In Search of the Great America

LOS ANGELES, CA: THE GREAT AMERICA OF 1900-1950

The first half of the 20th century was arguably the heyday of Los Angeles. This was the era when what was once considered a secondary city at best, first surpassed rival San Francisco as the largest city in California, and then became one of the largest cities in the country. Where economic expansion was once restrained by a modest supply of fresh water and the lack of a natural harbor, massive projects pushed by city leadership addressed these limitations, and Los Angeles became a center for trade and petroleum production, well prepared for the industrial boom to come. Los Angeles in this era seemed to embody the dream of opportunity, economic and otherwise, which had been associated with California in the American imagination since the days of the Gold Rush.

More than anything, however, what elevated Los Angeles to the status of great American city was the outsized place that it would hold in popular culture thanks to it having become a center of the burgeoning motion picture industry. Echoing previous generations of emigrants who came west to escape the constraints of the east, film pioneers settled in Los Angeles starting in 1910 to evade legal entanglements in the Atlantic states and to take advantage of year-round sunshine. By the 1930s, six Los Angeles based film studios, all started by Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs who had come from the East coast, would dominate the industry and the local economy. As an extension of filmmaking, Los Angeles quickly became a focus for the arts in general, and a vision of a lifestyle driven by Southern California’s sunny climate influenced American notions of fashion and leisure.

Civic boosters likewise found certain communities inconvenient to their vision of what they wanted the city to become and found them all too easy to set them aside in the name of progress. At the beginning of the century, African-Americans saw Los Angeles as a haven from the discrimination they faced in the East, but by the 1920s, they found themselves increasingly segregated by language in deeds, euphemistically referred to as “restrictions,” which limited their choice of neighborhoods. A thriving and well-established Chinatown was forced to move as a result of railroad expansion in 1938.

Nowhere does this seem more ironic than in the case of the Mexican-Americans community, once the city’s majority, but now less than ten percent of the population. Though Los Angeles embraced architectural elements like Spanish tile and promoted an admittedly antiseptic version of its Spanish and Mexican past, the people who represented that heritage were marginalized and had little voice in the City’s future. Restrictions kept Mexicans, immigrants from Japan and certain parts of Europe, in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights. Eventually, the sense of solidarity that emerged in these communities would provide them with some political clout, but this would be in the future.

Los Angeles continued to thrive after World War Two, but as it reached two million people, it became increasingly difficult to simply engineer its way out of problems or to ignore its issues. Growing suburbs in places like Orange County now competed for resources and political power. Emerging African-American and Mexican-American political leaders challenged the cliquish leadership at city hall. More than anything, this city that emerged largely during the era of the automobile was becoming too spread out and difficult to manage. The city is now more diverse and more representative than it was in those days, and retains its special place in our popular culture, but there is still a sentimental attachment to the era when it seemed that anything was possible there.

-Tom Prezelski

Episode 13. Vana Thiero describes a Great America where the kids of today become leaders who speak their minds and seek what is best for the greater good ALL humanity for the long term.

Vana Thiero is a single mom of two sons diagnosed with autism. She is a producer, writer, public speaker, Emmy winning editor, activist and comedian, who goes by the letter V.

Vana grew up in Pontiac, during the time in the 60s when blacks were migrating to the north for great jobs. It was a time of positivity and great opportunities. Her family was the first black family to buy a house in her neighborhood, so she was friends with white and black children alike growing up. Their house was featured in Ebony Magazine.

Though it was never a large community, Caliente, Nevada briefly boomed in the interwar years as a headquarters for the railroad. Much smaller now, the town still lives on the foundation established in those days even as local leadership pursues new economic opportunities.

The valley formed by the junction of Meadow Valley Wash and Clover Creek had attracted ranchers since the 1860s. The town of Caliente was established in 1901, when the Union Pacific Railroad’s new branch line north to Salt Lake City was built through the valley and built a station there. The town was designated a “division point” for the railroad, where crews and engines would be switched out. It also served as a headquarters for maintenance workers and administrative staff. An estimated ninety percent of the jobs in town were with the railroad.

The town reached a population of nearly 5000 by the 1930s. It had an active social life, with an Elks Lodge for the professional men in town, and an Odd Fellows Lodge for the working class, as well as a number of women’s clubs.

