“It Is a Young City, Crude, Wildly Ambitious, Growing”: Louis Adamic’s “The Truth About Los Angeles,” Little Blue Book No. 647, 1927, Part One

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Louis Adamic (1898-1951) was a native of Slovenia (then part of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire) who came to the United States in his mid-teens, served in the American Expeditionary Force during World War I and resided for much of the 1920s at San Pedro, where he worked as a clerk in the pilot’s office at the Port of Los Angeles and where many Slavic peoples lived. He began publishing during his time in the harbor city and was sometimes mentioned in local newspapers, such as the San Pedro News-Pilot, Los Angeles Record and Los Angeles Times for his efforts, including a chapbook, published in 1929, on the poet Robinson Jeffers.

He achieved some national renown in the 1930s and 1940s for his left-leaning political writings in such magazines as H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury, his own Common Ground and books such as Laughing in the Jungle, The Native’s Return, My America and Two-Way Passage. Much of his focus was on immigrants and ethnic minorities, as well as economic, political and social issues. Nearly finished with a book on the rise of Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, Adamic was found shot to death in his New Jersey home and, while there were allegations that he was assassinated because of his work, his death was determined to be a suicide.

Adamic’s life in Los Angeles was relatively short, though while he put in long hours in his harbor job, he also began to make a mark as a writer, which garnered some local attention from 1924 until he left the area four years later. One of his earliest publications does not generally receive mention in references to his life and work, but “The Truth About Los Angeles,” a pocket-sized 64-page analysis of the Angel City, and which we have in the Homestead’s collection, is the focus of this multi-part post.

The work was the 647th in a series called the “Little Blue Book,” edited and published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius of Girard, Kansas. The son of Jewish immigrants and born in Philadelphia as Emanuel Julius (he took the surname of his wife Anna to make his hyphenated last name), the publisher was a determined Socialist and, from 1915-1922, edited the newspaper, Appeal to Reason, which, however, was in decline during that period.

At the end of the Teens, Emanuel and Anna acquired the newspaper’s printing apparatus and began issuing their small booklets on inexpensive paper with stapled paper covers, using the “Little Blue Book” moniker in 1923. At just five cents and with contents that were often salacious and sensationalized, the series became widely popular during the Roaring Twenties and were published for decades. Adamic’s contribution may not have been among the top sellers, but the quirky, often sharp-tongued and barbed commentary is certainly worth remembering.

With a subtitle of “Los Angeles, Past and Present,” the first section is strangely titled “Halitosis” and the writer began by asserting that “this Christian civilization as I encounter it in modern Los Angeles reminds me of a young Italo-American named Carmelo” who served with Adamic in the military during the recent ear. This bunkmate was “a crude, strapping dago lad still in his teens, still growing, full of energy and nerve possessed by the dizzy ambition” of rising in rank. Yet, he had halitosis, not to mention athlete’s foot. After the camp doctor did nothing of substance about the latter condition, Adamic found Carmelo applying talc and toilet water to mask the odor with pleasant scents and this led the writer to suggest,

And Los Angeles, as I said, somehow suggests Carmelo. It is a young city, crude, wildly ambitious, growing; it has halitosis and osmidrosis [body odor], and to kill the stench it gargles religious soul-wash and rubs holy toilet water and scented talc between its toes.

Adamic then suddenly wheeled and went off in a direction by reporting that a “real estate shark” occupying a grand residence near his San Pedro home and who had “a paunch so enormous that he could barely see his feet,” got to the point where a crisis of conscience took place after “he happened to hear a famous evangelist and got ‘saved.'” The result was that “this fighting Christian whooper” revealed how the unnamed land speculator could obviate “the stench of his soul, with the perfume of religion.” Moreover, the latter became a devotee of Christianity and taught in the “world’s peppiest Bible class” while tracking his converts, said to near 1,000.

Another abrupt change came with part two on “Yang-na,” with the writer asserting that prior to the arrival of the “ecclesiastic go-getters,” or Spanish missionaries of the 18th century, “there as within the present downtown Los Angeles a village of aborigines, with the quotation of “creatures of a dingy brown hue, slight and squat in stature, small-eyed, flat-nosed, with high cheek bones and large mouths” and who could not be compared to “superior American tribes” like the Mohawk or Tuscarora.

The local indigenous people, Adamic asserted, were “a timid, disgusting lot” and “too indolent and cowardly to fight,” preferring instead to repair to the “tribal temple and bravely implore their favorite divinity to inflict some awful woe upon their enemy.” He acknowledged that these native people were “creatures . . . [or] victims of environment,” residing in an area in which “they sowed nothing and cultivated nothing, for results were uncertain.” Instead, they hunted small game, fished “and ate everything raw, or nearly so,” while they “walked about naked and painted their unbeautiful bodies” and lived in “flimsy” huts.

