CALIFORNIA
Dust Bowl Dust Up
The LAPD’s 1936 border blockade stops refugees from entering California
On April 14, 1935, a severe cold front slammed Oklahoma. High winds scraped the over-farmed, drought-stricken land and aerated millions of tons of topsoil. The dust was so thick people couldn’t see their hands — or breathe. Farmers and their children rubbed Vaseline into their nostrils and crafted masks. They still coughed incessantly.
The storm was the worst of a series that had blackened the plains since the beginning of the decade, blowing away the topsoil and any hopes of making a living. Desperate to flee the horror, families boarded westbound trains or tied their belongings onto rickety cars and headed to California.
Chamber of Commerce leaders had spent decades marketing Los Angeles as an idyllic land of sunshine and wealth. When hundreds of Dust Bowl refugees began spilling into Los Angeles daily, they started having second thoughts. The migrants were ready to grow fruit, run a store, or assemble machinery, but the Great Depression had eliminated those options. The sunshine was still pouring in, but the jobs were gone.
More than a quarter of Californians were looking for work, and a fifth were on public relief. Fearing the arrival of thousands more indigent families, L.A.’s mayor decided to prohibit “indigent alien transients” from entering the city. He proposed placing people who could not prove California residency into concentration camps. Yes, concentration camps. There, they would be assigned forced labor, building roads and parks. Moral outrage scuttled the idea, but Police Chief Jim Davis executed the mayor’s intent as best he could.
Davis was a pompous bully who overstated his middling height and tailored his uniforms to hide his portly girth. One journalist of his era called him “a burly, dictatorial, somewhat sadistic, bitterly anti-labor man who saw communist influence behind every telephone poll.” His career ended later in the 1930s when a city corruption trial revealed him to be dishonest and likely murderous.
Davis invented dragnets, the blockades where cops — ostensibly looking for fugitives or potential criminals — stopped cars without probable cause and questioned the occupants. The practice, an early automotive version of stop-and-frisk, would be ruled unconstitutional in the 1940s.
In February 1936, Davis transferred his dragnets to the borders of California. Eager to reject “the refuse of other states,” he sent 136 LAPD officers to sixteen points on California’s borders with Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona. All these locations were, of course, hundreds of miles beyond the L.A. city limits. Davis asked the local sheriffs to deputize his officers, and all but one happily agreed.
The officers questioned travelers about their legal domiciles and turned back those who could not prove California residency. The cops waved through fancy cars that indicated wealth. They rejected older jalopies pulling trailers, like those made famous by The Grapes of Wrath. Over ten thousand people were refused entry, and one thousand were arrested for vagrancy.
The operation, labeled the “Bum Blockade,” received editorial support from the conservative Los Angeles Times. On the other side, arguing that it was unconstitutional, the editor-publisher of the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News championed traditional American ideals. “We have an idea that a man without even so much as a plugged nickel in his pocket has a right to walk from here to there and back again in the United States even if a state line intervenes.”
I first learned about the Bum Blockade while researching a book about corruption in 1930s Los Angeles. The episode was characteristic of Davis’ bigotry and belligerence. I discovered that when a man in the Hollywood film industry challenged the border stops, the chief and his men viciously harassed him and his family. I also found that the man’s family situation was more intriguing than I’d first assumed.
What surprised me was how the blockade came to an end less than three months after its inception. Of course, I also couldn’t help but think about today’s migrant crises and fears about refugees. In migration stories, certain border towns illustrate the humanity and inhumanity of society. This story’s many facets converged on Blythe, where the Colorado River separates California from Arizona.
Blythe was the location of the busiest Bum Blockade checkpoint. There, cars traversed the Colorado River and entered California from Arizona on U.S. Highways 60 and 70. An agricultural inspection station in Blythe prevented fruit and vegetables with pests or invasive species from entering California. Chief Davis’ men commandeered that facility.
Like most of the Colorado Desert, Blythe was flat and fringed by mountains. Unlike the surrounding lands, Blythe sported deep green vegetation fed by the Colorado River. It was prime land for farming and ranching. In the early 20th century, as automobile traffic started to flow, Blythe emerged as a crucial stop for weary travelers, offering much-needed gasoline, repairs, and a night’s rest.
One observation that routinely jars me as I drive around the Desert Southwest is that in the 1930s, cars could only drive 30–40 mph. Frequent flat tires and breakdowns further slowed progress. Blowing desert sand and rough roads limited headway to a hundred miles a day.
The last fifty years have devastated Blythe. The advent of Interstate 10 and the introduction of vehicles that required fewer stops and repairs doomed local businesses that served drivers. Poverty blew into town on the recessionary winds of the 1970s and never left. The economic vacuum made the construction of two prisons seem attractive, but the high-paying jobs went to people who commuted from more built-up areas closer to Palm Springs — an hour or more away.
