Notes for 11/22

Last class before Thanksgiving: movies about California.  Clips with brief commentary on each by Professor Block.

including:

Grapes of Wrath
Swing Shift
Bullitt
The Conversation
LA Story
Annie Hall
Big Lebowski

Notes for 11/27 Lecture

Guest lecturer: journalist/scholar, author of Union of Their Dreams, Miriam Pawel.

Her Q to audience: How many have been part of a protest, a march?  (3, including me!)

Background of sixties protests: she a NewYorker, heard about Chavez from afar.  Civil Rights, SNCC, etc as a context.  She came to LA in 90s to report for the Times; investigated what the union had become--it was no longer much of an advocate, a family run operation that didn’t do much for workers at all.  Farm workers living in caves, tar paper shacks, and so on.  A failure as a union (higher wages, better conditions); a successful social movement, because all who were involved felt their lives changed forever. As a journalist/historian, she wants to show Chavez’s greatness, but also his flaws, failures: in order to understand what can happen going forward.

Clips from “Chicano!”  PBS documentary on the grape strike and UFW movement.  Chavez made it a civil rights movement. The boycott worked!

She practices “history without a license,” she says.  Interviews are interesting: memory is completely unreliable! She relied on documents; Chavez kept all his papers at the Ruether Library at Wayne State: everything was sent there.  Tapes too.  She then pursued living witnesses to fill in gaps. (Especially those who had good stories to tell.)  Very strong sense that there’s no objective viewpoint for writing this history--especially in such a dispersed movement.

The Fall:  said she was going to explain the decline of the movement, but didn’t. It’s in the book, I guess.  She got a lot of pushback for her portrait of Chavez; Mayor Villaragosa himself said, “It’s true, but why write it?  We need our heroes!”

More clips: scenes from Cesar’s life--in front of a storefront in Delano; four years later, the cover of Time Magazine.  Pray-ins at the supermarket.

Answered questions from the audience for a while: whether she got pushback (lots), her views of Chavez (complicated), next book (bio of Chavez).

Hist 240--11/8   Oil and Water

(Begins with short review of previous lecture:) 

Oil!

“Strategic Mineral Number One”

“The root of competitive advantage”

“Oil=energy!”

Water!

Oil + Water=Growth!  (Slides that look like “There Will Be Blood.” Clip from East of Eden. Lettuce in the Salinas Valley… Railroad key part. Each successive wave of immigrants started in field work.)

Iceberg lettuce--a breakthrough!  Because it keeps well refrigerated. Cali will dominate the nation because it’s all season, and the soil is uniquely fertile.

1920s-1940s

Edward Doheny gives money to USC in memory of his son; a white collar criminal oilman,  Teapot Dome scandal.  Escapes prison, turns to philanthropy.

Upton Sinclair picks up on the scandal, writes Oil, which is about Edward Doheny.  (There Will Be Blood: Clip of the oil blowout; Doheny started as a wildcatter, as shown in the movie.)

Hollywood: it can’t grow, because there isn’t enough water. (Ad for Lankershim Land and Water Co. in San Fernando Valley, but geared towards agriculture.) Mulholland diverts and dams a river (as in San Francisco), and turns the scrub Hollywood Hills into prime real estate. Mulholland Dam up on the hill there. In LA, Mulholland is a hero: everywhere else, Satan’s Spawn! He moves on to the Feather River, the Colorado River, always seeking water for LA.

However, Mulholland meets his match with the St. Francis Dam.  OKs a dam built against unstable mountain on sandstone: dam failed, people die. This starts a concern with zoning: don’t build houses on a flood plain.  Trailer parks, industrial parks instead.

Kevin Starr sees Los Angeles as OZ: a migration inducing scam.  The money is in building for those who come…

Edgar Rice Burroughs becomes a developer, builds Tarzana (next to Encino). Writes “The Story of Tarzana.”  This is before Tarzan is famous. “It’s irrigated!”  “We have sewage systems!”  LA sells modernity.  Where can we get more water?  Mulholland eyes the Owens River Valley and system.  Once drained into Mono Lake, which is now much lower because of diversions.  

