“One of the Most Amazing Stories of American Industry Today” in Sunset Magazine, April 1928

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Having, in yesterday’s post, touched upon aspects of the greater Los Angeles winemaking industry in 1865, this one looks forward more than six decades to the pages of the April 1928 issue of Sunset, which called itself “the West’s Great National Magazine,” including a feature article on the surprising growth of viticulture amidst Prohibition.

Notably, Thomas Pinney, in his The City That Vines, which was discussed yesterday, stated that, while Prohibition was a failure in its attempts to curb the production, distribution and sale of alcohol in the United States during its baker’s dozen of years of existence, it did have the effect of greatly reducing the number of winemakers and wineries along with vineyards in the region, while rapid suburban growth also was significantly involved.

Eugene B. Block, who wrote books on Bay Area history and on western train robbers, penned “Grapes Crushed While You Wait!” which noted that “California’s Grape Crop Profits by Nature’s Ignorance of Constitutional Amendments.” He began by observing the booming business of a San Francisco enterprise that crushed grapes to juice at 65 cents per gallon to a steady stream of customers, but could not be prosecuted by the feds because it legally sold unfermented juice. For Block,

that’s the story of the phenomenal growth of California’s vast grape industry—an industry that prohibition threatened but did not kill; the industry that has grown by leaps and bounds since prohibition became the law of the land. It’s one of the most amazing stories of American industry today—this story of California’s vineyards. It’s the story of an industry reborn; of panic turned to wealth.

When Prohibition took effect at the start of 1920, viticulturists “looked on in terror” with many of them adding fruit trees to their orchards and others plowing up the vines as “no one doubted that the grape business was doomed.” What was surprising was “a sudden, crying demand for California grapes” of all kinds “sweeping westward like a whirlwind, from all over the country.”

The result was a $250 million industry, with all types of the fruit generating $53 million and prices leaping from $6-12 to $20-80 per ton, while acreage devoted to the crop more than doubled to north of 660,000. For the first quarter of 1927, Block went on, 73,000 railroad cars hauled a million tons of grapes throughout the country with the rail companies taking in $45 million in gross revenues.

The reason for the insatiable demand was a provision in the Volstead Act, the enabling legislation for Prohibition, which stated that the law did not apply to anyone making non-alcoholic cider or fruit juice at home, free from interference without a search warrant—this only likely to happen if there was proof that any illicit product was being sold—and a California Grape Growers’ Exchange official smiled and asked Block, “can you tell when a fruit juice is intoxicating and when it is not? Neither can Uncle Sam.”

Because there was no realistic way to determine when a citizen made alcoholic beverages from grapes in the sanctity of their own home, “that’s why Uncle Sam does not molest the thousands—no the hundreds of thousands—of American householders who are converting our grapes into juice in their homes.” It was added that this was done by poor and rich alike, some using presses and others stomping grapes with boots. The officer concluded, “the important fact is that they want to drink the juice—and fermentation, you know, begins after 36 hours. Now you have the answer for the flourishing grape industry in California.”

Block commented that, before the onset of the so-called “noble experiment,” there were 700 commercial wineries in the Golden State producing some 40 million gallons, but only 50 remained for the manufacture of medicinal and sacramental wines amounting to about 5 million gallons. There were efforts to develop a non-alcoholic wine, the legal limit being one-half of one percent, “but drinking Americans demanded their kick,” so “the grape growers reluctantly decided to give up the fight.”

Yet, within that first year, the shocking rise in demand for grapes, because of the “fruit juice” provision, occurred “as if a fairy godmother had touched the magic wand to the forelorn [sic] vineyards of California.” An example was given of a grower who converted his orchard to raising alfalfa and corn, but, when there was a surge in grape orders, he leased 640 acres and sold grapes at up to 12 times the value prior to Prohibition.

It took legal battles to determine what “non-intoxicating” really meant, despite the one-half of one percent provision, including the remarkable case of a Maryland member of the House of Representatives who experimented with grape juice, including when the fermentation pushed the content above that level, and wrote federal officials asking if he was violating the law. It took some time, but he was arrested, indicted and tried, with plenty of argument in court about the provisions of the law and the judge instructed the jury that,

That determination of whether or not liquor is intoxicating is not what i meant in the law. Intoxicating liquor is liquor which contains such a proportion of alcohol that it will produce intoxication when imbibed in such quantities as it is practically possible for a man to drink. And that is the test that you are to apply to the decision of this issue of fact.

