“John Laslett’s Sunshine Was Never Enough is an extraordinary work of historical synthesis and interpretation, which brings to more than a century of labor history in Los Angeles the insights of a new generation of social, labor, and political historians. Laslett is highly sensitive to questions of race, gender, immigration, conservative politics, left-wing movements, and political economy, all essential in any contemporary effort to chart the history of the working class, past or present.”

—Nelson Lichtenstein, MacArthur Foundation Chair in History, University of California, Santa Barbara

“John Laslett’s comprehensive overview of the labor history of Los Angeles is a long-awaited contribution. The narrative of Sunshine Was Never Enough begins in the late nineteenth century, when the city was in its infancy, and tracks developments over an arc ending in the early twenty-first century, by which time Los Angeles had become the nation’s second largest metropolis and a rare beacon of hope for the U.S. labor movement. For too long, southern California was seen as a remote backwater. With this engaging volume, L.A. labor and the scholarship on it that has burgeoned in recent years finally has the careful treatment it deserves.” —Ruth Milkman, author of L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement

“John Laslett’s latest book represents a significant contribution to the field of labor studies and labor history. The Los Angeles labor movement has emerged as a dynamic focal point of the new American labor movement, and Laslett’s comprehensive and thoughtful analysis provides a much needed historic foundation. This is an invaluable resource for labor scholars and labor leaders alike.”

—Kent Wong, Director, UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education

John Laslett is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author or co-author of many books including Labor and the Left, Failure of a Dream?, Colliers Across the Sea, and History of the ILGWU in Los Angeles.

Sunshine Was Never Enough

Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010

By John H.M. Laslett

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The regents of the university of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27345-0

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix,
Preface and Acknowledgments, xi,
Introduction: Scope and Purpose, 1,
PART ONE: UNDER THE THUMB OF THE OPEN SHOP,
1. Myth versus Reality in the Making of the Southern California Working Class, 1880 – 1903, 13,
2. “It’s Class War, without a Doubt”: The Open Shop Battle Intensifies, 1904 – 1916, 39,
3. Grassroots Insurgencies and the Impact of World War I, 1905 – 1924, 62,
4. Moving to the “Industrial Suburbs”: From Hollywood to South Gate, and from Signal Hill to the Citrus Belt, 1919 – 1929, 83,
PART TWO: ORGANIZED LABOR COMES INTO ITS OWN,
5. Unemployment, Upton Sinclair’s EPIC Campaign, and the Search for a New Deal Political Coalition, 1929 – 1941, 107,
6. Raising Consciousness at the Workplace: Anglos, Mexicans, and the Founding of the Los Angeles CIO, 1933 – 1938, 131,
7. Battle Royal: AFL versus CIO, and the Decline of the Open Shop, 1936 – 1941, 153,
8. L.A. Workers in World War II: “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back”? 1941 – 1945, 175,
PART THREE: CULTURAL CHANGE AND THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW INDUSTRIAL ORDER,
9. “Caught between Consumption and the Cold War”: Rebuilding Working-Class Politics, 1945 – 1968, 209,
10. Employment, Housing, and the Struggle for Equality in the Civil Rights Era, 1965 – 1980, 238,
11. Globalization, Labor’s Decline, and the Coming of a Service and High-Tech Economy, 1970 – 1994, 267,
12. False Dawn? L.A.’s Labor-Latino Alliance Takes Center Stage, 1990 – 2010, 298,
Conclusion: Comparative Reflections, 321,
Notes, 331,
Primary Sources, 413,
Index, 417,

CHAPTER 1

Myth versus Reality in the Making of the Southern California Working Class, 1880–1903

DIVERGENT OPINIONS, OR SOMETHING MORE?

In its final report in 1915, the federally appointed U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations portrayed a nation torn by industrial violence, unemployment, and social discontent. Everywhere the commissioners looked, from the New York sweatshops to the Pennsylvania steel mills, and from the southern textile towns to the western metal mines, class lines were hardening. Even the Socialists were gaining political support. Unless something was done, America seemed poised for a social revolution.

