In the 1920s, Los Angeles became America’s car capital. Though manufactured largely in Dearborn and Detroit, the automobile’s sway over the City of Angels and its environs was unmatched anywhere else in the United States. Travel routes, refueling stops, supermarkets, and overnight accommodations for drivers and their passengers were all vestiges of southern California’s love affair with cars. The Southland was practically synonymous with autopia, a made-up term suggestive of a highly mobile society on wheels. At the same time that the car culture took hold of southern California, a young, vibrant airline industry developed in and near Los Angeles and San Diego.
Motor vehicle ownership was widespread in Los Angeles County in the decade after World War I. In 1927, for example, there were 560,136 automobiles in the county, which meant one car for every 3.2 people or about twice the national average. Writing in the New Republic magazine that same year, journalist Bruce Bliven observed with little exaggeration: “Any Angeleno without his automobile is marooned, like a cowboy without his horse.” While women throughout the state, as throughout the nation, were not nearly as likely as men to own cars, females in ever-increasing numbers learned to drive, largely to enjoy the mobility it afforded. Realizing that females influenced male car purchases, automobile manufacturers paid attention to what women wanted in style, color, comfort, and price. The average price of a new car in 1930, according to one authority, was $640; by the end of the decade that figure had increased to $700. Naturally, more expensive automobiles were available in the 1930s, such as the pricey Auburn 1935 851 Boattail Speedster, which sold for $2,250. Motorists paid about 10 cents a gallon for gasoline in 1930.
With sound factual backing, historian Kevin Starr has remarked: “For the first time in urban history a city [Los Angeles] was building itself around the automobile.” That was largely true for the county as well. From 1917 to 1927, Los Angeles County invested $24 million in building 1,300 miles of paved roads. The following year the county appropriated an additional $5.2 million for road construction. Some 450 filling stations sold gasoline to motorists. The spread of the city westward toward the Pacific via a 16-mile extension of Wilshire Boulevard was facilitated by the automobile. Bullocks Wilshire department store, with its rear area parking lot, was situated along a segment of this major thoroughfare
Known as the “Miracle Mile,” perhaps the world’s first business district designed to accommodate the automobile. American supermarkets first appeared along Los Angeles’ roadways, affording motorists the tantalizing option of one-stop grocery buying. Respite for weary drivers was provided by a new type of lodging, the motor inn or motel. Similarly, the automobile and the new access routes it entailed went hand in hand with the subdivision and development of real-estate tracts in Los Angeles’ mushrooming suburbs in the 1920s. Assured of convenient automotive transportation to and from the metropolis, by the middle of the decade suburbanites turned increasingly away from using the excellent Pacific Electric rail system and toward driving their own cars.
The Automobile Club of Southern California, founded in 1900 and headquartered in Los Angeles, promoted a car-centered lifestyle by advocating for road construction and touring by motor vehicles. The Auto Club posted numerous traffic signs throughout the Southland before the State of California took over that responsibility in the 1950s. Its magazine Touring Topics (later renamed Westways) provided thoughtful articles on travel destinations and routes, while promoting the pleasures of driving. In 1927 the non-profit organization had enrolled 124,000 motorists as recipients of its services.
California’s car craze was less evident in the Bay Area. Most likely the vastness of the bay and the geographical compactness of San Francisco, compared to Los Angeles, slowed the spread of a car-oriented society until bridges traversing the huge inlet were built in the 1930s. Still, the area had its northern counterpart to the Auto Club - the California State Automobile Association, headquartered in San Francisco.
Less formidable than the automotive industry, aviation constituted a new and growing sector of California’s interwar transportation economy. While aircraft manufacturing started in the East in the early 1900s, within several decades Los Angeles emerged as the nation’s aviation capital. The Southland’s clear skies and open spaces attracted the pioneers in the fledgling industry. In the 1910s two of the earliest aviators - Glenn Curtiss and Glenn Martin - were building their own planes. Meanwhile, in Santa Barbara the brothers Allen and Malcolm Loughead joined with John K. Northrop in assembling aircraft. After World War I they transferred their Lockheed (derived from Loughead) Aircraft Company to Hollywood-Burbank.
Throughout the 1920s the state’s aircraft industry outgrew its infancy. With an initial investment of $600, aeronautical engineer Donald Douglas began designing airplanes in a small space inside a Los Angeles barber shop. Unable to secure a bank loan, Douglas was advanced $15,000 by a group of investors led by Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler. With the money Douglas set up a successful factory in Santa Monica. In 1922 another aviation pioneer, T. Claude Ryan, established the first daily scheduled passenger flight route in the United States: the air corridor between San Diego and Los Angeles. The most famous aircraft of the decade, the Spirit of St. Louis, which Charles A. Lindbergh piloted into aviation history by making the first transatlantic flight in 1927, was built on the Pacific Coast in Ryan’s San Diego factory. The first crossing of the Pacific by airplane occurred the following year (see Pacific Profile below).
The mid-1930s witnessed the beginning of commercial transpacific flights to and from California. On November 22, 1935, amid great fanfare and media attention, Pan American Airlines’ China Clipper launched its first transpacific flight, covering a distance of 8,000
Miles. The large Martin M-130 seaplane departed from Alameda, in the Bay Area, and island-hopped to Oahu, Midway Island, Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines before arriving in Canton, China, with a cargo of mail. A year later Pan American inaugurated passenger flights over the same route. In the new era of transpacific air travel, California was the indisputable national leader.
Pacific Profile: Charles Kingsford-Smith's Transpacific Flight
Though not nearly as well known in the United States as Charles Lindbergh, Australian flying ace Charles Kingsford-Smith (1897-1935) and his three crewmen (only one of whom could fly a plane but was unlicensed) accomplished a feat as daring and arguably even more remarkable than Lindbergh’s. Before this success, Kingsford-Smith had won medals for valor as a fighter pilot in the Australian Flying Corps in World War I. His 1928 flight in the Southern Cross made aviation history by being the first to cross the Pacific, from California to Australia, and, after a brief stop in Sydney to then circumnavigate the globe, returning to the Bay Area.
The epic flight, financed by California businessman and former sea captain G. Allan Hancock, was divided into three transpacific segments: Oakland to Honolulu, Hawai’i; Honolulu to Suva, Fiji; Suva to Brisbane, Australia. The longest, stormiest stretch was the more than 3,000-mile segment from Hawai’i to Fiji. Shortly after landing in Brisbane, the four men visited Sydney, where they were hailed as aviation heroes by 300,000 cheering people.
On completion of the Pacific-crossing portion of the round-the-world flight, President Calvin Coolidge
Wired Kingsford-Smith saying: “Hearty congratulations to you and your companions on successful flight Oakland to Australia. Your brilliant and courageous pioneering has advanced the cause of aviation and strengthened bonds between your commonwealth and our country.” Hancock also wired Kingsford-Smith, telling the Australian pilot that the money advanced to finance the flight need not be repaid.
Overlooked in U. S. and California history textbooks, Kingsford-Smith’s Pacific crossing opened this vast track of ocean to commercial air travel in the late 1930s. The Golden State has been an integral hub in this air traffic from the start. For his role in pioneering transpacific flight and other aeronautical achievements, the highly decorated pilot was knighted, with the title “Sir” added to his name. His last flight occurred in November 1935. Taking off in England en route to his Australian homeland, he and his copilot failed to arrive in Singapore, one of their planned stopovers, and were never heard from again. Two years later, fishermen found part of their plane’s wreckage on the shores of an island off the coast of present-day Myanmar.
World History
