Historical Society Of Southern California

MOVERS AND SHAKERS WHO MOVED AND SHOOK L.A.:
THE DIVERSITY OF OUR CITY'S 19TH CENTURY HERITAGE

By Abraham Hoffman, Ph.D.

At the start of a new semester I like to give my California history class a couple of orientation quizzes. For the first quiz, I ask them to draw a circle near the bottom of a sheet of paper. Put your name in it. Draw two circles above that. Put the names of your parents in those circles. Then four circles for the grandparents. The acid test comes with the next generation: eight circles for great-grandparents. At this point I may get three or four students out of the entire class who can name two or three great-grandparents, but that's about it. So everyone, myself included, knows we weren't descended from Henry VIII or some other monarch. We're all just ordinary people who may only have a vague idea about our ancestors, unless we are interested in genealogy.

For a second orientation quiz, I ask all the students in the class to stand up. This is an elimination contest. First, if you were not born in California, sit down. In recent years I lose more than half the class on just that question. Second, if both of your parents were born outside of California, sit down. Third, grandparent generation, and there are only two or three students left standing. Rarely do I find a student who can claim California nativity for four generations.

Now, I am sure that the situation is quite different in other parts of the United States, especially in the South or New England where families have been around for many generations and are conscious of it. But we are quite a distinctive society here, a region of so many immigrants who have come here from other states and other nations that they have virtually no historical sense of where they now make their home. Their own history has yet to be grafted onto Los Angeles. I tell my students not to worry about it, that they should consider themselves the start of a dynasty of future Californians. For some reason they like to think of themselves that way.

It may be that elsewhere in California, particularly in rural areas, more people are conscious of their ancestry or how many generations their family has lived in the state. But the newness of southern California's society brings special challenges to local history. The only time a student is required to take California history is in the fourth grade, and the history of Los Angeles is presented in the third grade. So the state and city history is pitched at the level of eight- and nine-year-old children. If a child comes to California from somewhere else at age ten, that child misses even an elementary level understanding of California and Los Angeles history.

The end result of this situation is a young and not so young population, largely immigrant from other states and countries, who know little or nothing about why things are the way they are or who caused things to be the way they are. Many years ago, as a junior high school teacher, I challenged my history classes to bring in something "old" that said something about Los Angeles history. Many students brought in old California license plates, some in very good condition, others badly rusted. Eventually we compiled a complete set that ran from 1919 to 1955, when the state began issuing those little stick-on tags we use to this day. How had my students obtained these plates? Prior to 1955 the DMV issued a new set of plates every year. All over California, people took the old plates off their cars and replaced them with the new ones. Many of these people apparently just couldn't stand to part with their plates, for sentimental or other reasons, and so they nailed them to the wall in their garages.

There the license plates remained, until a teacher [me] asked his students to bring in something of a historical nature. The students looked around and found the plates on the garage wall, left there by a previous owner or tenant, in a neighborhood--Boyle Heights--that was one of the older sections of the city. Like amateur archeologists, these students took the plates off the wall and brought them to the museum--my classroom. But it also suggests a detachment from history. The students looked on the old license plates as relics, not of their own past, but someone else's, much as we might look at Indian petroglyphs or tour a museum in Rome or Paris or some country our own ancestors weren't from.

I'm a strong believer in people-oriented history, and we had a lot of fun with those old license plates, trying to figure out who would have lived in the house the year a particular plate came out. Most likely the people would have been just ordinary folks, no one there destined to become famous by writing a book, becoming a movie star, politician, business entrepreneur, or professional athlete. Maybe that person was a mover or a shaker in some way.

I welcome the idea of a conference that examines Los Angeles history through a biographical lens. But first, we need a definition of Los Angeles, a place that means different things to different people. I think of Los Angeles in four ways: 1) the City; 2) the County; 3) the region, which extends beyond county borders to include neighboring areas that are economically or politically influenced by Los Angeles or in turn reciprocate with an influence of their own to create a general sense of Los Angeles that equates the name with southern California. By that definition Los Angeles takes in Orange County--which was a part of Los Angeles County until 1889 (think Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm)--and Palm Springs, Victorville, and Bakersfield. Bakersfield? There is a hardy group of people known as supercommuters who live in Bakersfield and Victorville and work in Los Angeles.

