Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles

by Standiford, Les

  When the crews finally met near the midpoint of the five-mile project, Mulholland said, “The center line of the tunnel met within 11⁄8 inches and the grade check within 5⁄8 inch,” quite the accomplishment for such a project in that day. Furthermore, while the average rate of progress was projected to be eight feet per day at the outset, his crews, driven by the bonus schedule, had averaged more than eleven feet per day at a savings to the project of half a million dollars.

  With what Mulholland called “the controlling event” of the work behind him, it seemed that there was little of substance left standing in the way. Of labor matters, he had little to say in his “Sixth Annual Report,” issued in July, beyond an observation that labor conditions had not been “entirely favorable” during the previous year. Mulholland offered only a sketch of what he had encountered from the outset: “In the summer, when the weather is hot on the desert, the laborers make a general migration to the northern portion of the United States and British Columbia, where work is abundant at that season, under conditions that are more agreeable. As the winter months approach, this labor largely returns and there is a plentiful supply until about the first of May, when the northern exodus again starts. Consequently, the winter months are the best months for vigorously prosecuting the work.”

  He lamented the fact of the enforced slowdown in 1910, when the work force had to be cut in half. Overhead on the project remained relatively constant, he pointed out, whether there were 1,500 in the field or 3,000. Still, he said, he hoped to complete the aqueduct by the spring of 1913. Technically, Mulholland was now reporting to new superiors at least half of the time, given that an amendment to the city charter in March abolished the former water board and replaced it with a new Public Service Commission.

  The new body took charge of a water works system that took in more than $1 million, with per capita water consumption reduced from 306 gallons to 140 gallons per day, and rates to consumers less than half of what they had been at the outset of the city’s takeover in 1902. The group was also charged by Mayor George Alexander with developing a new bureau of power and light with Ezra Scattergood as chief. Mulholland would remain in charge of all things water related, while Scattergood would see to the distribution of power generated by the new stations to be constructed along the line of the aqueduct in San Francisquito Canyon. So far as aqueduct construction was concerned, however, Mulholland remained the Chief. Mulholland advised in his July report that work in the San Francisquito Canyon was delayed owing to various legal actions undertaken by the private power companies opposed to the city’s entry into the business, and he also noted that the last remaining work of significance lay in the Jawbone and Grapevine Divisions where the siphons remained to be finished.

  If the physics of the project seemed to have bent to Mulholland’s will, however, the ensuing mayoral campaign would soon prove that metaphysics was far less compliant. The machinations of Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler, Otis’s son-in-law and heir apparent at the Times, in opposition to various labor movements of the era are labyrinthine and have formed the stuff of numerous publications. By 1911, however, the influence of the American Federation of Labor and the Socialist Party had created a significant change in the political landscape of Los Angeles, where business interests and Republicans had held sway.

  While Mulholland had always enjoyed an unqualified reputation as an apolitical “man of the people,” that reputation was about to be called into question. Job Harriman, a vice-presidential candidate on the Socialist ticket in 1900, and Socialist nominee for mayor of Los Angeles for the December 5, 1911, election, had been an opponent of the aqueduct from the beginning, arguing that it was ill designed, incapable of delivering what was promised, and unnecessary in light of the copious flow of the Los Angeles River.

  With the aqueduct only about fifty miles shy of completion and the population of the city verging on 350,000, most of Harriman’s criticisms had been disposed of. However, there was one damning issue that remained, and he seized upon it vigorously in his campaign against the incumbent, Mayor Alexander. The aqueduct had been promoted for only one reason in the first place, Harriman claimed: it was never intended to benefit the citizens of Los Angeles, only a much smaller group, the members of the San Fernando Land Syndicate.

  There was little he could do to put a stop to the aqueduct at this point, Harriman declared, but given that the city was prohibited by state law from selling Owens Valley water to any individuals outside its limits, he would dedicate himself as mayor to ensuring that the manipulators behind the project would never receive a drop. For his part, General Harrison Gray Otis began a publicity campaign not so much in Alexander’s favor but as a merciless smear upon the “anarchic scum” represented in Harriman’s candidacy.

  In the meantime, in April 1911, two brothers and union operatives, James and John McNamara, had been arrested in Detroit, charged with the October 1910 bombing of the Times. The pair were extradited to stand trial in Los Angeles, though a number of labor supporters contended that the brothers had been grilled and tortured by a private detective for days inside the home of a Chicago police chief before being virtually kidnapped to Los Angeles. The McNamaras had been set up by Otis and his cohorts, many claimed; Eugene Debs, founder of the Industrial Workers of the World and long-time Socialist leader, went so far as to speculate that Otis had arranged for the bombing of his own building so that he could discredit the union movement in Los Angeles.

  Union leaders of every stripe banded together to raise funds for the McNamaras’ defense and in the end, Clarence Darrow was retained as defense attorney, with none other than mayoral candidate Job Harriman appointed to his team. The lead-up to the trial, with labor supporters decrying Otis and idolizing Harriman, seemed to promise an end to the days of Los Angeles as an open-shop city. On the other hand, Darrow had become increasingly concerned that the McNamaras could in fact be proved guilty. Popular muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, in town to cover the trial, had spoken with the McNamaras and had gone to Darrow to share his concerns. The pair might indeed have been treated shabbily by authorities, but Steffens thought that they had probably done what they were accused of.

