Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s

Abstract

Historians are constantly in search of watersheds, turning points, and pivotal events in their quest to understand why an era evolved as it did. Is it possible to isolate a single decade to explain why a major American city emerged as a metropolis? This is the task of fifteen historians who examine Los Angeles during the 1920s in a collection of remarkably fresh essays edited by Tom Sitton and William Deverell, Metropolis in the Making. The essays, which are arranged topically in five sections, examine a wide breadth of Los Angeles's rapid growth and development, culture, and people during this decade, and each author argues convincingly that the changes Los Angeles experienced were so profound that they collectively set the stage for the modern metropolis that we witness today. By 1929, not only had Los Angeles passed San Francisco as the most populous city in California, but it had also begun to rival or surpass many midwestern and northeastern cities in industrial output and had emerged as a national leader in oil production. During the 1920s, as Nancy Quam-Wickham writes in an essay that examines the relationship between home and the workplace in blue-collar suburbs, “Southern California's tremendous petroleum industry accounted for about 20 percent of the world's output of crude oil during part of the 1920s.” Renowned as an open shop city and openly hostile to organized labor, particularly through the leadership of Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles nevertheless appeared as an oasis to white migrants and Mexican immigrants who sought to better their condition. Similarly, the African American population, already set in motion by the events of World War I and the first Great Migration, settled in Los Angeles in increasing numbers during the decade of the 1920s, attracted by the appeal of sunshine and the prevalence of service and industrial jobs. By 1930, Los Angeles would boast more African Americans than almost all states in the Far West combined, and this population surge transpired despite a rigid pattern of residential and occupational segregation.

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