Conservation efforts led water agencies to pay farmers to leave their fields fallow. The need for farm workers, agricultural vehicles, tools, and supplies all declined. The poverty spiral, which has continued into the 2020s, has meant cuts to law enforcement and other public services unemployed residents desperately need. “Abandoned buildings, homes, and eyesores are common,” said Riverside County’s grand jury in describing the city’s apocalyptic streetscape. Its report was titled “City in Peril: Blythe is Dying.”
I’ve stopped in Blythe dozens of times because it is almost midway between our places in Palm Springs and Scottsdale. (I’ve also received speeding tickets near Blythe a couple of times, as the desolate interstate just outside town almost begs you to accelerate. So there, I blame the highway.) Over the past two decades, I’ve watched date farms replace almond orchards and jojoba plants abandoned during prolonged droughts. Shiny black solar arrays now cover thousands of acres, helping the climate but providing few jobs.
Road trips demand caffeine. The only drinkable coffee for a 200-mile stretch of I-10 is at a Starbucks in Blythe. In the 1930s, the intersection where the Starbucks sits housed a bustling movie theater, a drugstore, a café, and a garage. In the early 2000s, when I started driving through, a strip mall boasted a cineplex, an ice cream shop, a pizza joint, and a Chinese buffet. Their signs remain, but now most storefronts are empty except for a new kidney dialysis center — which was inevitable, I suppose.
Today, the city needs economic dialysis. But in 1936, when John Langan drove through town, Blythe was still booming.
Langan worked in Hollywood. He called himself a director but was a dialogue director not a film director. He was in his thirties and prospected in Arizona as a hobby. On February 10, 1936, Langan and his associate, Morris Sides, left at dawn for the trip home from Cleator, a village nestled in the mountains between Flagstaff and Phoenix. They reached Blythe in the middle of the night. Dust-covered and unshaven, Langan wore hiking boots and breeches. Nine days into the Bum Blockade, Langan and Sides crossed the Colorado River and encountered the Blythe checkpoint Langan had read about.
“Where you from, buddy?” an LAPD cop inquired.
Langan momentarily looked into the man’s eyes before responding, “Is it necessary that I tell you?”
“I have a tough punk here who thinks he’s a wise guy,” the officer said to a fellow cop.
“You can’t call me a tough punk or a wise guy,” Langan retorted defiantly. “What right have you to come here from Los Angeles to insult me? If there’s any insulting to be done, let the sheriff of this county do it.”
“I’m a sworn-in deputy of this county,” said the cop. “Maybe you ought to be in jail.”
After threatening to put Langan on a chain gang if he didn’t cooperate, the officer took Langan from his car and turned him over to a Riverside County deputy sheriff. Langan agreed to provide his identification to that man. Upon seeing the Los Angeles address on Langan’s driver’s license, he commented, “Why didn’t you show this in the first place? You could have been on your way a long time ago.” Langan said nothing and returned to his car.
On the drive home, he seethed with embarrassment and anger. He decided to bring suit against Chief Davis and the City of Los Angeles. He challenged the constitutionality of the border stops and reported that the delay at the border made him miss an important business meeting and tarnished his reputation with Sides. The lawsuit, the first to question the Bum Blockade, attracted national press attention. The ACLU assigned two lawyers to Langan’s case.
Langan was hardly the only person stopped at Blythe. Metrotone newsreel footage filmed the same week shows hundreds of Dust Bowl refugees being pulled from ramshackle vehicles, lined up, fingerprinted, and returned over the Colorado River bridge into Arizona. The newsreel narrator ended the clip by asking, “Criminals, or just human beings in search of happiness? They make a perplexing problem.”
To Chief Davis, Langan was an annoying mosquito that needed swatting. For that job, Davis turned to his trusted lieutenant, Earle Kynette. Kynette was a pugnacious, pudgy-faced man. He ran the LAPD “spy squad,” which used warrantless wiretaps, photography of intimate acts, and physical intimidation to harass perceived enemies of the city’s corrupt mayor and his gangster overlords.
Kynette visited Langan at the apartment he shared with his wife and three-year-old daughter in East Hollywood. He took Langan to dinner and suggested dropping the lawsuit. When his entreaties failed, he invited Langan and his wife, Lorna, a British citizen, to his home. Kynette offered to play some records, which turned out to be dictographs of Langan’s lawyers’ telephone conversations. He played other recordings of L.A. business leaders discussing incriminating topics. He showed the couple photos of famous people in compromising situations. Langan ignored the intimidation efforts and refused to back down from his lawsuit.
