From Other Lands: Ethnic Angelenos
by Gloria Ricci Lothrop, Ph.D.
This publication is made possible by a grant from
the J.B. and Emily Van Nuys Charities
The topic, "Los Angeles Lives Worth Knowing: History as Biography," prompted me to examine what has been written about the relationship between these kindred subjects. According to Sir Walter Scott the history of the world is but the biography of men and women. He declared that there is no heroic poem that is not at bottom a biography; it may be said as well that there is no faithfully recorded life that is not, in a sense, an heroic poem. Ralph Waldo Emerson felt as strongly. He wrote: "Man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world," leading him to observe that there is "no history, only biography."
It is the biographies of those who led their lives in southern California who can make our past come alive for us. Our local history is populated by a variety of individuals whose actions affect the content of our lives today. Some are known to us. Some remain at the margin of history. Many of those interesting Angelenos represent the numerous ethnic communities which exist in Los Angeles. In 2002 California was home to 8.9 million foreign born, the largest concentration in the United States.
"One may hear French or Italian as often as English or Spanish on the streets of Los Angeles," wrote visitor Ludwig Salvatore in 1876. Indeed, Los Angeles was already a multi-ethnic city by that date. Nothing so effectively highlighted the diversity of traditions and the blending of cultures as did the city's centennial celebration in 1881. In a unique display of cosmopolitanism the town's 12,000 citizens listened to ceremonial speeches delivered in English, Spanish and French. As early as 1860 more than ten percent of the local residents were French. Today French residents are creating a growing expatriate community in Venice which somewhat approximates the atmosphere of their distant Mediterranean Sea.
There are many unexpected ethnic enclaves in this prismatic metropolis. For example, West Los Angeles is home to the Iranian music business, "which by most estimates produces 90% of the world's Farsi-language pop music." Manila Way bisects the business district in suburban West Covina. The Filipino shops which line the thoroughfare are patronized by members of the Filipino community in Los Angeles County, the largest outside the Philippines.
Many of the world's great cities are recognized by their recognizable signatures. Paris has its boulevards, New York its skyscrapers. If there is a signature for Los Angeles it is its mix of races and the ethnic diversity of its neighborhoods. The county is home to 50,000 Germans and at least 200,000 Americans of German descent. There are 20,000 Irish-born Angelenos and another 630,000 who claim ties to Ireland. Los Angeles is home to the largest Indonesian community and the largest Danish settlement in the United States. Based on population statistics Los Angeles is the largest Korean city outside of Korea's capital, Seoul. Los Angeles claims the second largest concentrations of Salvadorans and Guatemalans in the world. There are more Mexican residents here than in any city except Mexico City. More Samoans reside in Los Angeles County than in American Samoa. In addition, there are more Japanese Americans in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the world.
Two 3,000-pound fiberglass dragons span North Broadway, serving as gate keepers to New Chinatown populated by mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and a growing number of Vietnamese. They are part of the county's Asian population which has grown by 34.4% since 1990. Beyond the gateway there are several thriving businesses established by the late Fung Chow Chan, an ethnic Angeleno one should meet. Chow was a Cantonese immigrant, who shortly after his arrival in 1933, established the family-run Phoenix Bakery which has become a multimillion-dollar business famous for its whipped cream and strawberry cake, a favorite at downtown office parties and a staple at Dodger and Laker team events. Despite his growing success, over the years Chan had difficulty securing business loans. As a result, he and several other investors secured a charter for Cathay Bank, the first Chinese American bank in southern California. As chairman of the board, Chan oversaw the development of twenty-one branch banks in New York, Hong Kong and Taipei. He also co-founded East-West Federal Savings, the first federally chartered thrift in a Chinese American community. This enterprising businessman, who was also a scholar of the Chinese classics, in the words of one admirer, "reached great success through hard work, eggs and flour."
There is a group of immigrants that is often overlooked. Their seemingly humble contributions may have been overlooked. But their labors, one stitch at a time, made a significant difference in the economic life of the region.