The fourth category exists outside geography. This is Los Angeles as a state of mind, an entity journalists in New York love to hate as they write essays about La La Land and smog and the movie business as if everyone living here wanted to be an actor or director or was shopping a screenplay to the studios. In a more positive sense, the Los Angeles image influences the nation and the world with its creativity in music, sports, entertainment, and, New Yorkers notwithstanding, cultural monuments such as the Huntington Library, UCLA, USC, Occidental College, Pepperdine, and the various Cal States. The Getty and the Autry Museum of Western Heritage demonstrate the ability of Los Angeles to attract major investments in popular education and edification. And never forget that the Los Angeles Central Library, an orphan for too many years, is one of the most underrated major libraries in the nation, deserving far more attention and respect than we usually give it.

Use of these four definitions of Los Angeles may at times seem contradictory or overlapping. But we would be parochial indeed if we stayed exclusively in our own neighborhood and tended our own garden and made believe that elsewhere didn't exist. So I pity the gated communities.

Having set up some definitions for Los Angeles, we have our work cut out for us if we are to teach our students something of the history of this city/county/region/state of mind. The city is dotted with reminders that people acted the roles of movers and shakers. Most were prominent or finally successful people, but some made their mark in non-economic or non-political ways.

At this point I would like to borrow from David Letterman, who makes up those "ten examples" lists, and offer a list of ten people from 19th-century Los Angeles whom we should know more about. Most of these people have been memorialized in one way or another by street names and other landmarks, but they certainly merit attention as flesh-and-blood people who lived in southern California and contributed to their communities. Anyone interested in local history would find their names recognizable as they are frequently mentioned in books and articles, but the mention is invariably limited to what it is those people did, not who they were. It is nice to be aware of the actions they took; it would be profitable for us to understand why they took them.

The first name on my list, Francisco Ramirez, was a young resident of Los Angeles in the 1850s who at age eighteen decided to publish a newspaper. His effort involved considerable financial risk, and in retrospect his daring or foolhardiness merits notice. Ramirez's newspaper, El Clamor Publico, was in the Spanish language, so it effectively excluded anyone who didn't read Spanish. He was a member of the new Republican political party, and his newspaper took an editorial position supporting it, this in a region full of Democrats and supporters of the South in the years preceding the Civil War. The main reading audience for his newspaper would have been the rico class of rancho owners who in 1855 were enjoying a brief moment of prosperity before the world fell on them as they expended their fortunes proving land titles and dealing with a prolonged drought that killed their cattle. They were hardly receptive to Ramirez's admonitions to represent their ethnic interests against a dominant English-speaking, non-Catholic, aggressive Anglo society. In 1859, El Clamor Publico ended its run after four years of effort. Some years later he briefly put out another Spanish-language newspaper, La Cronica.

Biographical detail about Ramirez is sketchy at best, yet this early defender of Hispanic society deserves more notice. If we know this much about what he did, then we should also want to know more about who he was. Is there enough material about Ramirez to create a full-scale biography? Paul Gray, author of Forster v. Pico, has done some excellent research into Ramirez's life, so we may be seeing a biography about him in the near future.

The second person on my list is Biddie Mason, born into slavery yet emerging as the most successful African American woman in 19th-century Los Angeles. Unfortunately, to most people she may also be seen as the only African American woman in 19th-century Los Angeles, much as Booker T. Washington was the only black person mentioned in U.S. history textbooks a couple of generations ago. In that regard Biddie Mason becomes a yardstick for what we know about African Americans in early Los Angeles. She parlayed a talent for real estate acquisitions into a substantial fortune and used her money for philanthropic purposes and church support. But we know relatively little about her personal life, and she stands in danger of having a whole lot of exaggerated stuff made up about her in place of hard facts. Are the resources available to create a more rounded version of her life and work? Sandra Kamusikiri, Cal State Northridge professor who has given many performance recreating the persona of Biddie Mason, has done more research into her life than anyone else, and a biography would be most welcome.