Secret purchases of water rights from farmers by LA Water Authority--Chinatown!  Dredging, diverting through the 20s.  New dams.  Owens water goes straight to downtown LA; later, redirected to San Fernando Valley, which makes real estate speculation real and viable. Meantime, LA is growing by annexation in all directions.  With state and federal resources, “reclamation projects”: reclaiming water from its intended destination of the ocean.

Salton Sink/Colorado Desert/Imperial Valley: a succession of names to make the area sound more attractive. Ca. WWI, diverting the Colorado River to irrigate the area (drying up Mexico in the process). In the process, a storm blows out their temporary dam, and river flows to the Salton Sink.  Which fills, and becomes the Salton Sea.  They develop it: sell plots!  Grow grapes!  Super hot, but water there also! Bring people to pick the crops too: pretty hostile climate.

Shows clip from Chinatown.  

Deverell: The more urban California gets, the darker it gets.  The birth of noir….seen more in fiction, then in movies.  

Deverell lecturing next Tuesday to talk about all that.

HIST 240 Lecture Notes for 9/18

My apologies for not getting these located here sooner.

HIST 240 Lecture Notes

Date: 9/18/12

By Valerie Slitor

Continued a point made about scurby and asked the question, “Why should you, as a historian, care about scurvy?” The disease, of course, was the result of a long sea voyage.

Then the topic shifted to the Jesuit Expulsion in 1767. New missionaries come in who are more ambitious and want to move North.

Here we get Father Serra. The Catholic church sent these missionaries to convert people into being Spanish citizens… who would then fight for their country. They were to stay near the coast for a few reasons as they started to expand their Mission Strip. Staying near the coast allowed them to be  near ports for food and transport, following the coastline made it harder to get lost in unfamiliar territory, and the indigenous populations were there. The missions are build from San Diego up along the Kings Highway, each within one days walk from the last. They’re not built in order.  

Serra had a 3-pronged approach:

• ·         Missions – Church.

• ·         Presidios – Military. This was strategically placed. There were fewer of these, and they housed guns and a Calvary. There were 4 (San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey, SF). Built as much for show as protection.

• ·         Pueblos – Towns, where civil society was to live. Didn’t really work out that way as the population was generally made up of retired military guys who weren’t really want one might call, “civilized.” Least successful of the three models. San Jose, LA, Branciforte.

So how did Serra go about building a mission?

• ·         He’d pick a location.

• ·         He’d get the labor (forced labor if you’ve got it). If the labor were done by indigenous people, Serra saw it as a means towards their salvation.

• ·         Then he'd build (or have labor build) a MASSIVE building that can be seen from really far away that looks so impressive that, surely, curious native people will come to check it out and ask to be let in/educated/saved/converted. Shock and awe.

In terms of building Presidios, there had to be military approval.

There would be a groundbreaking in which the land would be made consecrated… a practice the native people found, “weird.”

Then there was an epidemic. Serra didn’t see this as a total loss as MANY baptisms were performed before people (many of them infants) died. In Serra’s defense, he does regard them as human…

So, the outbreaks continue as the indigenous people are exposed to European diseases against which they have NO defense whatsoever. Mass deaths occur and the missionaries decided that there’s just something systemically and constitutionally wrong with them (that this is an “Indian disease.”) So they bleed a few and baptize the rest. Most deaths that occur in this period are not the result of direct violence but of disease. 

The sexual practices and beliefs of the indigenoius people, “freaked out,” the friars. Sex/nudity/non-bianary gender didn’t fit into their European model. They very quickly stop writing about food and clothing and start really focusing on the sex life of the native people.

A man named Pablo Tac was born in a mission to neophyte parents and died in Rome. He was an ardent convert, raised in Catholicism. The church uses Tac as a voice for this converted, neophyte population. They send him to Mexico City to talk to the people there. He writes a history of his people’s history in Spanish and the account is, obviously, very pro-church. “This was the day the priest came to save us from being heathens,” he writes. He views, and perpetuates the European belief that, his people are children who need a father to save them and protect them.

HIST 240 Lecture Notes for Tuesday 10/2

My apologies for not getting these located here sooner.

