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Los Angeles has finally forced the East to go West and do business. Many firms have surrendered to it completely, have moved their headquarters to Los Angeles. Among them: Rexall Drug, Inc., Carnation Co., American Potash & Chemical Corp. With all this, Los Angeles is the richest agricultural county and the most productive dairying county in the nation. As an afterthought it raises 3,000,000 rabbits, 10,000 chinchillas and most of the country's cymbidium orchids.
In a Little Spanish Town. It has reached this state of supercharged development through a process as astonishing as a Cecil B. DeMille production. Los Angeles began life in 1781 as the Spanish pueblo of Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula —a comatose village of 44 souls, surrounded by arid plains and arid mountains. It dozed for a century, hardly opening an eye when four square Spanish leagues of its dusty ground was incorporated into a U.S. city.
Then the West-reaching railroads got to Los Angeles—the Southern Pacific in 1876, the Santa Fe in 1885. New settlers came in expecting an oasis and found none. They set out to build an artificial one. They dug wells with imported picks, planted imported palms and eucalyptus trees, cultivated lemon, orange and nut groves and a thousand and one foreign flowers, grasses and grains. They built with imported brick and lumber. They had no domestic material but sunshine.
A city sprang up where no city seemed to belong. It built a 233-mile aqueduct, ruthlessly sucked away the water of the distant Owens River—a project which turned the verdant Owens Valley to desert and stirred its farmers to rebellion. It constructed an artificial harbor, hatched the motion-picture business and raised oil derricks and searchlight beams. Its full-voiced Chamber of Commerce ballyhooed to climate. The city gulped in armies of aging lowans, land-hungry Oklahomans and dazzled tourists.
It grew without inhibitions. It was fascinated by space, color, the vehement sermons of real-estate sharks and the horticultural efficacy of powdered cow manure. It developed into a new kind of city—a sprawling confederacy of villages, with five branch city halls and 932 identifiable neighborhoods, in which life is dedicated to the sun, the lawn sprinkler and the backyard grill, and in which the swimming pool is the mark of success and distinction.
Over the years it developed a new breed of Big Man. They were plungers, they were impatient of tradition, and they were fascinated by newness, bigness and the sound of battle. Director D. W. Griffith demonstrated that the jerky, flickering motion picture could be a dramatic form with sweep and magnificence. M.G.M's Louis B. Mayer ran a cheap variety theater in Haverhill, Mass, into a cinema empire. Oilman Edward L. Doheny, a gold prospector from Tombstone, Ariz., found a fortune beneath his feet and exploited the vast oil wealth of Los Angeles. Donald Douglas and "Dutch" Kindel-berger built air armadas, and restless Henry Kaiser, fabricator of dams & ships, gave southern California its first complete steel plant.