As for the rest of my list, I would like to offer some brief descriptions of people who appear with some frequency in the annals of Los Angeles but still await full biographical treatment. Persons number three and four are Abel Stearns and his wife Arcadia Bandini. Abel Stearns came to southern California around 1829, took Mexican citizenship, became a major landowner, and married into one of the region's pioneer families. As southern California grew and prospered, so did Stearns. He was involved in the political confusion surrounding the U.S.-Mexico War, the Gold Rush, and the litigation over land titles. Setbacks in the pastoral economy and the need to defend his rancho title hurt him but did not ruin him financially. When he died in 1871 he left his fortune to his widow.

California history teachers probably notice their students perking up and paying attention when the marriage of Abel Stearns and Arcadia Bandini is discussed. After all, there is the matter of age disparity. Arcadia was fourteen--same age as Juliet, I might note, except that Abel Stearns was no Romeo. At the time of their marriage he was 44 years old, and so self-conscious of the difference in their ages that he subtracted four years on the marriage license, as if 40 to 14 was somehow less embarrassing than 44 to 14. There was also the fact that he had been chopped up in a fight and was known by the nickname "Horseface." Still, the marriage was a success, though childless.

After Abel died, Arcadia married Robert S. Baker, a successful businessman who was one of the founders of Santa Monica. He built commercial buildings in downtown Los Angeles, most notably the Baker Block. After Baker died in 1894, Arcadia took a third husband, John Gaffey. She lived to 1912, reputedly one of the richest women in California, if not the richest, leaving an estate of $8 million. Yet we know very little about her personal life. Here and there glimpses come through: she wrote a description of the ball held by Governor Micheltorena to show there were no hard feelings against Commodore Thomas Ap Catesby Jones for his abortive seizure of California in 1842 under the mistaken belief that the United States and Mexico had gone to war. Arcadia wrote of the care that had to be taken lest her dress be dirtied by the mud in the street, and of the fact that the women put a lot of green, red, and white into their ball gowns as a subtle message to the Americans about the loyalty of Californio women. The Huntington Library has a collection of Stearns papers. Perhaps they hold a gold mine of biographical information about Abel and Arcadia, and, if so, it's time to start digging. The City of Los Angeles has a Stearns Drive. Arcadia is much better known, with city, streets, schools, library, and other landmarks named for her. But as a Shaker woman commented in a documentary made about her religious sect, she wanted the Shaker name to be known as "more than a type of chair."

For number five on my list, Harris Newmark presents a different kind of challenge to seeing "History as Biography." At first glance it would seem that Newmark is so well known that no further research about him is necessary. After all, he was the author of Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913, a major work that has gone through several revisions and editions. There is hardly a public library in southern California that doesn't have a copy of this book. It provides an eyewitness account, based on Newmark's encyclopedic memory, of every political, economic, and social event of any consequence, from horse races to elections, plus such natural disasters as earthquakes and man-made tragedies such as the massacre of Chinese in the city in 1871. On reflection, however, a reader of Newmark's book realizes that what is going on is the reader seeing Los Angeles through Harris Newmark's eyes. Looking out from Newmark isn't the same as looking at Newmark. So we stand very much in need of a biography of this Jewish immigrant who came to Los Angeles when the town was a backwater full of Gold Rush rejects, who witnessed lynchings and other lawless behavior, yet whose faith in the city's future kept him and his family here.

Number six on my list is Isaias Hellman, one of the founders of the Farmers and Merchants Bank, a direct ancestor through subsequent mergers of today's Bank of America. Like his co-religionist and contemporary Newmark, Hellman came from Europe and for many years made Los Angeles his home. A shrewd banker, Hellman was fair-minded but not about to risk depositor money in providing loans to borrowers who lacked collateral or at least the reasonable expectation the loan would be repaid. Not so Hellman's rival, the Temple and Workman Bank, which went under in 1875 for being far too generous in making dubious loans. Hellman's banking prowess was profiled in a book written 35 years ago, Isaias W. Hellman and the Farmers and Merchants Bank, co-written by Frank Putnam and Robert Cleland, but it only tells the story of Hellman's Los Angeles banking experiences, not a full biography or even a coverage of his later years when he moved to San Francisco and took charge of Wells Fargo Bank. As with so many of his contemporaries, Hellman was involved in much more than banking. Southern California in the late 19th century offered opportunities in real estate investment and a wide range of new and growing businesses. For example, Hellman was a shareholder in the Los Angeles City Water Company, the private firm that preceded the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in distributing water to the City of Los Angeles. A biography that dealt with Hellman's personal interests, his philanthropy, and his business activities would give us a fascinating picture of southern California at a time when venture capitalists all claimed a Midas touch. As an added note, the Hellman and Newmark families were quite large, and numerous descendants continue to live in southern California.

