An intensely personal story crossed with a political potboiler, Left in the Dust is a unique and passionate account of the city of Los Angeles's creation, cover-up and inadequate attempts to repair a major environmental catastrophe. Owens River, which once fed Owens Lake, was diverted away from the lake to supply the faucets and sprinklers of Los Angeles. The dry lakebed now contains a dust saturated with toxic heavy metals, which are blown from the lake and inhaled by unsuspecting citizens throughout the Midwest, causing major health issues. Karen Piper, one of the victims who grew up breathing that dust, reveals the shocking truth behind this tragedy and examines how waste and pollution are often neglected to encourage urban growth, while poor, non-white, and rural areas are forgotten or sacrificed.
An intensely personal story crossed with a political potboiler, Left in the Dust is a unique and passionate account of the city of Los Angeles's creation, cover-up and inadequate attempts to repair a major environmental catastrophe. Owens River, which once fed Owens Lake, was diverted away from the lake to supply the faucets and sprinklers of Los Angeles. The dry lakebed now contains a dust saturated with toxic heavy metals, which are blown from the lake and inhaled by unsuspecting citizens throughout the Midwest, causing major health issues. Karen Piper, one of the victims who grew up breathing that dust, reveals the shocking truth behind this tragedy and examines how waste and pollution are often neglected to encourage urban growth, while poor, non-white, and rural areas are forgotten or sacrificed.
Left in the Dust: How Race and Politics Created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A.
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Left in the Dust: How Race and Politics Created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A.
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Overview
An intensely personal story crossed with a political potboiler, Left in the Dust is a unique and passionate account of the city of Los Angeles's creation, cover-up and inadequate attempts to repair a major environmental catastrophe. Owens River, which once fed Owens Lake, was diverted away from the lake to supply the faucets and sprinklers of Los Angeles. The dry lakebed now contains a dust saturated with toxic heavy metals, which are blown from the lake and inhaled by unsuspecting citizens throughout the Midwest, causing major health issues. Karen Piper, one of the victims who grew up breathing that dust, reveals the shocking truth behind this tragedy and examines how waste and pollution are often neglected to encourage urban growth, while poor, non-white, and rural areas are forgotten or sacrificed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466891685 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/03/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Karen Piper is Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Missouri-Columbia and author of Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity. She lives in Columbia, Missouri.
Read an Excerpt
Left in the Dust
How Race and Politics Created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A.
By Karen Piper
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2006 Karen Piper,All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9168-5
CHAPTER 1
ESPRIT DE CORPS AT THE DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND POWER
In Owens Valley on Highway 395, I met a Department of Water and Power employee who offered to show me the aqueduct "intake," where Owens River is diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. This is where the river mysteriously disappears as its journey to Los Angeles begins. It is a simple concrete barricade that funnels the river into the aqueduct channel. Strangely, the channel looks the same on both sides of the barricade, so I couldn't tell the difference between the river and the aqueduct. The DWP employee had greeted me with a growling Rottweiler at his side, but he quickly called off the dog and stretched out his hand to shake mine. "I always carry a gun and take my Rottweiler with me out here," he explained as we followed the aqueduct up to the intake reservoir. He didn't explain why he needed a gun, so I guessed. "Oh, do you have problems with mountain lions?" I asked. "Not so much down here, I guess," he replied. "But up in those hills, that's where they are. I can feel their eyes on the back of my head when I walk." He continued, "It's pretty isolated out here, and that can really get to you after a while. But someone's got to do it for the sake of the City, I guess ... to keep the water coming."
This man, I knew, was one in a long line of men whose job it was to "keep the water coming," security guards who had been stationed along the aqueduct since it was opened. Jubilant crowds once arrived to watch Owens River water cascade down the mountains into the City when it first arrived in Los Angeles on November 5, 1913 (see figure 1.1). "There it is, take it," William Mulholland, the aqueduct's chief engineer, called to the crowd at the aqueduct opening after unfurling an American flag. From its inception, the aqueduct was described as a patriotic enterprise of imperialist expansion — complete with its own army. Owens River had been "discovered" by Mulholland when he was scouting around for new sources of water for Los Angeles in 1904. Mulholland teamed up with J. B. Lippincott, an employee of the U.S. Reclamation Service, who came to Owens Valley in the early 1900s purportedly to help develop a federal irrigation project for Owens Valley residents called the Owens Valley Project. In order to acquire the water rights in Owens Valley, Mulholland hired Lippincott as a consulting engineer to surreptitiously buy up water rights for Los Angeles.
Believing they were selling their water rights for their own benefit to the Owens Valley Project, Owens Valley farmers instead found out that their water was going to Los Angeles. The City then bought out the farmers in a checkerboard fashion, forcing property values down and scaring people into selling early. Lippincott knew his actions were questionable even before accusations of corruption were leveled at him by residents of Owens Valley. He wrote to the head of the Reclamation Bureau that though he supported giving water to Los Angeles, he feared it would put the bureau in "rather an embarrassing position ... with reference to the Owens Valley Project." But he believed that the nation would ultimately support him for working in the best interest of Los Angeles.
He was right. The struggle between Owens Valley farmers and Los Angeles ultimately was resolved in Washington, D.C. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt decided, "It is a hundred or a thousand fold more important to state that this water is more valuable to the people as a whole if used by the city than if used by the people of the Owens Valley." The oft-quoted motto of Roosevelt's Progressive party was "the greatest good for the greatest number." The greatest number, Roosevelt believed, lived in Los Angeles. The Reclamation Service's plans for setting up an irrigation system in Owens Valley were officially abandoned. As historian Abraham Hoffman notes, "Owens Valley fell victim to standards set not by the City of Los Angeles but by Washington, D.C., acting in accordance with the philosophy of the Progressive movement in the first decade of the twentieth century."
Roosevelt's actions drastically impacted Owens Valley, yet Roosevelt himself was not really that concerned with its dilemma. Roosevelt saw the problems of the settlers in Owens Valley as incidental to the larger struggle between private and governmental enterprises over providing utilities. He wrote, "I am also impressed by the fact that the chief opposition to this bill, aside from the opposition of a few settlers in Owens Valley ... comes from certain private power companies whose object evidently is for their own pecuniary interest to prevent the municipality from furnishing its own water." A private power company had already established itself in the Owens River gorge, and Roosevelt did not want to see Owens Valley taken over by private enterprises that would sell water and power to Los Angeles. The true enemies, in his mind, were monopolies that threatened to obstruct the public good — other complaints were treated as incidental. Roosevelt said of the private power companies, "Their opposition seems to me to afford one of the strongest arguments for passing the law, inasmuch as it ought not to be within the power of private individuals to control such a necessary of life as against the municipality itself." Roosevelt chastised Lippincott for concealing his intentions, but Lippincott defended himself: "I firmly believe that I have acted for the greatest benefit of the greatest number, and for the best building up of this section of the country." Lippincott was eventually absolved of all blame.
Roosevelt's decision to give the water to Los Angeles rather than to Owens Valley reflected his belief in the superiority of urban areas over rural areas, as well as public over private. J. B. Lippincott once argued, "The domestic use of water is the highest use to which it can be put." By this he meant that it was better to supply houses with water than to supply farms — that is, Owens Valley. The Progressives believed that the "highest use" for water, or its most "noble" purpose, was supplying residences rather than agriculture. But Roosevelt's belief in urbanization and the "public good" included underlying assumptions about imperialistic growth. The aqueduct would not only help the country expand and acquire new territories; it would also allow Los Angeles to abandon the older Mexican water system, the acequias, which were seen as dirty and inefficient. It would enable white flight to the suburbs of Los Angeles and end the so-called Indian problem in Owens Valley. In short, the Los Angeles aqueduct would bring with it a long story of inevitable "progress" — to meet the needs of the ever-growing white metropolitan populace.
Roosevelt, in fact, had several key political ideas that would have led him to support Los Angeles over Owens Valley:
1. Cities were seen as more defendable than rural areas against Native Americans. Theodore Roosevelt claimed that urbanization would force Native Americans to disappear from the "regions across which their sparse bands occasionally flitted." Native Americans were seen as having mutable and sparsely populated settlements that could not withstand large and permanent settlements. Densely settled populations, it was believed, would simply push out Indians. Roosevelt believed that "mere savages, whose type of life was so primitive as to be absolutely incompatible with the existence of civilization" would inevitably "die out" from areas that were densely settled. In Owens Valley, the so-called Indian wars had plagued the settlers since the 1860s — requiring military forts and soldiers to be permanently established in the area. This was not only a drain on government funding but also an embarrassment to the military. In many ways, the decision to send water to Los Angeles could be seen as a solution to the Indian "problem" in Owens Valley.
2. Cities were also seen as more "civilized" than rural areas. Many saw creating great cities in remote or inhospitable areas as a sign of colonial power and authority, as well as an inevitable sign of civilization and progress. In 1909, geographer Isaiah Bowman claimed that "one could build a city of a hundred thousand at the South Pole and provide electric lights and opera. Civilization could stand the cost." Supplying electricity and water to the desert city of Los Angeles presented a similar challenge — but with the same "noble" goal of extending civilization. Los Angeles, it was believed, would be a great imperial center that demonstrated America's successful colonization. Cities, in short, were a symbol of successful conquest in the colonies, representing the pinnacle of Anglo-American civilization.
3. Port cities were seen as sites for further imperialist expansion. Roosevelt claimed that Los Angeles was an important port city for his expansionistic goals in the Pacific. Roosevelt claimed: "Our interests are as great in the Pacific as in the Atlantic. ... The awakening of the Orient means very much to all the nations of Christendom, commercially no less than politically; and it would be short-sighted statesmanship on our part to refuse to take the necessary steps for securing a proper share to our people of this commercial future." Like the British, Roosevelt believed that naval supremacy was key to military and commercial success. He had already acquired Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines by 1898. In 1904, he paid Panama $10 million for rights to build the Panama Canal, which would make Los Angeles a major port city on the West Coast. Roosevelt openly modeled his ideas for expansion on the British Empire. In "Expansion and Peace," he wrote, "It is the great expanding peoples which bequeath to future ages the great memories and material results of their achievements ... England standing as the archetype and best exemplar of all such mighty nations. But the peoples that do not expand leave, and can leave, nothing behind them."
Finally, the aqueduct would help to keep the city safely segregated by allowing white people to move away from the already polluted inner city and drawing white immigrants from around the nation. By 1922, Pastor Bob Shuler commented, "Los Angeles is the only Anglo-Saxon city of a million population left in America. It is the only such city that is not dominated by foreigners. It remains in a class to itself as the one city of the nation in which the white, American, Christian idealism still predominates." William Mulholland was also repeatedly lauded for single-handedly saving the city from what was then described as a backward Mexican water system. So while the water was supposed to be for everyone, it ultimately benefited white people.
In fact, it was mainly a handful of white men who benefited most from the aqueduct. These were the men who knew about the aqueduct plans before it was announced to the public, including water commissioner Moses Sherman, railroad baron Henry Huntington, and Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis. They bought up land around the proposed aqueduct terminus in the San Fernando Valley and subdivided it for an enormous profit after the water arrived. In this sense, the water was not for the public good but for the benefit of land speculators.
There was a great deal of controversy at the time over whether Los Angeles even needed more water. In its defense, the water board argued that "while the existing water supply may be sufficient to meet the present demands of Los Angeles, the future development and prosperity of the city is dependent not only on an adequate domestic supply to meet its growing need but also for those of neighboring municipalities and agricultural lands." The theory advocated by the water board was that developing agricultural properties around an urban core would ultimately lead to the subdivision of those properties into housing plots. Essentially, the water board decided to move agriculture from Owens Valley to Los Angeles to develop the neighboring San Fernando Valley — with the idea that eventually the San Fernando farms would turn into suburbs, thus justifying this move. It was an ideology of the inherent worth of urban expansionism. The board stated, "Doubtless these lands if irrigated, would soon become densely populated suburban additions to a Greater Los Angeles." In fact, the board was right, though the benefits of this suburban sprawl are now no longer self-evident. But bringing water to Los Angeles to develop the San Fernando Valley was extremely controversial, because it seemed to confirm that the aqueduct was really intended to make a few men rich rather than to benefit the public.
Meanwhile, in Owens Valley, the "public" was even more inflamed. In Los Angeles, Morrow Mayo wrote, "the City of Angeles moved through this valley [Owens Valley] like a devastating plague. It was ruthless, stupid, cruel, and crooked." Farms began to dry up, and farmers fought back in the only way they could, by blasting the aqueduct. As they watched the lake drying up in the 1920s, Owens Valley residents responded by sabotaging the aqueduct. Violence on both sides became so regular that the Los Angeles Times dubbed this period "California's Little Civil War." William Mulholland gave "shoot to kill" orders for anyone who interfered with the aqueduct. He notoriously complained that there were not enough trees left in Owens Valley on which to hang all the troublemakers. Confronted with a losing war and no water, most Owens Valley residents eventually left.
The aqueduct was called "The Big Ditch" by employees who guarded it, such as Jess Ramsey, who worked at Sand Canyon Station from 1933 to 1938. Lois Ramsey Carr, his daughter, described his job: "He had to what we'd call 'ride ditch.' He did it on horseback, eight miles one way, eleven miles the other ... that was to guard the aqueduct from any thievery or bombing or anything like that that went on." In 1930, a Department of Water and Power advertisement entitled "Vigilance" honored the men who monitored the length of the aqueduct. The advertisement described the aqueduct itself as the "jugular vein" of the city, which must be defended at all costs. "Department engineers go forth each day from isolated mountain stations to scale a hundred storm swept passes," the advertisement extolled. It continued, "With 1,300,000 persons dependent upon this Aqueduct for their daily water there must be no interruption in its operation."
The Department of Water and Power, from its inception, claimed that its motto was "Esprit de corps" and compared its guards and other personnel to a military regiment. In 1924, the Department of Water and Power used the term esprit de corps to headline its first magazine, The Intake, claiming: "By this military phrase is meant the common spirit that does or should prevail among a group of persons, such as the men of a regiment, a body of officials or the employees of a concern. It implies a common sympathy, devotion and enthusiasm, and a jealous regard for the whole. It has an equivalent expression in just one word, one of the biggest words in the dictionary — loyalty." Militarily protecting an imperialistic enterprise was viewed as a "public good" at the time. The DWP was expanding civilization, creating a country with a band of men who were sacrificing themselves for this greater good. The Los Angeles Aqueduct was a manly project — and, indeed, the great length of its canal (with its spouting end) could be said to emblemize masculinity. William Mulholland saw himself as the military leader of this regiment, as he explained to Los Angeles Times editor Allen Kelly: "I'm going into this as a man in the army goes into war, because it would be cowardly to quit." According to his granddaughter, Catherine Mulholland, "Nor was his military analogy inapt as the organization needed to achieve this mighty task resembled a military campaign." In 1907, the bureau of the Los Angeles Aqueduct explained, "The construction of the Aqueduct resembles somewhat a military campaign. Men have to be quickly ordered to remote portions of the line and from one point to another, as the exigencies of the work require." Those who were involved in this "campaign" often also held military ranks: Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the Los Angeles Times, served in the Spanish-American War; Lt. Gen. Adna Romanza Chaffee, chairman of the board of Public Works, had a long and distinguished military career in the Indian wars, the Spanish-American War, and the Boxer Rebellion; Moses H. Sherman of the first Water Commission just liked to call himself "General."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Left in the Dust by Karen Piper. Copyright © 2006 Karen Piper,. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
Introduction * Esprit de Corps at the Department of Water and Power * Manufacturing Whiteness * The Department of Water and Power vs. The Paiutes * "We Ate the Dust" at Manzanar * Control Measures * "There It Is, Fix It" * Conclusion