The Great Los Angeles Swindle

Here is a saga of the roaring twenties, with its glorification of business, its get-rich-quick mentality, and its paucity of government regulation--which bred speculation, corruption, and corporate chaos throughout the country. The Great Los Angeles Swindle exposes the schemes of C. C. Julian and his Julian Petroleum Corporation, known familiarly to thousands of Los Angeles residents as Julian Pete, thanks to Julian's folksy weekly newspaper ads. The Julian Pete swindle ranked with Teapot Dome as one of the great scandals of the era and symbolized the failure of 20s boosterism and speculation. Here is a saga of the roaring twenties, with its glorification of business, its get-rich-quick mentality, and its paucity of government regulation--which bred speculation, corruption, and corporate chaos throughout the country. The Great Los Angeles Swindle exposes the schemes of C. C. Julian and his Julian Petroleum Corporation, known familiarly to thousands of Los Angeles residents as Julian Pete, thanks to Julian's folksy weekly newspaper ads. The Julian Pete swindle ranked with Teapot Dome as one of the great scandals of the era and symbolized the failure of 20s boosterism and speculation.

This is a true story from Maj. Harold Ferguson’s personal diary and letters describing his experiences during World War I and his life as a citizen of Los Angeles during the formative years of the 1920s. Maj. Harold Ferguson was a Stanford graduate lawyer and member of the United States National Guard returning from service in World War I to his home in Los Angeles, a city growing into a thriving metropolis. But Los Angeles was a different city from Chicago, New York, or Detroit. It was isolated from the rest of the country by its location on the West Coast, surrounded by mountain ranges and oceans. Natural resources were rare, and water would be crucial to supporting a new population that hailed mostly from the Midwest. All these challenges were part of Ferguson’s story. His entry into the LA real estate business came at a time when Los Angeles was overwhelmed with housing demands to accommodate all the new immigrants who saw Los Angeles as a Mediterranean paradise—sunshine, Hollywood, job opportunities, get-rich-quick schemes, and a new beginning. But delayed effects of World War I, subterranean and invisible to most, rose from the depths and created the Great Depression.

The restrictive covenants, many of which are still commonly employed, tell us as much about American society today as a century ago."--Jacket.

During the Great Depression, the Los Angeles area was rife with radical movements. Although many observers thought their ideas unworkable, even dangerous, Southern Californians voted for them by the tens of thousands. This book asks why. To find answers, author Errol Wayne Stevens takes readers through the history of such movements as the Utopian Society, Dr. Francis Townsend’s old-age revolving pension plan, Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California gubernatorial campaign, and Retirement Life Payments, known as Ham and Eggs. The book also examines the Los Angeles Communists and the free-market capitalists, both quasi-religious movements with large followings, as well as the self-help cooperatives, a spontaneous upsurge of neighbors who came together to help one another in a time of desperate need. As to these movements’ extraordinary popularity, Stevens finds the standard explanations unpersuasive. He debunks the idea that naïve, unsophisticated Southern Californians, living aimless, empty lives, suffering from ennui, and longing for community, readily supported charismatic leaders who promised a way out of the Great Depression. In Stevens’s telling, Southern Californians supported these movements because they spoke to their needs. Fearful or desperate, some elderly and hopeless, Angelenos cared less about the programs’ feasibility than about their promise of relief. As one Ham and Eggs supporter succinctly explained: “It may be a racket and maybe it won’t work more than a couple of weeks, but that will be $60 more than I ever got before for one vote.” Finding parallels between past and present, readers might wonder why people remain loyal to programs that prove unrealistic, or why voters continue to support leaders who reveal, time and again, their ignorance or dishonesty. In its illumination of a troubled time in American history not so long ago, this book offers insight into our own.

Best known as the woman who “ran MGM,” Ida R. Koverman (1876–1954) served as talent scout, mentor, executive secretary, and confidant to American movie mogul Louis B. Mayer for twenty-five years. She Damn Near Ran the Studio: The Extraordinary Lives of Ida R. Koverman is the first full account of Koverman’s life and the true story of how she became a formidable politico and a creative powerhouse during Hollywood’s Golden Era. For nearly a century, Koverman’s legacy has largely rested on a mythical narrative while her more fascinating true-life story has remained an enduring mystery—until now. This story begins with Koverman’s early years in Ohio and the sensational national scandal that forced her escape to New York where she created a new identity and became a leader among a community of women. Her second incarnation came in California where she established herself as a hardcore political operative challenging the state’s progressive impulse. During the Roaring Twenties, she was a key architect of the Southland’s conservative female-centric partisan network that refashioned the course of state and national politics and put Herbert Hoover in the White House. As “the political boss of Los Angeles County,” she was the premiere matchmaker in the courtship between Hollywood and national partisan politics, which, as Mayer’s executive secretary, was epitomized by her third incarnation as “one of the most formidable women in Hollywood,” whose unparalleled power emanated from her unique perch inside the executive suite of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Free to adapt her managerial skills and political know-how on behalf of the studio, she quickly drew upon her artistic sensibilities as a talent scout, expanding MGM’s catalog of stars and her own influence on American popular culture. Recognized as “one of the invisible power centers in both MGM and the city of Los Angeles,” she nurtured the city’s burgeoning performing arts by fostering music and musicians and the public financing of them. As the “lioness” of MGM royalty, Ida Koverman was not just a naturalized citizen of the Hollywood kingdom; at times during her long reign, she “damn near ran the studio.”

Alexander Pantages was 13 when he arrived in the U.S. in the 1880s, after contracting malaria in Panama. He opened his first motion picture theater in 1902 and went on to build one of the largest and most important independently-owned theater chains in the country. At the height of the Pantages Theaters' reach, he owned or operated 78 theaters across the U.S. and Canada. He amassed a fortune, yet he could not read or write English. In 1929 he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old dancer--a scandal that destroyed his empire and reduced him to a pariah. The day his grandest theater, the Pantages Hollywood, opened in 1930, he lay sick in a jailhouse infirmary. His conviction was overturned a year later after an appeal to the California State Supreme Court, but the question remains: How should history judge this theater pioneer, wealthy magnate and embodiment of the American Dream?

Throughout America cocktail parties sparkled defiantly through the dreaded first minutes of January 20, 1920. With morning would come the official start of Prohibition. It was easy, however, to keep the party going in Long Beach, California. Though Long Beach had been "dry" throughout most of its history, illegal liquor distribution throughout the city was already perfected by the time the 18th Amendment, banning the sale of most alcoholic beverages, became law. Already in place were underground booze operations, secretive speakeasies and bootlegging, the perfect staging ground for crime, corruption AND murder. READ ABOUT: Oil - The one discovery that made Long Beach different from the rest of 1920's and 30's America and would change the life of the city in many unforeseen ways. Good vs. Evil - Murders, gun battles, lawlessness ...the city was a battleground between the influences of good and evil. Involved in the battle was the Ku Klux Klan, Communists, rum runners, bootleggers, gangsters, and corrupt politicians. MEET: Hollywood celebrities William Desmond Taylor, Fatty Arbuckle and other well-known figures who ended up dead, or their careers ruined, because of rampant corruption and illicit booze. Gangsters such as Al Capone's henchman Ralph Sheldon, who gunned down Long Beach policeman William Waggoner, and got away with it. Bootleggers like Thomas Johnstone, murdered by his wife when he refused to give up his nefarious profession. Oil swindlers, many influenced by C.C. Julian and his Ponzi scheme that bilked thousands out of their life savings. Murderers such as Bluebeard Watson, who killed most of his 15 wives until one of them became suspicious. These are just a few of the individuals and matters discussed in this eye opening account of Long Beach and Southern California during the 1920's and 30's.

Western historians continue to seek new ways of understanding the particular mixture of physical territory, human actions, outside influences, and unique expectations that has made the North American West what it is today. This collection of twelve essays tackles the subject of power and place from several angles�Indians and non-Indians, race and gender, environment and economy�to gain insight into major forces at work during two centuries of western history. The essays, related to one another by their concern with how power is exercised in, over, and by western places, cover a wide range of times and topics, from 18th-century Spanish New Mexico to 19th-century British Columbia to 20th-century Sun Valley and Los Angeles. They encompass analyses of the concept and rhetoric of race, theoretical speculations on gender and powerlessness, and insights on the causes of current environmental crises.