Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  All during the inquest, Mulholland had sat alone taking his own counsel. Now, without speaking, he walked solemnly alone through the crowded courtroom and outside to the street to his waiting car. While the mob of reporters followed him, shouting questions at his back, he got in the black Marmon sedan and rode silently away. For two solitary hours, Mulholland drove aimlessly through the city that had benefited from his genius in its headlong growth from 15,000 souls to almost a million and a half. A genius now discredited and aging.

  The Coroner’s jury, without the benefit of Pierson Hall’s records, or the studies conducted by explosives expert Zatu Cushing, or the findings of the Hercules Powder Company among others, or the affidavits filed by the Stanford professor who expounded the “Stanford Fish” theory, or the affidavits sworn by witnesses who had found the dynamite crate, the map, the tell-tale rope, or who overheard terrorist threats, concluded that dynamite may have caused the dam’s failure, but in their own verdict and in discussions with the press afterward, it was abundantly clear that despite the ever-present skepticism concerning the possibility of sabotage, that possibility did not outweigh suspicion that the true cause was the weakness of the rock structure in San Francisquito Canyon.

  The office of the District Attorney, Coroner Frank Nance, Mayor George Cryer, members of the City Council, Board of Water and Power Commissioners, leading businessmen and boosters, state officials, federal authorities and the citizens of Los Angeles accepted the jury’s verdict without hesitation, and the guilt of William Mulholland was immediately fixed in the minds of the general public.

  The verdict proved to be the tragic end to an extraordinary career.

  ACCORDING TO PIERSON HALL, politics and geology sadly conspired to suppress the bitter truth surrounding the reasons behind the collapse of the St. Francis. Despite the coroner’s verdict, Hall maintained that the dam had been a target of sabotage, and he remained convinced that whoever dynamited the dam perished with it.

  Thirty-six years after the tragedy, Hall made his beliefs public. “I am perhaps the only person alive today, who, at that period of time was an official of a policy-making body of the City of Los Angeles,” Hall wrote in 1964. In a letter attached to his critical review of author Charles Outland’s book on the disaster, Hall revealed his account of what happened behind the scenes, a discussion made possible only by the lapse of three decades.

  I confess to being a part of that “past generation” who did what we thought was, and since proved to be, not only the honorable thing to do, but the only thing to do for the future welfare of this City which has always been and always will be thirsty for water.

  Mr. Outland rather seems to accept the skepticism expressed by the Los Angeles Record that the dam was dynamited. I think it was. I was at the dam site the day following the break. Shortly thereafter the “self-admitted expert” from Texas examined the face of the blocks lying immediately back of the center standing position. He said that in his opinion dynamite had been used.… I called the Hercules Powder Company … [they] gave the same opinion. I was still not satisfied with that, so I had a testing laboratory in Los Angeles conduct some experiments, and they came up with the same answer.

  All of this was done without fanfare or publicity; indeed nothing was said by me to the City Council concerning these activities. But by the time we came up with the same answer from three unrelated sources, we had long since passed the point where the city of Los Angeles had agreed to assume full responsibility not only for restitution, but for reparations and liability. So that matter was “swept under the rug.”

  I do not believe the testing company filed a written report, and nothing but controversy and ill-will could have resulted from any further discussion or disclosures.

  Hall was adamant that the city of Los Angeles should immediately accept full responsibility for the tragedy. He concluded that the only proper course for the city was to assume complete and absolute liability for all damages without question.

  Hall and other key officials recognized the urgency surrounding passage of the Boulder Dam legislation, and as argument raged in Congress, local advocates, including influential members of the Board of Control, did what they could to bring an end to the publicity and scrutiny surrounding liability for the tragedy. The blame squarely fixed on Mulholland’s shoulders added to the quick dissipation of public concern over the catastrophe, and Asa Keyes’s zealous onslaught against Mulholland served that end as well.