The writer’s dismissive attitude toward the local native people continued, as he insisted,

There is scarcely anything to be said in favor of the dirty, degraded California Indians, though I suppose their unadmirable characteristics and ways were pardonable and justified. Their attitude toward the Spaniards was as disgusting as that of, say the Iroquois toward the invaders of their territory was admirable. They submitted to the foreigners entirely, indeed worshipped them; and it was only after a long series of outrages perpetrated upon them by the Spanish soldiers that they became inspired with a feeble resentment.

He then claimed that the Spanish descended into “the same easy, slothful existence,” despite the achievements of past centuries, so “the logical question that intrudes itself upon one’s mind, is: What effect will the perennial spring softness have upon the life and character of the present Angeleno?”

Part III was titled “El Pueblo” and Adamic essayed how the Spanish came to the area in early August 1769 “and, with their fondness for long and sonorous titles, they entitled it Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles [de la Porciúncula],” while a dozen years later the pueblo of that name was established. He stated that the pobladores of eleven familes (and 44 persons) “marched about the staked-off plaza, singing holy hymns, praying, and carrying the banner of the Virgin, while the Indians of Yang-na stood by at a distance in stupid awe.”

The scribe concluded that the City of the Angels “was founded as a Christian city should be,” with those banners, hymns and prayers and seemed to be planting tongue firmly in cheek when he observed “and it may be that the explanation for the city’s present unmistakably Christian character, its prosperity and all-around greatness should be sought in its auspicious beginning.”

The fourth part bears the title of “The Plaza” and Adamic remarked,

For many decades the pueblo led a quiet existence, with only a foreigner, a drunkard, or a revolution here and there to disturb it. It lay, meek and dirty, about the Plaza, blinking and drowsing in the perpetual summer [or was it spring, as stated above?] sun. Years dragged on and the population increased slowly, imperceptibly.

Not for four decades was the “Mission of Our Lady,” or Plaza Church constructed and it was added that “today the Plaza is a little park across the way from the Mission, which is practically all that is left of the old pueblo.” What Adamic did not know, apparently, was that the Plaza of 1927 and today was not the first, yet, he continued by offering:

But even as it is, the Plaza district is the most interesting part of Los Angeles. It consists, for the most part, of cheap wooden tenements occupied by Mexicans and Chinks [Chinese], of various camouflaged bawdy houses, dancehalls, forlorn-looking hotels, bootleg dives, hop joints, movie shows, tamale stands, peep shows, shooting galleries, and stores selling rosaries and holy pictures. Main Street North, the principal thoroughfare of the district, is a moron stream, muddy, filthy, unpleasant to the nose . . . an awful stew of human life.

The colorful and dismissive prose continued, as Adamic noted that this was the “free speech area,” in which “here come the queer bozoes who think they have a Message that the world should hear” as they stood upon their soapboxes and pontificated on atheism or religion and did so “under police protection, provided, of course, the message is not economic heresy.”

Change, however, was afoot, as he noted that “the doom of the Plaza district is sounding” because “a few millionaire realtors had got together with the railroads running into Los Angeles and cooked up a scheme to build a Union Station in the Plaza, which would give a tremendous boost to the land values in that vicinity.” He continued that “the old Mexican district, with its picturesque filth, vice, lice, crime, and its simple moron piety, shall soon give way to Babbitt [Upton Sinclair’s titular figure in a popular novel of the era], Progress, and Chemical Purity.” While it was true that a radical remaking of that area was proposed and a Union Station part of the plan, the Plaza was saved when it was decided to raze Chinatown to the east and put the depot there instead.

Adamic claimed that, after an election that approved the Plaza Union Depot plan, he went to the Plaza Church and witnessed an elderly Latina, dressed in old clothes, with a “dark and drawn” visage, “eyes watery and bleary” and a rosary wrapped in her “shaking, fleshless fingers” as “her toothless jaws moved in prayer.” Next, he informed the reader, He went to a “cheap dance hall” a few blocks away “where an impossible jazz orchestra moaned for a crowd of young Mexicans, frail-bodied, foppish, decadent-looking boys and girls, the sweat of their bodies mingling with the scents of cheap perfumes and talc; their deep-sunk black eyes aglow with a desperate passion for joy; humming American ragtime.”

