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A Town To Learn In (Page 3)
After Ed Doheny struck it rich in petroleum, oil drilling rigs sprang up all over L.A. Over the next thirty years or so, just about everybody, so it seemed, tried his or her luck at one time or another. One of the most successful was Emma Saunders, the Oil Queen of Los Angeles. For the decade before Ben arrived, the quest for oil became something of a local obsession. Now land speculators could not only sell the climate, but the prospect of cash-gushing mineral rights too.
By 1906, while considerable oil drilling activity was already taking place in Signal Hill and the Baldwin Hills, and ten years later, with a vengeance, in Huntington Beach, these remained relatively isolated pockets of habitation. Once Collis P. Huntington's plan to dredge a major port at Santa Monica had failed in favor of San Pedro, the staid seaside community remained relatively isolated from the central city. More compelling as a beach excursion was that fanciful extravaganza of real estate development that its visionary founder, Abbot Kinney, christened Venice. Kinney's dream of genteel living along gondola-graced canals opened to the public on July 4, 1905, a year before Ben arrived.
The principle obstacle to successful growth in the Los Angeles basin was the lack of a reliable, sufficient supply of water. Thus, the major civic undertaking of the decade was the quest to bring water to the expansive, semi-arid plains extending north, west, and south of central Los Angeles.
The Owens Valley aqueduct project was financed by the sale of city-issued bonds approved by Angeleno voters. By 1913, seven years after Ben's arrival, the visionary venture to transport water hundreds of miles through, over, and around apparently impassible terrain, had been achieved by City Engineer William Mulholland. Yet the initiative had long been led by such influential men as lawyers Jackson A. Graves, Henry W. O'Melveny, and James H. Shankland, not to mention General Harrison Gray Otis, longtime publisher of the Los Angeles Times.
These were men of wealth, influence, and power, men who regularly undertook and evidently relished titanic struggles, sometimes in mutually beneficial alliance, often enough against one another, to build the metropolis they envisioned. They instinctively strove to increase their own individual resources, to realize their personal goals, pursue their selfinterested plans and dreams. At the same time, they invariably viewed their own successes as inextricably intertwined with the vitality of the city to which they were devoted, which they passionately loved, as if it were their own flesh and blood, because, in large measure, it was.
Ben Weingart's settling in Los Angeles coincided with a protracted, tense, bitter, and increasingly violent confrontation between such men and the poorest of the new arrivals, between management and labor, employers and employees. In the stark terms of the day, between capital and labor. In fact, as antagonists on either side were likely to acknowledge, between the owners and the owned. In Ben's chosen city, the turbulent antagonism between competing racial, ethnic, financial, and political interests was laced with the inherent antipathy felt by the two great urban rivals of the Pacific Coast - Los Angeles and San Francisco.
San Francisco had already profited handsomely from the proceeds of unprecedented mineral wealth, an energetic population of courageous, optimistic seekers and risk-takers, a highly developed commercial and banking sector, a magnificent natural harbor, early and extensive rail connection to the East, an abundant and easily accessible supply of water, plus what amounted to at least a thirty-year head start. Los Angeles, blessed with few if any of her rival's inherent resources, enjoyed only two real competitive advantages: abundant land into which the city might expand; and an abundant, constantly replenished, ready, able, eager, if not desperate, supply of cheap, unorganized, immigrant labor.
Major Los Angeles capitalists and commercial interests were determined to maintain their advantage where inexpensive and amenable labor was concerned. San Francisco, for all its relative sophistication, was not only physically, but economically constrained. The city to the north, twice as long in the making as Los Angeles, had matured earlier and, by the first decade of the century, had by far the most organized and selfdisciplined labor force in the West. Organized labor had helped build San Francisco and now held a recognized if not always honored place at the civic banquet table.
In Los Angeles, though employers generally paid fairly decent wages, the city fathers were determined to maintain an "open shop" environment, the better to avail themselves of the steady stream of new laborers lured to the city by cheap train fares and the owners' self-serving civic boosterism. If Los Angeles were ultimately to prevail financially and commercially over San Francisco, the southern city would have to grow farther, faster, cheaper. All of which added up to better. And to better San Francisco, Los Angeles would have to suppress organized labor.
Such was the perspective of most leading citizens. And in support of this perspective, their irascible champion was Civil War Colonel Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Survivor of fifteen Civil War battles, twice wounded and cited for gallantry, promoted to general for service in the Philippines during his second major military conflict, the Spanish-American War, Otis tended to command Los Angeles as if it were his own personal regiment.
Through much of the 1890s and the early years of the new century, the Los Angeles-based Local #174 of the Union of Typographers had been locked in conflict with H.G. Otis and the Times. Three years before Ben's arrival, union headquarters dispatched a nationally experienced organizer to Los Angeles. His task was to transform the civic and political environment of the city, to till the soil and plant the seeds that might someday flourish in the garden of the working man. It did not turn out that way.
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