The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. You can support my ongoing research and writing on Patreon.
As context for my Fullerton history project, I like to read books about California history more broadly. I’m currently reading my way through Kevin Starr’s epic series “Americans and the California Dream.” I’ve just finished reading book three, entitled Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s.
“This is a book about design, construction, and identity, whether in aqueducts, architecture, gardens, city plans, transportation systems, hotels, studio sets, symphony orchestras, or hydroelectric grids,” Starr writes. “I am concerned with the process through which Americans in Southern California materialized or acted out in material forms their individual and collective aspirations.”
I present here a book report on some of the things I learned from Material Dreams. Throughout, I try to connect the main topics to local (Fullerton) history. No town exists in isolation, and the growth of Fullerton is very much connected to the growth of Southern California as a whole.
Water for Profit and Growth
Starr begins by discussing the large-scale water projects that made the astonishing material growth of Southern California possible.
Many of these projects in the early 20th century were tied up with real estate speculation and greed. An early example of this is Imperial Valley.
In 1901, George Chaffey (founder of the town of Ontario), Charles Robinson Rockwood, and other investors created the California Development Company and devised a clever way of profiting off of public resources (water and land). They diverted water from the Colorado River, then helped settlers obtain free or nearly free public land courtesy of the Homestead Act and the Desert Land Act. Those settlers then paid the Development Company for water for their farms and towns. When they could not pay, the company often got the land.
“The Imperial scheme represented a massive use of public resources for private profit,” Starr writes.
Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis was in on the scheme, using his paper to advocate for Imperial Valley irrigation projects that would benefit his own sprawling land-holdings in California and Mexico.
Then, in 1905, an ill-advised cut by the development company into the Colorado River caused water to overrun a dam which caused millions of metric tons of water to run westward, creating the Salton Sea. It was a natural disaster facilitated by greed and arrogance.
Like the Imperial Valley scheme, the creation of the LA Aqueduct was a tale of greed and deception that decimated the livelihood of Owens Valley farmers in eastern California.
In the early 20th century, former LA mayor/real estate speculator Fred Eaton was sent by a group of LA oligarchs to buy up options on critical land sites in the Owens Valley for later resale to Los Angeles.
“The former mayor–to his own great profit–was operating on behalf of a Los Angeles government,” Starr writes. “Eaton acquired options on Owens Valley property which he sold to Los Angeles for $450,000. He made another $100,000 on commission…Rarely has public service been so richly rewarded.”
Times owner Otis was part of a syndicate of LA oligarchs, the San Fernando Mission Land Company, whose members included Henry Huntington of the Pacific Electric Railroad, E.H. Harriman of the Southern Pacific, and Joseph Sartori of Security Trust and Savines, which was quietly buying up and in the San Fernando Valley which would soar in value once water arrived.
“The water destiny of Los Angeles was unfolding as a conspiracy in which public ambition and private self-interest mingled murkily,” Starr writes.
The newspapers and powerful elites were pushing for a water project that would not only benefit Los Angeles, but would make them all very wealthy. Helped along by articles and editorials from the Times, LA voters passed a $1.5 million bond measure to build the Aqueduct, which was the creation of City water engineer William Mulholland.
“Like a vampire, Los Angeles had affixed itself to the primal source point for the Owens River and the valley it watered,” Starr writes.
The Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed in 1913. “There it is. Take it,” Mulholland said upon its opening, as water rushed to irrigate both Los Angeles and the farmlands of the San Fernando Valley, now worth millions.
This water facilitated fantastic growth and even more fantastic profits for some. While the Los Angeles Aqueduct did not bring water to Fullerton (That would come later from the Colorado River Aqueduct), its place in the story of water in Southern California is a good example of the collusion of the very wealthy and government officials operating out of pure greed or, as they might put it, “enlightened self-interest.”
In 1928, a Metropolitan Water District was formed to administer the Colorado River project. That same year saw the tragic St. Francis Dam disaster, which killed over 400 people, and tarnished the legacy of William Mulholland.
The 1920s Real Estate Boom
Upon the foundation of its newfound water source, Los Angeles and its surrounding communities experienced a building boom in the 1920s.
“Water made imperial Los Angeles possible, but it was real estate development…within the decade of the 1920s [which] propelled greater Los Angeles past the million mark, making it the fifth largest city in the United States,” Starr writes.
Between 1920 and 1930 two million Americans migrated to California.
Although the original town of Los Angeles was founded by a multi-racial group in 1781 as an outpost of the Spanish Empire, by 1920, it was a majority white city.
