8.2: Prosperity Decade- The 1920s

Called the “Jazz Age” and the “Roaring Twenties,” the 1920s was a period of prosperity that sometimes seems a swirl of conflicting images. Prohibition tried to preserve the values of 19th-century America. “Flappers” scandalized many by flaunting their sexuality. The booming stock market and the oil gushers of southern California seemed to promise prosperity to all. Many blue-collar workers endured the destruction of their unions. Technology emerged as an ever-more-potent ingredient in the state’s economic growth.

Politics in a Time of Prosperity

During the 1920s, a large majority of California voters registered as Republicans, but the state Republican Party was sharply divided between progressives and conservatives. U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson led the progressive faction. In 1920, he sought the Republican nomination for president, running as a progressive and the heir of Theodore Roosevelt. Another Californian, HerbertHoover, also ran for the presidency that year. He could claim some commitment to progressive values and pointed to his experience as a highly successful federal administrator during the war. In California, progressives and union leaders lined up behind Johnson, and conservatives and business leaders backed Hoover. In the state’s Republican presidential primary, Johnson took about 370,000 votes to Hoover’s 209,000. Only about 23,000 Democrats voted in their party’s presidential primary. The Republican presidential nomination, however, went to Warren G. Harding, who easily carried California and the nation in the general election. Hoover became secretary of commerce. Johnson turned down the Republican nomination for vice president; had he accepted, he would have become president when Harding died in 1923.

Johnson sought reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1922. He faced strong opposition in the Republican primary but won the election easily. In 1922, there was also a closely contested Republican primary for governor. The incumbent, William Stephens, was a pragmatic progressive. He shared many of Johnson’s concerns about big business and was willing to extend the role of state government as seemed necessary, but he shied away from projects that seemed unpopular or unworkable. Stephens lost in the Republican primary to Friend Richardson, a staunch conservative. When Richardson sought reelection to the governorship in 1926, he was defeated in the Republican primary by a progressive, C. C. Young. In 1928, Johnson sought reelection to the U.S. Senate and again faced a conservative opponent in the Republican primary.

Thus, throughout the 1920s, the Republican Party of California scored victory after victory in statewide and local elections but remained deeply divided. The most important elections were those in the Republican primary. After 1910, many voters seem to have moved to the Republican Party as a way to participate in the important contests that characterized every primary. By 1930, 73 percent of the state’s voters called themselves Republicans, making California one of the most Republican states in the nation. The Republican proportion among registered voters in major urban areas ranged from 81 percent in San Francisco, to 79 percent in Alameda County (Berkeley and Oakland), 71 percent in Los Angeles County, and 70 percent in San Diego County. California Democrats could not come close to a majority in a single county.

Throughout the 1920s, prohibition divided voters and affected state politics in sometimes unpredictable ways. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting production or sale of alcoholic beverages, was, in some ways, the last gasp of the reforming zeal that had generated progressivism. Many Californians simply disregarded it from the beginning, and it grew less popular the longer it lasted. Nonetheless, prohibition remained the law from 1920 until 1933, when the Twenty-first Amendment repealed it. Prohibition was most effective among those groups and in those areas—notably southern California—that had provided its greatest support. It was not well enforced in most places, and police largely ignored it in most cities, especially San Francisco. Bootlegging—production and sale of illegal beverages—flourished.

The administrations of Governors Stephens, Richardson, and Young demonstrated that divisions among Republicans were not mere personality contests; rather, they reflected significantly different approaches to the role of the state in the economy and society. Stephens was a cautious, pragmatic progressive. In 1919, he promoted a huge bond issue to build highways. In 1921, he proposed a number of new programs to regulate business or protect particular groups of consumers or workers. To pay for the new programs, he backed a 35 percent increase in taxes on corporations. At the same time, he tried to reorganize state government to make it more efficient.

Richardson defeated Stephens in the 1922 Republican primary by condemning Stephens for higher taxes and spending. As governor, Richardson slashed spending for state programs, and, in 1925, set an all-time record by vetoing more than half of all bills passed by the legislature. Young defeated Richardson in the 1926 Republican primary by criticizing his negativity. During Young’s administration, state government expanded to assist the disabled and elderly, protect the environment, conserve water, and expand state parks. To pay for these new programs, Young backed a tax on banks and greater efficiency in state government. State budgets had been in the range of $100 million in the early 1920s; by 1930, despite Richardson’s budget cutting, the state budget stood at $244 million.

