 1913, enjoying his regular pleasure drives around Washington as President. He too came to espouse the creed of ever-expanding American business as the handmaiden of American power. What sweet music to the ears of Henry Ford when, in his hometown of Detroit, President Wilson addressed 3,000 managers at the first World Salesmanship Congress in 1916: ‘Go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America’.30

  LOS ANGELES

  Boom!

  Henry Ford’s success with the Model T Ford depended on one other crucial factor: a steady supply of gasoline. Internationally, there were concerns about how long petroleum supplies could match skyrocketing demand. In London, while armchair strategists fretted about the decision to begin the Royal Navy’s move from coal to oil-fired ships, rising petrol prices led cab drivers to strike. The Economist reported that ‘the associated automobile clubs of the world have decided to offer a prize of £20,000 to anyone who will produce a suitable substitute for petrol’.1 The British government began an era of oil diplomacy, ultimately leading it to deepen its stake in the Middle East, particularly in Persia.

  In the United States, and especially in California, the position was somewhat different. Around 1913, America produced two-thirds of the world’s petroleum; of that, California was responsible for four barrels out of every ten. The United States Geological Survey reported that:

  the United States being omitted, California produced more oil than any other nation; and if Russia and the United States are omitted California far surpassed the production of all the rest of the world, including Mexico, India, Rumania, Galicia, Japan and South America.2

  This was a remarkable development for such a young industry, born in far-off Pennsylvania in the 1850s, when the US state of California was barely a decade old. The first commercial well sunk in Los Angeles dated only from 1893 when Edward L. Doheny, a Wisconsin-born oil man who had prospected in Kansas, South Dakota, Arizona and New Mexico, had struck oil at 150 feet on the corner of Patton and State streets, so close to the centre of town that the hard-up Doheny rode a streetcar out there the first time he visited the patch.

  Oil derricks outside Los Angeles. The first man to strike oil in the area, Edward Doheny, rode out to the patch twenty years previously in a streetcar. By 1913 California alone produced more crude oil than any country in the world (bar the United States).

  But by 1913 Doheny was one of America’s richest men, and Los Angeles was established as the capital of the oil industry of southern California, the nation’s largest. Doheny’s oil interests now stretched across the border into Mexico, and his fortune was prodigious. From rooms in a cheap hotel twenty years previously, he now lived in a palace, decorated with 10,000 orchids. In 1913, his wife Estelle, inspired by a long trip to Europe, commissioned a marble and glass ballroom that became known as the Pompeian Room, designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.3 Doheny bought more estates, gave money to the Catholic Church, and supported Irish causes with his munificence. Estelle Doheny’s soirees were compared to those of the White House. The area around Los Angeles, meanwhile, was now dotted with hundreds of oil rigs, some dipping their feet into the Pacific Ocean. Floating on oil, California boasted more cars per head of population than anywhere else, more even than Detroit itself. But then California boasted more of everything: more telephones, more tramlines, more sunlight, more opportunities, more bright tomorrows.

  Like gold and cheap farmland before it, and the movies after, oil became the symbol of California’s promise of easy riches. ‘It is true that there are some persons in California who are making oil a gambling device’, wrote the self-styled historian of the state’s oil industry Lionel V. Redpath in 1900. ‘There is something about the oil business’, he continued, ‘which prompts men to dream dreams at the expense of the most common of common sense’.4 But where could one dream dreams if not California? Men such as Doheny had become rich, why not others? In the old new world of America, as one writer put it, Los Angeles was the ‘old new land of promise’.5

  For visitors, the area around Los Angeles was a picture of natural wealth converted into individual prosperity. ‘I have been fortunate enough to live in France’, wrote Paul-Henri d’Estournelles de Constant, ‘I know England, the shaded vales of Oxford or Cambridge, have greeted the stirring of spring in our Algerian oases, I thought myself blasé’:

  Yet I note that the Americans have covered the most beautiful valleys of California with lawns, flowers and fruit and have created … veritable outposts of paradise on earth … Each villa in Pasadena sits on its own carpet of green; each cottage, different from its neighbour, nestles under leafy bowers and the flowering of roses and climbing geraniums … In these gardens, created by Americans, reigns the inspiring idea of America.6

  Californian wines, Constant noted, were ‘not less good than ours, but more full bodied’. He suggested setting up a school of French cooking as a complement to Californian culture. He recounted the story of a land surveyor who had been astute enough to accept payment for a job in land. Now that oil had been struck he had a thousand dollars a day to his name.