  Hall never informed his fellow City Council members about the sensitive research findings concerning the dynamite. He did, however, inform the members of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners, the mayor and key persons at the Department of Water and Power, including William Mulholland and Harvey Van Norman. Hall never made his beliefs public knowledge and never released his findings, telling officials that nothing but ill will would have resulted. Hall and Cushing destroyed their documentation and correspondence involving the dynamite studies to protect what they believed to be the best interests of the city. Pierson Hall desired quick resolution of reparation payments to the victims and did not believe it was advantageous to attempt to “prove the city’s innocence.”

  Mulholland was aware of the evidence which seemingly proved foul play, but nevertheless accepted full responsibility for the tragedy, no doubt conceding at least in his own mind the harm that could result from releasing the information to the public. Mulholland had painstakingly labored for the construction of the Boulder Dam and was least likely to jeopardize the project. His acceptance of total blame was in the words of Pierson Hall indicative of Mulholland’s “towering courage.”

  FOLLOWING THE DEPRESSIVE aftermath of the collapse of the St. Francis dam, fearing that economic malaise would settle over the. City of Angels and stifle its growth, city fathers and the omnipotent Board of Control searched for a potent cure, a booster shot in the arm for their ailing city. They turned to a promotion that had served them well in the past—a civic parade.

  Two weeks after the verdict, the inquest behind them and forgotten, a mind-boggling, five-mile-long parade featuring thirty-two thousand matchers in four divisions of thirty-one high-stepping bands, squads of spit and polish sailors and soldiers, mounted police, Boy Scouts, flying airplanes, pretty girls and children, singing cowboys, dancing Indians, Mexican troubadours, jazz singers, mezzo-sopranos, film stars, and hundreds of decorated automobiles and elaborate floats, one featuring a roaring lion, declawed for the occasion but symbolizing the fierce determined spirit of the city, was turned out for two hundred and fifty thousand gasping Angelenos thronged in the streets to marvel at in wondrous civic pride.

  It was, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed, “the largest civic procession ever seen west of Chicago,” and the largest celebration ever in the history of Los Angeles to date, surpassing by far the flower-strewn, airplane punctuated spectacle in 1924 for the dedication of Mulholland Highway and the earlier dedication of the aqueduct. And it was all there to celebrate the three-day-long dedication of the new Los Angeles City Hall, “a sheer gleaming tower of white symbolizing a new era of progress and accomplishment for the Pacific Southwest” and a warning message to the skyscrapers of New York to beware. Voted in, like the aqueduct, in a bond election, and two years in the making, the building cost the people of Los Angeles $4.8 million, and its towering height of 452 feet soon made the tragic 200-foot center piece of the St. Francis dam a distant memory.

  Out of respect, officials had asked William Mulholland to be one of the guests of honor at a dedication luncheon at the Biltmore Hotel, with his faithful friend and ally Mayor George Cryer, and Arthur Eldridge, president of the Board of Public Works. Mulholland sent his regrets and remained at home. That evening, Ruth and Rose Mulholland listened to the live radio broadcast of the spectacle. When President Coolidge pushed a golden telegraph button in Washington, D.C., they rushed to the window to see light beaming into the Los Angeles sky from the huge beacon atop the tower of the new City Hall. The Lindbergh beacon
, dedicated to the illustrious aviator, turned silently on its pivot and cast the message of Los Angeles’s civic progress and development as an aviation center in a beaming circle 120 miles in diameter. Los Angeles was moving on to new pursuits and new heroes.

  MULHOLLAND’S MANY DETRACTORS looked upon the St. Francis disaster as proof of his shortcomings as an engineer, and the city halted construction of his last dam project after five million dollars had been spent. With amazing speed, Mulholland’s beautiful water supply dam in the Hollywood Hills was no longer called Mulholland Dam but quietly and permanently renamed the Hollywood Reservoir.