The hot springs that gave the town its name attracted additional attention. A large hotel was built to accommodate tourists. The railroad also did its part to make the place more appealing to travelers by constructing an elegant new depot in 1923 to replace a previous utilitarian building that was gutted by a fire. Like a lot of public buildings in the west during that era, the new depot was built to evoke a Spanish past by emulating the missions of California, though the actual Mexican-American population of Southern Nevada was declining in terms of real numbers in those days. In addition to offices and dormitories, the new building had a second floor which was set aside as a hotel.

Though the railroad attracted an ethnically diverse workforce, largely of European immigrants, African-Americans were considered unwelcome, which seems ironic given that the two original American settlers in the valley in the 1860s were escaped slaves. Reformers dubbed Nevada the “Mississippi of the West” because political leaders actively pursued Jim Crow-style segregation. In Caliente and surrounding Lincoln County, the Black population remained quite small, but witnessing the mistreatment of an African-American family friend during his depression-era boyhood in the town helped inspire a man named Ralph Denton to work for change. During his long career as a lawyer, activist, and elected official, Denton championed civil rights and transformed both the Democratic Party and Nevada politics in general.

With the transition to diesel engines, the division point at Caliente was no longer necessary, and operations were moved to Las Vegas in 1948. The population quickly declined, though the railroad would remain an active element of the town’s economy. Local leadership continues to pursue development of a tourist industry related to the area’s natural beauty, though a shortage of hotel space presents a challenge, as does concern about retaining the town’s character. The depot, one of the few such buildings from its era which still stands, would become a city hall, museum and community center and serves as a symbol for the town.

-Tom Prezelski, Resident Historian

Episode 12. Mary Love describes a Great America where there are jobs and our financial future is upbeat and positive.

Mary Love is a widowed mother of one, entrepreneur and realtor. She has had several businesses and loves to be creative.

Mary grew up in rural Utah and when she was six, moved to Caliente, NV with her parents so they could work as school teachers. The family farmed in the summer and went to school the rest of the year. She learned fundamentals of working hard and being frugal.

LAS VEGAS, NV: THE GREAT AMERICA OF 1946-1980

The usual consensus is that the “golden age” of Las Vegas occurred between 1946 and 1980, as the desert city became known as the “entertainment capital of the world” and assumed a unique place in the popular imagination. Though the bright lights gave the city a surreal aspect that seemed removed from the prosaic day-to-day concerns of mainstream America, Las Vegas would confront issues similar to those that faced the country as a whole.

Las Vegas’ reputation as a haven for vice go back to its earliest days as an incorporated municipality, the term “sin city” dating back to 1906. Nearby federal projects in the form of the construction camp at Boulder Dam (1931-1936) and the Las Vegas Army Airfield (1925, later Nellis Air Force Base), each with an almost entirely male workforce, were a ready market for gambling (legalized in 1931), liquor (illegal during prohibition) and prostitution, all of which were readily available in the city. Efforts by officials to crack down on or otherwise control vice merely provided an opportunity for organized crime, which arrived in the form of gangs from the East Coast.

There was a nugget of truth to the popular notion that the mob ran Las Vegas. Local government was weak and decentralized, something which left space for organized crime to exert influence. This led to a free-wheeling, almost libertine vibe. For most Americans, the city quickly came to represent a special sort of freedom, a place that seemed built just for a certain notion of leisure that allowed for an escape from the responsibilities and expectations of working life in the United States. By the same token, investors similarly saw opportunity in a place where they could build a business without some of the constraints seen elsewhere, and created a gaudy and ostentatious cityscape.

Beyond gambling (soon rebranded as more respectable “gaming”), entertainment options were generally affordable and accessible, with middle-class people able to see performers like Liberace and Frank Sinatra in the relative intimacy of a lounge. Significantly, these performers were often people past their heyday, and Las Vegas provided an opportunity for them to find new relevance in an era when rock-and-roll was ascendant in the rest of the country. The lounges helped preserve a swaggering, cigarette-smoking notion of cool made obsolete by the social upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.