Kynette then falsely informed Langan’s employers and mining partners that Langan was a communist. He told Langan he would lose his mining clients if the case continued. None of the tactics worked until Kynette suggested that the director’s three-year-old daughter might be in danger and his wife could be deported. That convinced Langan to drop his suit.
Lorna was so enraged at Kynette’s threat to her daughter that she tried to inform the authorities or whomever would listen. Langan called Kynette to help him manage his wife. Kynette warned Lorna he would institutionalize her if she said anything. Kynette taped Lorna’s mouth shut and called for a doctor to have her committed. The doctor, instead, prescribed a mild sedative.
Lorna locked herself in a bathroom, opened the window, and screamed for help. When a patrol car responded, Kynette waved it off, saying he was in charge of the case and that it was just a hysterical woman. Lorna then dropped a note from the bathroom window. A newsboy picked it up and delivered it to her husband’s attorney, who rescued her.
When the lawsuit’s court date arrived, Langan didn’t show up. Instead, he sent the judge a letter asking to drop the case. Langan’s attorney reported that Langan had been terrorized by the police, had now gone missing, and must have written the letter under duress. The judge was suspicious and kept the suit active.
Several days later, Langan showed up in court and asked in person for a dismissal, saying, “I simply changed my mind about the suit.” He continued, “There has been some hint of duress and intimidation in my withdrawal of the suit. Certain charges have been made. I wish, therefore, to say that to my own knowledge there has been no form of force or threat used against me. I believe the police department of this city to be wholeheartedly working for the protection and welfare of everyone, and I regret that accusations have been made in my behalf.” Langan’s words were likely written by Davis and Kynette.
The judge dismissed the case, but, believing that the police had intimidated Langan, asked the local U.S. attorney to investigate. The federal prosecutor said there wasn’t much he could do if Langan stuck to his story.
Langan then wrote a letter to Chief Davis saying that his contacts with Kynette had been “pleasant and cordial.” Kynette, he suggested, had genially persuaded him that his legal action was not in the interest of the greater welfare of the city. Langan advocated that Kynette be commended for his actions, saying that the police department “would be immeasurably aided and supported by the promotion to a higher office of Kynette.” Indeed, as a reward for squashing the pesky mosquito, Davis promoted Kynette to captain.
The Bum Blockade lasted just two-and-a-half months. Some attribute its demise to court cases filed by the ACLU, which argued that the Constitution made people citizens of the United States, not individual states. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that citizens could move themselves or goods from one state to another. The Los Angeles police, well outside their jurisdiction, were acting as judge, jury, and jailor, deciding who could enter the state without a hearing.
Neighboring states weren’t so happy with the operation either, as refugees backed up into their domains. They refused to cooperate. Even the California Highway Patrol opposed Davis’ shenanigans, fearing that the LAPD was stepping into its jurisdiction.
But before courts could rule, the Los Angeles taxpayers funding the operation complained about its high costs, and the curtain fell on the Bum Blockade without court action. Afterward, Davis asked one of his top officers to document the Dust Bowl refugees’ negative impact on the city. The captain gathered data from every source he could find. His conclusion: the transients were not parasites; they were hardworking and adding to the city’s economy. Davis buried the report.
The sad coda to the story is that Langan and his wife spent the next decade fighting over the custody of their daughter, Joan. Shortly after the border incident, Lorna filed for divorce and claimed that Langan was not Joan’s father. She declared that she and Langan had never had sexual relations. Already pregnant from an affair, she married him to obtain citizenship.
The pair spent several years kidnapping Joan from one another. Langan lost his job at Warner Brothers when Lorna picketed outside the studios to protest his unwillingness to make child support payments. Since neither parent could afford care, a court then placed Joan in an orphanage.
Langan eventually took her from there and deposited her at his mother’s home in Massachusetts. A court officer brought her back to L.A. This time, a judge awarded Lorna primary custody and allowed Langan to see Joan periodically. On one weekend visit, he absconded with the child to Washington, where he’d found a wartime job. A court there reaffirmed Lorna’s custody. But after mother and daughter were reunited at her hotel, Langan stole her again. The next judge felt Langan could raise the child better and awarded him full custody, depriving Lorna of any visitation rights. Joan was raised by Langan and several of his five wives and later attended Smith College.
Responding to a 1989 article in The New York Times Magazine about the effects of divorce on children, Joan wrote, “I can testify to the fact that often deep wounds are sustained and that even after a lifetime, they may never have healed.” Joan herself married and divorced twice but chose not to have children.
The Langan custody dispute weirdly echoes the Bum Blockade nonsense. In both cases, vulnerable people were manipulated, neglected, and subjugated to the whims of authority figures desperate to maintain power.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