The Los Angeles garment district sprawls for blocks a few miles south of the dragon gateway to Chinatown. Since earliest days it has occupied converted downtown lofts and crowded stalls along Santee Alley. The area hardly appears to be the leading garment manufacturing center in the United States, and second largest center in the world. The Los Angeles needle trades gained momentum early in the twentieth century sewing sportswear from butcher cloth and using wool from flocks owned by Kaspare Cohn, founder in 1914 of Union Bank, major lender to the garment industry. By the end of the twentieth century it employed 122,500 workers. Traditionally, leadership has been provided by Jewish, European and American owners and contractors. But sixty-six percent of the workers are Latino and mostly female. This statistic reflects the little-known fact that since the late 1920s more than half of the nation's immigrants have been female.
The more recent preponderance of female immigrants reflects patterns of family reunification. But the feminization of the nation's newcomers also reflects "the willingness of more women to use migration to improve their fortunes." The garment industry has offered ready employment to these newcomers limited in labor and language skills. As a result of the fact that they are newcomers, these non-union workers often earn below the minimum wage doing piecework in unregulated environments. These Latina workers are generally employed by garment contractors who operate shops of thirty to forty workers or rely on homework to meet short delivery deadlines. These contractors constitute an informal labor sector where business is done in cash, where undocumented workers are exploited and unrepresented, and health and safety regulations are largely unenforced.
The current situation stands in contrast with the conditions following the 1933 month-long strike by largely Latina members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Despite clubbings and arrests the women, led by labor organizer Rose Pesotta, won a modest wage increase and, more importantly, secured recognition of their union, the ILGWU.
News of Latinos' labor struggles and their infrequent victories were reported in the Spanish-language press, the most widely read in Los Angeles being La Opinión first published on September 16, Mexican Independence Day, 1926, by journalist Ignacio E. Lozano, Sr. A native of Nuevo León in northeastern Mexico, Lozano moved to San Antonio, Texas when he was twenty-one. There he established a bookstore. "Fueled by a passion for journalism and a mission to establish a truly independent newspaper, Lozano founded the daily Spanish language newspaper, La Prensa in 1913."
Lozano's newspapers carried news from Mexico throughout the southwest and as far as Oregon and Kansas. La Opinión which by the end of its first decade had a circulation of twenty-five thousand, featured foreign correspondents in Paris, Mexico City and Washington, D.C., as well as some of the most prestigious writers in Mexico. Today it is the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States with a daily circulation of 700,000. Lozano served as publisher until his death in 1953. The newspaper, which celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in September, 2001, has been headed by successive generations of the family considered to be among the fifty wealthiest Latino families in the United States.
From our neighbor to the north, Canada, came migrants like moviemaker, Mack Sennet and evangelist, Aimee Semple MacPherson. Both would have far reaching influence on the people of Los Angeles and beyond. The community of Canadian Angelenos also included Allen and Malcolm Loughead, who first settled in Santa Barbara before joining the ranks of daring aviation experimenters in the Los Angeles area. The brothers arrived at a propitious moment in the infancy of aviation. The Los Angeles Aeroclub had successfully presented two international air shows at the Dominguez Ranch in 1910 and 1912. There gliders, balloons, dirigibles, mono-planes and pusher bi-planes had captured the popular imagination. Cal Perry Rogers' eventful transcontinental flight in 1911, culminating in a landing before thousands at Victory Park, Pasadena, had been hailed by the press as the feat of the century. Later in 1914, at an air show staged to inaugurate the new Pomona auto raceway, Glen L. Martin demonstrated the Martin Life Pack Parachute, established air to ground communication and dropped ammunition on a land target - all dramatic firsts for aviation.
The Lougheads entered this heady atmosphere where aviation was literally ready to take off. They established their airframe company in 1917, all the while cultivating professional relationships with aviation inventors as Glen Martin, Donald Douglas and Jack Northrop. By the 1920s companies like Douglas, Martin and Lockheed were recognized internationally for the successful implementation of their new ideas. They were not the largest companies in American aviation, but in the opinion of aviation historians, "they had the largest role in translating the advances in aeronautical science and technology into operating aircraft during the years 1925 to 1935."