In the early 1920s, California politics continued in the anti-Asian mode set by the progressives through the Alien Land Law in 1913. A wave of anti- Japanese sentiment swept the state beginning in 1919. James D. Phelan, the progressive Democrat elected U.S. senator in 1914, faced reelection in 1920. He based much of his campaign on the slogan, “Keep California White.” Though defeated by a large margin, Phelan ran well ahead of other Democrats—due, perhaps, to his anti-Asian campaign but also to his progressive stance on economic issues. Phelan’s Republican opponent differed little on racial issues but was more conservative on economic matters. That year, voters approved by a three-to-one margin a second Alien Land Law, designed to close loopholes in the legislation of 1913 by prohibiting aliens who were ineligible for citizenship (those born in Asia) from putting land in the names of their American-born minor children. With this Alien Land Law and with changes in federal immigration policy (see pp. 250–251), anti-Asian rhetoric became more low-key, at least until World War II.

New Economic Patterns

During the 1920s, important changes emerged in the state’s economy. Some involved massive construction projects by local, state, or federal government. Others involved innovations in the structure of business or the application of new technologies. And, everywhere in the state, labor organizations found themselves on the defensive.

California’s first paved highway opened in 1912, but the 1920s saw a burst of highway construction. The state had 784 miles of concrete-paved roads in 1916 and 2,171 miles in 1930. This construction went far toward realizing a long-term plan for two major highways, one through the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys and one along the coast, connecting as many cities and towns as possible and with branches to cities and towns not on one of the highways. The Bayshore Highway, connecting San Francisco and San José, built between 1924 and 1932, represented one of the most advanced highway designs of its day, carrying three lanes of high-speed traffic in each direction. California’s first freeway—multilane, divided, with controlled access, patterned after the German Autobahn—was in southern California. Planning began in the 1920s for what became the Pasadena Freeway, and it finally opened in 1940.

Highways were crucial for California’s transportation infrastructure, but the two most dramatic transportation projects, by far, were the two great bridges that linked San Francisco eastward to Oakland (the San Francisco– Oakland Bay Bridge) and northward to Marin County (the Golden Gate Bridge). Both projects began in the 1920s. When the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, it was the longest and highest single-span suspension bridge in the world and quickly became a widely recognized symbol of San Francisco. Proposals for a bridge or tunnel connecting San Francisco and Oakland had been discussed for many years before the 1920s, but planning intensified in 1927 and 1928, and the Bay Bridge opened late in 1936. It was, at the time, the largest bridge ever built.

Highway and bridge building contributed to a transportation infrastructure crucial to the state’s long-term economic development. Other massive construction projects sought to develop water and electrical resources by reengineering the landscape. California’s electrical power companies had long been pioneers in the development of hydroelectric power, and California’s growers had been at the forefront of developing irrigated agriculture. In the 1920s, public officials began to look to projects of such size that only the government could possibly undertake them. Throughout the 1920s, Californians debated elaborate plans to dam the Sacramento River and construct canals to carry its water south into the San Joaquin Valley. Voters rejected three such plans, but the planners persisted, drawing encouragement from Governors Stephens and Young. Eventually, those plans led to the California Water Project after World War II.

Throughout the mid-1920s, Senator Hiram Johnson and Congressman Phil Swing promoted federal legislation to create a gigantic dam at Boulder Canyon on the Colorado River, in Nevada, to accomplish flood control, generate hydroelectric power, and provide water for irrigation and urban growth. They first introduced their bill in 1922, but passage came only in 1928, after agreements among the six states affected by such a drastic change in the river. The first of these, the Colorado River Compact of 1922, was the first compact ever among states under the provisions of Article I, Section 10, of the U.S. Constitution. Negotiations among states and amendments to the original bill limited the amount of water that could be claimed by California. When Boulder Dam was completed in 1935, it was the largest dam in the world. In 1947, it was officially renamed Hoover Dam, for Herbert Hoover. Large-scale highway, bridge, and dam construction during the 1920s and 1930s brought the emergence of new business enterprises. Henry Kaiser began in road construction before World War I and built projects throughout much of the West in the 1920s. When the federal government sought contractors for Boulder Dam, Kaiser realized that few companies in the entire West could mobilize the resources necessary for such a huge project. He led in the formation of a consortium of six western construction companies that successfully bid on the contract. They emerged from the project as leaders in western construction. Eventually Kaiser, Warren Bechtel, and some of their partners each became the head of a giant, multinational construction corporation.

