Anniversaries, Novelties, and Outrages
Uncomfortable memories on the anniversary of an unprecedented shutdown of California's borders
LOS ANGELES — Feb. 3, 1936
Eighty-seven years ago as I write, the Los Angeles Police Department deployed 136 armed police officers to sixteen checkpoints along California's state lines with one mission: turn back anyone deemed too poor to enter.
Headed for railroad and highway crossings from Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona, the officers — hand-picked by authoritarian LAPD chief James E. Davis, aka "Two-Gun Davis" — represented a sort of vanguard for the idealized distillation of the American Dream that boosters of the "Golden State" had long promoted. In Davis's eyes, they were legionnaires defending civilization from "hordes of indigents" who'd rendered Los Angeles a "backwater," worsened its unemployment problem, and "were responsible for the surging of crime waves in the city."1 The future and safety of Los Angeles, California, and of American freedom itself was under assault, Davis seemed to believe, and only he and his police force could protect it.
A little over a year previously, Davis — passionately and vocally anti-Communist throughout his career — had warned at a Pasadena convention of California law enforcers and in an accompanying article in a police journal that "in recent years, the Communists have been able to plant seeds of bitter hatred, class warfare and treason to our country, and disbelief in God, thereby defiling the pure stream of American citizenship at its very fountainhead" and that they were "using the cause of the unfortunate unemployed as their crucial argument."2
Davis would expand this argument over the last months of 1934, through 1935, and into 1936, suggesting that migration to the Golden State was not driven by the environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl nor the economic devastation of the Great Depression. Instead, the tens of thousands of destitute Americans headed west each year, the chief insisted, were one prong of a complex Soviet plot to undermine California and the United States. The other prong, Davis warned, involved a network of Communist agents infiltrating schools to indoctrinate America’s children. Worse, Davis swore, it was well underway.
"In many ways, many children of this community are daily being poisoned and infected with a violent and Godless and treasonable doctrine which, in later years, will, as the Communists intend it shall, warp their adult minds and make them not only susceptible to but active in a movement to revolutionize this country".3
—Los Angeles Chief of Police James Edgar Davis, October, 1934
For the sake of brevity I’m only including a sliver of the abundant rhetoric of this sort my research resurfaced. The striking resemblance to present day punditry and the reminder of how little of it seems novel was one major motivation for my writing of last year's The Golden Fortress: California's Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees. History has largely neglected the story of the 1936 blockade and of Davis's career in general. Perhaps that's because Davis later resigned amid scandal. Perhaps it's because his border patrol ended quietly with Los Angeles's vanguard withdrawn barely two months after its deployment.
"Historical hindsight might treat Davis's border blockade as a curious blip. Perhaps they'd dismiss it as all bluster with little impact, but the deployment operationalized anti-migrant attitudes that had long pervaded California's ruling institutions. The LAPD chief's policing philosophies made tangible a generation of reactionary politics in the Golden State and laid the groundwork for militarized policing that the LAPD would hone to the point that it became the preeminent model for law enforcement agencies for the ensuing century."
—Bill Lascher4
I concluded (and still believe) that dismissing the blockade and other historic events as failed or insignificant weakens our ability to recognize and avoid future abuses of the constitutional protections upon which a free society depends. Characterizing such episodes as aberrations to larger historical narratives also minimizes these events’ significance to the people whose lives were altered by them. Whether someone had literally been turned back by Davis’s border patrollers or had simply decided not to attempt to reach California in the first place after hearing about the blockade, the trajectory of their lives would have been altered by its existence.
Whichever had occurred, would we even know? Would those whose lives pivoted on where they could or could not go in search of opportunity have maintained the same kind of records as those produced by the institutions and prominent figures featured in my book? Would those records that had existed have survived as well?
By no means am I the first to ask such questions, but that doesn't make them any less worth asking, does it?
This Week's Souvenir
PORTLAND, Ore — Late Spring, 2020
“The New Corona.”
First I saw the typewriter. Then I read the words.
"The New Corona."
It was a simpler time. The pandemic was in its infancy. Its first wave was beginning to crest, not that anyone imaged there would be multiple waves.
I had a book to write and research to complete. So, I started reading old newspapers. Soon I saw that uncanny ad.
“The New Corona.”