The jury returned a verdict of not guilty “and ever since, through the grace of this and similar decisions, carloads of California grapes have been rolling over the country as fast as they could be picked off the vines.” While the article did not refer to greater Los Angeles vineyards, with the real growth being in central and northern California, it is interesting to note that Walter P. Temple had federal licenses to make grape juice at the Homestead during the Prohibition years and we can assume that fermentation did take place!

Another regionally related feature is “Catalina: Isle of Magic Beauty” by Josephine Hemphill, who wrote of her interest in visiting the island after seeing a rendering of it on a curtain in the opera house in her hometown of Clay Center, Kansas, situated about 90 miles northwest of Topeka. Why Catalina was depicted there was, apparently, a mystery. In any case, the author and a younger brother, both schoolteachers, recently made the voyage.

After seeing flying fish just outside the port at San Pedro/Wilmington, the duo arrived at Avalon just after Noon and went to a waffle shop where brother John worried, evidently that the world “waffle” was too much like “wobblie”, that the server would think they were members of the International Workers of the World, a much-despised leftwing labor union at the time. Hemphill’s reply was “everyone we’ve met so far knows we are school teachers from the wilds of Kansas—even the Chinamen in Chinatown [in Los Angeles] suspected it.” Asked by her sibling how this was known, the reply was “don’t ask me, and don’t use all the maple syrup.”

The writer described the virtual imperative of taking a glass-bottom boat excursion at the harbor, being duly impressed by the fish and plant life while taking time to mock “a stylishly stout” woman from Kansas City in her home state who exclaimed that she saw a man-eating shark. Hemphill added that she and John didn’t tell their fellow passenger “that she sees the reflection of her own weird-looking hat.”

Visits to ubiquitous curio shop yield gifts for family members and there is another trip out to Seal Rocks at the eastern end of the island, while John rode in a speed boat, with Hemphill demurring as being “too fast” for her tastes. At one point, a ship used by famed Western writer Zane Grey was sighted and mentioned, though a Nebraska plumber did not recognize the name, nor was it known to the author that Grey’s impressive Pueblo-style house overlooked Avalon at its west end.

A stroll along the boardwalk leading from Descanso Beach to Pebble Beach on either side of Avalon, though there was no time to see the country club in the canyon back of town or the hilltop house, on the eastern side of Avalon opposite Grey’s resident, of the island’s owner, chewing gum magnate, William Wrigley, Jr.

The last item described concerned child coin divers, who went after money tossed into the water and kept them in their mouths until they were too full and a sardine can became the storage unit—another Kansas tourist, horrified, exclaimed, “there are thousands, perhaps millions, of microbes on that filthy money!” With that, the trip ended and, as the steamer Catalina pulled away to return to the mainland, Hemphill ended that “the beautiful isle, set in a turquoise sea more beautiful than any artist can paint, fades from view.”

In “The Pulse of the West” section there is a short piece that observed that, following a wildfire, torching 15,000 acres in the Verdugo Mountains next to Burbank and Glendale, and then mudslides from winter rains that reminded of “the value of a protective brush cover against erosion,” locals “decided to go into the conservation business” and “to assist nature in restoring brush at the earliest possible moment.”

To do this, residents of the two cities “mobilized the school children” as well as the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls and, in January, some 2,000 children were sent “into the hills to cover every square foot of each area,” surveyed and laid out in square sections, “with the proper seeds.” It was reported that this “was all done between dawn and dark with very little expense.” Important as the reseeding was, “more valuable was the lesson taught the children” as

Hereafter most of them will have a personal stake in those hills; the lesson of conservation will have been driven home to them and they will constitute themselves automatically as guards against the greatest foe of the American forests—fire.

Another item in this section concerned Edward Gardiner Lewis, the founder of University City, Missouri, just west of St. Louis, and the central California city of Atascadero, but who was “found guilty by a federal jury of using the mails to defraud.” Should his appeal fail, he would have to report to a federal prison, to which he was sentenced to six years.

The magazine added that “having had a hand in the work of protecting the public against the wild schemes of this remarkable promoter, we can safely express the hope that some way may be found of making use of the talents” he possessed in repaying those affected by his crimes. Moreover, it advocated for his being put on probation so that he could earn the money owed to others and “the ends of justice would be served more effectively than through the incarceration of the man.”