Segregation was an issue as well, though the city’s unique political dynamics made the struggle play out differently than it did in other places. The mob, largely Jewish and Italian, were at best ambivalent about segregation, and saw it as bad for business. They defied the hidebound elected city leadership, who continued to champion southern-style segregation through the 1950s and 60s. Additionally, entertainers like Frank Sinatra refused to perform at segregated clubs, further pressuring the city to integrate. Segregation was brought down by a series of dramatic protest actions starting through the 1960s and 70s by a coalition that included the NAACP and an increasingly powerful (and integrated) Culinary Workers Union.

In 1980, a fire at the MGM Grand Hotel killed 87 people and injured nearly 700 more. A subsequent inquiry found that the death toll was due in large part to a lack of sprinklers, something that was allowed by city officials. The resulting outrage led to reforms as it became clear that the city’s permissiveness could not continue. By this time, most of the old organized crime figures who once held sway in Las Vegas were no longer in the picture, and federal law enforcement had broken the power of the mobs nationally. Increasingly, the resort industry in Las Vegas would become a well-marketed corporate venture.

-Tom Prezelski, Resident Historian

Episode 11. Johnn Jones describes a Great America that is compassionate, loving, respectful of ourselves, of others and of the planet.

Johnn Jones is a husband, brother, friend and petter/feeder of two shelter dogs. He is also a musician and media content producer in Las Vegas.

Johnn grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. His parents practiced unconditional love and taught him the value of self respect and respect and consideration for others. He learned to play the piano as a young child and brought his love of music and performing into adulthood. This has served him well in every aspect of his life and career as a musician, performer and media producer.

SALT LAKE CITY, UT: THE GREAT AMERICA OF 1847-1857

Salt Lake City was great from 1847-1857, its founding decade. Though the city, which serves as a financial, political and spiritual center of the Inland West, has long been prosperous and known for its livability as a community, it was in those earliest years that the utopian dreams of its founders came closest to being fully realized. Left more or less alone, adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS or “Mormons”) were allowed to build a new society in the Great Basin, and this period of relative autonomy would continue to shape the sect’s relationship with its neighbors.

Fleeing bigotry and mob violence in Missouri, LDS President Brigham Young led a band of followers across the Great Plains, eventually arriving, on July 24, 1847, at the shores of the Great Salt Lake in what was nominally Mexican territory, where Young famously declared “this is the right place” (or “this is the place” in some accounts). The surrounding valley reminded Young of accounts of the geography of the Holy Land, with the brackish water of the lake evoking the Dead Sea. An adjacent river was dubbed the Jordan to complete the biblical analogy.

Like many religious groups that emerged out of the “Great Awakening” of the early 19th Century, the Mormons practiced what we would now call “intentional community.” The new settlement, initially called “Great Salt Lake City” would be laid out in keeping with previous neatly planned Mormon communities in Illinois and Missouri, with some modifications by Young. At the center of the city a square was set aside for a temple. Though the actual building would not be completed for decades, this prominent location symbolized the church’s central role in the life of the community

This utopian dream, however, was meant to include only church adherents. Upon arrival, the Mormons saw what they believed to be an unpopulated valley, but this was because a smallpox epidemic had devastated the native Shoshone months before. Future interactions with native tribes were largely friendly, church leadership recognizing that these were potential allies, but they were marginalized and even converts could not hope for more than second-class status at best. Non-Mormon settlers, who became more plentiful as Salt Lake City became a key stop on an important route to California, also found themselves regarded as outsiders, and were regarded with indifference or hostility by church members. Their grievances would bring unwelcome attention to the Mormon experiment in Salt Lake City.

This era of relative autonomy would come to an end in the summer of 1857. A year before, the platform of the new Republican Party opposed the “twin evils of polygamy and slavery,” reflecting a growing national distrust of the Mormons, with particular suspicion focused on the unusual practice of plural marriage, though their communitarianism were also a source of mistrust as well. Responding to public pressure, newly elected Democratic President James Buchanan sent a new slate of appointed officials with an escort of some 2500 soldiers, about a sixth of the regular army. The subsequent “Utah War,” which consisted mostly of Mormon guerrillas harassing federal troops by destroying supplies and blocking roads, would finally be settled in April, 1858, when the Mormon leadership agreed to accept the authority of non-Mormon federal appointees.