Among the local innovations was the Lockheed Vega, first built in 1927. The high-wing, single-engined monoplane designed to carry ten passengers at speeds of up to 135 miles per hour for a range of up to 900 miles was an aviation innovation which revolutionized plane design in the United States. Its wooden fuselage and cantilevered wooden wings in an advanced streamline shape were aerodynamically superior. The Lockheed brothers' Vega became the model for general-purpose aircraft. It was duplicated worldwide and ultimately influenced the design of larger transport airplanes. The Lockheeds, who officially changed their name in 1934, sold their interests in the company in 1930. Malcolm, the inventor of the widely used four-wheel hydraulic brake, retired to his mining property in the California gold country. But the two brothers' pioneering innovations in aviation design live on in the name of the company, Lockheed Martin, which in 200l was awarded a ten-year contract to produce 3000 fighter jets for $200 billion, the largest contract ever granted by the federal government.
The golden age of aviation attracted independent spirits who were intrigued by innovation and inspired by challenges. The new field which had few barriers welcomed otherwise excluded minorities including African Americans and also women. Katherine Cheung, who had come from China to study music at the University of Southern California, was unique among them all. In 1932 after merely twelve and half hours of instruction the diminutive pioneer became the first Chinese American woman to fly. The mother of two "donned pants and an aviator helmet" and became a barnstormer, often blithely flying her open cockpit plane upside down. She became a member of Amelia Earhart's organization of professional women pilots, the Ninety-nines, and regularly entered air races flying a biplane presented to her by the local Chinese American community. Until her retirement in 1942 Cheung was an enthusiastic advocate for women aviators declaring, "We drive automobiles - why not fly planes?" Today she is honored in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. In the Beijing Air Force Aviation Museum she is described as China's Amelia Earhart.)
Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini was another southern California migrant who was not restrained by conformity. While faithful to the rules of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, the religious order she founded, her vision and her conviction led her to explore possibilities beyond the expected. Undaunted by chronic ill health, the diminutive Italian missionary sailed the Atlantic thirty times in thirty-five years in her effort to minister to her migrant Italian countrymen living in the two Americas. From New York to Buenos Aires Cabrini purchased property, drew up contracts and negotiated with a host of foreign governments as she built orphanages, hospitals and schools.
In the United States she established six centers in major cities including Los Angeles to which Bishop Thomas J. Conaty invited her order in 1902. Mother Cabrini arrived in the summer of 1905 to find a city which, she wrote: "is widespread and seems to grow recklessly. Property is very expensive . . ." She marveled at the quality of the air and extolled the afternoon breezes which tempered the summer heat. Invited to Catalina as a guest of the Banning family, she described seeing the island on the horizon in a burst of saffron color set amidst a sea of "such a transparent blue, that myriads of fish could be seen deep down."
Cabrini, the director of a far flung international enterprise was nevertheless attentive to detail, noting that "Los Angeles homes made of wood are of exquisite workmanship." With undisguised admiration she praised the city's "incomparable system of electric trains constructed by the characteristic boldness of Americans." These red cars transported her to Abbot Kinney's Venice in America and to the heights of Mount Lowe. From the 6,000-foot peak, "Los Angeles appeared like a majestic queen," she later wrote.
By the fall of 1905 she had converted the J.W. Robinson estate into an orphanage housing more than one hundred infants. Another 110 infants and toddlers were housed on Mateo Street and St. Peter's school was established on Alpine Street. On subsequent six-month visits she provided added programs. After studying local maps, which it is said she used much as a general would before battle, she purchased undeveloped land in Burbank and constructed the state's first preventorium for the treatment of girls at risk from tuberculosis. Today it is the site of Woodbury University.
At her canonization in 1946, a mere 27 years after her death, Pope Pius XII observed: "Especially toward immigrants . . .did she extend a friendly hand, a sheltering refuge, relief and help." The first naturalized American citizen to be canonized lived in our times and moved in our midst. She is a twentieth century missionary who belongs uniquely to Los Angeles.