Paid for by a stationery store selling the latest model of a popular portable typewriter, the ad ran in the Jannuary 30, 1923 edition of the Sacramento Bee (A century ago, last Tuesday). It was probably April or May of 2020 when I saw it. By then, the term "novel coronavirus" had spread from the lips of public officials, epidemiologists, and the media. It infected our consciousness. We were exhausted.
The outbreak and society's response to it was anything but "novel" at that point, but the days were lengthening. Summer glimmered in the distance. It promised escape. Even if we'd still be socializing distantly, at least we could finally comfortably do so outside.
Then the dam broke. Police in Minnesota murdered George Floyd. Floyd's death would garner global attention and stoke widespread outrage in a way that so many previous, similarly brutal, similarly unjust murders had not. It was as if the raw emotion that had been welling up within so many of us over the course of the pandemic had fused with a long, history of state sanctioned violence and institutionalized racism, then burst open upon news of Floyd's murder. The stark reality of the crime gave voice to the anger of some, while the sound of that very voice after so many years of silence sparked others' rage.
At first we were together, apart but together. We began to drift again only to slam back together in our outrage. All that emotion we had held in check so long spilled forth and swamped the horizon we were just beginning to glimpse. The inundation was overwhelming. The connection we'd cultivated in the desperation of pandemic loneliness first soured, then withered.
Miasmic despair soaked through what we’d hope would have been a season of relief. Bucolic summer nights turned into anxious evenings as riot squads roamed neighborhoods and tear gas drifted into backyards. Storefronts that had just reopened shuttered again. Reporters "kettled" in the same pens and hit by the same batons as the protesters they were documenting were vilified for doing their jobs. Flames erupted. So did volly after volley of Internet vitriol.
The summer slogged onward with each new outrage, each new disappointment, each new heartbreak. Variants emerged as officials see-sawed from public health measure to public health measure. Face masks transformed into political signifiers. Teenage vigilantes with guns became celebrities. Forests burned. Air so harmful the pollution was unmeasurable for weeks was matched in toxicity by weaponized disinformation. Gathering indoors remained a threat, but now, simply going outside, that very thing we had longed for, could prove deadly.
"The New Corona,"the ad implored. "Come and see it."
At some point another century will have passed. At some point lives begin. At some point lives end. At some point hearts break and at some point they mend. At some point, what was new will be old, and then something new will arrive again.
What is it we'll see then?
This Week's Scenery
This Week's Detours
Side roads I expect to take over the coming week include:
Attending the Portland Winter Light Festival: I don’t go out enough. So I’m thrilled that my family will celebrate an upcoming birthday with friends at this event I’ve always wanted to witness but always seem to miss.
Building Something From the Back of the Box: It was Brio last week (and oh, did I indulge, especially when my kid was home sick from day care for three days and work went out the window). This week I suspect it will be Lego. Specifically, it’s attempting some “back of the box builds” using the random assortment of legos my niece and nephaw gave my son to recreate some of the alternative models featured on the back of my childhood Lego boxes. There’s a Solo Trainer in store, I suspect.
Indulging at Taylor Street Kitchen: Last Spring I stumbled into this market and café on SW Taylor Street (shocker) in Portland, Ore., after a dentist appointment upstairs. I instantly fell in love (and instantly felt hungry). Someone gave me a gift card there fore Father’s Day. I miraculously didn’t blow it in one day, so I think I’ll have to finish the deal this week. Anyone want to join me for lunch?
Selling signed copies of the Golden Fortress: I still have some copies in stock that I’d be happy to mail you. And they’re on sale! Want one? Click here to order directly. Feel like supporting your favorite bookstore? Check it out here:
Thanks for reading! I look forward to seeing you along the scenic route.
-Bill
P.S. Remember when I warned last week to expect some bumps and a twist or two for the first few weeks as I find my way along the Scenic Route? Well, this edition was meant to go out on Thursday morning but here we are. I’m hoping to nail down a set schedule, but I will be back next week.
What journeys — literal or figurative — are you taking this week? Let me know in the comments?
Citations
“Police Take Up Duty on State Lines,” Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles, Calif.; Feb. 4, 1936; p. 2
Davis, James E., “Communism,” Police and Peace Officers’ Journal of the State of California; San Francisco, Calif.; Vol. XII, No. 10; October, 1934; p. 12; accessed at https://archive.org/details/policepeaceoffic19331934sanf/page/340/mode/2up
Ibid
Lascher, Bill, The Golden Fortress: California’s Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees; Chicago Review Press, Chicago, Ill.; 2022; p. 204