In 1926, “a census of 1.3 million…revealed 45,000 Hispanics, 33,000 Blacks, and 30,000 Asians. Everyone else, 9 tenths of the people, was of European descent,” Starr writes.
Throughout the 1920s, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, racial discrimination was widespread.
“The Asiatic Exclusion League of California, having secured legislation in 1913 outlawing the ownership of land in California by Japanese,” Starr writes. “Congress cut off immigration from Asia in 1924.”
While Asian-Americans declined in the 1920s, the Mexican American and Black populations increased. However, non-whites were excluded from many neighborhoods through racially restrictive housing covenants and “red-lining.”
As part of the greater LA area, Fullerton also experienced this housing and construction boom in the 1920s. Many of the first large subdivisions, spreading outward from downtown, were built in the 1920s. Most of these, too, had racially restrictive housing covenants.
How Cars Supplanted Public Transit in Southern California
In the early 20th century, Southern California boasted one of the largest inter-urban passenger rail systems in the world–The Pacific Electric Railway Company, whose “Red Cars” provided a transportation option for the masses.
For a while, the Red Cars and automobiles coexisted, but beginning in the 1920s, the automobile began to supplant the train as LA’s preferred mode of transit.
“The very time other American and European cities were building subways and elevateds to bring mass transit into and out of the central city above or below street traffic, Los Angeles was rejecting such alternatives in the belief that Los Angeles County would peak with 100,000 automobiles by 1919,” Starr writes. “By 1924 there were four times that number.”
While cities like New York built upward on a foundation of subways, Los Angeles increasingly built out on a foundation of roads and cars.
By the 1930s, streetcar usage was rapidly declining.
Los Angeles, Bruce Bliven observed in 1927, “is now a completely motorized civilization. Nowhere else in the world have human beings so thoroughly adapted themselves to the automobile…Any Angeleno without his automobile is marooned, like a cowboy without his horse.”
And so Los Angeles county expanded outward in a decentralized fashion. By the end of the 1920s, Los Angeles encompassed 450 square miles.
Beginning in 1917, the “Red Cars” came through Fullerton as part of the La Habra-Fullerton-Yorba Linda line. There was a Pacific Electric depot downtown. With a decline in ridership, the Pacific Electric line to Fullerton was abandoned in 1938. The old depot is now Hopscotch bar/restaurant.
Oil!
Although it’s not so obvious today, in the 1920s, Southern California was a major oil-producing region.
The oil boom of the 1920s actually began in Orange County, at Huntington Beach.
“Bathers swam or lazed on the sand against a forest line of derricks that crowded the beach itself,” Starr writes.
The area of Signal Hill “became a Dantesque landscape of flares and shadows and moving machinery.”
And just as water and real estate were making some rich, oil was producing millionaires like George Franklin Getty whose wells covered property at Santa Fe Springs between Los Angeles and Anaheim.
“In 1924 oil surpassed agriculture as the leading industry of the State,” Starr writes. “The Los Angeles basin that year alone produced 230 million barrels of crude oil and 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas.”
Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! describes “the transformation of Paradise (Long Beach) from a quiet little seaside village where retired Iowa farmers pitched horseshoes into a bustling boom town porcupined with derricks.”
Fullerton and surrounding environs like Brea got in on the oil boom, with hundreds of derricks once dotting the landscape north of town.
The Film Industry
By 1920, filmmaking had become Los Angeles’ biggest industry.
Directors like Cecil B. De Mille were creating cinematic spectacles that captivated the imagination of the United States.
The film industry also inspired the creation of a new kind of spectacular public place–the movie palace.
A pioneer of this was Sidney Grauman, who set about to create on Broadway in Los Angeles the movie equivalent of Broadway in New York.
Movie palaces used murals, statues, decorative carvings, carpets and furnishings to create “a cathedral of color and fantasy with jazz as liturgical music.”
“All great cities must have their places of worship,” Starr writes.
Although it was a ways away from Hollywood or Broadway, Fullerton’s own Fox Theater was designed by the same architects who designed Grauman’s Egyptian and Chinese movie palaces in Los Angeles.
Fullerton also was home to Lois Weber, the first major female Hollywood Director.
Religious Life
The religious tradition which most characterized Los Angeles in the 1920s was Protestant Christianity, although there were also notable Catholic and Jewish communities.
Starr focuses on two larger-than-life religious figures of 1920s Southern California, who represented two different strains of popular Christianity at the time–Bob Schuler and Aimee Semple McPherson.