The city claims many more distinguished émigrés. This year, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Arnold Schoenberg, the city is examining his works and honoring one of the most controversial figures in the world of music. Schoenberg was an unabashed romantic, a celebrated intellectual, an outcast in exile, a father, a teacher and a composer who forever changed music.
Schoenberg was a contemporary of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Like Stravinsky he would spend a significant portion of his composing life in Los Angeles. He arrived in 1934 with his wife and three children, fleeing the rising tide of Nazism. They were befriended by an expatriate community of Germans and Austrians including former student, Otto Klemperer, who was director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1933 to 1940. Klemperer conducted a number of Schoenberg's works including the premiere of the "Suite for String Orchestra" in concerts at the Philharmonic Auditorium. The circle of friends also included Thomas Mann whose novel Buddenbrooks was awarded the Nobel Prize for its humanity and the loftiness of poetry and intellect. There was German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, author of such plays as "Mother Courage" and "The Caucasian Chalk Circle," who attended Schoenberg's composition classes at UCLA. Also among the friends was Austrian-born architect Richard Neutra, his wife Dion and Austrian-born novelist Vicky Baum. German writers Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger hosted many gatherings at their home, Villa Aurora, overlooking the Pacific, where they were joined by writer and composer Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler. While Schoenberg never composed for Hollywood, the industry had attracted several within his circle including German-born screenwriter and art patron, Galka Scheyer, the collector of the Blue Four Expressionist painters, and Polish-born actress and screenwriter for Greta Garbo, Salka Viertel who chronicled the émigrés' lives in Los Angeles on the eve of World War II in the book, The Kindness of Strangers.
In 1935-36 Schoenberg taught at the University of Southern California. From 1936 until his retirement in 1944 he was a member of the UCLA music faculty. His students included John Cage and David Raksin and Hollywood composers Mario Castelnuevo-Tedesco and Oscar Levant. Schoenberg's theoretical writings and harmony texts produced during this period are considered important writings half a century later. He composed more than a dozen concert works while living in Los Angeles, including the haunting "A Survivor from Warsaw" in 1947.
Schoenberg's musical work is marked by a distinctive "form of organizing the pitches of the scale - the 12 tone system . . ." This device permitted him to order pitches without reference to traditional harmony. Yet he retained an inner unity in his music. Thus he could use conventional forms like the sonata but create music that was unpredictable and complex. Leopold Stokowski wrote in 1937, that Schoenberg stands alone: "In the evolution of occidental music there never has been a musician of similar character and gifts."
On a Sunday afternoon in July 1944 in the same Philharmonic Auditorium where Schoenberg's works had been played, impresario Norman Granz launched what would become the famous Jazz at the Philharmonic. The fund raiser for the defendants in the Sleepy Lagoon Case was unique for it brought together jazz soloists with a racially integrated band. As Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts were played across the country Granz insisted that the audiences also be integrated.
There was ample reason for Jazz at the Philharmonic to be launched in Los Angeles. As early as 1908 musicians playing ragtime had been migrating here from New Orleans and other southern cities. By 1912 the first record store was opened by the Spike brothers on Central Avenue not far from the Cadillac Cafe where "Jelly Roll" Morton entertained. By the early 1920s when rag was being replaced by "jazz," Reb Spikes organized a band called the Majors and Minors and made records including the first African American New Orleans jazz recording. It featured incomparable jazz musician Edward "Kid" Ory.
Because of the racial divide which existed even in Los Angeles, African American musicians were not accepted in the white musicians union and were overlooked in hiring. Consequently, they organized their own union and performed in Black clubs and theaters along Central Avenue and at Sebastian's Cotton Club, a white club featuring African American talent, on Washington Boulevard near La Cienega in Culver City. It headlined such historic talents as Fats Waller, the Mills Brothers and Lionel Hampton. "Los Angeles soon became recognized as a mecca for some of the greatest jazz in the world."