HIST 240 Lecture Notes

Date: 10/2/12

By Valerie Slitor

Topics broached at top of class: John Sutter promises the Mexican government that his fort will serve as a border between Ca and Mexico. Fremont -- Smear campaign and eventual court marshal… continuing a discussion about the Bear Flag Rebels. The war ends, Capitulation of Cahuenga in 1847, and the Treaty of Guadalupe.

The Donner Party is discussed again… as the public understanding of their plight was that they screwed up. The survivors are viewed as savages and sub-human… celebrities for the worst possible reason.

Sutter, however, continues to believe that Americans are coming to his paradise. He builds a mill because then, as they come, he’ll be an industrial force to be reckoned with. He hires James Marshall to build his mill which he does, stupidly, up-river and as close as possible to the trees..

·          

• Down River is preferable as the resources are better used and thus allows for more labor.

The mill is never fully constructed, though, as GOLD is found. A second hand account of this accidental first gold finding was read in class… ultimately revealing that Sutter wanted to keep the gold on the DL so that the mill would get finished.

Doesn’t stay quiet for long though, as Sam Brannan, a Mormon like James Marshaall, fills a milk bottle with gold and runs through town with it in San Francisco. People then drop what they’re doing and go where the gold is.

·          

• Brannan, it’s argued, was motivated as he was a merchant and luring more people to his area would greatly benefit him.

A “Golden tea Cozy” is shipped to the President and with that, oddly, the Gold Rush becomes an official thing.  A steamship routed from the East Coast to CA via Panema leaves before the announcement is made but quickly sells out as people leave their homes for California.

·        

•  If there is the PULL OF GOLD in California, if could be argued that there is a PUSH FROM HOME.

What results is the largest mass migration up to that point. There was a recission… pushing people towards what seemed to be limitless, easy wealth.

Americans are convinced that in coming to California, they’re taking part in the biggest historical event yet.  They buy into the epic mythological adventure, calling themselves Argonauts (seeking, like Jason, the Golden Fleece).

A satiric drawing of an Argonaut is shown, depicting a foolish man with a variety of silly objects. There’s a great deal of art generated, showing a variety of versions of the Gold Rush experience, including images of Sutters Fort and a very solitary indigenous figure looking over the mill… there was some in class discussion as the the symbolism of this and what was concluded was that the man is an outsider, watching over his changing home but not a participant in the evolution. What’s revealed in this was that it was a primarily MALE society… there weren’t many women at all in the Gold Rush. The question is raised what happens in a mostly male environment like that… and the answer is violence and a skewed vision of gender and gender dynamics.

A woman named Louise Amelia Knapp Smith or “Dame Shirley” wrote an account of what life was like, “in the mines.” These “Shirley Letters,” were meant as a means for those back home to get an idea of what was happening in California. She meant the letters to be published.

The advantages of being a woman were that skills that were at that time strictly gendered in society were highly profitable. Men didn’t know how to sew or cook or launder clothes because they’d never had to do it. So for a woman, what would have been unpaid expected work at home would now have the  potential of making her the wealthiest person in  a camp.

Women too were symbolic of home. Men would pay women jus to LOOK at them… allowing them to see, in a way, someone they miss at home.

Also prostitution was a thing. Obviously. They weren’t all just gazing innocently.

Gambling is an issue, raising the larger question of the morality of being a 49er at all as the ENTIRE enterprise was a gamble.

Eliza Farnham wrote that the problem in California is that there are no women and that the place will remain uncivilized until they are there in force. The solution, she argued, was to ship unwanted spinsters from eastern states because it would be win-win; the men in the mines wouldn’t be so picky and those poor spinsters would FINALLY get married to somebody and in the process they’d, by virtue of their sex, civilized the state.

Then there was Grizzly Adams, or James Capen Adams.

He left his New Hampshire home in the 1850’s to make his fortune. Mining, however, was a very hard lifestyle and people are dying all over the place. Malaria’s a big problem and very poor, insufficient diets aren’t helping anyone’s immune system. So, Adams says, “nuts to this!” and figures out a way to make a living off of the gold miners rather than trying to make a living off the gold. By 1853 he was no longer a miner. He becomes a professional hunter and makes WAY more money doing that.

