Picture this: You arrive in Los Angeles on a shiny, newfangled train that never blows smoke. As you look out the window, you pass by vistas of vineyards and orange and lemon trees ringed by snowcapped mountains and dotted with Spanish adobes and Victorian mansions. When you step off the train, the sun shines, and the rose-tinged air is a perfect 72 degrees, even though it is the dead of winter. Within days, you have found a high-paying job, a charming home with your own ever-blooming garden, and weekends of sanitized outdoor adventure.
This was the dream that lured thousands of people to Los Angeles more than 100 years ago. It was a dream carefully crafted and packaged and sold to citizens all over America and beyond. This multipronged, decades-long promotion helped create the Los Angeles we love, but it also solidified the myths of Los Angeles, whose sunny shadows hang over us to this very day.
The “booster era” of Los Angeles spanned roughly 40 years, from 1885 to 1925. Over these pivotal decades, rough-hewn and optimistic pioneering city leaders worked with creative writers, real estate barons, and artists to bring new settlers and new businesses to their dusty Wild West town. In creating a narrative to sell Los Angeles, these boosters often rewrote the city’s history and present situation to suit their idealized, European-American values.
As boosters told it, Southern California began as a romanticized Spanish utopia. It was currently a paradise of beautiful weather, cheap land, and plentiful jobs. Its future was that of a thriving metropolis, equal to and set to one day surpass San Francisco or New York. There was also a good dose of “thinly veiled racialism, all put to the service of boosterism and oligarchy,” Mike Davis explains in his book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.
These pillars of self-promotion were all pushed on the American public by the city’s chamber of commerce, which operated like an ad agency on steroids.
“Chambers of commerce are common,” Peter Clark MacFarland wrote in Collier’s magazine in 1915. “This one is uncommon. Possibly it is the most efficient of its kind in the world… it built the city.”
Beginning in the late 1880s, the chamber, under the leadership of Charles Willard and later Frank Wiggins, distributed millions of pamphlets, booklets, and postcards extolling LA’s numerous advantages.
According to Tom Zimmerman, author of the fascinating Paradise Promoted: The Booster Campaign that Created Los Angeles, in the one-year period from February 1898 to February 1899, the chamber distributed 127,000 pieces of pro-Los Angeles literature in Omaha, Nebraska, alone.
“It is generally admitted that Los Angeles is the best-advertised city in Southern California, the best-advertised section in the Union,” chamber of commerce leader Charles Willard wrote in 1894.