Yet the commission largely exempted Los Angeles from its criticisms. Except for the October 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, L.A. had never experienced industrial violence of the kind that exploded in April 1914 in Ludlow, Colorado, when the Colorado National Guard, acting on behalf of coal mining companies, massacred striking coal miners and some members of their families. Los Angeles civic leaders believed that the city’s Mediterranean climate, its lack of heavy industry, and its location in the middle of a seemingly endless fertile plain enabled it to avoid the pitfalls of poverty, unemployment, and class conflict. Many of these beliefs still linger in people’s minds today. Most residents of the city will acknowledge that Los Angeles has experienced major conflicts over race, urban sprawl, and public education. But if you tell them that it once had a strong socialist movement and experienced several episodes of serious class conflict, they will express surprise. Such ideas do not fit with the popular image of Southern California as the home of Hollywood, orange groves, plentiful opportunity, and perpetual sunshine.

The idea of Los Angeles as a consumers’ paradise is attractive, and in some ways it reflects the reality of lived experience. But it is only part of the city’s story. Many Angelenos today think that the city’s white residents have always been middle class and that poverty has largely been confined to Mexicans and other immigrants. Yet until World War II the majority of the city’s workers were native-born whites, not immigrants, and they were frequently forced to undertake strikes and other forms of protest to protect themselves against wage cuts and mistreatment by their employers.

These beliefs about Los Angeles are not just the result of historical amnesia. They were deliberately cultivated by a wide array of L.A. boosters who, from the 1880s to the 1920s and beyond, promoted Southern California as a paradise for settlers from the East. Members of the city’s business elite continued to trumpet this belief to the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations when its representatives visited the city in 1914. For example, General Harrison Gray Otis, the belligerent and powerful publisher and editor of the Los Angeles Times, began his presentation of evidence before the commission by asserting confidently that most L.A. workers were “prosperous and contented.”

The reason for this, said Otis, was that land in the area was cheap and readily available and that most of the white midwesterners then flooding into Southern California had brought enough savings with them to buy homes of their own. In addition, Otis added, the prevalence of the open shop (meaning that L.A.’s workers were not compelled to join labor organizations as a condition of employment) limited the formation of unions, organizations that Otis believed stifled employee initiative and interfered with the employers’ right to hire and fire anyone they chose.

Otis’s testimony before the commission was followed by that of Owen T. Rice, another L.A. booster who also hailed the virtues of the open shop. The weakness of the city’s unions, Rice said, meant that any competent man could secure “a wage commensurate with his ability without the assistance of a union card.” Realtor Edwin Janss took the open shop argument even further. He said that the absence of unions kept labor costs down, guaranteed the profits of the real estate industry, and enabled it to build single-family homes throughout the Southland.

At a time when unions are again in disrepute, some readers may find these arguments plausible. Do not unions, especially unions that enforce the closed (union) shop, raise wages to artificially high levels? Are they not often bureaucratic and corrupt? Do they not force workers to pay dues against their will? The debate about trade unionism is, of course, legitimate. But, in 1914, Southern California’s open shop champions failed to mention that there was then—as there still is today—a price to be paid for the absence of unions. In that year, wages in Los Angeles were lower than in several other industrial cities; most workers lacked insurance and other union benefits; and many newcomers to the city found that, once they secured a job, they were at the mercy of unscrupulous employers. None of this fit the image of a settlers’ paradise.

It was not only white settlers who subscribed to the utopian image of Los Angeles. Many African Americans, seeing L.A. as a place where segregation was at first minimal, did so too. When black leaders from other parts of the country returned home after visiting the city, they often praised the superior opportunities it offered. “One never forgets Los Angeles and Pasadena,” wrote W .E. B. Du Bois in The Crisis, official organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAA CP), in August 1913. “The sensuous beauty of roses and orange blossoms, the air and the sunlight and the hospitality of all of its races lingers long.”