  A new state program for certification of dam construction and safety was abruptly put into force. A new law enacted in 1929 stipulated that all dams but federally owned ones must be reviewed by a board of eminent civil engineers and geologists retained by the state engineer before and during construction. This commission subsequently became the Division of Safety of Dams (DSOD) within the State Department of Water Resources, and became one of the first agencies created specifically for dam safety review in the world.

  Critics blamed Mulholland’s monstrous ego for the disaster, boldly asserting that if he had only retired from his position as Chief of the Department in 1921 at age sixty-six instead of continuing to dominate its every move, none of the tragic events in the San Francisquito Canyon or the Owens Valley would have occurred. “If he had retired this year and left the management of the city’s water system to younger hands,” William Kahrl observed, “to a mind less inclined to see in every problem an occasion for self-righteous conflict, to someone whose sense of identity was not so completely wrapped up in the city as a whole that he saw each challenge as a personal affront, perhaps the history of Los Angeles’s relations with the Owens Valley would have been very different. But Mulholland stayed on, and in only seven years he destroyed his own career, embarrassed the city, devastated the Owens Valley, and undermined the ideal of public water development he had labored so long to establish.”

  Now, entering a life of self-enforced isolation, Mulholland spent most of his days alone at home except for the occasional company of his sons and daughters. Once limitlessly energetic, outspoken, and vigorous, Mulholland now became listless and withdrawn, although foes maintained that he was without conscience and still the same ruthless old conniver he had always been. Trapped in the brooding despondency that had ensnared his mind, he seemed to forget his many accomplishments.

  The world being what it is, a lifetime’s effort can be wiped out in a single tragic event, and following the collapse of the St. Francis, the legend obscured the man underneath. Later generations would only vaguely know him from the monuments named for him—Mulholland Highway, Mulholland Dam, and Mulholland Junior High School in the San Fernando Valley; there is also the Mulholland Memorial fountain at the intersection of Los Feliz Boulevard and Riverside Drive, where Mulholland had lived as a young man working in the crude zanjas.

  The characteristic, good-natured combativeness that had given drive and spice to his life seemed to vanish as he entered into his exile, and family members said that he often lacked even the energy to speak to friends and visitors. Catherine Mulholland recalled that following the St. Francis break, detached and aloof, her grandfather appeared like “a silent specter” at gatherings even with his own family, whereas before the disaster his frequent visits to her childhood valley ranch were clamorous affairs and she and the rest of the children would stop playing games and rush inside to greet him by standing at attention and answering his many questions about school. The immense tragedy of the St. Francis weighing so accusatively upon her grandfather’s shoulders meant little if anything in the life of a young girl concerned with her Raggedy Ann and games of hop scotch. “In his dark suit, stiff-collared shirt, and cravat, wreathed in the smoke of his ever-present cigar, he was a given in my life, and I loved him as one loves a grandparent, respectfully and unquestionably.”

  Unlike some of Mulholland’s colleagues who declined to visit him during the aftermath of the St. Francis, Raymond Taylor continued to see Mulholland whenever he could during this painful period, both as friend and physician, extending his warm fellowship. Conferring with Mulholland’s attending physician, Dr. Anton, Taylor was told that while Mulholland’s Parkinson’s disease and age-related disabilities could be treated with some degree of success, his severe depression had taken a deep hold of his mind.

  During one particular visit, Dr. Taylor found most of Mulholland’s teeth and gums in such bad shape that he must immediately visit a dentist if he wanted to save them. When Taylor returned the following day to escort Mulholland to the dentist’s office, Mulholland greeted him with a toothless grin, casually relating that after Taylor had departed the day before, he walked into the garage, took a pair of pliers and yanked out all of his decayed teeth one by one without assistance or anesthesia. Needless to say, Taylor was shocked at the incident. For the first time, Taylor wrote, he became keenly aware of the full extent of Mulholland’s terrible depression.

  But Dr. Taylor was not only concerned with Mulholland’s mental condition. Sadly and helplessly, Taylor watched as Mulholland gradually succumbed to the ravages of Parkinson’s disease. By 1930, due to the severity of his involuntarily twitching muscles, Mulholland could barely sign his name.