Contemporary with Newmark and Hellman was number seven on my list, Phineas Banning, energetic promoter of San Pedro and Wilmington and builder of a railroad that connected the harbor to Los Angeles in the 1870s. Banning is better served in biography than most 19th-century major figures, as he is the subject of a well-done study, Port Admiral, by Maymie Krythe. However, that book was written almost a half century ago, and Banning's accomplishments should perhaps be measured against modern Los Angeles. His name dots the landscape with school and community landmarks, and the Banning Home is a city attraction that draws visitors and students on school field trips. The biography of his life is a good one, but I think a new appraisal of his accomplishments as the "Father of Los Angeles Harbor" would be of interest to us.

Number eight on my list is Mary Foy, a name not well known outside of library circles, but someone who definitely merits more attention. For one thing, Mary Foy lived a life that neatly rounded out at one hundred years. Born in 1862 during the Civil War, Foy lived to see the first efforts of astronauts in their voyages to where no one has gone before. She became a librarian and witnessed the evolution of literary Los Angeles from the first halting efforts to start a public library to the establishment of a network of branch libraries throughout the city.

As a young college student making expenses by working as a messenger clerk at the Los Angeles Central Library in the late 1950s, I recall Mary Foy visiting the History Department there. Everyone was invited to meet her. Clueless in the ways of the world, I had no idea who that old lady was. I wonder how many of us have shared that same experience, encountering a senior citizen of advanced years, dismissing that old person as having nothing of value to tell us or share with us, and finding out too late what we might have learned. I urge my students to make use of our modern technology and use tape recorders and video cameras to capture older relatives and the stories they can tell for posterity. I warn my students not to wait too long, because, as I put it, "You're going to look awful silly at the cemetery yelling at the grave for answers to questions you wish you had asked when the opportunity was there!"

Mary Foy's name is commemorated with a reference room named for her at the Los Angeles Central Library. I think she is a great example of a relatively unknown person whose life enriched our society, and who would make for a fascinating biography.

Number nine on my list is a name everyone knows, but few know the person. Benjamin D. Wilson came to southern California in 1841, originally intending to travel to China. His plans were altered dramatically when he met and married Ramona Yorba, another of those marriageable daughters of a pioneer Californio family. Wilson became a powerful landowner whose properties included such areas as the present sites of Westwood, UCLA, Pasadena, Alhambra, San Gabriel, and San Pedro, plus part of Riverside County. He adapted to Hispanic society, learned the language, became a Catholic, and was referred to as "Don Benito." He had quite a few adventures during the U.S.-Mexico War, not the least of which was suspicion from both sides as to his loyalties.

After the war Wilson served as the second mayor of Los Angeles after California achieved statehood. He was elected to the state senate for three terms, lobbied for federal subsidies for railroad connections and harbor improvements, and raised cattle, sheep, wheat, and grapes on his properties. Mount Wilson and the observatory at its summit are named for him. Don Benito was also the maternal grandfather of George S. Patton, Jr., who went on to his own area of fame as a general in World War II.

With all this, it seems amazing that no authoritative biography exists of this remarkable man. Certainly the sources are abundant. The challenge exists for a talented doctoral student to do the research on Wilson, write a dissertation, and then revise it as a readable biography that would both entertain and enlighten readers as to the career of this very significant mover and shaker.

My tenth person is a Californio who, like Arcadia Bandini, witnessed the transformation of California from Hispanic pastoral province to a modern industrial state. Antonio Coronel was born in Mexico and came to Los Angeles in 1834 at age 17. His father Ignacio started the first school in the small town and also served as a secretary to the town council. Antonio's career was long and distinguished. Although he had supported Mexico during the U.S.-Mexico War, no one seemed to have any hard feelings in the postwar period. Coronel accepted American rule as a fact of life and made the most of it. Among other public offices he was city assessor, served as mayor in 1853 and 1854, was a county supervisor, and at the state level was elected treasurer. Helen Hunt Jackson visited Coronel's home and listened to his stories of the old days, and a lot of this material found its way into her famous novel, Ramona. Coronel was a founder of the Historical Society of Southern California, and he backed Francisco Ramirez's La Cronica newspaper.