Then he specializes and becomes a bear hunter.

He hunts them and then eventually really starts to respect them, especially the grizzly bear. He wrote a lot of his love affair and symbiotic existence with nature and bears. He refered to bears as the “Monarch of Nature,” comparing their size and strength to the size and scope of the native trees of California… stating that the grizzly is not like a lion, but rather overwhelming like the snowy hard mountains of the native terrain.  Being attacked by a bear gave his life purpose.

HIST 240 Lecture Notes for Tuesday 10/16

My apologies for not getting these located here sooner.

HIST 240 Lecture Notes

Date: 10/16/12

By Valerie Slitor

There was some discussion of the upcoming midterm. The term Argonauts was clarified (gold-seekers; those who came to CA in the gold rush).

The expansion of san Francisco was covered in great detail.

The Golden Gate was named after the Golden Horn, hearkening to the mythological notion of PLENTY and the Golden Horn Bay… this place would be even more valuable.

Market Street was built upon the influence of Philadelphia’s main thoroughfare by O’Farrell and is a wide, grand boulevard.

In terms of the structural expansion of the city, hills were a problem (hills killed horses and made transporting goods and services on foot difficult). The solution was a cable car system.

However, the result of this expansion is massive inflation and a population boom. .. which comes with problems. As the population booms and the Rail Road expands, what was meant to bring prosperity actually brings depression as too many unskilled laborers flood into the city.

·          

The Chinese are blamed for this (SCAPEGOATS). It’s argued, for example, that Chinese Laundries are too efficient, that they work too hard, and are putting other (non-Chinese) workers out of employment.

o   In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act goes into effect. The Chinese are the first group to have their entrance in the US restricted. Chinatown is populated by Chinese men and not women or children… wives were not to be brought along.

Lecture Notes for Tuesday 10/30

HIST 240 Lecture Notes

Date:     10/30/12

By Valerie Slitor

Professor Block was out sick and the TA’s led a brief Q&A session. Questions were focused on the novel the class is currently reading. What came out of this was the thematic issue of Hollywood/LA/California normally being thought of as a place where people come to heal/become well/be better (as in the precedent of people coming to the state as a cure for TB) and the ways in which West writes against this as Hollywood/LA being a place where dreams (and people) come to die.

The vision of LA in this novel is grim, apocalyptic (the painting being painted is one of Los Angeles on fire). West writes about IDEAS about PLACES… something to consider thinking about. In what ways are those ideas mythologies? What happens when someone writes AGAINST that idea?

A question was asked about LA’s Chinatown which was established in 1865 following the SF fire (SF’s Chinatown was destroyed and the population was told they could rebuild if they built it to the city’’s specifications – many relocated to LA instead.

The TA’s then showed several clips from whitewashedadobe.com. Very interesting perspectives and a continued conversation about these less told versions and what it means/has meant to white-wash the history of California. The first clip was of Mission San Gabriel’s Playhouse. It featured some commentary on the restoration and construction of the building (that the ceiling is a “floating ceiling” built from hundreds of wire cables so that when the building moved in an earthquake the ceiling would move with it rather than be destroyed) and a ghost story. The clip lead to a conversation in class about The Mission Play, a stageplay first staged in 1912 (that was quite popular at the Playhouse) that told a white-washed version of Father Serra’s California.  This was a response to the kind of epic Cecil B Demille vision of history… and was well received.

A point was made that as California expanded, and as the Boosters continued to lure more people into the state (with Rail Road, Oil, and Real Estate…) a white-washed version was a much more preferable, marketable way to sell the state as a place to come to.

The TA’s talked about Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, a novel that did for Native Americans what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for African Americans (that the only way “up” for the minority group is through white intervention) and how the national response to the book lead to a Mission Revival period in California (in restoration and architecturally, etc) and how that cultural imagination coincided  with increased the expanding railroad increasing easy, transcontinental mobility into the state… and a boom in tourism (post cards, Ramona related merchandise, attractions, etc).

