by Paul R. Spitzzeri
In its ongoing efforts to create awareness and support for its Industrial Underwriting Corporation, which was intended to have $50 million in stock subscriptions to provide to existing and new manufacturing companies, the Greater Los Angeles Association embarked on an aggressive and ambitious promotional campaign after its founding in late March 1924. This included a weekly bulletin, of which the Museum has three issues, with the 12 May edition the featured artifact for this post.
As the summer began, that work continued, with the Los Angeles Times of 29 June reporting that the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce on its own program of emphasizing the Angel City’s industrial sector and advertising to other parts of the country regarding opportunities in our region. It was added that “the campaign for more factories now being carried on by the Greater Los Angeles Association, the Chamber of Commerce and other organizations already is making itself felt.”
After remarking that activity in industry was greater than in other business areas as “new factories are rising and those in operation are humming,” the paper remarked,
Los Angeles is destined to become one of the leading industrial cities of the world. The development of the past few years is proof enough that manufacturers in legion numbers are awakening to the fact that this city is ideal for their factories.
Los Angeles residents, who do not think their city is forging to the front industrially, should take a trip through the industrial districts. The development of the past year or two should be a revelation.
In its 1 July number, the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News briefly noted that the Central Manufacturing District magazine for June published an article by Association advertising director L.J. Burrud titled “Financing Industries,” which explained the organization’s concept. The tie to the Windy City was likely explained by the fact that Association President Harry H. Merrick lived and worked there for two decades, mostly for the well-known firm of Armour and Company, but then as vice-president of the Central Trust Company and then president of the Great Lakes Trust Company, before migrating to Los Angeles early in the Twenties.
Four days later, the Los Angeles Express published excerpts of an address by Willis Owen, an advisor on industry to the late railroad magnate and financier Edward H. Harriman, to a commercial trade association at the Biltmore Hotel. In a colorful address, Owen told the assemblage,
If Los Angeles and its sister cities saw the opportunity for the expansion of home industry as I see it there would be a bargain counter rush to join the Greater Los Angeles association, there would be a membership of more than 25,000, the $50,000,000 revolving fund to promote such home industries [as mentioned elsewhere in his talk] would be over subscribed . . .
Somebody is throwing mud on your white spot [this a symbol of the Association effort] and it’s time to stop it.
The Van Nuys News of the 11th reported on a gathering that evening of the Greater San Fernando Valley Association, obviously inspired by Merrick’s organization and at which he was to “address the meeting summarizing facts and figures in a convincing way,” while other presentations concerned major highways through the valley.
Yet, quite abruptly, media mentions of the Association dropped significantly after this, though Merrick pursued a personal project with the El Caballero Country Club in Tarzana, where a fellow promoter was John H. Blair, who we highlighted very recently in a post about his residential Greater Goodyear Park near a growing industrial area of South Los Angeles and who also involved in the Greater San Fernando Valley Association, and development projects in the valley. The Los Angeles Record of 1 September wisecracked that a man showed up in a New York City train station not knowing who he was and it added, “maybe it’s the guy who started the Greater Los Angeles association.”
The 29 November edition of the Express observed that the Association filed its article of incorporation with the state and it was recorded that,
The initial subscription toward the huge amount [of $50 million] to be devoted the city’s welfare is $5,000,000, which sum will be used in giving financial aid to industrial efforts already located here. Under the plan the entire community will be behind the movement to close the single gap in local economy—with manufacturing to an extent that will balance with population and agricultural development.
Merrick released details including the fact that the issue was to be in 200,000 shares at a par value of $25 each and it was added that “as the needs of the corporation may require the capital stock may be increased from time to time to not exceeding” that $50 million amount. Offices were maintained at his existing realty business space in the Hillstreet Theatre Building in downtown Los Angeles.
As the year concluded, however, little new appeared in the press, other than a brief reference to an election of an Association representative from the Eagle Rock section of the Angel City. As 1925 dawned, there was some excitement in the eastern San Gabriel Valley town of San Dimas, as mentioned in the Pomona Bulletin of 9 January, when Merrick’s partner Richard L. Ruddick visited and proclaimed that it “is ideally located for a great industrial center” and he congratulated local business figures for their interest.
He gave an example of the silk industry, with raw materials obtained in Japan, shipped across the Pacific and then transported to the east to be made into clothing, some of which came back to the west coast for sale, but with the requisite higher prices because of shipping costs. Reddick remarked that “there is no question that San Dimas will be some day an industrial center,” though he added “it is up to you men to see that the right kind of factories are started here.” His remarks concluded with the observation that the Association “would finance such manufacturing projects as those who would be apt to start [them] in San Dimas.”