Coronel's list of accomplishments could go on, but what I find most fascinating about his life is his commitment to preserving his Hispanic heritage. Granted that as a wealthy man he defined the past in terms of the rancho owners rather than the ranch hands, he nonetheless wanted people to remember the time of the Dons. He utilized photography and art to capture the daily life and activities of pre-Gold Rush days. In fact, there is hardly a book on California or Los Angeles dealing with the Hispanic period that fails to include photographs or pictures of Don Antonio and members of his family. Maybe he overdid it a little, for the visual effect is one of guitar playing and dancing the fandango as stereotypical activities of rancho life.

Antonio Coronel represents a transitional figure in Los Angeles, someone who was able to thrive even as he moved from one life style to a dramatically different one. Here again is someone whose life spanned most of the 19th century but known to us only in bits and pieces. Coronel would make an excellent subject for biographical research, and a book about his life and times would add immeasurably to our view of Los Angeles in its development from pueblo to metropolis.

I claimed a list of ten, but I want to add a bonus figure to the list: Andres Pico, brother of Governor Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California. Andres's main claim to fame comes from his leadership of the Californios in the U.S.-Mexico War. Note that the Californios who fought the Yankee invaders were not a professional army. They were more in the area of militia, though they were expert horsemen and adept at hunting wild boar and grizzzly bears. When General Stephen Watts Kearny rashly ordered his force of a hundred men to charge against the Californios at San Pascual on December 6, 1846, Andres Pico handed Kearny one of the worst military defeats in American history. Within five minutes a third of Kearny's little army was killed or wounded. Kearny himself was wounded in the buttocks, speared by a lance wielded by one of those boar-hunting Californio horsemen.

Andres Pico realized his Californios would in the long run be no match against the U.S. army and the reinforcements who were arriving in increasing numbers. Figuring that Kearny might want to have him executed, being a sore loser about San Pascual so to speak, Andres worked out an agreement with John C. Fremont to end the hostilities in California. On January 13, 1847, Pico and Fremont signed the Cahuenga Capitulation, also known as the Treaty of Cahuenga, by which both sides agreed to stop the fighting. From that point on California was out of the war, though the United States and Mexico continued to go at it for another year until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the conflict in February 1848.

Like Coronel, Pico proved adaptable to the new society. He was elected to the state assembly in 1850, immediately following California's admission to the Union. He joined the Democratic party and supported the northern Broderick faction against the pro-South William Gwin, then switched to the Republican party as the Democrats fractured over the issue of slavery. In 1859 he was elected to the state senate, and he also held other public offices during the American phase of his life. In 1853 Andres purchased about half of the San Fernando Valley, and the home he built, the Andres Pico Adobe, serves today as the headquarters of the San Fernando Valley Historical Society. Although he had money problems, to a great extent due to his extravagant brother, Pio Pico, who went from one financial crisis to another, Andres Pico lived a life that was colorful and fascinating, certainly a life that was never dull. The best work dealing with Andres is Forster vs. Pico by Paul Gray, but the book is not a biography of him, though it provides biographical details. The full biography remains to be written.

I can't leave Andres Pico without commenting on the most unusual encounter between Pico and his former enemy, Archibald Gillespie. At the Battle of San Pascual Pico and Gillespie were trying very hard to kill each other. Thirteen years later, in 1859, Pico was an assemblyman in the California legislature, and Gillespie, who had sparked the revolt of the Californios in Los Angeles by his imperious rule and arrogance, needed a job. An opportunity existed for him as an assistant clerk in the legislature. Pico, more than willing to let bygones be bygones, addressed the legislature, endorsing Gillespie for the job. A unanimous vote confirmed him in the position. Paul Gray notes a subsequent meeting between Gillespie and Richard Henry Dana, author of the book Two Years Before the Mast. Gillespie praised Pico as a man who "was as brave as a lion and the soul of honor," attributes Gray suspects "were influenced by gratitude" for Gillespie's getting the job. Such is the nature of an ideal California in which old enemies forgive and forget, and maybe argue a little over drinks about who had fought harder.