  Nine months after the dam’s collapse, and only a month before President Coolidge signed the Boulder Canyon Project Act, William Mulholland, now seventy-three years old, after fifty-one years of devoted service, retired from the Department of Water and Power. Scheduled to go to Washington, D.C., in the winter of 1928 to join the President in ceremonies commemorating the signing of the Swing-Johnson bill, the conclusion of his lifetime effort to supply water to his beloved city, Mulholland sent W. B. Mathews and Van Norman in his place.

  18

  Kingdom of Angels

  There the wicked cease from troubling

  and there the weary be at rest.

  JOB 3:17

  IN AN IRONIC TURN OF EVENTS, as Mulholland wrestled with the demons of his conscience hunkered down in his memento-filled study, District Attorney Asa Keyes was indicted by a Los Angeles grand jury for bribery, conspiracy, and jury tampering in connection with a highly publicized trial involving the Julian Petroleum Corporation.

  More than one taxpayer had raised eyebrows at Keyes’s expensive, tailored wardrobe, antique-filled Beverly Hills home, spiffy green roadster sports car, gold jewelry, monogrammed golf clubs, unlimited spending cash, and a daughter’s steep tuition at Yale, all seemingly paid for with apparent ease on a civil servant’s salary.

  By early January 1929, Asa Keyes’s own deputies were preparing an iron-tight case against their former boss, and by mid-month a high-profile trial against Keyes commenced with state witnesses testifying that thousands of dollars in secret bribes were paid to Keyes in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

  After weeks of explosive testimony that garnered national headlines, including accusations that Keyes’s moral fiber had been broken by liquor and greed, in February Keyes was sentenced to fourteen years in San Quentin.

  The Los Angeles Times gleefully reported that “On March 11, shortly after 5 P.M., after twenty-five years as a member of the district attorney’s office, escorted by deputy sheriff Frank R. Cochran, Asa Keyes boarded the Southern Pacific Owl for San Quentin. Although he fought to preserve his composure, it was evident that the once powerful public official was a broken man.… Keyes wore an old suit and carried only a few personal possessions, including two pipes, a little tobacco, a razor and some stationery.”

  Keyes’s fall from public grace was just as swift as that of William Mulholland, but not as unexpected, nor as personally traumatic. The Times failed to run the statement made by Keyes just minutes before his transfer from county jail to San Quentin, and given to the same press corps who, months earlier, had eagerly covered his flamboyant press conferences denouncing William Mulholland.

  In some quarters there is apparen
tly an impression that I am going to San Quentin downcast and broken in spirit. In fact, I have seen statements to this effect in the press lately. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I will enter the State prison with my head held up, looking the world squarely in the face, and will serve my time there, regardless of how long or short it may be, soothed and sustained entirely by the knowledge in my own heart, and the knowledge of my family and friends, that I am absolutely innocent of the crime for which I was convicted. I go to San Quentin firm in the belief that justice will soon come my way. While there my friends can rest assured that I will do the time and not let the time do me.

  And true to his word, the time did not “do” him. In October 1931, after only thirty-two months in the “Big House,” Asa Keyes, healthy and sound, was paroled and eventually received a full executive pardon from California Governor Rolph. The fact that Keyes during his tenure as district attorney was credited with having sent more than a third of the prisoners in San Quentin to the cells which they were occupying during his stay attested not only to his knack for self-preservation, but also to the extraordinary precautions taken by the warden to protect him.

  The ways of fame are more often than not fleeting and capricious. On the occasion of his homecoming, Asa Keyes was greeted by over four hundred people and dozens of reporters on hand at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, and driven to his Beverly Hills home for an elaborate celebration dinner with family and friends. A week later, Keyes reported to work at his new job as a used car salesman at a Pasadena car dealership. At Union Station a number of fans had tried to slip him their personal checks in hopes of being the very first to purchase an automobile from the once-fearless prosecutor.