When Kaiser needed financing for the Boulder Dam project, he turned to Amadeo Peter Giannini, the San Francisco banker whose Bank of America wastransforming Americans’ thinking about banking. The son of Italian immigrants, Giannini founded the Bank of Italy in 1904 as a bank for shopkeepers and workers in the Italian neighborhood of San Francisco. Called the greatest innovator in 20th-century American banking, Giannini created his bank for ordinary people and opened branches near people’s homes and workplaces. Until then, most banks had only one location, in the center of town, and most limited their services to businesses and people with hefty accounts. Giannini broadened the base of banking through advertising that encouraged working people to open checking and savings accounts and to borrow for such purposes as car purchases—all virtually unknown before his efforts. By 1920, the Bank of Italy was the largest bank in California and became the third largest in the nation in 1927. Giannini renamed it the Bank of America in 1930. His bank backed entrepreneurs such as Kaiser and helped to fund the fledgling film industry in southern California. By 1929, one California farmer in every 11 had a loan from the Bank of Italy. The bank not only made loans to growers, but also provided information on new agricultural techniques and crops.

Between World War I and 1940, cotton emerged as a major crop. In 1909, only 18 California farms raised cotton; by 1939, more than 5000 farms raised cotton, pushing California to eighth place among the states in cotton production. By then, California cotton growers were the most productive, on a per acre basis, in the country. Cotton growing was concentrated in the southern San Joaquin Valley, with some production in Imperial and Riverside Counties. One of the leading cotton growers was J. G. Boswell, who came from Georgia in 1921 and began growing cotton in the former bed of Tulare Lake (p. 175).

California agriculture was becoming increasingly industrialized during those years. These new patterns can be seen in operations of the California Packing Corporation, or Calpak, whose products were marketed under the name Del Monte. Throughout the 1920s, Calpak was the largest canning operation in the world. By the 1930s, it not only contracted with thousands of growers to supply its canneries but also raised its own fruit and vegetables on thousands of acres. Another California company, Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation, was the nation’s largest seller of fruit, based on some 15,000 acres of irrigated farmland in the San Joaquin Valley and on contracts with other growers. Calpak and Di Giorgio had storage and distribution facilities in other parts of the nation and thus represented vertical integration in agriculture—growing crops, processing the fruits and vegetables, and distributing the produce to dealers across the country.

New Social Patterns

California’s rapid growth in the 1920s brought changes in some social patterns and intensified some previous patterns. Changes in federal immigration laws altered the ethnic composition of migrants to California, and this, in turn, affected both ethnic and racial relations and ethnic patterns in some sectors of the economy.

Though LA led the state’s population growth, other areas also experienced rapid growth. California more than doubled in population between 1920 and 1940, moving from the eighth largest state in 1920 to fifth in 1940. Population growth in the 1920s came largely from other parts of the United States, especially the Midwest, and most of the newcomers located in southern California. Most came for economic opportunities, but some came for other reasons—for example, to establish utopian communities or create new religious organizations.

California, from the time of the Gold Rush, has attracted utopians—those who hope to create a perfect society. In the early 20th century, a group of artists and writers created a colony at Carmel, and that area and the nearby Big Sur region attracted artists and writers through the 1920s and after. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several socialist communities were established, based on cooperative principles, but few lasted very long.

Many utopians had religious inspirations. From 1897 until her death in 1929, Katherine Tingley led the Theosophical Society in America from an elaborate complex at Point Loma, now part of San Diego. They drew upon various religious traditions, especially those of India, to create a community devoted to “developing a higher type of humanity.” A few other Theosophical communities developed along the coast, including a large one at Ojai.