“Fierce, patriarchal, bigoted, Bob Schuler personified the Bible Belt in all its relish for hellfire and damnation,” Starr writes. “Schuler hated Jews, Catholics, movies, evolution, jazz, and dancing.” He also spoke favorably of the Ku Klux Klan, which was enjoying a major resurgence in the 1920s.
Shuler amassed a congregation of 42,000, and broadcast his messages on a radio station, KGEF. The strain of Christianity he represented might be called Fundamentalist or even Christian Nationalist.
“Los Angeles,” Shuler argued, “is the only Anglo-Saxon city of a million population left in America. It is the only such city that is not dominated by foreigners. It remains in a class to itself as the one city of the nation in which the white, American, Christian idealism still predominates.”
Aimee Semple McPherson, by contrast, preached a more welcoming message that might be equated with what is called the Prosperity Gospel today.
“McPherson loved automobiles as well as Jesus Christ–big, open touring cars which she could emblazon with evangelistic slogans,” Starr writes. She had the $1.5 million Angelus Temple by Echo Park, and a radio station (KFSG).
McPherson’s ministry was cut short by a fake kidnapping and sex scandal in 1926.
I’m not sure to what extent Shuler and McPherson’s radio programs influenced Fullerton in the 1920s, but the McPherson scandals were headline stories in the Fullerton News-Tribune.
Fullerton was, certainly, a majority Protestant town in the 1920s, with several large churches in the downtown area.
Architecture in Southern California
Starr writes about how architecture styles of the 1920s materialized a sense of place for southern Californians which “expressed itself architecturally in three directions: Craftsman Bungalow, Mediterranean, and the various evolutions of Spanish Revival.”
“Spanish Revival struck the most pervasive chord of popular acceptance,” Starr writes. “By the 1930s, California Spanish, as it came to be known, had emerged as Southern California’s most popular design for living. Some communities, in fact–Santa Barbara, Ojai, Palos Verdes, San Clemente, Rancho Santa Fe–went so far as to declare other styles illegal.”
Spanish Revival, with its red-tiled roofs and white walls “represented a romantic grafting of a largely imaginary past onto the physical fabric of the American present.”
One major proponent of this style was architect Myron Hunt who, between 1910 and 1929 completed some 500 projects in Southern California.
Some of Fullerton’s most iconic downtown buildings were built in the 1920s and 1930s in the Mission Revival style, including the Fox Theater, the California Hotel (now the Villa del Sol), the High School Auditorium, the Santa Fe Train Depot, the Fullerton Post Office, Fullerton College, and the Fullerton Hospital. The first Fullerton City Hall (built around 1940, now the Police Station) was also Mission Revival Style.
Literary Dreams of Southern California
Another way people were materializing their dreams in Southern California was through books.
A notable example was L. Frank Baum, author of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Baum and his family moved from Chicago to Hollywood in 1910, and every Oz book except the first was written in Southern California.
“The essential storyline of the first Oz book functions as a prophetic probe into the inner imaginative texture of the mass migration of midwesterners to Oz/Southern California and the Emerald City of Los Angeles down through the 1920s,” Starr writes. “Los Angeles, in other words, was Oz come true; Southern California as a whole was Baum’s Oz dream materialized.”
Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, in true southern California style, made his fortune off books and real estate, founding the subdivision of Tarzana.
Literary dreams manifested themselves through book stores like Vroman’s in Pasadena and Dawson’s in downtown Los Angeles, and collections like that of Henry Huntington.
Los Angeles in the 1920s had its circles of booksellers, collectors, and intellectuals like Jacob Israel Zeitlin, Carey McWilliams, Herbert Klein, Phil Townsend Hanna, Jose Rodriguez, Louis Adamic, and Merle Armitage.
Local publishers popped up like Jake Zeitlin’s Primavera Press, Fine Arts Press of Santa Ana, and The Arroyo Press–many of which focused on books about California.
Books were important to Fullertonians in the 1920s, as evidenced by its beautiful Carnegie Library (now the Fullerton Museum Center).
Conclusion
“By 1930 Southern California stood materialized as a metropolitan and suburban region, and Los Angeles, its population standing at 1.2 million, had become the dominant American city west of Chicago and a maritime center on the Pacific Rim,” Starr writes.
This process of dreams becoming material reality was made possible by massive water projects, the greed of real estate speculators, the designs of architects, and more.
According to author Bruce Bliven, Southern California in the 1920s “offers a melting-pot in which the civilization of the future may be seen, bubbling darkly up in a foreshadowing brew.”
All of the bubbling prosperity of the 1920s would be put to the test in the 1930s. Stay tuned for my upcoming report on the next book in Kevin Starr’s series: Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California.
Fullerton History 