Roundup: September 2021

WHOOPI-TY-AYE-OH No. 2
BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN

September Roundup
Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Almansor Court – 700 S. Almansor, Alhambra, CA.
Social Hour: 5:00 PM
Dinner: 6:00 PM

Our Speaker: Dr. Geraldine Knatz
Her Subject: The Port of Los Angeles

In one of dozens of classic lines from Chinatown, John Huston’s Noah Cross says to Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes that Hollis Mulwray made this city, adding that he also made Cross rich in the process. Theirs was a freshwater empire, made of a complex recipe: greed mixed with altruism, adding hydrology, intrigue, and murder.

Geraldine Knatz insists that what we might call the Los Angeles saltwater story, the Los Angeles Harbor story, is every bit as compelling, mysterious, dramatic, important. She insists that the Port of Los Angeles deserves to have its own tales narrated. And she is right.

The Port of Los Angeles made this city. Its history explodes the intimacy of a case study. It is far more important than that. It very well might be the study of what made modern Los Angeles.

Personalities, crimes, power moves disguised as bureaucratic banalities, jurisdictional feuds, and outright warfare—it is all here. So, too, is the way that the port has remained umbilical to Los Angeles: feeding it, for sure, but also tethering it to worlds an ocean away.”

Roundup Synopsis

Taken From Branding Iron 304 Fall 2021. 
The guest speaker for the September Roundup was Geraldine Knatz, speaking about the early 20th-century history of the Port of Los Angeles, centered around her recent 2019 book, Port of Los Angeles: Conflict, Commerce, and the Fight for Control.
Thomas Gibbon in 1891 attempted to build a wharf on Rattlesnake Island (now Terminal island), on tidelands held by individuals erroneously sold by the state. His case was successful, but no action occurred until he was appointed to the Board of Harbor Commissioners in 1907, when he then pushed for the state to recover the property. An agreement was reached in 1917 for the property owners to turn the land over to the city in 30 years. This land would eventually become the Port of Los Angeles. Wilmington and San Pedro would eventually be consolidated with Los Angeles, with the tidelands being transferred to the city. Mormon Island, belonging to the Banning family, was also absorbed by the city in the 1930s after a long legal battle. Thomas Gibbon also attempted to have a railroad built, but this never saw the light of day.
In the 1920s Walter B. Allen was appointed to the Board of Harbor Commissioners, and was seen as someone who could clean up the corruption, though he had his own conflicts of interest in trucking port cargo with his own delivery company. Allen was tasked by the city mayor to merge the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Politics, rate wars, duplicate facilities, and Los Angeles’ desire to control Long Beach’s oil money triggered many attempts to merge the two ports, but they remained separate. Allen was eventually removed due to bad publicity for his involvement with the Julian Petroleum scandal. Many years later Assemblyman Vincent Thomas would also attempt to merge the two ports and was similarly unsuccessful.
WWII forever changed the world’s appreciation of the port. Los Angeles proved that it could move more than just oil, and could be a general cargo port as well. Meanwhile the port customer base was shifting from locally based oil companies to international shipping companies. By the 1960s, trade through Los Angeles Harbor had grown faster than its terminal facilities, longshore workforce, and its own office space could handle. The 1960s for the harbor also saw exciting developments, as if ripped straight from the latest film noir: corruption, graft, secretly taped meetings, indictments, a suspicious death, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé by the Los Angeles Times.
The Port of Long Beach would grow so rapidly that the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners voted to support merging of the two ports. We continue to hear past and present arguments supporting this initiative, but the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach remain separate to this day
— Patrick Mulvey

Photos from the Roundup

Roundup: August 2021

Roundup Synopsis

In August, the Westerners held, possibly, the last of our web-based roundups. Serendipitously, our need to gather at a distance led us to join with the Hawaii chapter of the Tsung Tsin Association and Chinese genealogical organizations in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Together, we explored an area in which our respective spheres of interest overlapped. As such, we dipped our collective toes into the rich waters made up by the stories of Chinese immigrants to Hawaii and California. The gathering on August 23rd was the culmination of a special two-part series hosted by our newfound collaborators. It featured a lecture by Dr. Brian Dillon which focused on the experiences of Chinese immigrants in our part of the country and their influence in helping to shape the California that we see today. The introductory portion of Dillon’s talk reminded us that, until the latter half of the 20th century, the Chinese were all but omitted from the history of this country. When an author deigned to mention them at all, it often served only to perpetuate general misconceptions with something trite, along the lines of, “They built the railroads, then moved to San Francisco.” As we learned throughout Dillon’s presentation, the Chinese story in California is much more complicated. The construction of railroads was not the only undertaking of large numbers of Chinese workers, as they also left a significant stamp on the mining industry. Indeed, by 1854, as many as one-in-five California miners were Chinese, often working abandoned claims and making them profitable. Remnants of mining ditches, wagon trails, and irrigation canals hand-dug by Chinese, today serve as testament to their creators’ contributions to the progress of the West, apart from the railroads which made their fellows famous. Unfortunately, these Chinese immigrants were subject to terrible mistreatment in their new homeland. Racially motivated mass murders, including the largest lynching in California’s history in Los Angeles in 1871, were far from the only crimes to which these people were subjected by their white neighbors. Both rural and urban Chinese communities endured unfair hardships perpetrated by their neighbors. Making things worse, all levels of government, from local to federal, stripped the Chinese of their civil rights, making it impossible for injured parties among them to seek justice. The Chinese who stayed in California after the Gold Rush, being mostly single men, eventually died of old age. Their slow decline led to many “One-Man Chinatowns” dispersed throughout California’s small rural communities. Afterwards, urban Chinatowns became the last significant haven for California’s Chinese population. Some of these urban Chinatowns still thrive today. This cooperative presentation enabled us to learn more about the efforts of Chinese immigrants in the 19th-century development of our home state. Especially in this present, COVID-induced era of rising anti-Asian racism, it is essential that we celebrate such contributions and lament the mistreatment which is too often the only reward of such immigrants. Here’s to future communions with groups like the Tsung Tsin Association, which provide a great opportunity, for all involved, to incorporate new perspectives into our respective worldviews. — Alan Griffin

Zoom Presentation: April 15, 2021

Roundup: March 10 2021

Zoom Roundup: March 10, 2021

To join the Zoom meeting on March 10, please click here.

The passcode for the Zoom was emailed to Corral members in February.

If you do not regularly receive Corral emails, please contact Brian Dillon at  briandervindillon@gmail.com for a virtual invitation.

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