A brief video was shown featuring George Sanchez discussing how California/Los Angeles is/was seen as a place to come to from somewhere else, a destination. The TA’s mentioned that until 2010, the majority of the population was born somewhere else.

Another video was shown, this time telling the story of a woman who grew up in a Mexican community built around the Simons Brick Company. She speaks with great emotion about what it meant to grow up in that community, the simplicity of her father’s vision and hope (not aspiring to have great wealth or a car but to just provide a house and life to his family) and how as a child  she did not feel poverty as long as she felt loved and cared for. She told the story of the day that a white school teacher came into her yard to check on her and how she as a child did not feel the effects of prevalent racism/anti-mexican sentiment. The community, it was discussed, was a self sustaining construct – the laborers were kept within a small community that provided them with essential needs (schools, markets, etc) and the population was rewarded for producing more laborers (a silver dollar was given to a family that bore a male child). Bricks were produced in mass quantity, quickly, and used in construction immediately as Los Angeles expanded rapidly.

The TA’s spoke about Boosters again (rail, journalism, and oil...) and how as something like the RR or the trolley line expanded, tracks of land were sold around it for housing and development. As California continued to expand in this way, as controlled by these capitalist forces, the unions were kept out and LA was seen as the ideal place for the “open market,” without unions and teeming with cheap labor, a far cry from the state of the competing major city, San Francisco.

A note was made that WATER was a major issue as this expansion sprawled and that Mullholland made his fortune by figuring out a means to bring enough water into the city for the population.

The last video focused on the Plague of Los Angeles (Halloween 1925) and the institutional response to the outbreak. Within the shanty communities of Mexican laborers and their families, the Bubonic Plague killed 40 people. The city was quick to respond (primarily by quarantine, rat killing, the burning/destruction of housing in effected areas…). The spread was controlled but after that, the city instituted strict quarantining of Mexican people in the city, thinking that the plague was a Mexican illness (viewing the issue of outbreak and disease not as a matter/result of POVERTY but of ETHNICITY). This response reveals the city immaturity in terms of what we would view as multiculturalism… LA was not as enlightened as the white-washed history would have us believe.

This lead to an interesting discussion of Race, Disease and Eugenics in California.

·         The quarantine showed a gendered bias in the understanding of disease as women and children were kept within the boundaries yet men, laborers, were allowed in and out to continue working.

·         There was a profound lack on infrastructure in place to REMEDY the problems that resulted in diseases being so readily spread (better sewage etc) which lead to a self fulfilling prophesy that those ethnicities kept in living conditions that were left, by the city, in unhygienic conditions would invariably become sick and spread more disease.

o   There was, it should be mention, push back. People understood that it was through legal action that change would take place. People knew too that under the 14^th Amendment, their children were considered citizens even if they themselves were not – change must be made for the future.

·         Eugenics and California – California was the 3^rd state to legalize sterilization of those deemed genetically unfit, many of whom were ethnic women. It reveals the relationship between the way that disease, race and poverty were viewed in that time (and beyond). 1/3 of the sterilizations under this principle were done under this guise… and as the understand was that those in poverty were at fault and would not be able to get themselves out of it, that it was not in fact a failing of the system or the state, that the solution was just to control the number of new poor people born.

o   The outside control of those deemed incapable of controlling themselves.

o   This was a multi-pronged attack in which social workers were sent to ethnic women and urged (and sometimes forced) them to undergo a sterilization procedure.

o   This is an issue relevant in LA as recently as 1979 when healthcare providers were giving non-english speak women in labor a contract to sign that said they agreed to have their tubes tied after delivery – and were informed that their baby would not be delivered until the form was signed. In court proceedings, the doctors were acquitted as they were, “trying to do the right thing for those women.”

o   Frequent mention was made in class of the report, “The Culture of Poverty.”

At the end of class, the Chinese Massacre of 1871 was talked about. 2 rival gangs fought and a white man was caught in the crossfire and killed, leading to Chinatown being shut down. When the mob saw that it was a white man killed, they attacked and by the end of that night, 19 Chinese men and boys had been lynched.

Which is a story definitely not told in \the white-washed version of California’s history and the history of the City of Los Angeles