  With stories such as this,
the idea of California as a land of opportunity was constantly embellished and enriched, its reputation reaching across the country and enticing migrants from cold Detroit, crowded New York – or even from across the Pacific. In most respects, Los Angeles was not particularly cosmopolitan. Although three-quarters of American-born Angelenos were from outside California, only a fifth of the city’s overall population was born outside the United States – a far smaller share than in New York or Detroit. Of these, most came from England and Germany rather than from Italy or Russia, let alone Asia. The Mexican era of California’s history, meanwhile, survived as much in architecture and place names as in people.

  While enticing domestic migrants, Californians nonetheless had long feared foreign immigration, particularly from Asia, and had periodically sought to limit it. While the Chinese preferred San Francisco, Japanese migrants preferred the area around Los Angeles. The numbers involved were small – 8,000 Japanese in the whole of LA county by 1910 – but fear and prejudice were amplified by local politics, and a push-button issue was constructed out of little more than worked-up imaginings of the ‘Yellow Peril’. ‘My neighbor is a Jap’, one farmer told a journalist:

  He has an eighty acre place next to mine and he is a smart fellow. He has a white woman living in his house and upon that white woman’s knee is a baby. Now what is that baby? It isn’t white. It isn’t Japanese. I’ll tell you what it is. It is the beginning of a problem – the biggest race problem the world has ever known.7

  In 1913 the California legislature in Sacramento prepared to pass legislation which would disbar Japanese farmers from owning land in the state. Washington advised California against it, on the basis that it would offend Asian sensibilities and might, as Japanese diplomats insisted, run counter to the United States’ treaty commitments. The Los Angeles Times appealed to the legislators’ common sense, leaving ‘the Japanese in our midst to cultivate their vegetable gardens, and clean clothes, and make and sell kimonos without molestation’.8 Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was dispatched on a five-day trek to Sacramento to try and negotiate a form of words which would allow all sides to claim a measure of victory. But the law Bryan lobbied against was passed in spite of him. Wilson tried to play the whole thing down in public. In private, the President and his Cabinet received the US Navy’s startling assessment of the possibility of war with Japan and its outcome. ‘It is conceivable’, read Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, ‘that Japan may conclude – may have already concluded – that, if she should go to war with the United States, she could, by enduring a period of privation and distress lasting about two years, acquire possession of both the Philippine Islands and the Hawaiian Islands’.9

  Paradise was untroubled by the prospect. As Los Angeles boomed, land values soared and the city stretched along the coast, building out rather than up, the very opposite of New York. Confidence filled the air. The Los Angeles and Pacific Electric railways ‘extended into the open country, ahead of, and not behind the population’, explained the company’s owners, justifying their investments.10 An advertisement in the Los Angeles Times promised returns of 200 or 300 per cent to those investing in The Palisades, a coastal development by Santa Monica, soon to be connected to the Pacific Electric and enjoying ‘four beautiful macadam boulevards’ to the city.11 While the much more established San Francisco repaired itself after the 1906 earthquake and prepared for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, the population centre of California moved south. It was commonly anticipated that Los Angeles, whose population had increased from 1,500 in the 1840s to nearly 500,000 by 1913 would pass the million mark in 1920. Some felt this would happen even sooner. One journalist predicted that the population in 1920 would stand very precisely at 1,193,086.12 A Times editorialist imagined Los Angeles in 1938 as ‘the Wonder City of Los Angeles’, ‘the Mecca of art, culture and learning’, ‘the Athens of the modern world’. Another, more humorously, pictured an eighteen-storey Los Angeles department store, staffed by the deposed monarchs of the globe.13

  But though California was floating on oil, Los Angeles was running short of a still more important commodity: water. The city’s response, typically grandiose, was the Owens River aqueduct to bring water 225 miles, the same distance as between Washington and New York, from the verdant countryside to the thirsty city. ‘The impossible’, rhapsodised the Times, ‘was again met and driven by the invincible city of Los Angeles’:

  … a great river has been turned from its course – a course it followed since the hand of God raised the mountains and laid the oceans in their place on the morn of creation – and brought down to serve the people of Los Angeles who are here today, and the millions more who are to come tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow.14

  On 5 November, the Catalina Island band played ‘I Love You, California’, the Stars and Stripes were unfurled, and Owens River water gushed towards the thirsty city.15 Thirty thousand looked on. Later, a celebratory dinner was held at the Hotel Alexandria, Los Angeles’ finest.