Aimée Semple McPherson preached a different message. She arrived in southern California in 1918 and by 1922 had organized her Four Square Gospel Church in Los Angeles. In her immense Angelus Temple, she preached in white robes, staged spectacular performances complete with a full orchestra that sometimes played jazz, and drew thousands of enthusiastic converts to her version of fundamentalist Protestantism—a call to return to the Bible and the simplicity of old-time religion. She was also a pioneer in the use of radio. One observer suggested that she was popular because “she made migrants feel at home” and “gave them a chance to meet other people.”

Though among the most flamboyant, Sister Aimée was only one of many fundamentalist preachers in California. Fundamentalist Protestantism emerged in the early 20th century from a conflict between Christian modernism and orthodoxy and became a powerful force throughout the nation by the 1920s. Whereas modernists tried to reconcile their religious beliefs with modern science, fundamentalists rejected anything incompatible with a literal reading of the Scriptures and argued that the Bible’s every word is the revealed word of God.

Migration to California in the 1920s came largely from within the nation rather than Europe, due partly to changes in federal law. Californians had long been at the forefront of efforts to restrict immigration from Asia, but others wanted to limit immigration from Europe. The National Origins Act of 1924 limited immigration to 150,000 people each year, with quotas for each European country based on two percent of the number of Americans whose ancestors came from that country. Those provisions cut immigration from southern and eastern Europe to a mere trickle. Californians in Congress shaped two provisions of the new law. The author of the law, Albert Johnson, a Republican from Washington State, included no provisions regarding immigration from Asia. Senator Hiram Johnson of California demanded exclusion of all immigrants from Japan, and the final language prohibited entry by any immigrant not eligible for citizenship—meaning those from all of Asia. Johnson and other Californians failed to persuade Congress to amend the Constitution to deny citizenship to the American-born children of Japanese immigrants. Though the new law excluded Asians, it placed no limits on immigration from Canada and Latin America. Occasional efforts to introduce quotas for the western hemisphere were defeated through loud protests from representatives of California and southwestern agriculture and business, who argued that they could not survive without laborers from Mexico.

Though the new law placed no numerical limits on immigration from Latin America, all immigrants entering the United States had to provide birth certificates (and marriage certificates if they were traveling as a family), prove their ability to read and write, undergo health inspections, and pay fees of $18 (equivalent to nearly $230 today) plus $8 for each family member. For poor Mexicans seeking a better life north of the border, these were significant limitations, discouraging many would-be migrants from entering legally. Even so, more than half a million migrants from Mexico did pass through border checkpoints and secure their papers between 1919 and 1930. Probably another half million people entered without papers. Most migrants went to Texas, but increasing numbers came to California. By 1930, Mexican Californians (those born in Mexico and those of Mexican descent) made up at least 6.5 percent of the state’s population, with larger proportions in the south and the cities. By 1930, the Mexican population of Los Angeles was estimated at 8 to 15 percent, or between 100,000 and 190,000 people. Mexicans also made up some 80 percent of agricultural field labor in southern California, and somewhat less farther north.

During the 1920s, in many areas of southern California, the children of Mexican immigrants were increasingly segregated into separate schools as local boards of education established “American Schools.” These were separate facilities or classrooms where Mexican students received instruction in English and American culture. Behind this policy there was usually a racial agenda of separating Anglo and Mexican children. The Los Angeles School District, for example, justified segregation by saying that Mexican children “are more interested in action and emotion but grow listless under purely mental effort.” Such practices were widespread throughout the Southwest, until the Supreme Court declared them illegal in Mendez v. Westminster (1947).

Anti-immigrant sentiments, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and fear of radicalism contributed to the growth of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s. The original Klan, created during Reconstruction to intimidate former slaves, had long since died out. D. W. Griffith’s hugely popular film, The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, glorified the old Klan and led to efforts to resurrect it. The new Klan portrayed itself as a patriotic order devoted to America, Protestant Christianity, and white supremacy. It attacked Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and African Americans, along with bootleggers, corrupt politicians, and gamblers. Bob Shuler, a leading fundamentalist preacher in Los Angeles, defended the Klan as helping to keep Los Angeles, as he put it, the only large American city “not dominated by foreigners.” Other Protestant ministers also encouraged the Klan, which established strong chapters in Los Angeles and San Diego. There the targets of Klan attacks—verbal and physical—were often Mexicans.

