Throughline - California's 'Bum Blockade'

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

The story of the Los Angeles police chief who, faced with one of the largest internal migrations in American history, tried to close California's borders to stop it.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes. Because no one story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR. Hey everyone, before we start the show, you may have heard that President Trump has issued

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And if you already support us via NPR Plus or another means, thank you. Your support means so much to us now more than ever. You help make NPR shows freely available to everyone. We are proud to do this work for you and with you. Now on to the show. The only time that I really remember that I was scared was that dark Sunday. Oklahoma, April 14, 1935. We could see it coming. It rolled in like smoke almost.

On the horizon, a wall of black dust over 500 feet tall, stretching as far as the eye could see. It would be just dead quiet. It'd be just dead quiet. The neighbor said there was birds flying ahead of that storm. And, uh, that storm hit. 60 mile per hour winds. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. The storm ripped through six states from Nebraska to Texas.

In some places, total darkness lasted an hour. Black, whole black. It was as black as the ace of spades. It was a day that haunted the minds of those who lived through it. They called it Black Sunday. it. They called it Black Sunday. feeling that this is the end of time. I thought that was the end of the world. The very next day, a journalist coined a new term to describe what was happening across the Great Plains. He called it the Dust Bowl. What you just heard were oral histories conducted with people who lived in the heart of it. But those dust storms just devastated the country.

They were perpetual, and you can depend on it. The dust was relentless and inescapable. It covered every inch of people's homes. It choked the crops. It filled people's lungs, causing hundreds, maybe thousands of people to die from dust pneumonia. The Dust Bowl made the Great Plains nearly uninhabitable.

So many of them left. No, he did. Went to California. ["Dust Bowl"] Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl troubadour, immortalized this time in song. Across the desert sands they roll, getting out of that old Dust Bowl. They think they're going to a sugar bowl, but here's what they find. Looking east from Los Angeles, the city's top brass began to panic. The Dust Bowl migrants were not the kind of people they wanted coming to their shining city.

So they began to hatch a plan to stop them. I'm Randa Abdifattah. And I'm Ramtin Arablewi. Today on the show, producer Anya Steinberg tells the story of one of the largest internal migrations in American history and the rogue police chief who tried to close California's borders to stop it. California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see. But believe it or not,

you won't find it so hot if you ain't got the do-re-mi. Hi, this is Kyle from Boystown, Nebraska. You are listening to Throughline from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things and other currencies. With WISE, you can send, spend, or receive money across borders all at a fair exchange rate. No markups or hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit WISE.com.

T's and C's apply. Hey, it's Rund. In our latest bonus episode, we hear from our producer, Lawrence Wu, about the world's first automatic machine gun and the lengths he took to find out exactly what it would have sounded like in a 19th century battle. Listen now and get sponsor free listening for all of our episodes by signing up for ThroughlinePlus at plus.npr.org slash throughline. Does the idea of listening to political news freak you out? Well, don't sweat it. The NPR Politics podcast makes politics a breeze. Every episode will break down the day's headlines into totally normal language and make sure that you walk away understanding what the day's news might mean for you. It's a balmy February day in Los Angeles, California. spot. It's a balmy February day in Los Angeles, California.

The year is 1926, just a few years before the Dust Bowl begins, and Detective Lieutenant James Davis, otherwise known as Two-Gun Davis because of his incredible marksmanship, is sitting at his desk at the Detective Bureau office. A very proper man. Just then, a reporter barges through. I'm looking for Davis. It informs the 36-year-old Davis that he's just been named the Interim Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Davis blinks in surprise as he realizes that he's now in charge of all police officers in the nation's so-called Wonder City that's quickly becoming a shining metropolis driven by the riches and glamour of Hollywood, oil and real estate for whoever can afford it. Davis started his life very poor. Born in 1889 in Texas to a strict Methodist mother. Once as a youngster I found a pack of playing cards. I took them home and asked my mother what they were. She told me, and hardly threw them in the fire. Davis' upbringing shaped his worldview. He lived a lifetime of sobriety. This is Bill Lasher, author of The Golden Fortress, California's border war on Dust Bowl refugees.

He was a very brusque, very authoritarian man. At age 16, he ran away from home. For a while, he farmed and worked hard labor jobs. Then he joined the army and was stationed in the Philippines. The army brought discipline to his life, a sense of order and stability. The military was a good fit, but once he left the army, his future was less clear. So like many others, he migrated to California. And arrived in Los Angeles penniless

and unsure what he was going to do next. He was so poor that all he had to wear was his Army uniform until he heard about a new opportunity with the LAPD. He signs up and gets work as a as a beat officer. But it doesn't go well. He gets kicked out. He drifts for a while, traveling across the US doing odd jobs. But then, he writes a letter to the then police chief asking for another chance. And he gets it. In 1912, he returns to the LAPD. After a while, he's placed on the Vice Squad.