He forecast that the elderly woman in the church would soon die, while nearby ground was to be broken for a skyscraper and trucks hauling dirt from the site, somewhat, was the soundtrack to “her impending departure from the scene.” The “Babbits,” paragons of progressivism, would not only build the depot, but very likely “erect next door to the Mission a limit-height [height-limit, meaning no taller than 11 stories under ordinance] office building for realtors, Christian Science practitioners, chiropractors, and movie-extra agencies.”

This section ended with another claim that purported to show the rampant change underway in the first decades of the 20th century:

So much for the Mexican rabble that is being fast swept off the scene. As to the Spanish landed gentry of Southern California, once on a time the favorite hero material for our fiction and [movie] scenario writers, I have even sadder news. In a suburb near where I live the present head of a family that less than thirty years ago owned practically the entire site of the town which had been given them as a grant by the Spanish regime, was recently elected to the Grand Exalted Rulership of the local lodge of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks and upon a window of the latest subdivision office is pasted the emblem of the Rotary [Club].

With his breezy style, Adamic titled his fifth part “Go-Getters From The East” and it began with a story that, in 1787, a ship, said to be owned by George Washington, was sighted off the California coast—this appears to refer to the Lady Washington accompanying the Columbia Redivivia, both of which sailed around Cape Horn from the new United States and landed in what became Oregon, with the former soon lost in the Philippines, while the latter completed a trip around the world, being the first American ship to do so. In any case, the writer used this to observe that the Spanish had “the same uneasiness about foreigners in general as there is now about the Japanese.”

With Mexican independence, “objections to foreigners lessened and Americanos began coming in one by one, then in groups,” this would include Jonathan Temple as part of the first and the Workman family with the second, while Adamic added that this migration involved a substantial extranjero [foreign] presence in Los Angeles before the Mexican-American War and the conquest of Alta California. Then came the Gold Rush, which “brought to the pueblo hordes of disappointed prospectors and cut-throats, and before long the place began to assume a new face.” Typically, the writer remarked that,

These Americanos brought them pep, zip, and snap; they promptly chopped off the first ten words of the official name of the pueblo, leaving Los Angeles, as it is now writ large on the map of the world, and transformed it into a hell-roaring Western town . . . as one pious historian puts it, Los Angeles was then “at its worst . . . the toughest town of the entire Nation.” Murder, rape, drunkenness, gunplay and lynchings occurred daily. Once a mob of five hundred brave Nordics looted the Chinatown and slaughtered nineteen Chinese. Well-nigh every morning the rising sun kissed a few Indians and half breeds lying in road-ditches and alleyways.

Here, again, are some questionable statements, such as the daily litany of horrific crimes—though there were certainly enough incidences of these to justify the quote cited. Moreover the Chinese Massacre of 24 October 1871 was not conducted by “Nordics,” or whites only, as Latinos participated in the mass lynching, as well. In any case, Adamic went on to state that the era of lawlessness was not long, though it really was close to a quarter-century, and he added that “pure and proper Angelenos of today dislike to speak or hear of it” and he asked “is there a city anywhere that has not a black spot somewhere in its history?”

What then followed, it was asserted was “the coming into effect of American law and order,” though the lynching era was in the early American period, “and with the introduction of several new and improved brands of Christianity,” which seems to be a knock on Catholicism, “there began an epoch of uplift and industrial development.” This might mean tannery, brickmaking establishment or brewery, so small scale business growth, but it was added that “Mexican labor was cheap; besides, Japs and Chinks were being imported to help do the dirty work.” Here, too, is another error, in that the Japanese did not come to Los Angeles in substantial numbers until later.

When it came to the Boom of the 1880s (which mostly took place during the administration of William H. Workman as mayor), Adamic asserted that the usual bust that would be expected to follow and “result in ruin,” did not take place. He, however, conflates another earlier, and smaller, boom, that took place in the late Sixties and into the mid Seventies by citing Charles Nordhoff’s work, California for Health, Pleasure and Residence, which was published in that earlier era. It is true, though, that the promotional push was heavily weighted towards efforts that “heralded Southern California as a wonderful health resort; and ever since there has been rolling toward Los Angeles a stream of ailing, neurotic, pathetic humanity.”

There was a short, sped-up summary of the massive increase in population from 1880 to the present, with the totals doubling or tripling through decades and reaching over a million by the time of writing, though Adamic cited local media sources and promotional organizations that were said to “look confidently forward to 1930, when the population shall mount the two million mark.” He, however, was citing county figures since the 1890s, but the point was still the same, concerning the remarkable growth of greater Los Angeles.

We’ll halt here and return with part two, so check back for that soon.