What Los Angeles Has Lost

Los Angeles is the American city most associated with the future. But contrary to popular belief, it also possesses a rich past. And major parts of it are going up in flames along with homes in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Pasadena, as the L.A. wildfires, already among the most devastating natural events in American history, finally edge toward containment. Losses run to the hundreds of billions. But not every loss can be measured in dollars and cents. Along with their property and, yet more tragically, their lives, the people of Los Angeles have lost some of the best parts of their history and culture.

The Will Rogers Ranch House in Pacific Palisades is gone, burned in the wildfire. Like so many other Angelenos and their descendants, the Oklahoma Territory–bred Rogers went west during the first decades of the 20th century to find his fortune — in his case, in the movies. Rogers brought his brand of homespun, plainspoken humor with him from the Plains and made it a part of the culture of his new city. He represented the hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Midwest and South who poured into Los Angeles, some fleeing the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, others seeking job opportunities in the defense industries that made Los Angeles one of America’s “arsenals of democracy” during World War II. “The Folks” — that’s what one observer called them —were Will Rogers’s people. Rogers died in a plane crash in 1935, but his ranch house overlooking the Pacific, complete with stables and corrals, was where Oklahoma met L.A. It was The Folks’ house, too, symbolizing one of the greatest and most successful internal migrations in our nation’s history. Now it no longer exists.

JP

About the Author

Jerald Podair

Jerald Podair is Professor of History Emeritus at Lawrence University.

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Los Angeles is the American city most associated with the future. But contrary to popular belief, it also possesses a rich past. And major parts of it are going up in flames along with homes in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Pasadena, as the L.A. wildfires, already among the most devastating natural events in American history, finally edge toward containment. Losses run to the hundreds of billions. But not every loss can be measured in dollars and cents. Along with their property and, yet more tragically, their lives, the people of Los Angeles have lost some of the best parts of their history and culture.

The Will Rogers Ranch House in Pacific Palisades is gone, burned in the wildfire. Like so many other Angelenos and their descendants, the Oklahoma Territory–bred Rogers went west during the first decades of the 20th century to find his fortune — in his case, in the movies. Rogers brought his brand of homespun, plainspoken humor with him from the Plains and made it a part of the culture of his new city. He represented the hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Midwest and South who poured into Los Angeles, some fleeing the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, others seeking job opportunities in the defense industries that made Los Angeles one of America’s “arsenals of democracy” during World War II. “The Folks” — that’s what one observer called them —were Will Rogers’s people. Rogers died in a plane crash in 1935, but his ranch house overlooking the Pacific, complete with stables and corrals, was where Oklahoma met L.A. It was The Folks’ house, too, symbolizing one of the greatest and most successful internal migrations in our nation’s history. Now it no longer exists.