  To the south, another opening, that of the Panama Canal, was expected to bring new trade routes to Los Angeles, and new travellers from Europe. In preparation, the city’s deep-water port was expanded. By early May 1913, five shipping companies had announced around-the-world routes that would stop in Los Angeles, prompting a local shipping agent to proclaim: ‘If no others come, these five concerns assure this harbor of the rosiest of futures, a place on the premier trade lane, that around the world’. ‘The tri-color of France, the Union Jack of old England, the sun-rayed flag of the Mikado’s kingdom will flaunt jauntily from the taffrail of ships entering this harbor’, continued the Los Angeles Times. The Chamber of Commerce, in addition to publishing Los Angeles Today, a book extolling the natural wealth, climate and prosperity of the city, proposed a Spanish pamphlet to advertise California’s products to the Latin American market. ‘It is to be the opening wedge’, a journalist wrote, ‘by which it is hoped to not only foster closer relations with our neighbors to the south, but also trade relations, that will put money in our purses’.16

  Water for the thirsty city of Los Angeles, the city of ‘tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow’.

  For those who had come to the city with grand dreams only to find that sunshine and hope did not put bread on the table, all this reeked of industrial-scale boosterism. In October 1913 the Los Angeles Record asked Angelenos their thoughts on the city’s problems. The readers’ responses were instructive. ‘Of course it is to the advantage of “big business” to advertise the country and circulate ads stating that the population in 1913 is so and so, and in 1915 will be so and so’, one wrote in, ‘but it is very noticeable that they do not place under those same ads statistics showing the large percentage of that population who are eagerly seeking work to keep bodies and souls together’. ‘Long hours and small wages’, diagnosed another reader:

  … too much grafting; the mistake of not getting municipal ownership, the main object – to make a smooth road for the RICH and a rocky one for the POOR, too much of the ‘Los Angeles spirit’ – (‘how much money has he got and how can I get it away from him?’) … IF you question the EMPLOYERS regarding the continual changing in their staff they will tell you that Los Angeles has a ‘floating population’, apparently failing to realize that the population would be permanent if living wages were paid.17

  After a few weeks of such letters the Record summed up its findings across the front page on 5 November 1913: ‘What’s the Matter with Los Angeles? It is G-R-double E-D, GREED!’ Perhaps the journalists of the Record were amongst those who had invested in the Los Angeles Investment Company, a debt-financed real estate company that worked hand in hand with the Chamber of Commerce to build mile after mile of cheap bungalow housing in order to entice new low-paid workers to Los Angeles. In a cycle all too familiar for California, the boom produced the bubble, and the bubble, eventually, burst. Over the course of a few weeks at the end of 1913 the Los Angeles Investment Company share price collapsed from
$4.50 to just 23¢.18

  Rags to riches, riches to rags, whether from land purchases or from oil or from orange groves, Los Angeles was already a city which conjured up popular dreams of novelty, success and prosperity in the minds of visitors, out-of-towners and prospective migrants. It had not yet claimed full ownership over the medium which so effectively packaged these dreams: the movies. Los Angeles was not yet Hollywood. In 1913, it was only just embarking along the road to becoming the metropolis of mass entertainment, just as Detroit, a little further ahead, was becoming the metropolis of the automobile.

  Over the previous fifteen years film had exploded across the United States. By 1910 there were 10,000 cheap cinemas in the country. Twenty-six million Americans – one-fifth of the country’s population – went to one of these, known as a nickelodeon, each week.19 (As Henry Ford might have observed, a nickel might not be much, but twenty-six million nickels is a great many.) The country, and particularly its working class and immigrant communities, was in the midst of a moving picture craze. ‘You wonder’, wrote author Olivia Howard Dunbar, ‘how it can be possible, in an alleged busy world, to secure this magnificent total of leisure – to assemble daily, and for long, blank periods, so many people who have nothing to do and who are obviously not worrying about it’.20 Three-quarters of movie-goers were men.

  Most nickelodeons showed short silent films, one after another, irrespective of continuity or subject, with the expectation that spectators would arrive and leave at different times. Many films were news items. For those used to the stage there was something two-dimensional about this form of entertainment, bereft of narrative structure, and without the support of the spoken word: