California's 'Bum Blockade'

The story of the Los Angeles police chief who, faced with one of the largest internal migrations in American history, tried to close California's borders to stop it. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 1:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Now, on to the show.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  The only time that I really remember that I was scared was that dark thunder.

• 1:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oklahoma, April 14, 1935.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  We could see it coming.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  It rolled in like smoke, almost.

• 2:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  On the horizon, a wall of black dust, over 500 feet tall, stretching as far as the eye could see.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  It would be just that quiet.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  The neighbors said there was birds flying into that storm.

• 2:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  And, uh... That storm hit.

• 2:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sixty mile per hour winds.

• 2:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. The storm ripped through six states, from Nebraska to Texas. In some places, total darkness lasted an hour.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Black, whole black. It was as black as the ace's face.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  It was a day that haunted the minds of those who lived through it. They called it Black Sunday.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  You just felt like you were going to choke, you know? That dust was just, you couldn't hardly breathe.

• 3:25Speaker 05

  If you knew anything about the scripture, you know what it says? The moon will turn dark and this, that, and the other. So we just had the feeling that this is the end of time.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  I thought that was the end of the world.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  The very next day, a journalist coined a new term to describe what was happening across the Great Plains. He called it "The Dust Bowl." What you just heard were oral histories conducted with people who lived in the heart of it.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  That those dust storms just devastated the country.

• 4:01Speaker 05

  They were perpetual, and you can depend on it.

• 4:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  The dust was relentless and inescapable. It covered every inch of people's homes. It choked the crops. It filled people's lungs, causing hundreds, maybe thousands, of people to die from dust pneumonia. The Dust Bowl made the Great Plains nearly uninhabitable.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  So many of them left. No, he is. Went to California.

• 4:43Speaker 06

  Lots of folks back east they say leaving home every day feeding the hot old dusty way to the California line.

• 4:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl troubadour, immortalized this time in song.

• 4:56Speaker 06

  Across the desert sands they roll getting out of that old Dust Bowl. They think they're going to a sugar bowl, but here's what they find.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Looking east from Los Angeles, the city's top brass began to panic. The Dust Bowl migrants were not the kind of people they wanted coming to their shining city, so they began to hatch a plan to stop them.

• 5:21Speaker 06

  Now the police at the port of entry say you're number 14,000 for today. Oh, if you ain't got the do re mi force, you ain't got the do re mi.

• 5:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  And I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 5:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today on the show, producer Anya Steinberg tells the story of one of the largest internal migrations in American history and the rogue police chief who tried to close California's borders to stop it.

• 5:54Speaker 06

  California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see. But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot if you ain't got the do re mi.

• 6:14Speaker 07

  Hi, this is Kyle from Boystown, Nebraska. You are listening to Throughline from NPR.

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• 7:54Speaker 09

  Part One: The Great White Spot.

• 8:02Speaker 09

  It's a balmy February day in Los Angeles, California.

• 8:08Speaker 09

  The year is 1926, just a few years before the Dust Bowl begins. And Detective Lieutenant James Davis--

• 8:16Speaker 10

  Otherwise known as Two-Gun Davis because of his incredible marksmanship--

• 8:20Speaker 09

  is sitting at his desk at the Detective Bureau office.

• 8:24Speaker 10

  A very proper man.

• 8:26Speaker 09

  Just then, a reporter barges through and informs the 36-year-old Davis that he's just been named the interim chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.

• 8:42Speaker 09

  Davis blinks in surprise as he realizes that he's now in charge of all police officers in the nation's so-called "Wonder City" that's quickly becoming a shining metropolis, driven by the riches and glamour of Hollywood, oil, and real estate for whoever can afford it.

• 9:05Speaker 10

  Davis started his life very poor.

• 9:07Speaker 09

  Born in 1889 in Texas.

• 9:10Speaker 10

  To a strict Methodist mother.

• 9:12Speaker 11

  Once, as a youngster, I found a pack of playing cards. I took them home and asked my mother what they were. She told me and hurriedly threw them in the fire.

• 9:24Speaker 09

  Davis's upbringing shaped his worldview.

• 9:26Speaker 10

  He lived a lifetime of sobriety.

• 9:28Speaker 09

  This is Bill Lasher, author of The Golden Fortress: California's Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees.

• 9:34Speaker 10

  He was a very brusque, very authoritarian man.

• 9:40Speaker 09

  At age 16, he ran away from home. For a while, he farmed and worked hard labor jobs. Then he joined the army and was stationed in the Philippines.

• 9:50Speaker 10

  In the army, brought discipline to his life, a sense of order and stability.

• 9:55Speaker 09

  The military was a good fit, but once he left the army, his future was less clear. So, like many others, he migrated to California.

• 10:04Speaker 10

  And arrived in Los Angeles penniless and unsure what he was going to do next.

• 10:10Speaker 09

  He was so poor that all he had to wear was his army uniform. Until he heard about a new opportunity with the LAPD.

• 10:19Speaker 10

  He signs up and gets work as a beat officer.

• 10:25Speaker 09

  But it doesn't go well.

• 10:28Speaker 09

  He gets kicked out. He drifts for a while, traveling across the US doing odd jobs, but then?

• 10:35Speaker 10

  He writes a letter to the then-police chief, asking for another chance.

• 10:41Speaker 09

  And he gets it.

• 10:44Speaker 09

  In 1912, he returns to the LAPD. After a while, he's placed on the vice squad.

• 10:51Speaker 10

  He was an early drug warrior. He saw it as a moral contagion to be the drug addict.

• 10:58Speaker 12

  The underworld fears, but does not hate him. He'll play square, his victims tell you.

• 11:05Speaker 09

  Close your eyes and imagine a cop from a film noir movie. Well, that's pretty much James "Two-Gun" Davis.

• 11:12Speaker 10

  He is known for sort of daring raids on things like drug dens and vice dens.

• 11:19Speaker 12

  His friends call him Jim, and his enemies give him lots of elbow room.

• 11:24Speaker 10

  At one point, he like swung through a window to, you know, arrest some criminals.

• 11:29Speaker 09

  And the local papers, like the LA Times, eat it up.

• 11:33Speaker 12

  He's got guts, is the consensus of opinion among the gentry that ought to know.

• 11:39Speaker 09

  The press is obsessed with him. They wax poetic about his, quote, "eyes blue and keen," and his, quote, "thick, wavy hair."

• 11:48Speaker 12

  He knows what it is to have the muzzle of a revolver pressed against his rib.

• 11:52Speaker 10

  He believes maybe there's some fights, maybe there's some people hurt, but if he gets those criminals, it's okay.

• 12:02Speaker 09

  In 1921, after years of paying his dues in the rank and file, the higher-ups at the LAPD finally start to take notice of Davis. They give him his first promotion.

• 12:14Speaker 10

  Then it's like wildfire.

• 12:15Speaker 09

  Davis moves fast.

• 12:17Speaker 10

  Bust after bust after bust.

• 12:18Speaker 09

  He becomes head of the vice squad.

• 12:20Speaker 10

  Promotion after promotion after promotion.

• 12:22Speaker 09

  Until that fateful day in 1926, when he learns that he's been chosen as the interim chief of police. Shortly after, Davis gets the job for good, and he immediately starts to reshape and modernize the force into a more...

• 12:38Speaker 10

  Professionalized, standardized, uniformed police force.

• 12:43Speaker 09

  Under his watch, LAPD officers have to look a certain way.

• 12:47Speaker 10

  He enforces, wearing the uniform of a certain militaristic style.

• 12:52Speaker 09

  And they have to know how to use their guns.

• 12:55Speaker 10

  He insists that members of LAPD are top marksmen.

• 13:02Speaker 09

  Davis is a showman when it comes to his raids, but he's making all these other changes quietly.

• 13:08Speaker 10

  He is what the LA Times describes as "soft-spoken and hard-fisted." This is the picture that his friends will paint you of the youngest chief of police in the history of the city. That soft-spokenness, that idea that he's not saying anything, but he's taking action, is the image that he wants the entire police force to promote.

• 13:35Speaker 09

  LA civic and business leaders, as well as the press, like the LA Times, applauded his efforts. He was exactly the kind of police chief they wanted running LA, because they had plans for what this up-and-coming city should look like and be like.

• 13:52Speaker 13

  New friends and their money. Its resources are unlimited. Its wealth untold. Its possibilities unsurpassed.

• 14:02Speaker 10

  Especially through the 1920s, a lot of the leadership of the city is wanting it to be sort of a beacon that literally they articulate as the "white spot" of the United States.

• 14:13Speaker 09

  Yeah, you heard that right. The white spot.

• 14:17Speaker 13

  The prosperity of this great white spot is the talk of the country.

• 14:23Speaker 09

  Even though LA was formerly part of Mexico and continued to be a vibrant, multi-ethnic city, a lot like it is today, it didn't matter. It was about the image of what it could be, more than the reality.

• 14:37Speaker 13

  Los Angeles is the great white spot on the industrial map of the United States. Cash in on this great era of prosperity.

• 14:46Speaker 14

  Los Angeles very quickly recognized that its key to prosperity lay in advertising and promoting images.

• 14:56Speaker 09

  This is Mark Wild, a history professor at Cal State Los Angeles.

• 15:00Speaker 14

  The Los Angeles Times put out something called a mid-winter edition every late January, early February, right in the teeth of the winter for the Northeast and the Midwest. And they would send it out, and it would be full of pictures of people sitting in their gardens, growing these huge oranges, these huge fat babies on the lawn. And they'd say, "You know, it's 75 and sunny here in Los Angeles. Why don't you come out?"

• 15:21Speaker 10

  This image becomes produced of a city of empty land, of a place where anyone, the right kind of person, and there is a, there's a very clearly articulated idea of people with money already, who can come and invest and build on this quote unquote "empty land" that's in Los Angeles.

• 15:42Speaker 14

  The business plan is to promote it as a place of prosperity, to promote it as a place of good investment. And a corollary to that is that there is a docile, willing workforce that's not going to cause trouble.

• 15:55Speaker 09

  Which was an important bit of marketing. Because in recent years, labor organizers had taken aim at big business across the country. There were headlines about unrest, disruptions, sometimes even violence. L.A. was like, "No, no, none of that here."

• 16:14Speaker 14

  And the city government is really in tune with promoting those interests and making sure that the image persists and that it's not threatened by working-class communities, immigrant communities that might be engaged in activities that would undermine it.

• 16:33Speaker 09

  And Davis, the crusader against vice, becomes a symbol of this effort.

• 16:38Speaker 10

  And he's constantly talking about the threat, about the external threat to Los Angeles, whether it's from drug users or quote unquote "vagrants" or communists or perceived communist labor agitators. This idea that people with ill intent are coming from one source or another to harm the safe and orderly process of life in Los Angeles.

• 17:04Speaker 09

  For Davis, that threat had to be dealt with by any means necessary.

• 17:12Speaker 09

  As one columnist put it.

• 17:13Speaker 15

  Davis, quite honestly and sincerely believes that the country would be better off if the whole question of constitutional rights was forgotten.

• 17:22Speaker 09

  To do this, he ramped up the work of the LAPD's nascent Los Angeles Intelligence Squad.

• 17:28Speaker 14

  Better known as the Red Squad.

• 17:30Speaker 09

  Which, as its name implies.

• 17:32Speaker 14

  Engaged in a number of activities, including surveillance. Red Squad of Police in City Augmented. They would spy on people who were suspected of radical activities.

• 17:44Speaker 09

  And keep tabs on suspected communists and labor organizers.

• 17:49Speaker 14

  Reds arrested after rioting.

• 17:51Speaker 09

  But it wasn't all in the shadows. The squad also knew how to put on a show to make it clear who did and didn't belong in LA.

• 18:00Speaker 16

  Quick arrests have been ordered to forestall any anti-American move.

• 18:06Speaker 10

  They would engage in public intimidation. They would clear demonstrations. They would bully people. They like to pull out their batons and crack heads.

• 18:16Speaker 09

  Police Chief James Davis had his critics, but they didn't slow him down.

• 18:21Speaker 10

  Until there's a kidnapping in early 1928.

• 18:28Speaker 09

  Mother believes her son kidnapped.

• 18:31Speaker 17

  The mystery surrounding the case of Walter Collins, nine years of age, remains impenetrable, police say.

• 18:40Speaker 09

  In March 1928, a young boy named Walter Collins goes missing. And for months, the LAPD cannot find him. It's a bad luck, and the pressure on the LAPD keeps growing. But then one day, the boy shows up in Illinois.

• 19:00Speaker 17

  Collins youth found in East.

• 19:03Speaker 09

  Mother hears good news. His mother immediately sends the money to have Walter brought back to her in Los Angeles. But when they reunite, she looks at the child and says, "That's not my son." And the LAPD is like, "Yes, he is." And when she insists that he's not...

• 19:21Speaker 10

  They arrest her and commit her to a mental institution.

• 19:26Speaker 10

  This causes eventually a tremendous scandal when it turns out that they haven't caught the kidnapper.

• 19:32Speaker 09

  And they haven't found Walter either. The boy they brought back is an imposter, a runaway pretending to be Walter.

• 19:44Speaker 09

  There's a huge fallout. People are angry at the LAPD.

• 19:52Speaker 16

  Remove from office, Chief of Police James E. Davis, on the grounds of incompetency, inefficiency, and failure to properly enforce the laws.

• 20:02Speaker 09

  Tensions continue through 1929. And then?

• 20:11Speaker 09

  The stock market crashes.

• 20:13Speaker 10

  And that begins the Great Depression.

• 20:16Speaker 09

  Everything is in chaos.

• 20:20Speaker 09

  And shortly after the market crash, Davis loses his job as the police chief.

• 20:29Speaker 09

  But before long, he'll get another chance.

• 20:47Speaker 18

  This is Jose Hernandez from California, and you're listening to Two Line from NPR.

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• 22:16Speaker 09

  Part Two.

• 22:19Speaker 09

  California is closed.

• 22:24Speaker 19

  I remember it blue every day.

• 22:28Speaker 19

  Sometimes in the mornings, you could see the imprint of your head on the pillow. Would have been that dusty.

• 22:37Speaker 09

  In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl and the economic devastation of the Great Depression wreaked havoc on the lives of people across the country, but particularly the Great Plains.

• 22:48Speaker 14

  It's the South, it's the Northern Plains. Lots of farmers lose their farms or become convinced not to farm anymore because prices crash.

• 23:00Speaker 20

  I think there's a lot of desperation.

• 23:02Speaker 09

  This is Alisa Minoff. She's Director of Economic Security and a Senior Fellow in Policy History at the Center for the Study of Social Policy. And she wrote her PhD dissertation all about internal migration during this time period.

• 23:18Speaker 20

  By the mid-1930s, there've been so many bad years that people sort of lose hope in being able to sustain themselves on the farms.

• 23:26Speaker 09

  Once bustling family farms fell silent. And nearly a quarter of the country's workforce was unemployed.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  So many people were down on their luck, didn't have anything to eat, no job. You couldn't buy a job, you couldn't get a job.

• 23:40Speaker 09

  By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the plains states. And over 300,000 of them made their way to California. Entire families packed up their belongings and hit the road.

• 23:55Speaker 20

  What would strike us about it today is that the journey was long, much longer than, you know, driving down Route 66 today.

• 24:08Speaker 09

  Route 66.

• 24:13Speaker 09

  In 1930, the Mother Road, as John Steinbeck would later dub it in his novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was over 2,400 miles long and stretched from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles.

• 24:26Speaker 14

  You had a steady stream of people coming across and oftentimes these broken-down-looking jalopies with all their, you know, life's possessions piled on top of them, families with kids. And that procession was real.

• 24:41Speaker 09

  The journey was difficult and lonely.

• 24:45Speaker 20

  As people passed from one town to the next, they were likely to have experienced xenophobia. Local sheriffs in these towns that people passed through were very intent on ensuring that families moved on and did not stay.

• 25:04Speaker 21

  All a transient hears is no work, no relief. Keep moving.

• 25:12Speaker 20

  And that really only sort of foreshadowed the difficulties they would have once they arrived in California.

• 25:25Speaker 17

  Is this the dumping ground for the country's unemployed? L.A. Times, 1932.

• 25:32Speaker 14

  In overall terms, migration to California slows.

• 25:36Speaker 09

  But people are still coming in. It's just not the kind of people Los Angeles city leaders wanted to attract.

• 25:44Speaker 14

  From the perspective of L.A. civic leadership, the character, the makeup of that population changes dramatically. There's a lot more folks coming in looking for work without capital. They're not going to be buying a home. They're not going to be moving into these middle-class districts. They're desperate.

• 26:03Speaker 09

  At first, there's a lot of sympathy for these migrants.

• 26:07Speaker 14

  Los Angeles had this network of support for destitute people. And so you had a lot of the missions and settlement homes and different types of institutions that would cater those folks sort of in downtown L.A.

• 26:21Speaker 09

  This was the case in cities across the country.

• 26:24Speaker 14

  The understanding basically was we were taking care of our own people. The care for these folks was really the duty of the communities in which they resided.

• 26:32Speaker 09

  But the Depression changed everything.

• 26:35Speaker 14

  Things got so tough, so quickly, so many people lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their way of livelihood, that it swamped this private network of support that had existed. Completely overwhelmed the community chess organizations, the soup kitchens. There was just no way they could handle it.

• 26:56Speaker 14

  And so, as the decade progressed and the Great Depression continued, folks began to try to find ways to try to manage this burden. And one of the ways for communities where people were coming in was to try to exclude folks who they would claim didn't belong.

• 27:13Speaker 09

  And an easy target was all the newcomers driving into LA on Route 66.

• 27:20Speaker 14

  Some folks began to say, alright, folks who aren't working now, they have different options. Maybe they should be getting back to work, and if they aren't, then why not?

• 27:31Speaker 09

  Newspapers and politicians at the time often referred to these migrants as indigents, vagrants, transients, or bums.

• 27:39Speaker 14

  People are exhausted, and I think some of their sympathy is starting to run out.

• 27:48Speaker 09

  In 1933, LA elects a new mayor. His name is Frank Shaw, and he has a reputation for being anti-migrant.

• 27:58Speaker 10

  Shaw advocated for a county-wide anti-indigent ban in the 1930s in sort of the early days of the Depression.

• 28:04Speaker 09

  But there's a catch.

• 28:06Speaker 10

  The problem is that Shaw was born in Ontario, Canada.

• 28:10Speaker 09

  Shaw is Canadian. He is ironically a migrant himself. And also...

• 28:16Speaker 10

  There's not good evidence that his parents ever had him or his brother naturalized.

• 28:22Speaker 09

  And if that's the case, it means he's not actually eligible to be LA's mayor. It's a scandal in the making. And when Harry Chandler, the publisher of the LA Times catches wind of the story, he sees an opportunity. He goes to Shaw and says, let's make a deal.

• 28:39Speaker 10

  As the story goes, at least, he agrees to hold back these reports that are alleged to prove that Shaw is in fact a Canadian. And in exchange, he gets Shaw to agree to reinstall Davis as chief of police.

• 28:54Speaker 09

  James Davis, as in the recently fired police chief, who tends to play it loose when it comes to people's civil rights, all in the name of preventing crime.

• 29:04Speaker 10

  Chandler and others, people in the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, want someone like Davis, who isn't as concerned about the criticisms that happen with anti-labor activity, to be there at the head of LAPD.

• 29:16Speaker 09

  And it works. Davis is reinstated as the LAPD's chief of police, with the express purpose of picking up where he left off.

• 29:26Speaker 10

  The gloves are off, I guess. And he runs with it. Davis hits the ground running.

• 29:31Speaker 09

  It's not long before the Red Squad, the anti-communist policing unit, is again starting to infiltrate.

• 29:38Speaker 10

  Political movements and things like that, and starts to try to smear people perceived to be labor agitators.

• 29:46Speaker 11

  War, war to the finish. War in which every radical head will be stomped back into the earth as quickly as it rises.

• 29:57Speaker 09

  And of course, Davis keeps the interests of Chandler and the other business leaders of LA in mind. And they, in turn, scratch his back.

• 30:05Speaker 22

  We appreciate that Chief Davis and his coworkers in Los Angeles are fighting the battle of all of Southern California when they hold firmly in check the subversive activities of radical agitators.

• 30:20Speaker 14

  The Los Angeles Times, which as much as anyone really supported them, would report how they were sort of controlling the Reds and getting rid of the criminals and all of that.

• 30:30Speaker 16

  Suppression of violence commended. Colonial War Society praises Chief Davis and local police force.

• 30:37Speaker 09

  This time around, Davis gravitated to the attention. He wanted everyone to know that he meant business.

• 30:44Speaker 14

  He was a very media-friendly person. He loved to take pictures of himself looking tough, pointing guns at the camera. He really embraced the image.

• 30:54Speaker 09

  The state's incoming migrants quickly became the focus of his policing work. By the mid 1930s, these efforts were particularly pointed at single men, which Davis and critics would call hobos or vagrants.

• 31:09Speaker 14

  Those were the folks who were considered a threat. They're unattached, they're potentially prone to criminality, they're prone to labor disruption. And if you have a single male who doesn't have a family to provide for, no children to provide for, all those types of responsibilities tend to engender not only sympathy but responsibility.

• 31:31Speaker 09

  Speaking to a group of Hollywood women in 1934, Davis made it clear that his fight to rid the city of vagrants was an extension of his work to rid the city of communists.

• 31:41Speaker 11

  Americans are asleep. In two to six years, communism will be a reality in the United States if drastic steps are not taken to check it.

• 31:54Speaker 09

  Davis and LA's business elites feared that poor migrants coming into the state were more likely to join a labor movement or vote for socialist ideas, which they saw as a growing threat in California.

• 32:07Speaker 23

  We mean mass production under modern conditions. The land, the workers are to have the best land and the factory workers the best machinery.

• 32:17Speaker 09

  In 1934, Upton Sinclair.

• 32:20Speaker 14

  Most famous as a muckraking journalist. He wrote a book called The Jungle about the Chicago meatpacking industry.

• 32:27Speaker 10

  And until very recently, a socialist.

• 32:30Speaker 14

  He runs in the Democratic Party. And to everybody's shock, he wins the Democratic primary and he runs for the governor of California. And he devises a plan called Epic.

• 32:42Speaker 23

  And poverty in California.

• 32:45Speaker 09

  This is Upton Sinclair, speaking later in his life about his upstart campaign.

• 32:50Speaker 23

  And of course, Epic suggests something important and something wonderful.

• 32:56Speaker 14

  And this stuns the civic leadership in Los Angeles and across the state. They're scared to death because these policies seem to reflect a direct assault on business as usual.

• 33:09Speaker 10

  They fear that their hold on power is going to falter.

• 33:17Speaker 09

  So they get to work on a smear campaign to discredit Sinclair.

• 33:22Speaker 14

  They develop a message to counter Sinclair's campaign. They paint him as a radical. They paint him as a leftist.

• 33:29Speaker 09

  They even suggest he's a Russian agent.

• 33:32Speaker 24

  I'm going to vote for Upton Sinclair. Will you tell us why? Upton Sinclair is the author of the Russian government and it worked out very well there and I think it should do here.

• 33:41Speaker 14

  And then they enlist the Hollywood studios who obviously want a part of this as well.

• 33:45Speaker 09

  A lot of Hollywood bigwigs do not want radical politics. They want a nice, business-friendly LA. So they chip in and help produce so-called newsreels that would run before feature films at movie theaters.

• 33:59Speaker 14

  They create these fake newsreels. They have these actors hired to portray unemployed workers coming into California, riding the rails and saying, "I'm coming to California because I heard Upton Sinclair is going to be governor. And once he's in there, I'm going to be able to take advantage of these great resources that are going to be able to provide for me."

• 34:17Speaker 03

  California is going to be fair to poverty and everybody gets things for nothing.

• 34:23Speaker 09

  Upton Sinclair tries to fight it, calling it the lie machine. But it's a loud and inescapable campaign.

• 34:32Speaker 14

  And it works. He's defeated fairly easily.

• 34:40Speaker 09

  James Tugan Davis is watching this election unfold. He sees the growing fear of migrants, and he gets an idea. On February 3rd, 1936.

• 34:54Speaker 10

  135 officers in squads of 7 and 7 leave Los Angeles. They drive to 16 stations around the state of California. So, anywhere where there's a domestic state line.

• 35:11Speaker 14

  Arizona, Nevada, all the way up to the Oregon border. So he spread them out along this huge border, hundreds of miles long.

• 35:18Speaker 10

  Alongside highways and near rail crossings.

• 35:21Speaker 14

  And he arranged for all of them to be deputized by the local police or sheriff's office up there.

• 35:28Speaker 10

  To legally work as law enforcement officers in those counties.

• 35:33Speaker 09

  The papers call it "The Bum Blockade." And all along the California border, LAPD officers set up and wait.

• 35:51Speaker 07

  Hello, my name is Jeff Cooper from Bozeman, Montana. I love through line, usually listen to it on the way home from skiing with my two young daughters, or you'll catch me listening to it on the way to my job as a flight paramedic. Keep up the good work, I love through line, and it's a great show. Thank you.

• 36:11Speaker 08

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• 36:52Speaker 08

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• 37:39Speaker 13

  Part Three. That Do Re Mi.

• 37:51Speaker 21

  While the worker on the survey observed the officers, about half the automobiles were allowed to pass without any inspection.

• 37:58Speaker 09

  In 1936, the California state government released a nearly 400-page report on migrants to the state. And an entire section of it was devoted to surveyors' eyewitness accounts of the LAPD's border blockade.

• 38:16Speaker 21

  A beautiful new Packard sedan with four passengers was signaled to pass. The officer turning to the worker, remarking, "We would make enemies if we stopped people like that."

• 38:37Speaker 21

  A 1929 Ford Roadster, dripping water and oil with a homemade trailer attached, came to a stop under the canopy. The police beckoned them to halt.

• 38:49Speaker 14

  They would try to discourage people who looked like they were very poor from coming into California.

• 38:54Speaker 10

  It's being enforced very subjectively.

• 38:58Speaker 21

  The old car was lacking paint in spots, spattered with oil-soaked dust, and probably not washed for a year or so.

• 39:05Speaker 10

  If it's a rundown car, it might be stopped. A man traveling alone is more likely to be stopped.

• 39:21Speaker 21

  The family totaled nine. The oldest boy, 18, sat alone in the middle of the trailer. Heaped around him for what appeared to be all the worldly possessions the family owned.

• 39:32Speaker 10

  Questioning them, asking why they're coming into state, where they're coming from, who they are, what their name is. Proof of work, proof of means, or proof you have somewhere to go.

• 39:41Speaker 21

  A check with the police revealed that the family were coming to California for the first time to see the wife's sister. They had $30 in cash. The captain of the highway patrol informed the travelers that it would cost $20 to clear the licenses on the car and trailer. For 10 minutes or so, the scene was tense. The mother clutched her baby girl to her as she broke out in sobs. The boys sat quietly, staring into space, waiting for their parents to decide. The father, unshaven and unwashed, silently took his place behind the wheel. The battery was low, and the motor did not respond, but when it did, it sounded as if

• 40:22Speaker 21

  it too was undesirable and in need of assistance. The father turned the Ford around, and the family of nine went back over the road they had traveled, having denied police the privilege of fingerprinting them as not wanted in California.

• 40:45Speaker 09

  Surveyors' reports of the blockade told a story of inconsistency. The police stopped hitchhikers, cars, trains, and buses coming into the state. In some places, migrants were fingerprinted, and those prints were sent off to LA and to Washington DC to check for a criminal background. Some were detained in local jails. Others were just turned around and sent back across the state border.

• 41:16Speaker 09

  To pull off the blockade, from a legal standpoint, the LAPD was relying on an anti-indigent state law that had been passed in 1933.

• 41:25Speaker 14

  That prevented the importation of people into the state, quote unquote, "likely to become a public charge."

• 41:31Speaker 09

  A "public charge," meaning they would be a drain on the city's coffers.

• 41:36Speaker 14

  So the law itself is sort of representing that ideology, and that then becomes the legal justification for the bum blockade. They weren't trying to stop all migration into California. They were trying to stop certain people from coming in.

• 41:51Speaker 09

  As soon as the LAPD's border blockade was rolled out, it made headlines.

• 41:57Speaker 16

  Most public officials chatter at length in print about the desirable things they are going to do. A few do things first and talk about them afterward. While the interminable talkers at Sacramento are fuming and spluttering, 136 of the city's finest are on the job, turning back undesirables.

• 42:15Speaker 14

  I could find people who both supported and opposed it.

• 42:19Speaker 16

  Hobos of America will fight in the courts, if necessary, to preserve their constitutional rights in this city's current Border Patrol campaign against indigent transients.

• 42:28Speaker 14

  The debate turned on a question of character of the blockade's targets. Were they victims of economic circumstance who deserved sympathy? Or were they arriving due to some cultural or moral flaw? Were they unwilling to work?

• 42:49Speaker 22

  Why should California become the stamping ground for undesirables? Professional bums, men and women who come here merely to live off others?

• 42:59Speaker 14

  The phrase that Davis often used was "won't workers," that they refused opportunities that were available to them in their home communities or in other parts of the country, and that therefore, we did not owe them entry.

• 43:15Speaker 09

  In this sense, the blockade was building on sentiments that already ran deep. Cities and towns had always struggled with the question of what to do when desperate people showed up on their doorsteps. And anti-vagrancy laws had existed since before the US was even founded. In the 1930s, LA wasn't even the only place that tried out a blockade.

• 43:37Speaker 20

  There were similar actual border blockades.

• 43:41Speaker 09

  The governor of Florida had sent the state police out to the state's border two years before the LAPD's blockade. But still...

• 43:49Speaker 20

  The LA border blockade attracts a huge amount of attention because of the theatricality of it.

• 43:56Speaker 09

  In some places, Police Chief Davis's blockade became a laughingstock. On the border with Nevada, some men from Reno put up a sign mocking the blockade that said, "Stop: Los Angeles City Limits." Backlash against the blockade spread, and it was reported out in newspapers across the region.

• 44:17Speaker 12

  "Bum blockade is merely LA publicity," says Oregon Governor Martin.

• 44:22Speaker 09

  A California state senator called the program...

• 44:25Speaker 12

  "Damnable, absurd, and asinine."

• 44:28Speaker 09

  Some of the sheriffs in border towns refused to deputize Davis's officers.

• 44:33Speaker 12

  "I do not intend to place county officers and taxpayers in a position which almost certainly would lead to lawsuits."

• 44:40Speaker 09

  And a newspaper publisher near the border of Nevada said...

• 44:43Speaker 15

  "People here are anything but friendly to the plan. In fact, they don't like it a bit. So far, they think it's just a lot of hooey."

• 44:54Speaker 09

  In the pages of the LA Times, Davis was given space to defend his blockade, and to keep people updated on how he thought it was going.

• 45:03Speaker 17

  "February 5, 1936."

• 45:06Speaker 11

  "I doubt if the people so ready with criticism of this plan know the facts. The hordes of indigents are coming with the idea of getting on relief rolls, begging, or stealing."

• 45:18Speaker 17

  "February 10, 1936."

• 45:22Speaker 11

  "Within 36 hours after placing a blockade, the tide of forging floaters was turned."

• 45:32Speaker 09

  And on February 12th, he took to the airwaves.

• 45:38Speaker 25

  Los Angeles Police calling all cars, attention all cars, call cat 116. Be on the lookout for Eddie Griffith. Described as American 823.

• 45:49Speaker 10

  Calling all cars was this sort of predecessor to shows like Dragnet and other cop shows.

• 45:55Speaker 09

  The show was based on real cases from the LAPD.

• 45:59Speaker 10

  It's sort of a propaganda machine for the LAPD.

• 46:02Speaker 25

  And now we present Chief James E. Davis of the Los Angeles Police Department. Good evening, friends.

• 46:10Speaker 09

  That week, Davis had a special story prepared for critics of his blockade.

• 46:15Speaker 25

  The killer, whose career of crime will be unfolded for you here this evening, was a typical migratory criminal who entered the state in the parlance of a hobo.

• 46:29Speaker 09

  The killer, a man named Eddie Griffith, had embarked on a crime spree, traveling from Seattle to California by hitchhiking and riding the rails.

• 46:38Speaker 25

  He came into California without money, without any visible means of support. He sought to forage in green pastures, even if he had to rob and kill to do so.

• 46:49Speaker 09

  And before he launched into the story, Davis made his case.

• 46:54Speaker 25

  Tonight's story is the true story of one migratory indigent whose criminal career, under a proper fingerprint and border patrol program, might have been lived in the bud.

• 47:06Speaker 09

  If something like his border blockade had existed, Davis said Eddie Griffith never would have made it to California. The only hitch was, there was no Eddie Griffith. The story wasn't true.

• 47:22Speaker 09

  It was a dramatized version of a couple of police cases stitched together and embellished. And the same was starting to seem true of the entire premise of Davis's border blockade. His claims about hordes of dangerous migrants storming the border were seeming flimsier each day.

• 47:44Speaker 12

  While Los Angeles city cops huddled in the High Sierras, engaged in a "war to save California from the hobos", a checkup showed the war was dying out due to an almost complete lack of hobos.

• 47:58Speaker 20

  Police Chief Davis claimed that they turned away thousands of migrants at the border. I think that's hard to verify.