Cultural Expression

The most conspicuous form of cultural expression to come out of California during the 1920s was the movies. The new medium quickly gave birth to a wide variety of genres—comedy, westerns, sentimental dramas, swashbuckling adventure tales, history epics, and romances—all of which were silent. In 1927, Hollywood produced The Jazz Singer, the first “talking picture.” Many movies derived from earlier forms of cultural expression—novels, vaudeville, and the theater—but they reached much larger audiences than their predecessors could have imagined. The plots of movie westerns and swashbucklers usually bore little resemblance to historical reality, but they reached so many people that their version of the past was often more widely known than the actual history. The Mark of Zorro, for example, a 1920 adventure film, fostered a romantic version of Mexican California. Though some critics dismissed the movies as inherently tasteless and uninspired, some films demonstrated that they were, in fact, a new art form. The comedies of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd not only provoked laughter—they also frequently provided a moving commentary on the human condition.

Hollywood’s productions reached and affected the majority of Americans. Movie attendance doubled from a weekly average of 40 million people in 1922 to 80 million in 1929. By then, the equivalent of two-thirds of the nation’s population went to the cinema every week! The popularity of movies created a new type of celebrity—the movie star. Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, cowboy stars Tom Mix and William S. Hart, and dashing Douglas Fairbanks became as well known as champion baseball sluggers or presidents. Sex, too, sold movie tickets and made stars of Theda Bara, the “vamp,” Clara Bow, the “It” girl, and Rudolph Valentino. Through their movies, California’s screenwriters, directors, producers, and studios played a significant role in redefining and homogenizing American culture.

Californians who contributed to literature, the arts, and architecture could not hope to reach the numbers that the movies did, but there was a flowering of cultural expression in the 1920s, especially in architecture. The prosperity of the decade took concrete form as the central business districts in both San Francisco and Los Angeles boomed upward with dramatic new high-rise office

Highly popular during the 1920s, the California bungalow design derived from several architectural sources, but one of its key characteristics was simplicity. The bungalows were usually all on one floor with a large frotn porch that was offset from the center of the house and which usually had distinctive pillars. One of the great advantages of the simplicity of design was that prices could be low. Aside from price, what may have made this design so popular?

buildings. Movie theaters sprouted everywhere; in the cities, especially, architects employed exotic styles for grandiose theaters, drawing inspiration from ancient Egypt, traditional China, and medieval Spain (For an example, see p. 244.).

The 1920s marked the high point of popularity for the bungalow, a California contribution to residential architecture associated especially with the work of Charles and Henry Greene. The brothers came to Pasadena in 1893 and gradually incorporated architectural elements from Mexican California, Japan, and the Arts and Crafts movement into their work, producing some spectacular residences in the Pasadena area in the early 20th century. A scaled-down, one-story, inexpensive version, the California bungalow, was widely popular from around 1905 through the 1920s, making it possible for an ever larger number of middle-income Californians to acquire their own single-family home.

The 1920s and 1930s marked the culmination of the careers of two of California’s most creative and influential architects. Bernard Maybeck, son of a German immigrant, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (the world’s leading school for architecture). During the early 20th century, he adapted the popular Arts and Crafts style to emphasize building materials native to the Pacific coast, and he applied his own vision to the creation of a series of remarkable houses and churches in the Bay Area. The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Berkeley (1910), is especially notable. He drew upon his Beaux- Arts training to create the majestic Palace of Fine Arts for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915) and to design elegant showrooms for selling automobiles in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles in the 1920s.

Julia Morgan studied engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, worked for a time with Maybeck, then, in 1898, became the first woman admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. Upon returning to the Bay Area, she began, like Maybeck, to define a California variant of the Arts and Crafts style with her designs for houses. Morgan also designed larger commercial or public structures for the YWCA, other women’s organizations (notably the Berkeley Women’s City Club), the University of California at Berkeley, and Mills College. She was a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete and was perhaps best known for the creation of William Randolph Hearst’s fantastic mansion at San Simeon. Morgan’s sophisticated seismic engineering prevented serious damage there when a major earthquake struck in 2003.