These early African American visitors were followed by generations of Mexicans, Japanese, and other migrants of color who were attracted to Southern California for the same reasons as whites. Mexicans first moved north across the border to escape the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution and later to look for jobs in a modern city with a reputation for opportunity and the largest Mexican community in the West. Immigrants from China and Japan, the Philippines, and Latin America did much the same. In some cases, their motives barely changed over time. In 1985, for example, a woman who had moved to L.A. from El Salvador to find peace and stability explained that there was “much danger because of the rebels and the army” in her homeland—the same reason that Mexicans had used to justify moving north in 1910.

USING MYTHS TO CREATE A “USABLE PAST”

It was not unusual for promoters of an ambitious American metropolis to exaggerate its advantages over those of rival cities. For years, upstart settlements on the western frontier had proclaimed themselves great cities of the future in order to attract settlers, secure political advantages, or persuade national railroads to run their tracks through town. It is also true that the warm, dry climate of Los Angeles was good for health and that land was at first plentiful and cheap. When land values rose, as they almost invariably did, the small bungalows built by the early settlers could be traded in for bigger and better houses with yards and picket fences. Once the Pacific Electric Railway (Red Car) system had been completed, and sufficient water had been diverted from the Owens River in 1913 to irrigate the San Fernando Valley, the fertile Southern California plain afforded wonderful opportunities for suburban living.

But this was only part of the story. Even during the early years of the twentieth century, much in the boosters’ narrative was misleading. The downside of living in Los Angeles included political corruption, primitive working conditions, land grabs by investors intent on driving up prices to make a killing, and the spread of industrial blight to large parts of the downtown area. In addition, the city’s leading employers were clearly willing to exploit workers to gain an advantage for themselves. While nominally supporting “industrial freedom” (an idea that in theory gave equal rights to both employer and employee), a majority of companies opposed any form of trade unionism and brazenly recruited members of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to help them keep the unions at bay. Not until the U.S. Senate hearings held by the La Follette Committee, which investigated violations of free speech and the rights of labor in the late 1930s, was the extent of their illegal practices exposed.

THE GARDEN CITY

By the early years of the twentieth century, Southern California’s boosters had distilled their beliefs into three main myths in order to furnish believers with a “usable past”—a past that legitimated their view of what L.A. had been and what they hoped its future would be. The first myth derived from the then-fashionable “Garden City” movement, which was espoused by Progressive reformers as well as by the business elite. The idea was to perpetuate L.A.’s image as a spacious, semi-rural metropolis where most workers owned their own homes, regular work was available, and slums were few. In 1907 Protestant cleric Dan Bartlett claimed that in Southern California the “poor live in single cottages, with dividing fences and flowers in the front yard.” He acknowledged that manufacturing was growing, but he argued that it would somehow develop in “the country” and that the city’s factories would be hidden behind a “wealth of climbing vines and roses.” 19

The promulgation of the Garden City image distorted reality in a number of ways. First, it neglected the efforts of Los Angeles Times editor General Otis and other members of the business elite to turn the city into an industrial dynamo that would replace San Francisco as the largest manufacturing city in the West. Although the Bay Area continued to boast more factories and workshops, by 1910 L.A.’s industrial sector had grown so fast that the proportion of the city’s labor force defined as wage earners, at 79.2 percent, was higher than in San Francisco, as table 1 shows. By 1920 Los Angeles had outstripped San Francisco both in number of manufacturing establishments and in the number of white-collar employees.

Los Angeles boosters also exaggerated the proportion of the city’s population who owned their own homes. Although the statistical evidence shows that L.A.’s rate of homeownership ranked high among U.S. cities, it did not rank high enough to justify the extravagant claims that were made for it. Table 2, which rank-orders rates of homeownership in the country’s ten fastest-growing cities between 1890 and 1920, shows that whereas Los Angeles ranked fifth in 1890, it had dropped to ninth place thirty years later.

But the most misleading impression left by promulgators of the Garden City image was the idea that most of the city’s residents, including its workers, lived in salubrious surroundings with no congestion, few uninhabitable buildings, and a fully developed infrastructure. While Los Angeles certainly did not possess as many slums and immigrant tenements as New York and Chicago, its downtown area contained numerous impoverished neighborhoods where Mexicans, Chinese, and Eastern European immigrants lived cheek by jowl and where rented housing, not privately owned homes, predominated. In 1910, for example, 113,673 people (36 percent of the city’s population), the vast majority of them working class, lived in the districts shown in map 2, an area bounded by Sunset Boulevard on the north, Temple and Figueroa streets on the west, Vernon Avenue on the south, and Indiana Street on the eastern side of the city. By this time, downtown L.A. had been zoned into several discrete districts, some of them designated for industrial development, others for residences only.