He was an early drug warrior. He saw it as a moral contagion to be the drug addict. The underworld fears, but does not hate him. He'll play square, his victims tell you. Close your eyes and imagine a cop from a film noir movie. Well, that's pretty much James Two Gun Davis. He is known for sort of daring raids on things like drug dens and vice dens. His friends call him Jim and his enemies give him lots of elbow room.

At one point, he swung through a window to arrest some criminals. And the local papers, like the LA Times, eat it up. He's got guts is the consensus of opinion among the gentry that ought to know. The press is obsessed with him. They wax poetic about his, quote, eyes blue and keen and his, quote, thick, wavy hair.

He knows what it is to have the muzzle of a revolver pressed against his rib. He believes maybe there's some fights, maybe there's some people hurt, but if he gets those criminals, it's okay. In 1921, after years of paying his dues in the rank and file, the higher-ups at the LAPD finally start to take notice of Davis. They give him his first promotion.

Then it's like wildfire. Davis moves fast. Bust after bust after bust. He becomes head of the vice squad. Promotion after promotion after bust. He becomes head of the vice squad. Promotion after promotion after promotion. Until that fateful day in 1926 when he learns that he's been chosen as the interim chief of police. Shortly after, Davis gets the job for good and he immediately starts to reshape and modernize the force into a more professionalized, standardized uniformed police force. Under his watch, LAPD officers have to look a certain way.

He enforces wearing the uniforms a certain militaristic style. And they have to know how to use their guns. He insists that members of LAPD are top marksmen. Davis is a showman when it comes to his raids, that members of LAPD are top marksmen. Davis is a showman when it comes to his raids, but he's making all these other changes quietly. He is what the LA Times describes as soft-spoken and hard-fisted. This is the picture that his friends will paint you

of the youngest chief of police in the history of the city. That soft-spokenness, that idea that he's not saying anything but he's taking action is the image that he wants the entire police force to promote. LA civic and business leaders, as well as the press like the LA Times, applauded his efforts. He was exactly the kind of police chief they wanted running LA, because they had plans for what this up-and-coming city should look like and be like. New friends and their money. Its resources are unlimited, its wealth untold,

its possibilities unsurpassed. Especially through the 1920s a lot of the leadership of the city is wanting to be a sort of a beacon that literally they articulate as the quote white spot of the United States. Yeah you heard that right, the white spot. The prosperity of this great white spot is the talk of the country. Even though LA was formerly part of Mexico, and continued to be a vibrant multi-ethnic city, a lot like it is today, it didn't matter. It was about the image of what it could be, more than the reality.

Los Angeles is the great white spot on the industrial map of the United States. Cash in on this great era of prosperity. Los Angeles very quickly recognized that its key to prosperity lay in advertising and promoting images. This is Mark Wild, a history professor at Cal State Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times put out something called a midwinter edition every late January, early February right in the teeth of the winter for the Northeast and the Midwest and they would send it out and it would be full of pictures of people sitting in their gardens

growing these huge oranges, these huge fat babies on the lawn and they'd say, you know, it's 75 and sunny here in Los Angeles, why don't you come out? This image becomes produced of a city of empty land, of a place where anyone, the right kind of person, and there is a very clearly articulated idea of people, with money already, who can come and invest and build on this quote-unquote empty land that's in Los Angeles. The business plan is to promote it as a place of prosperity, to promote it as a place of good investment.

And a corollary to that is that there is a docile, willing workforce that's not gonna cause trouble. Which was an important bit of marketing. Because in recent years, labor organizers had taken aim at big business across the country. There were headlines about unrest, disruptions, sometimes even violence. LA was like, no, no, none of that here.

And the city government is really in tune with promoting those interests and making sure that the image persists and that it's not threatened by working class communities, immigrant communities that might be engaged in activities that would undermine it. And Davis, the crusader against vice, becomes a symbol of this effort. He's constantly talking about the threat, about the external threat to Los Angeles, whether it's from drug users or quote unquote vagrants or communists or perceived communists, labor agitators, this idea that people with ill intent are coming from one source or another

to harm the safe and orderly process of life in Los Angeles. For Davis, that threat had to be dealt with by any means necessary. As one columnist put it, Davis quite honestly and sincerely believes that the country would be better off if the whole question of constitutional rights was forgotten. To do this he ramped up the work of the LAPD's nascent Los Angeles intelligence squad. Better known as the Red Squad. Which as its name implies, engaged in a number of activities including surveillance. Red squad of police in city augmented. They would spy on people who were suspected of radical activities.

And keep tabs on suspected communists and labor organizers. Reds arrested after rioting. But it wasn't all in the shadows. The squad also knew how to put on a show, to make it clear who did and didn't belong in LA. Quick arrests have been ordered to forestall any anti-American move. They would engage in public intimidation. They would clear demonstrations.