The Pomona Progress of 5 February covered the results of a business association in that town, with attendees “enthusiastically agreeing that the future of San Dimas lies as much in the development of an industrial sector as in an agricultural community.” The chair of an industrial survey committee asserted “we have everything in San Dimas that a manufacturer desires” including cheap land, good transportation routes, plenty of water and the fact that “there is no longer [a] danger of a power shortage in the Southland.” It was decided to request the Association to include the town in a metropolitan-area industrial survey.
Yet, by early April, San Dimas soured on the Association, with the Progress of the 3rd reporting that the locals preferred to deal with the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce because a silk mill owner “held out little hope for the industrial service of the Greater Los Angeles association” and who “charged that [it] was an organization of real estate dealers whose chief interest lay in Los Angeles” and added “the chance of an outside community being pushed by this organization [was] slim.” Moreover, it was reported that attempts to reach the Association were not answered.
Merrick did speak to some 200 members of the Associated Chambers of Commerce of the San Fernando Valley in a gathering at Girard, now Woodland Hills, while he also appeared in the Orange County town of Fullerton to praise efforts there to secure the local branch of the University of California (this ended up moving to Westwood and became U.C.L.A. by decade’s end). Nothing appears to have been said or at least reported on regarding the Association’s efforts.
Another likely bad omen for the Association was the dissolution of Merrick and Ruddick, with Merrick immediately launching a new firm, Harry H. Merrick and Company, which to focus on “high-grade subdivisions” as well as “the wholesaling of real estate.” The Times of 5 April remarked that Merrick’s work with Mulholland Highway and Beverly Boulevard were notable and added that his son, Marlowe, was involved with his father’s work.
Merrick’s status as Association president was mentioned and it was commented upon that the stock issue was then at $10 million, though nothing specific was stated about what the enterprise was doing with those funds. After referring to him as “a leading figure in Los Angeles business life,” the paper cited John H. Blair as proclaiming that, with Merrick’s work, as houses sprung up in the Hollywood Hills and San Fernando Valley, they would be “a vast monument” to Merrick. Among these tract was Hollywood Manor, developed by Blair and Charles F. DeWitt and where, not surprisingly, Merrick built a residence.
Two months later, Blair, as an Association director, was quoted in an advertisement from a commercial realty firm, with the fantastic moniker of Clinch and Thurtle, as he uttered that
Industrially, Greater Los Angeles stands today where New England stood in 1880, where New York stood in 1895, where Pennsylvania and Ohio stood in 1900, where Chicago and St. Louis stood from 1905 to 1908, and where Detroit stood in 1909 and 1910.
Clinch and Thurtle added that “fortunes are going to be made in manufacturing” so Blair’s testament “should be appreciated by every business man in Southern California.” The rest of 1925, however, only found mention of the Association with respect to Merrick’s identification with the Mulholland Highway extension plan from Los Angeles city limits to the Pacific and with El Caballero.
Otherwise the name of the enterprise did not arise again until 1929 and the election of Mayor John C. Porter, with the Los Angeles Record of 24 July asserting that Merrick, who became a prominent figure in the management of the 1928 project involving the creation and development of Studio City, and his son were becoming major players at City Hall, apparently working to elect several council candidates. The paper referred to Harry Merrick as an exemplar of “semi-public service,” meaning that he promoted public projects serving private interests.
It was, in fact, one of those that led him to a short stint at a federal prison, as Merrick was charged with pocketing tens of thousands of dollars as a fee for a simple transaction related to the massive San Gabriel Dam project of the late Twenties and early Thirties and he was convicted on a common tax evasion rap. He and his company’s treasurer were handed sentences to McNeil Island prison in the Puget Sound in Washington. When Merrick was released, he declared insolvency and avoided paying the $1,500 fine that went with his prison sentence.
From that point, Merrick largely vanished from the public record and migrated to Brazil in the early 1940s, perhaps dying there. His brief flurry of activity with the Greater Los Angeles Association is remarkable in the context of the massive growth of the City of the Angels and vicinity and, especially, in the promotion of industrial and manufacturing growth in the region during the Roaring Twenties. These aspects of the local economy skyrocketed during World War II and in the postwar period, with defense, automobile manufacturing and other heavy industry and, while his effort failed, it deserves some remembrance.
I was a bit startled when I first read that Merrick “declared insolvency” to avoid paying the $1,500 fine imposed in addition to his prison sentence. I believe that a century ago, newspapers were often looser in their reporting of legal affairs and tended to simplify the entire formal judicial proceedings into the word “declared” – as though it only needed to be declared by the individual himself.
I also noticed that in this post Merrick is said to have declared “insolvency,” while in the earlier linked post from 2021 he is described as having declared “bankruptcy.” This may suggest that during Merrick’s era, California’s state Insolvency Act still coexisted with federal Bankruptcy Law, and hence that the terms “insolvency” and “bankruptcy” were used more interchangeably than they are today.