By 1910 the so-called Industrial District, in the southwestern quadrant of map 2, contained over fifty major businesses. Of the households in the district, 24 percent were headed by unskilled laborers, and only 2 percent of the district’s workers held white-collar jobs. Only 17 percent of the residents owned their own homes. The Commission of Immigration and Housing in California, reporting in 1915, attributed this partly to high rates of unemployment and partly to the presence of poor white Americans as well as low-income “Japanese and blacks” in the district.

The most degraded of the downtown districts was the Macy Street area, located in “De Bloody Ate” (the Eighth Ward), which included much of old Sonoratown, the original Mexican area of settlement. Besides Chinatown and the decaying Plaza area, the Macy Street District contained a large slum neighborhood of some sixty-seven hundred people, who hailed from no fewer than fourteen countries. Directly contradicting the boosters’ claim of “no congested districts” were the Eighth Ward’s overcrowded housing courts, where dozens of poor immigrant families huddled together around refuse-strewn open spaces, sharing outside toilets and an outside water supply. The 1915 commission report documented high levels of child labor, illiteracy, unemployment, and poverty in the area. Very few of the families in this district possessed any insurance or savings.

Extensive unemployment in the Macy Street District, as well as in the Railroad Yards area, also contradicted the myth about the “regularity of work.” More than 200 of the 688 residents in the latter neighborhood worked in nearby factories, but many of them experienced unemployment for more than three months of the year. Periodic unemployment was also endemic in the downtown garment industry, because of seasonal changes in fashion, as well as among the cannery workers and farm laborers who cultivated stretches of open land all over the Los Angeles basin. A large minority of the Mexican men in the Macy Street District were employed digging ditches or laying track for the Pacific Electric Railway.

Not even the relatively attractive Temple Street District, the one district on the West Side of Los Angeles where a majority of the inhabitants were clearly middle class, lived up to the boosters’ homeowning myth. Originally settled when the Temple Street cable railway opened in 1886, this neighborhood was for some years a genuine residential suburb. By 1910, however, numerous working-class German, Jewish, French, and Italian families had moved into the area. Most noteworthy, only 37 of the 294 “American” households living along Temple Street that year owned their own homes.

RACIAL MIXING IN EARLY DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES

The second myth cultivated by L.A.’s business elite was that Southern California was the “white spot of America.” This phrase had several meanings, but the most popular one was that Los Angeles was a racially pure space, a city built by white Americans for white Americans. Some of the evidence already cited here shows that this assertion was misleading, but it was frequently repeated by propagandists. For example, in the 1910 edition of his popular booster tract Land of Sunshine, Charles Lummis reiterated his claim that “our foreign element is a few thousand Chinese and perhaps five hundred native Californians who do not speak English.” No one reading his account would have guessed that among the city’s 319,000 residents in 1910 were 13,557 immigrants born in southern and eastern Europe as well as more than 30,000 Mexicans, Asians, and other people of color.

These totals were not comparable to the hundreds of thousands of European immigrants who lived and worked in the industrial cities of the Midwest and the East, but they were significant. Nevertheless, Los Angeles civic leaders continued to promote the image of their city as a “white spot” by deliberately romanticizing—and denigrating—the role played by indigenous Mexicans, Chinese, and other groups in developing Southern California’s modern infrastructure. This racially condescending image was promoted in the first “Fiesta de Los Angeles,” which was held in April 1894. Invitations to Mexicans and other minority residents included a request that they dress in “native clothes.” This rendered them objects of condescension instead of presenting them as they really were: urban workers with up-to-date skills who were often the victims of racial oppression.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Sunshine Was Never Enough by John H.M. Laslett. Copyright © 2012 The regents of the university of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.