It was added that “unlike many other promoters, he has always lived a clean, simple life” and he believed in the schemes he concocted so hat “he rarely hesitated to throw his last dollar into the pot” along with the millions contributed by his dupes. For Sunset, Lewis’ failure was through “the means he used to extricate the money, not by the foolhardy manner in which he tossed the millions he raised to the four winds.” His organizational skills, supervised by competent overseers, “may produce dividends” for those who suffered from his “foolhardy optimism and lack of sound business judgment.”

What was not mentioned was that Lewis was, following his Atascadero project, the promoter of Palos Verdes Estates from 1921 to 1924 and which had his grandiose vision stamped all over it, unrealizable as this was. Mired in bankruptcy and the legal proceedings that led to his conviction, Lewis’ appeal was denied and he reported to McNeil Island in Puget Sound in Washington state, but was released halfway though his sentence. When he launched a magazine, with subscriptions through mail order, he violated his parole and returned to finish the remaining three years and was released in 1935. He lived under the radar until his death fifteen years later.

The magazine’s defense of American imperialism in central America, stating that the United States’ “intervention” brought stability and peace to countries in perpetual unrest was also mentioned in this section, while it also weighed in on “The Real Cost of Cheap Mexican Labor.” Referring to the first immigration laws enacted in the country four years prior, the editors reminded readers that “we emitted a hollow, mocking laugh . . . [about] the stupidity of closing the front door” against Europeans, “while allowing unrestricted numbers of Mexicans to pour in through the wide open backdoor.”

Moreover, Sunset claimed that “nobody disputes the fact that immigrants from northern Europe fit far better into the American scene than swarms of Mexicans,” conveniently omitting the fact that the largest group of European immigrants in recent decades were from Italy and large numbers from the Slavic nations, Greece and others outside the British, German and Scandinavian groups prized by the magazine’s editors. The piece continued that “it would be better to class Mexicans with orientals and exclude them entirely,” with the exception of merchants, students and tourists.

Acknowledging that farmers, mining companies and railroads “are objecting vigorously to any reduction in the stream of cheap labor flowing across the border at the rate of hundreds of thousands a year,” the magazine further allowed that “cheap and abundant Mexican help” enabled many farmers to “get by” and that mining and transportation costs would rise if Latino labor was subjected to the quota system. Sunset claimed, however, that “many white families would find employment at tasks now reserved for Mexican labor” while insisting that “much disease would be excluded and the burden on city and county charitable institutions would be materially diminished” as half of such support went to Latinos. The screed concluded,

In other words, farmers, railroads and mine operators get their Mexican labor cheap because the taxpayer comes to the rescue and feeds them when they are out of work, hospitalizes them when they are sick.

If the farmers or miners of the Southwest need a subsidy to survive, let’s pay it to them in some other form than through the importation of hordes of aliens who cannot be assimilated. The present price is too high.

These arguments sound all-too-familiar today, but the onset of the Great Depression a year-and-a-half later changed the calculations (that word meant in more than one sense) about Mexican immigration, as mass deportations ensued, including a great many American citizens, during the 1930s.

A piece titled “The West at Washington” featured Representative Joe Crail of the 10th District in Los Angeles. The Republican, a native of Fairfield, Iowa and Spanish-American War veteran who became a lawyer and failed Congressional candidate in his home state, migrated to Los Angeles in 1913. Working as an attorney, he was regional chair of state Republican central committee from 1918-1920 was elected to Congress in 1926 and served three terms through 1933.

The article poked a little fun at Crail, joking that it was not always clear whether he was being substituted for by his twin brother, Charles, a Superior Court judge in the Angel City. It told a story of the latter jumping in for the former when they were schoolchildren and Joe got into a little trouble with a teacher and added that the siblings served together in the Signal Corps during the war and exchanged duties in caring for a superior officer’s house without his knowledge that they were trading places. It ended by asking “what if Joe Crail should now and then slip away from Washington and simultaneously Charlie Crail should take a notion to leave Los Angeles?”

In architectural pages of the publication, a redwood staircase in the Beverly Hills house of architect Lucius A. Phillips and the use of rectangular planters in the garden of Santa Monica resident Mrs. E.W. Halliday were featured. Otherwise, the magazine is filled with other general material, including fiction, fashions, housekeeping and other topics, not to mention many advertisements of interest. With many issues of Sunset in the Museum’s collection, we’ll be sure to feature them here from time to time in the future posts.