The historical memory of the early years of hostility and oppression from the American mainstream has contributed to a sense of common cause among Mormons. This solidarity has assured their continued prominence as a political and cultural force in the western states. Likewise the legacy of what they accomplished in the Salt Lake Valley during the decade when they had a degree of self-determination, remains an inspiration as well and a reminder of what they could achieve as a community.

-Tom Prezelski, Resident Historian

Episode 10. Jewel Cummings describes a Great America that is a unified country through listening, caring and understanding each other.

She is a college student studying accounting and is a return missionary from southern Germany and Salzburg, Austria. She loves the warm weather of Southern Utah.

Jewel grew up in Mill Creek neighborhood in Salt Lake City, Utah with five younger sisters. She enjoyed the diversity and amenities of Salt Lake City. Her mission to Europe during the COVID virus was an exceptional experience. These foundational experiences of family and her faith taught her the value of listening to people and hard work.

CEDAR CITY, UT: THE GREAT AMERICA OF 1918-1941

Local historians in Cedar City, Utah, point to the period between the two world wars (1918-1941) as a time when the town showed its best as a community. In those years, residents came together to embrace a new economy and to save the town from collapse during the darkest years of the Great Depression.

Cedar City was founded by Mormons in 1851 as a hub for iron and coal mining in the region. It was a fairly modest community, with a population of less than 1500 at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, it remained growing and prosperous as an economic center for the region.

Expansion of nearby Mukuntuweap National Monument into Zion National Park in 1916 was seen as an opportunity by the town’s leadership. In 1919, the local chamber of commerce raised money to build an elegant hotel, El Escalante, to serve and attract tourists. Transportation would remain a problem until 1923, when the Union Pacific Railroad built a spur to the town to serve local mines and agriculture.

Tourism quickly exploded, and the hotel hosted thousands of visitors every year, including celebrities and President Warren G. Harding. The Union Pacific purchased El Escalante and ran a tour company, the Utah Parks Company, out of the hotel and adjacent depot. A vehicle fleet, first of Model T Fords, but of busses by the late 1930s, would take visitors to national parks as far away as the Grand Canyon.

Even with this new industry, the Great Depression (1929-1939) would hit Cedar City as hard as it did most other places, but resident’s willingness to come together as a community helped the town survive through the crisis. One such occasion occurred in 1931, when state regulators ordered the closure of the Bank of Southern Utah, the main financial institution in the town and the surrounding region, for not having enough cash on hand to cover its deposits. Residents raised $90,000 to re-open the bank and held a ball to celebrate its survival. This incident, and others like it, remain part of local lore as an example of Cedar City’s unique solidarity and resilience as a community.

This solidarity, however, tended not to include the local Southern Paiute tribe, who remained on the fringes of the community and the economy. Under a series of Federal and State policies intended to force assimilation of tribal people, the Southern Paiute had become landless and destitute, serving largely as laborers for local Mormon families and exploited as tourist curiosities. This state of poverty and dependence would continue for decades until the focus of Federal Indian policy moved to one of building tribal self-governance.

With the expansion of auto travel after World War Two, rail travel declined in importance, though Cedar City remained a “Gateway City” to the National Parks of Southern Utah. The town continues to embrace tourism and has dubbed itself “Festival City U.S.A.” for the numerous arts and cultural events that have located there. This was all made possible by the vision of the town’s leaders a century ago.

The rapid postwar growth of the town in the subsequent decades meant the loss of the community’s character as a scrappy small town. However, a spirit of civic pride remains from those days as the town continues to find inspiration in their forbearer’s willingness to set individual concerns aside to work together as a community.

-Tom Prezelski

Episode 9. Tamra Borchardt-Slayton describes a Great America that is a melting pot of diversity, acceptance and knowledge, where people actually listen to each other instead of fighting.

She is the Chairperson for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah.

Tamra grew up in rural Enoch, Utah on a road past where the pavement ended. Although, Enoch acts as a suburb of Cedar City, it is actually its own town. Growing up, there was no gas station or store in Enoch so they would drive ten miles into Cedar City for supplies. She was one of very few minority students at her school, but loved the family and farm community she grew up in.