  Steffens had an idea, though. Perhaps a plea-bargain deal could be brokered. The McNamaras would be spared hanging in return for light sentences, and Otis would agree to reopen negotiations with typographers and other groups wishing to unionize within the Times. Otis scoffed at the idea of negotiating with the unions, and wanted nothing more than to see the McNamaras hanged, but his son-in-law Harry Chandler argued that a plea-bargained admission of guilt would achieve the greater aim of discrediting the union movement among Angelenos. Job Harriman, meantime, knew nothing of the negotiations.

  Finally, on December 1, just four days short of the mayoral election, the bottom fell out for Harriman. Clarence Darrow stood up in court to announce that the brothers McNamara had changed their plea to guilty. John McNamara admitted that he had placed the suitcase full of dynamite outside the Times building on the fateful night. Harriman, who read of the admission in the newspapers, was stunned. Hours before, he had seemed a shoo-in for mayor. Now his candidacy was doomed. On December 5, he was defeated by a margin of some 34,000 votes out of the 137,000 cast.

  Though it would have been precious little consolation at the time, Darrow later explained why he had blindsided Harriman. The lives of his clients were at stake, he wrote in his autobiography. “I had no right or inclination to consider anything but them.” If Darrow had advised Harriman of what was being considered, it would have placed him in the position of either quitting the race or sending at least one of their clients to the gallows, a choice that Darrow said he wished to spare him.

  FALLOUT

  THE MCNAMARAS’ CONFESSION TO WHAT HAD BEEN termed “the crime of the Century” constituted a watershed moment in American labor history, as devastating as the quashing of the Homestead Steel Strike had been in Pennsylvania in 1892. In the same way that it would take labor
organization within the steel industry four decades to rebound from the Homestead calamity, it would likewise take forty years and the unprecedented manufacturing boom of the post–World War II era before the open shop in Los Angeles was challenged again.

  Mulholland was no outspoken opponent of labor, save for his concern that he be able to complete the aqueduct for the sum that he said it would require. In fact, he lent his stated support, along with that of a number of other prominent members of the Los Angeles business community, to the compromise that Lincoln Steffens had tried to broker between Harrison Gray Otis and Clarence Darrow. Steffens later wrote that he was happy to have the support of reasonable men such as Mulholland, but that his ideal had been to bring polarizing figures such as Otis and Eugene Debs into conversation together. As for the likes of William Mulholland, “he was too public-spirited” to be useful for Steffens’s quixotic purposes.

  Nonetheless, Mulholland was stung by Job Harriman’s renewed criticism of the aqueduct project, and on November 27 he delivered a spirited defense before a City Women’s Club luncheon of 600, saying that he had had his fill of misrepresentation and distortion prompted by nothing but political gain. Eighty percent of the project was complete, he said, and it had taken exactly 80 percent of the funds to do it. “The other 20 percent will be built with the other 20 percent of the money,” he told his audience.

  As to the claim that the 20,000 inches of water brought from the Owens River were far in excess of the city’s present needs, and the suggestion that the excess should thus be left in the Owens Valley, Mulholland scoffed. He admitted that he too had once been doubtful of the need for more water—he had even told Fred Eaton as much: “Not long ago, I was a pessimist,” he said. “I believed that growth would stop and we would have a chance to catch up in the way of water.”

  But time had proved him to be shortsighted, Mulholland said. Each year the city was demanding an additional 250 inches of water and there was no end in sight. “Are we to be fools and only take that which we need from year to year and leave the rest up in the Owens Valley? Are we to lose the great electrical energy the full quantity of water will produce?” The full flow of the aqueduct was required to generate power, and while that flow would indeed be in excess of the city’s present needs, that water was the property of the City of Los Angeles and it would not be wasted but sold in order to help recoup the project’s cost.

  As to where the excess should be sold, that was a question for voters to decide, Mulholland said, though he did give his view of the controversy surrounding the San Fernando syndicate. “Some say it must not be sold to the San Fernando Valley because a syndicate owns a lot of the land. Well, if you sell it to Cahuenga or the Redondo region, you will find that the land there is owned by somebody. In fact, anywhere you put it someone owns the land.”

  Mulholland also responded to those who criticized his proposal for building impoundment reservoirs for the Owens River water in the San Fernando Valley. “There is a loud wail because the aqueduct stops at the head of the San Fernando Valley or that it comes by way of the valley.” He paused with characteristic Mulholland timing to glance around the room. “Well, we couldn’t bring it by way of Catalina and San Pedro, nor by way of San Bernardino.” The route through the valley was the most direct, he reminded them, and it crossed the narrowest part of the intervening Coastal Range to get there.