Having created a list with ten plus a bonus figure, I have to note some special challenges confronting the theme "History as Biography." Such lists invariably lean towards the famous, the notorious, the wealthy, the celebrity. Ordinary lives of working-class people seldom have the marketability of someone who fought wars, entered into a sequence of multiple marriages with ever-younger spouses, or gained enough wealth to make us stop and take notice. Most such people are men, and probably not of a racial or religious minority.

What about everyone else? Some studies of ordinary people have been made for Los Angeles in the 19th century, most notably Richard Griswold del Castillo's The Los Angeles Barrio. Ricardo Romo, Gloria Miranda, Gloria Lothrop, and a few other scholars have shown it is possible to dig up information about the people who were, shall we say, on the receiving end of the moving and shaking in the making of Los Angeles. Let me suggest some possibilities for biographical investigation to add to their work load, though of course they would appreciate help from anyone who accepts the task of doing research in this area.

First, the Asian community in Los Angeles in the 19th century. Everyone knows they were there because of the Chinese Massacre of 1871 in which a mob murdered some twenty Chinese. But we need to know a lot more about when these Chinese arrived and how long they were here before that tragic incident, and how they fared afterward. Who were the leaders of the Chinese community, how did they interact with the dominant political and economic power structure, and how did they deal with issues such as schools, recreation, and preservation of their heritage?

Similar questions could be asked of African Americans, as I noted earlier. Who besides Biddie Mason worked and lived in Los Angeles? Did they come here directly after the Civil War? From the South as freedmen? Or from a North that rejected them as job competitors? Studies have been done for the black community in Los Angeles in the 20th century--can we push the calendar further back?

Native Americans became an invisible minority after statehood. Here and there are accounts of their employment as ranch hands and laborers, and of discrimination against them. It would be interesting to learn of local tribes that had spokesmen; their stand on accepting or rejecting European religious faiths; how they spent their days amid or isolated from a society that had overwhelmed them.

I'm also interested in an examination of European ethnicities and their contributions to Los Angeles diversity. Newmark and Hellman are but two examples of pioneer Jews in Los Angeles. Obviously, most Jews didn't achieve their level of success. Neither did most Italians, Hungarians, Russians, French, Irish, Dutch, or other nationalities, though I am sure some did well. Los Angeles seems always to have been a city of immigrants, a diversity we can celebrate if only by going to a different ethnic restaurant every day for a month without repeating ourselves.

Beyond ethnicity, race, and religion, there is gender. Few women seem to have gained prominence in the historical record as it currently stands. Dig around a little and we may find that Arcadia Bandini Stearns Baker Gaffey doesn't stand alone. Then there are occupations and professions. Which people spent forty or more years offering their services in Los Angeles as doctors, craftsmen, lawyers, enterprising businessmen who started with little and worked up to a little more? What about teachers?

Los Angeles has many lives worth knowing, and History as Biography can enrich our own understanding of the past and attract students who may learn that others were here before them to make things look and be the way they are today. Digging the information out is hard work. Someone has to turn the pages--figuratively, they're on microfilm--of the Los Angeles Star, El Clamor Publico, Los Angeles Semi-Weekly Southern News, the Tri-Weekly News, the Los Angeles Daily Times, the Express, the Herald, and other forgotten newspapers to read of the news of the events of the 19th century. There are important manuscript collections at the Huntington Library, the Seaver Center for Western History at the County Museum, collections at USC, UCLA, Occidental College, the Los Angeles Central Library, and other repositories. Someone has to do the digging. I'd like to think we're all prospectors.

ABRAHAM HOFFMAN, a native of Los Angeles, attended local schools and received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA. He teaches California history at Los Angeles Valley College. Dr. Hoffman's book, Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Water Controversy, was awarded a Donald F. Pflueger Local History Award by the Historical Society of Southern California. His articles have appeared in California History, Pacific Historical Review, Western Historical Quarterly, and other publications. He is active in the Los Angeles Corral of Westerners and is a member of the Board of Editors of the Southern California Quarterly. He was awarded the Francis M. Wheat award for his article, "Water Famine or Water Needs: Los Angeles and Population Growth, 1896-1905," published in the Fall 2000 issue of the SCQ.