Jazz reviews as well as advertisements for such Central Avenue theaters as the Rosebud, the Gaiety and the Tivoli, appeared in the Black press including the California Eagle published by Charlotta Bass from 1912 to 1951. Through the paper she and her husband John battled against discrimination, employment restrictions and de facto segregation, taking on the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters as well as the Ku Klux Klan. In 1952 Bass capped a politically active career by running for vice-president in the national presidential campaign on the Progressive Party ticket. Her slogan was, "Win or Lose, We All Win!"
It was, no doubt, with pride that Bass reported on the singular honor conferred upon a former neighbor, a high school valedictorian who had been denied membership in the city's honor society because of race. Ralph Bunche later became the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Undeterred by his earlier exclusion from the honor society, Bunche matriculated at UCLA where he was a football quarterback, captain of the debate team and UCLA's first black valedictorian. After earning a doctorate in political science from Harvard, Bunche joined the faculty of Howard University. The Civil Rights activist later entered government service where he had a key role in organizing the United Nations. His pioneering "shuttle diplomacy" in the Middle East during the Six Day War and in such areas as Suez, the Congo and Cyprus won international acclaim. In 1963 while Bunche was director of the NAACP, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom the nation's highest civilian honor.
Among her early crusades Charlotta Bass had unsuccessfully attempted to halt the production of "The Birth of a Nation" which D. W. Griffith filmed in southern California in 1914. The climate, the variety of settings and the casting possibilities provided by the southland's multi-ethnic population drew early film makers from their show shops and motion picture arcades lining 14th Street along the northern edge of Manhattan's lower east side. By the second decade of the twentieth century films were being made in Victorian buildings atop Bunker Hill and, in the hills east of Glendale Blvd. Mack Sennet directed frantic chases with his Keystone Cops in hot pursuit. By 1913 the feature film joined the rollicking one reelers when Cecil B. DeMille directed "The Squaw Man" in a rented barn at the corner of Selma and Vine streets in the rural community of Hollywood.
The conservative country town of Hollywood, which limited grazing herds of sheep to two hundred, would soon be made the film capital of the world by a group of eastern European Jews who would reign over their glamorous creation for thirty years. They transformed the store-front theaters of the late teens into the movie palaces of the twenties." They filled the entertainment firmament with stars and successfully produced motion pictures celebrating the American mores and attitudes which these immigrant entrepreneurs had enthusiastically adopted as their own. Each had rejected his personal past and, instead, embraced America, its culture and its promise, as his own. In the estimation of one historian, they nearly made a religion of assimilation. One even permanently obscured the date of his birth, declaring instead that he had been born on the Fourth of July. These eastern European immigrants who had experienced discrimination from so many quarters became part of an infant industry too young to have established protocols or erected barriers. Consequently, there were no impediments barring their entry into this faintly disreputable business of movie making. There was opportunity for Jews as there was for the Black businessmen who in 1915 founded the Lincoln Film Company. At the outset of their careers these future Hollywood moguls had been employed in the clothing trade and retail merchandising where they had come to understand public taste and had become masters of marketing. They used this valuable experience to great effect in the business of film making.
The eight who were singularly influential in shaping Hollywood were a remarkably homogeneous group and were born or had roots in communities separated by no more than a few hundred miles. Carl Laemmle was born in 1867 in a small village in southeastern Germany. After the death of his mother, the thirteen-year-old appealed to his penurious father to allow him to migrate to the United States. Eventually, he would establish Universal Pictures. Adolph Zukor was born in the Tokay district of Hungary. Orphaned in infancy he was placed in the austere household of an uncle. When old enough, he fled to America where he would later found Paramount Pictures. William Fox immigrated to America from Hungary with his parents. To compensate for his father's neglect young Fox sold soda and sandwiches to support his family. He would one day head the Fox Film Corporation. Louis B. Mayer traveled with his parents from Russia to the Maritime Provinces of Canada. He too departed from his parents' authority at an early age setting up a salvage business in Boston before heading for Hollywood where he created the greatest studio of them all, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Benjamin Warner left Poland for America where he labored as a cobbler and a peddler before having enough money to send for his wife and family. In the United States the family grew to include Harry, Sam, Albert and Jack, who at one point decided to pool their savings to buy a dilapidated movie projector. It was a prelude to the birth of Warner Brothers Studios.