  Nor did the water stop there in the valley reservoirs, he said, pointing to a slide projected onto the wall behind him. “That black line you see coming down (from the Valley Reservoirs) is the route of the conduit the Public Service Commission is ready to build to bring the water to the city.” That conduit would use public roadways for its route, he said, and its size would be determined by the amount of water that voters wished to sell and by the location of the lands consuming it. In any case, that conduit would bring water “ample for all city purposes for decades to come.” Furthermore, he said, the conduit was being brought down the west side of the city’s present limits for a simple reason: “Because the growth of the city is to the west.”

  Mulholland’s contention on the latter score was anathema to Pasadena and other eastern communities that hoped to avail themselves of the excess water, but part of his reasoning was grounded in the fact that supplying water to unincorporated potential locations at higher elevations in the eastern part of the county (Azusa, Glendora, and Covina, for example) would require costly pumping and piping arrangements. Even allocations to Pasadena would be “water down the drain,” so to speak, for engineers calculated that fully one-quarter of any irrigation waters supplied to San Fernando Valley lands would eventually percolate down into the Los Angeles River aquifer and return to the city’s supply. However, waters supplied east of the Glendale Narrows would not reenter that same aquifer.

  That debate was a fine point, and a matter for another day. He closed his talk with a swipe at those who invented conspiracies for their own ends, lambasting one person who had written to the bond-buying syndicate of Kountze-Leach complaining of egregious cost overruns on the project. A recent break in the line near the intake gate above Independence had cost $360,000 to repair, the complainant charged. In fact, Mulholland told his audience, the repairs had cost $360. Perhaps the letter writer had just made an honest mistake?

  A week later, just prior to the election, Mulholland issued a similar rejoinder to Harriman before the City Men’s Club, with particular emphasis upon charges that he had concocted a “water famine” in order to stir up support for an unnecessary project. He recited a battery of US government figures on the flow of the Los Angeles River for the period and also addressed another old charge: “They say we emptied the reservoirs into the outfall sewer,” Mulholland said, referring to the 1904 incident that would later be recast as part of the plot of Chinatown, “but I need only remind you that during this water famine, when we had so much to waste, the superintendent of streets tried to have me arrested for turning the water off of the city sewer flush tanks.”

  On December 9, the week after Harriman went down to defeat by Mayor Alexander, Mulholland, still rankled by the suggestion that he had any illicit motivations in undertaking the project, sent a letter to his supervisors at the Board of Public Works, requesting that the board press the City Council to appoint “a committee, composed of its own members or private citizens, as may be deemed best, to make, with independent engineering assistance, a thorough investigation, not alone of the physical features of this work, but of the field administration and all other departments thereof as well.” It was his wish, Mulholland said, that the citizens thus be assured of “the true conditions of this work . . . and judge for themselves whether it has been carried on in a proper manner.” If Mulholland’s intentions were in fact noble, it was an instance where a friend might have counseled him to leave well enough alone.

  The City Commission, as could have been expected, responded as it usually did when prompted by Mulholland and quickly voted to appoint such a panel of experts. From that point forward, however, the matter deteriorated into the type of committee work sure to produce a camel. There was much discussion as to just how many members the investigating committee should have, and an equal amount of debate arose as to the ideal political constituency of the group.

  By the end of January, a weary City Council finally ended debate with the Socialist opposition and named a three-person Aqueduct Investigation Board, to begin public hearings on February 7. Any citizen with relevant information or complaint was invited to come forward. Angry Socialists began a drive to force a voter initiative to reconstitute the committee to five members, with two Socialist Party members added, and to expand the scope of the investigation to include the original procurement of land and water rights and the nature of contracts made between the city and individuals or corporations. By the end of March, enough signatures had been collected to force a special election on the matter, scheduled for the end of May.

  In the meantime, the chronic issue of funding had pres
ented itself once again. On a crisp morning in early January, the city clerk opened a letter from the Kountze Brothers and Leach & Co. and stopped short at the terse message that ended, “owing to the position of the city of Los Angeles bonds, the syndicate decided today not to exercise its option under the terms of our contract.” This was not a refusal to extend credit or accelerate the rate of purchase but a flat-out denial of interest in the remaining $4.2 million in bonds necessary to complete the project. Mayor Alexander, who had earlier in the week assured the City Council that exercise of the option was a foregone conclusion, was flabbergasted. Without the bond sales, there was only enough money left in the coffers to keep the work going for sixty days.

  There was also great speculation as to the meaning of the phrase “owing to the position.” Some interpreted that as a reflection of uncertainty regarding the growth of the city’s indebtedness, as voters had approved both a $3.5 million bond issue to develop a municipal power system and another $3 million to finance improvements to the harbor at San Pedro. Others, however, attributed the turndown to the influence of the existing electrical power interests upon the financial houses, who were heavily invested in private power in the Los Angeles area.

  Project attorney William Mathews was already on a train bound for New York, where he presumed he would be facilitating a simple process, and was himself dumbfounded when he found a telegram awaiting him with the news. Mathews was aware that Mulholland’s patience with the bond-selling process was wearing thin, but there was little to do but persevere. After attempts to persuade Kountze-Leach were fruitless, Mathews approached James Speyer, who had underwritten bonds for the original acquisition of the power company a decade before.