1. Charles Dwight Willard, booster extraordinaire, started the Land of Sunshine in 1894; the journal eventually became less boosterish in tone and content, especially once Charles Fletcher Lummis took over the editorial duties full-time and changed the magazine's name to Out West. In its earlier life, however, the journal was little more than a Chamber of Commerce publication. [BACK]

2. "Facts About Industrial Los Angeles, Nature's Workshop" (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, 1926). For insightful readings of regional boosterism in the period, see, among others, Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl, eds.,      20th-Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion and Social Conflict (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1990), esp. chap. 1; Clark Davis, "From Oasis to Metropolis: Southern California and the Changing Context of American Leisure," Pacific Historical Review 61 (August 1992): 357-386; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. chap. 5; Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles 1850-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso Press, 1990), esp. chaps. 1 and 2; see also William Deverell, "Privileging the Mission over the Mexican: The Rise of Regional Consciousness in Southern California," in Michael Steiner and David Wrobel, eds., Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997). [BACK]

3. Some sense of the degree to which "typicality" informed the ways in which Los Angeles constructed and understood all kinds of cultural categories can be gained even by examination of non-Anglo promotional vehicles. The "typicality trope" crossed racial bounds, and it was present as well amongst the African American community. For instance, the proud pamphlet Western Progress, published in 1928 by two African American entrepreneurs, highlighted the "economic and social advancement in Los Angeles" through these now-familiar images. Businesses, homes, sunshine, flowers, and so on were all exhibited as representative images of African American life in the city. The Conner-Johnson Funeral Home, for instance, ''typifies so well the progressive west" and Nickerson's Drug Store stood as "an excellent example of the new idea in western business." See Louis Tenette and B. B. Bratton, Western Progress: A Pictorial Story of Economic and Social Advancement in Los Angeles, California (Los Angeles: Tenette & Bratton, 1928). African American boosterism, and its relationship to Anglo boosterism, has been discussed in William Deverell and Douglas Flamming, "Race, Rhetoric, and Regional Identity," in Power and Place in the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming). For an earlier depiction of the reflex, see Los Angeles California, Queen City of the Angels (Los Angeles: M. Rieder, ca. 1907), with its pamphlet depictions of the city's "typical Mission residence" and "typical cottage house" (both extremely large). [BACK]

4. This reflex could be found at work even within the progressive reform community. See, for instance, John Kienle, "Housing Conditions among the Mexican Population of Los Angeles," M.A. thesis, University of California, 1912; Kienle, who would soon run the city's housing commission, noted that "the idea was not to have the investigations confined to one locality or any particular type of construction, but to cover the vast area dotted with Mexican homes, thus endeavoring to select those in each community, which, in my judgment, were typical of the rest" (p. 2). Kienle had opened his discussion with an apparent nod to diversity amongst the Mexican population in Los Angeles, pointing out that "there are many Mexicans in Los Angeles, who are divided into different classes." Two pages later, however, he admits that "there are three classes of Mexicans." [BACK]

5. Details about the plague outbreak and its victims are drawn largely from "Plague in Los Angeles, 1924-25," bound manuscript produced by the California State Board of Health, copy in the Huntington Library, subchap. 1 [of 12], p. 49. Hereafter cited as "Plague in Los Angeles." Other sources I have found helpful in this project include James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: Free Press, 1981), esp. chap. 2; Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History: The Biography of a Bacillus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934); Alan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). [BACK]

6. Clara Street is directly behind the Terminal Annex Post Office on Alameda Street (not yet built in 1924), within sight of downtown Los Angeles. The little bit of Clara Street still in existence today is dominated by a penal complex. [BACK]

7. See Helen Martin, The History of the Los Angeles County Hospital (1878-1968) and the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center (1968-1978 ) (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1979), chap. 15: "The Plague Epidemic." Years later, a Los Angeles physician tracked down Luciana Samarano's midwife (who had not contracted plague); the midwife verified that Luciana had delivered a stillborn child on the very day that she died. See John Emmett to Alexander Langmuir, July 17, 1952, in miscellaneous correspondence files, Communicable Disease Division, City and County of Los Angeles Health Services Department. [BACK]

8. Bruella's first name may have been Medrano. He is buried in the clergy burial plot at the San Gabriel Mission. [BACK]

9. Martin, History of the Los Angeles County Hospital, p. 68. [BACK]

10. Maria Valenzuela was sent to the county hospital on October 31, just as the Belvedere Gardens quarantine was getting under way. Her mother, however, was not; one of the county physicians wrote that Guadalupe Valenzuela, along with her son and another daughter, were "appreciably under the influence of liquor" and that he "was not concerned regarding her condition." She died on November 3. See the narrative of the county plague response, "Plague," in miscellaneous correspondence files, Health Services. The author of this document is probably county public health officer Dr. J. L. Pomeroy. [BACK]

11. It is difficult to determine how old Raul Samarano was at the time of the epidemic. Some texts (e.g., Martin, 1979) argue that Raul was the fourteen-month-old son of Luciana and Guadalupe. Some eyewitness accounts suggest that he was older, somewhere between six and nine years old. A photograph in "Plague in Los Angeles" seems to indicate that Raul was a very young boy, and he himself suggested this years later. A 1960 story in the Los Angeles Examiner about the plague brought about an impromptu reunion of Raul Samareno (his last name now changed) and Dr. Elmer Anderson, one of the physicians who had first responded to the Macy Street quarter illnesses. After the epidemic rendered him an orphan, Raul lived with relatives, became a ward of the state in foster homes, worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps in the thirties, joined the Navy, and ended up with a position in the Army Corps of Engineers in Los Angeles County. See Los Angeles Examiner, March 14, 1960.

      The death grip of disease was actually the work of two different forms of plague: most of the cases were diagnosed as the more deadly and contagious pneumonic plague, a few others were identified as bubonic plague. According to a graph in California State Board of Health, Special Bulletin No. 46, Pneumonic Plague: Report of an Outbreak at Los Angeles, California, October-November, 1924 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1925), the plague outbreak (both forms) killed the following thirty-three individuals (spelling maintained as printed): Francisca Lujon, Lucena Samarano, Guadalupe Samarano, Jessie Flores, Ruth San Ramon, Josephe Christenson, Peter Hernandez, Roberto Samarano, Gilberto Samarano, Victor Samarano, Marie Samarano, Alfredo Burnett, Father Brualla, Urbano Hurtado, Joe Bagnolio, Juliano Herrera, Fred Ortega, Arthur Gutierrez, Horace Gutierrez, Efren Herrera, Jesus Valenzuela, Juana Moreno, Refugio Ruiz, Guadalupe Valenzuello, John McLoughlin, Mike Jimenez, Jose Jimenez, Tomasa Vera, Lujo Peralta, Frank Perinlo, Maria Rodriguez, Mercedo Rodriguez, and Martin Hernandez [Abedannio]. In some cases, I have checked spellings in the 1924 Los Angeles City Directory; in others I have relied on the documentation within "Plague in Los Angeles." All plague victims except for ambulance driver McLauthlin died at General Hospital. McLauthlin died at St. Vincent's. There remains some confusion as to the identity of the four Samarano brothers; I suspect that one of them was named Victor (Raul, Roberto, Gilberto, and Victor). This would mean that two Victor Samaranos were killed by the disease: the young boy and his uncle. The other, equally plausible scenario given the poor record-keeping surrounding the plague, is that there were actually only three Samarano brothers, not four as the eyewitness accounts suggest. [BACK]

12. As historian George Sanchez has noted, with particular reference to Los Angeles, "Americanization programs are an important window for looking at the assumptions made about both Mexican and American culture by progressive Californians during the 1920s." George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), P. 106. For studies of local Progressive reform, see Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); William Deverell and Tom Sitton, eds., California Progressivism Revisited (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, esp. chap. 4. [BACK]

13. Quoted in Arthur Viseltear, "The Pneumonic Plague Epidemic of 1924 in Los Angeles," Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 47 (March 1974): 40-54; quoted at p. 41. [BACK]

14. Ibid. Viseltear also notes that both the New York Times and the Washington Post quickly picked up the story. [BACK]

15. "Plague in Los Angeles," at subchap. 12, p. 11. Retired Los Angeles physician Edward Shapiro remembers riding the Pacific Electric to his weekly violin lesson and hearing the conductor yell for everyone to stay on the train. Phone interview with Edward Shapiro, August 7, 1996. [BACK]

16. "Plague in Los Angeles," at subchap. 12, p. 7. An informed discussion of the Los Angeles civic and commercial elite can be found in Starr, Material Dreams, chap. 6; see also Davis, City of Quartz, esp. chaps. 1 and 2; and Frederic Jaher, The Urban Establishment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). [BACK]

17. "Plague in Los Angeles," at subchap. 1, p. 27. [BACK]

18. Delivery of food proved absolutely critical, as some families, caught as they were in the quarantine nets, ran out of food very quickly. See El Heraldo de Mexico, November 4,1924. [BACK]

19. "Plague in Los Angeles," at subchap. 12, p. 6, listed Belvedere's Mexican population caught in the quarantine as five hundred. But, at other times, health officials admitted that the entire Mexican population of Belvedere ranged from seven to twenty thousand. [BACK]

20. One guard, evidently seeking a promotion, pointed out that he had been in charge of the "general cleanliness + disinfection of a German Prisoner of War camp in France." See E. Teasdale to Carl Williams, November 9, 1924, in "Applications" file, Health Services. The five-dollar-a-day wage would have made guards amongst the highest paid people within the quarantine boundaries. See Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, chap. 3. [BACK]

21. Pomeroy admitted that he had gone home before establishing much of the quarantine perimeter on October 31 because "the hour was late." Of yet another quarantining incident, he wrote that, despite "considerable resistance from the Mexicans. . . . military quarantine soon brought them to terms." See J. L. Pomeroy's report for 1924 in miscellaneous correspondence files, Health Services. See also the narrative description of the county response, "Plague," in miscellaneous correspondence files. While it is most likely that the author of this latter document was county health chief Pomeroy, there is a slight chance that it was one of the quarantine's other physicians, a Dr. Roth. [BACK]

22. See "Claims—Damages, etc." file, Health Services. [BACK]

23. Benigno Guerrero to Pomeroy, November 11, 1924; Guerrero to Los Angeles County Board of Health, n.d.; "Claims—Damages, etc." file, Health Services. The food, which, presumably, quarantine guards either ate or threw away, included hundreds of large and small tamales, ninety pounds of chili, and seventy-five pounds of mixtamel [sic]. [BACK]

24. Walter Dickie, transcription of remarks before the City Council of Los Angeles and Board of Directors, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, November 15, 1924, in City Council petition no. 7340, City Archives of Los Angeles. Hereafter cited as Dickie transcription. Cyanide and monoxide treatments may have come into use primarily once the United States Public Health Service took over much of the rat-killing in the summer of 1925. See the Annual Report of the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service of the United States, 1926 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1926), pp. 80-81. I cannot find anyone who suggested that this might not be the best idea in earthquake country. San Francisco public health authorities seem to have pioneered this idea. See the photograph on page 37 of Frank Morton Todd, Eradicating Plague from San Francisco: Report of the Citizens' Health Committee and an Account of Its Work (San Francisco, ca. 1909). See also Guenter B. Risse, "'A Long Pull, A Strong Pull, and All Together': San Francisco and Bubonic Plague, 1907-1908," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66 (Summer 1992): 260-286; Annual Report of the Los Angeles County Department of Health, 1924 (Los Angeles: County Department of Health, 1925). [BACK]

25. [George Parrish], Annual Report of Department of Health of the City of Los Angeles California for the Year Ended June 30, 1925 (Los Angeles, 1925), p. 60. Hereafter cited as Annual Report 1925. See Dickie transcription, November 15, 1924. That little, or nothing, was done to replace the hundreds, even thousands, of structures destroyed in the quarantined districts was made clear in the 1925 report of the city health department. The department's Bureau of Housing and Sanitation bluntly declared that "no new construction has been undertaken to house the people thus dispossessed, [and] they have been scattered to other parts of the city and county, many of them into other houses or quarters that are unfit for home habitation, a menace to the city at large and a barrier to the progress of the life and character of the persons living in them" (Annual Report 1925, p. 60). [BACK]

26. In one month alone, apparently, 600,000 pieces of poisoned bait were distributed in the industrial and commercial district down by the Los Angeles River. Charles Stewart, one of the foremen of a rat-killing detail, remembered years later that he "couldn't sleep at night. . . . Small children in the district often attempted to eat our 'rat sandwiches.' More than once I slapped a piece of poisoned bread out of a kid's hand." Stewart said no children ingested any of the poison, an assertion somewhat difficult to believe given the sheer amount of "rat molasses" spread around the various neighborhoods. See City of Los Angeles Health Department press release (marking Stewart's retirement), October 17, 1958, in "Plague Reference" file, Health Services; see also Ben Zinser, "City in Nightmare: How L.A. Battled Plague," in ''Plague Reference" file. The "dainty poison crouton" label comes from San Francisco; see Todd, Eradicating Plague from San Francisco; see also Annual Report of the Public Health Service of the United States, 1926. [BACK]

27. By May of 1925, the number of rats killed by the program was estimated to be over 100,000. Of these, 182 had tested positive for plague. [BACK]

28. See "L.A. Tenement Problem and the Bubonic-Pneumonic Plagues: Report of Survey by Representatives of Nine Leading Organizations," Municipal League of Los Angeles Bulletin 7 (February 1925): 2-6. On the tendency of the dominant culture to create dichotomies between "native Americans" and "Mexicans," see the insightful discussion in Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), chap. 5. [BACK]

29. "Plague in Los Angeles," at subchap. 1, p. 52. [BACK]

30. Health officials nonetheless declared the Los Angeles harbor "plague infected" at the end of the year, despite the fact that no disease-laden rodent had been discovered there. See Viseltear, "Pneumonic Plague Epidemic," pp. 49-51. [BACK]

31. See Stenographer's Reports, Board of Directors meeting, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Regional History Center, University of Southern California, November 26, 1924. Hereafter cited as Stenographer's Reports. The Chamber of Commerce had earlier appointed a new health and sanitation committee, composed of "physicians, health officers, business men, city editors and local publishers and charity and school organizations." "Plague in Los Angeles," at subchap. 12, p. 8. [BACK]

32. Los Angeles Realtor (December 1924): 7. [BACK]

33. W. B. Knox, "Los Angeles' Campaign of Silence," The Nation 121 (1925): 646-647. Of the alleged cover-up of an outbreak of polio, Knox wrote: "What are a few broken children, probably of people who don't count anyway, compared to the welfare and prosperity of a great metropolis?" A later Nation article regretted Knox's hyperbole but stood by the assertion of a concerted public relations' campaign to mask the true details of public health problems in Los Angeles. See "Los Angeles and Its News," The Nation 122 (1926): 272. [BACK]

34. See Stenographer's Reports, October 30, 1924. [BACK]

35. In the first weeks of 1924, the city faced a serious smallpox outbreak, which members of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce wanted kept quiet. See Stenographer's Reports, January 9, 1924; quotes from meeting of January 31, 1924 (quoting Directors Hill and Pridham). [BACK]

37. El Heraldo de Mexico, November 4, 1924. Robert McLean, in his reformist tract That Mexican! chastised the white press for publishing news of the plague outbreak "in the columns on the back pages of the newspapers—columns which are reserved for the stories of the earthquakes." Robert N. McLean, That Mexican! As He Really Is, North and South of the Rio Grande (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1928), p. 150. [BACK]

38. Minutes of the Board of Directors, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, November 13, 1924. [BACK]

39. Dickie transcription. [BACK]

40. Mexican consul Almeda registered protests with the city and the Chamber of Commerce over these dismissals. The Chamber of Commerce agreed to work toward the reinstatement of those workers who did not live within the quarantined districts; those that did were out of luck. [BACK]

41. Dickie transcription, November 15, 1924. It is illustrative, for instance, that despite earlier concerns about other poor and predominantly ethnic neighborhoods housing Russians, Asians, and others, Dickie's explicit reference regarding autopsies is to Mexicans, and only to Mexicans. The suggestion is, I think, that plague transmission had become a vector of ethnicity and not of class. [BACK]

42. Ibid. [BACK]

43. Ibid. [BACK]

44. Ibid. [BACK]

45. In later months, when the United States Public Health Service took over some of the plague suppression activities, it was noted that the policy of destroying homes willy-nilly was "expensive, time consuming, and devoid of any great benefits." See Annual Report of the Public Health Service of the United States, 1926, p. 80. [BACK]

46. Annual Report 1925. [BACK]

47. In a small pamphlet published about a year after the outbreak, the Los Angeles County Medical Association celebrated both "the limited number of deaths" and absence of "a money loss, which, while running into the millions, could have been, five, or ten or twenty times as great!" Los Angeles County Medical Association, The Bubonic and Pneumonic Plague: Some Questions and Answers in Regard Thereto (Los Angeles, [County Medical Association, 1926?]). [BACK]

48. "Plague in Los Angeles," at subchap. 12, p. 4. The Chinatown plague of 1900, according to one physician who studied it, was "one of the darkest pages in the history of North American medicine" in that an effort was made by the city's business and political leaders to cover up the outbreak and silence medical personnel. In addition, some city physicians refused to endorse the findings of plague by others. The outbreak arguably lasted four years. See Silvio J. Onesti, Jr., "Plague, Press, and Politics," Stanford Medical Bulletin 13 (February 1955): 1-10, quoted at p. 1; see also Henry Harris, California's Medical Story (San Francisco: Grabhorn Press and J. W. Stacey, Inc., 1932). Harris notes succinctly, in reference to the Chinatown outbreak, that "such news was bad, for business and capital, always timid and jumpy, were fearful of sick rats and Chinamen." See also Risse, "'A Long Pull, A Strong Pull."' [BACK]

49. There is one tantalizing mention of rebellion by the "inmates" of the Macy Street quarantine within the newspaper record. The unsubstantiated story, which appeared decades after the outbreak, mentions LAPD officers wielding shotguns at angry residents who demand that the quarantine be broken. See Zinser, "City in Nightmare." [BACK]

50. I found several helpful sources in this regard: Mark Reisler, "Always the Laborer, Never the Citizen: Anglo Perceptions of the Mexican Immigrant during the 1920s," Pacific Historical Review 45 (May 1976): 231-254; and, for a particular study of Los Angeles, Douglas Monroy, "Like Swallows at the Old Mission: Mexicans and the Racial Politics of Growth in Los Angeles in the Interwar Period," Western Historical Quarterly 14 (October 1991): 435-458. See also Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), esp. chap. 15; David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), esp. chap. 3; Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities, esp. chap. 5; and Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American. [BACK]

51. "Plague in Los Angeles," at subchap. 12, p. 43. [BACK]

52. See remarks of William Lacy, Stenographer's Reports, November 6, 1924. [BACK]

53. Stenographer's Reports, November 6, 1924. A still-useful study of the "Mexican problem" can be found in Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States (New York: Lippincott, 1949), chap. 11. [BACK]

54. Such association was by no means new nor limited to Los Angeles. Assumptions about ethnicity's role in disease susceptibility and transmission had long been staples of American medical, not to mention political, thought. For a representative version of this ideology, albeit slightly later, see Benjamin Goldberg, "Tuberculosis in Racial Types with Spanish Reference to Mexicans," American Journal of Public Health 19 (March 1929): 274-286. "We seem, throughout the United States," Goldberg wrote (with specific reference to Chicago), "to be asleep to the menace of the immigrant Mexican" (p. 274). It is especially intriguing that Goldberg distinguished the health risks posed by urban African Americans from Mexicans. The former, he argued, had a more legitimate claim upon citizenship and its benefits (including, presumably, health care) than the latter. I am grateful to David Gutierrez for bringing this article to my attention. [BACK]

55. "Plague in Los Angeles," at subchap. 12, pp. 19 and 29 (italics added). [BACK]