According to many contemporary historians, elites are overrated. Rejecting the “great man” theory of history in favor of larger political, cultural, technological, and economic transformations, and bringing much-needed attention to everyone else, historians in recent decades have broadened their narratives to better comprehend society as a whole. Bucking these trends, Maxwell Johnson, author of A Connected Metropolis: Los Angeles Elites and the Making of a Modern City, 1890–1965, convincingly argues that these “dead, rich, white guys” (xiii) are still worth attending to.
Whether Los Angeles is presented as a sunny paradise or an unsustainable suburban hellscape, some prominent historians of the city as divergent as Mike Davis and Kevin Starr, as well as many works of popular culture, have granted prominence and agency to the city’s elites: the newspaper editors, promoters, real estate barons, railroad magnates, Hollywood moguls, and all the other incredibly wealthy and connected people who used their power to make the city (and themselves) bigger and richer. Fifty years ago, a fictionalized amalgam of a number of these elite figures coalesced into Noah Cross, the malevolent, depraved villain played so memorably by John Huston in the film Chinatown. That darker view of L.A. elites has endured in the decades since.
Johnson is not engaged in a rehabilitation campaign. Instead, he argues that we cannot fully understand this provincial community’s spectacular ascent into economic and cultural prominence without understanding it in relation to other places, and that its elites are central to understanding those relationships. The city was “simultaneously a command post of the American empire, and an outpost utterly dependent on other places” (1).
The city’s elites were involved in more than just boosterism, or the promotion of economic development, Johnson asserts. Rather, they “espoused a politics of connection” (3), and through this they secured things as varied and valuable as a water supply, a port, investment capital, Mexican laborers, and Midwestern migrants. This is his central focus: how Los Angeles’s elites “shaped the city’s connection to the outside world” (11). It is a compelling argument, and it fits within a growing trend in L.A. and urban historiography to study cities less in isolation and more in connection: the ways Los Angeles was connected to other U.S. cities, how it projected its power south into Mexico and west into the Pacific, and the ways international trade and commerce linked L.A. to Mexico City, Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing.
The book’s chapters, a series of case studies, look at elite efforts to achieve new or better connections and connectivity for their city, but they also explore elite fears about how much their city should, or should not, be enmeshed in the larger world. Johnson focuses first on the “free harbor fight,” which secured federal funding to build an artificial port on a California coast where rival cities already possessed two of the best natural harbors in the world. Chapter 2 focuses on World War I preparedness and paranoia, and fears of an improbable dual Japanese–Mexican invasion. Chapter 3 follows a more familiar story, William Mulholland’s efforts to provide the city with a sufficient and reliable water supply. Chapter 4 focuses on the Great Depression, the city’s triumphant 1932 Olympics, and the successful efforts to defeat Upton Sinclair’s campaign to become governor of California. Chapter 5 discusses World War II, when Los Angeles attained newfound military and economic stature, but its leadership encouraged Japanese American internment. A coda follows the city’s elite into the postwar era, including their triumph over Mexican American residents (and Brooklyn) to bring the Dodgers to Chavez Ravine, but also their travail as their idealized metropolis descended into violence that shocked the nation in the 1965 Watts rebellion.
Johnson convincingly connects these disparate case studies, though some are more emblematic of Los Angeles and its elite than others. Unfortunately, the elite (and many middle-class and working-class Whites) of West Coast states and cities largely supported Japanese American internment, and nationalism paired with xenophobia manifested in many places in both world wars. Likewise, there were rich people across California eager to ensure Sinclair did not become governor. Yet the stories of the harbor; the endless thirst for water; the proximity of Mexico as market, real estate, labor source, and hypothetical threat; and the irresistible combination of Hollywood, automobiles, and oil, all arriving around the same time, are distinct to the city and region, and profoundly illuminating of its history.
Exactly who was defined as elite is a little fuzzy. Grounding his research in landmark works of U.S. urban history, Johnson argues that he is attempting to study “individuals who lead their chosen fields at the upper echelons of the class structure” (2). Fair enough—Harrison Gray Otis, Henry Huntington, Edward Doheny, William Mulholland, William Randolph Hearst, Louis B. Mayer, and a succession of L.A. mayors and L.A. County supervisors were all powerful—but they possessed and wielded distinctly different kinds of power.
Johnson asserts that this elite group might have indeed been varied and changeable, but that there were certain elite institutions that endured, such as the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association. That is true, but it also hints at his primary focus: businessmen directing economic interests, though their agendas might range far beyond business. One might also ask about other enduring and influential Los Angeles institutions, from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to the boards of trustees for USC and UCLA, or the hosts of boards and commissions that oversaw everything from downtown redevelopment to beach preservation to the LA County Art and Natural History Museums.
Frankly less engaging is the author’s assertion that “American masculinity was in crisis at the turn of the century” (4). Take a cursory look at the historiography of any era, and you will find numerous books proclaiming that American masculinity was in crisis. Thankfully, Johnson zooms in, illustrating how this elite acted out very L.A.-specific anxieties, whether it was stealing the Owens River and claiming the Colorado, campaigning against the homeless during the Great Depression, or preparing the city and region for world wars. Specifically White manly virtues were on public display, and nowhere were they employed more ruthlessly than in elite efforts to ensure Anglo dominance in the city.
The author’s insights and analysis are at their best when focused on elite preoccupations and agendas most specific to Los Angeles, even while keeping an eye on how the city was enmeshed in a larger world of relationships. Los Angeles’s elites certainly succeeded in creating a huge, and hugely important, city. They also created an “intensely hierarchical city” (248), which it remains. If the book continued further into the future, it might find that the city’s elite became more diverse, more global, more connected, though in many ways perhaps less connected to the city itself.
Despite these few critiques, A Connected Metropolis is an excellent addition to the city’s growing historiography. Johnson’s central focus, “the spectacular visions and rambunctious activism of a group of influential men dedicated to transforming a remote frontier town into a global metropolis” (4) makes for compelling reading. Their story and their city remain important, even if the story is far more complex and diverse than the version they told themselves.
University of California Press