Through the magic of film these recent arrivals with their business experience and salesmen's skills, were able to evoke on the screen the privileged, genteel and affluent society from which Jews were still barred in early twentieth century America. Ironically, the prosperity resulting from their success permitted them to create an extension of that exclusive world in their own palatial homes and clubs. With time the vast influence and wealth of the studios would also win them a place among the nation's elite.
In the process of creating their movies, the film makers crafted so powerful a constellation of impressions of America that in the words of Hollywood historian, Neal Gabler, "they colonized the American imagination." The mass medium of Hollywood film inevitably publicized the local setting and introduced the world to the southern California life style. That included the great outdoors, especially the beaches which bordered the blue Pacific. But the hero who brought life to those beaches with the excitement of surfing and the glamour of the lifeguard was not from Hollywood, but rather from Hawaii. George Freeth, known as the Hawaiian wonder and the king of the surfboard, journeyed from Waikiki to surf with southern Californians, teach the basic rules of water safety and generally impart his generous "aloha spirit."
Upon arriving in 1907 Freeth was employed by both Henry Huntington and Abbot Kinney to stage surfing exhibitions promoting their respective seaside developments of Redondo Beach and Venice. The popularity of both had been marred by the alarming number of drownings of ocean swimmers. This had revealed the inadequacy of the region's ocean rescue response. Freeth soon ushered in change by teaching his innovative water rescue techniques. At the same time he served as a swimming and diving instructor, providing valuable free training to several Olympic hopefuls.
In the words of Freeth biographer, Arthur Verge: "Freeth's greatest virtue was his willingness and ability to teach and share the exceptional talents he possessed . . .In an age where the ocean was to be feared and avoided, George Freeth introduced surfing to southern California . . . It was from these warm California coastal waters that surfing would ultimately gain its greatest appeal amongst the American masses . . . Freeth worked diligently to teach and popularize the aquatic sports of swimming, water polo, and diving . . .His greatest impact on California, however, remains his instrumental role in revolutionizing the profession of ocean lifesaving."
Freeth could not have imagined the impact of his efforts, but fortunately his personal contributions would be recognized by the American government before his untimely death in the flu epidemic of 1919. On December 16, 1908 a sudden winter squall swept into the breakwater near Huntington's Long Wharf upsetting a small fleet of boats carrying Japanese fishermen northward. Freeth leaped to the rescue and swam through the heavy surf for two and a half hours rescuing seven fishermen, while the rescue team he had personally trained saved three more. In gratitude, the Japanese fishermen renamed their coastal village Port Freeth and a grateful nation made him the fifth recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal first awarded to George Washington in 1776. Freeth's is a biography which made history.
Their lives are varied. Their nations of origin were diverse. But the contribution of each is memorable. These are a few of the citizens of twentieth century multi-ethnic Los Angeles who provide inspiration. Their biographies are the heroic poems, to paraphrase Emerson, the bundle of relations, "the knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world" of southern California. They are Los Angeles lives indeed worth knowing.
Gloria Ricci Lothrop is the W.P. Whitsett Professor of History at California State University, Northridge, where she teaches the history of California and conducts graduate and undergraduate seminars on the history of California and the American West. In addition to her many honors she is a Fellow of both the Historical Society of Southern California and the California Historical Society. Dr. Lothrop's publications include Recollections of the Flathead Mission (1979), and Pomona: A Centennial History (1988), among others. She is co-author of California Women: A History (1987), co-editor of A Guide to the History of California (1989), selected as the best bibliography of 1989 by the American Library Association, and editor of Fulfilling the Promise: Italian Americans and the California Dream (2001). She is currently completing a chapter on the history of the Los Angeles Public Library and the Department of Cultural Affairs for a two-volume study of the development of municipal government in Los Angeles.