• 48:06Speaker 14

  They only actually stopped a small number of people.

• 48:11Speaker 09

  On March 17th...

• 48:12Speaker 20

  The Attorney General of California finally issues an opinion and says that, "No, the police chief cannot do this."

• 48:21Speaker 09

  Calling the blockade unconstitutional. He says...

• 48:25Speaker 16

  "Organized government, state, county, or municipal, should not attempt the achievement of a laudable purpose by unlawful means."

• 48:34Speaker 20

  California is one state in a sisterhood of states.

• 48:38Speaker 16

  "As other states must do unto California, so must California do unto them."

• 48:45Speaker 09

  By the end of March, things were looking grim for the blockade's future. The ACLU had organized a lawsuit against the blockade, which newspapers reported was only dropped after police intimidated the lead plaintiff. Bad press about the blockade continued to pile up. Most of all, it was expensive. And so, in early April, after a little over two months, the blockade ended. Its demise came quietly, without any fanfare or headlines in the paper.

• 49:20Speaker 14

  I think it was fairly obvious to most people at the time that this was for show, that this was not making an appreciable difference in migration into the state. Lots of people were still coming in. It was fairly easy to get around the blockade if you needed to.

• 49:37Speaker 20

  Looking back from the perspective of history, no, it was not effective.

• 49:47Speaker 09

  In 1938, James Davis's career as police chief ended. For good this time. He was forced to resign after it was revealed that he'd helped cover up the bombing of a private investigator who'd been looking into corruption in the LAPD. Davis spent the final years of his life sailing aboard a tuna trawler and collecting his pension. Meanwhile, California's attitude towards migrants changed.

• 50:26Speaker 14

  With the arrival of World War II, suddenly, everything slams into reverse.

• 50:33Speaker 09

  The US starts ramping up the war effort in 1940, sending supplies to Allied forces in Europe.

• 50:39Speaker 14

  Suddenly, California and many other places state want as many migrants as possible because of the building war effort. And so, communities that might have wanted to exclude people before are now desperate for them.

• 50:54Speaker 09

  And in 1941, a Supreme Court case would cement that change. Edwards v. California. The case revolved around a 1933 law, the same anti-indigent law that Davis used as legal justification for his blockade. The plaintiff had been caught bringing his brother-in-law, who had no job and no money, into California. And the justices ruled unanimously in his favor.

• 51:23Speaker 12

  It is a privilege of citizenship of the United States to enter any state of the Union.

• 51:31Speaker 14

  We can no longer have any of these laws prohibiting interstate migration of citizens.

• 51:37Speaker 12

  If national citizenship means less than this, it means nothing.

• 51:43Speaker 14

  And so that eliminates that law precisely because of national defense, that this may be a barrier to sending labor to places where we're going to need it in case of a national emergency.

• 51:55Speaker 12

  The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run, prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.

• 52:14Speaker 09

  In some ways, Davis's legacy, the border blockade, lived on. Just maybe not with the effect he intended.

• 52:25Speaker 20

  It really did lead people to try and interrogate the rights that they instinctively felt were being violated by the blockade. People said, "If citizenship means anything, it means that I should be able to move about the United States and to be treated like I belonged where I ended up."

• 52:52Speaker 14

  I think the blockade shows the malleable definition of who deserves to belong or not belong in a community. Different people can come under attack, even those that you wouldn't expect, like native-born white American citizens. The instrumental morality of attitudes towards migrants and homeless people depending on social demand, it really does turn a dime.

• 53:36Speaker 06

  You want to buy you a home or farm? That can't deal nobody harm. Or take your vacation by the mountains or sea. Don't swap your old cow for a car. You better stay right where you are. You better take this little tip from me, 'cause I look through the want ads every day. But the headlines on the papers always say, "If you ain't got the do re mi, boys, you ain't got the do re mi." Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.

• 54:16Speaker 06

  California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see. But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot if you ain't got the do re mi.

• 54:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  And I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 54:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  And me, and.

• 54:50Speaker 26

  Lawrence Wu.

• 54:51Speaker 13

  Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 54:56Speaker 21

  Devon Katayama.

• 54:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Irene Noguchi. Voiceover work in this episode was done by Mark Roth, Kevin Jones, Tessa Hall, Ari Steinberg, Bergen Hoff, and Alice Oriola.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Thank you to Johannes Derge, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

• 55:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Special thanks to Shelley Lemons, Steve Kite, and the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at Oklahoma State University for access to the Dust, Drought, and Dreams Gone Dry collection, to Ludlow Music for permission to use Woody Guthrie's "Do Re Mi," and to the Boulh Art Research Library at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for their recording of Upton Sinclair.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. The episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.

• 55:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes.

• 55:51Speaker 26

  Navid Marvi. Cho Fujiwara.

• 55:53Speaker 22

  Anya Mizani.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. And make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app so you never miss an episode.

• 56:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 56:28Speaker 08

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.