They would bully people. They'd like to pull out their batons and crack heads. Police chief James Davis had his critics, but they didn't slow him down. Until there's a kidnapping in early 1928. Mother believes her son kidnapped. The mystery surrounding the case of Walter Collins, nine years of age, remains impenetrable, police say. In March 1928, a young boy named Walter Collins goes missing, and for months the LAPD cannot

find him. It's a bad look, and the pressure on the LAPD keeps growing. But then one day, the boy shows up in Illinois. Collins Youth, found in East. Mother hears good news. His mother immediately sends the money to have Walter brought back to her in Los Angeles. But when they reunite, she looks at the child and says, that's not my son. And the LAPD is like, yes, he is. And when she insists that he's not,

They arrest her and commit her to a mental institution. This causes eventually a tremendous scandal when it turns out that they haven't caught the kidnapper. And they haven't found Walter either. The boy they brought back is an imposter, a runaway pretending to be Walter. There's a huge fallout. People are angry at the LAPD.

Remove from office Chief of Police James E. Davis on the grounds of incompetency, inefficiency, and failure to properly enforce the laws. Tensions continue through 1929. And then... The stock market crashes. And that begins the Great Depression. Everything is in chaos. And shortly after the market crash, Davis loses his job as the police chief.

But before long, he'll get another chance. This is Jose Hernandez from California and you're listening to Too Line from NPR. The scary new movie Sinners from the director of Black Panther finds Michael B. Jordan playing twin brothers. It's got vampires, it's got great music, and it's a fun one to see with a big crowd. This is the most excited I've been about a movie in a very long time. We'll tell you why you should see Sinners on the biggest screen you can. Listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. Unlike headlines or social media posts, books can give you the long view on the news, which

is where NPR's Book of the Day can help. To think big picture about stories like the death of Pope Francis. What's missing from the picture, he says, is the merciful face of Christ. You can find this interview and others just like it on NPR's Book of the Day podcast. Tune out the noise and listen every weekday. Look, we get it. When it comes to new music, there is a lot of it. And it all comes really fast But on all songs considered NPR's music recommendation podcast

We'll handpick what we thinks the greatest music happening right now and give you your next great listen So kick back settle in get those eardrums wide open and get your dose of new music from all songs considered only from NPR part two California is closed New music from all songs considered, only from NPR. Part Two. California is closed. I remember it blew every day. Sometimes in the mornings, you could see the imprint of your head on the pillow. It would have been that dusty.

In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl and the economic devastation of the Great Depression wreaked havoc on the lives of people across the country, but particularly the Great Plains. It's the South, it's the Northern Plains. Lots of farmers lose their farms or become convinced not to farm anymore because prices crash. I think there's a lot of desperation. This is Elisa Minoff. She's Director of Economic Security and a Senior Fellow in Policy History at the Center for the Study of Social Policy.

And, she wrote her PhD dissertation all about internal migration during this time period. By the mid 1930s, there have been so many bad years that people sort of lose hope in being able to sustain themselves on the farms. Once bustling family farms fell silent. And nearly a quarter of the country's workforce was unemployed. So many people were down on their luck, didn't have anything to eat, no job. You couldn't buy a job. You couldn't get a job. By 1940, two and a half million people

had moved out of the Plains states, and over 300,000 of them made their way to California. Entire families packed up their belongings and hit the road. What would strike us about it today is that the journey was long, much longer than driving down Route 66 today. Route 66. In 1930, the Mother Road, as John Steinbeck would later dub it in his novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was over 2,400 miles long and stretched from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles.

You had a steady stream of people coming across and oftentimes these broken down looking jalopies with all their life's possessions piled on top of them, families with kids. And that, that procession was real. The journey was difficult and lonely. As people passed from one town to the next, they were likely to have experienced a xenophobia. Local sheriffs in these towns that people passed through were very intent on ensuring that families moved on and did not stay. All a transient hears is no work, no relief, keep moving.

And that really only sort of foreshadowed the difficulties they would have once they arrived in California. Is this the dumping ground for the country's unemployed? LA Times, 1932. In overall terms, migration to California slows. But people are still coming in. It's just not the kind of people Los Angeles city leaders wanted to attract. From the perspective of the LA civic leadership, the character, the makeup of that population changes dramatically.

There's a lot more folks coming in and looking for work without capital. They're not going to be buying a home. They're not going to be moving into these middle class districts. They're desperate. At first, there's a lot of sympathy for these migrants. Los Angeles had this network of support for destitute people. And so you had a lot of the missions and settlement homes and different types of institutions that would cater those folks sort of in downtown LA. This was the case in cities across the country. The understanding basically was that we were taking care of our own people. The care for these folks was really the duty of the communities in which they resided.

But the Depression changed everything. Things got so tough so quickly. So many people lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their way of livelihood that it swamped this private network of support that it existed. Completely overwhelmed the community, chess organizations, the soup kitchens. There was just no way they could handle it. And so as the decade progressed and the Great Depression continued, folks began to try to find ways

to try to manage this burden. And one of the ways for communities where people were coming in was to try to exclude folks who they would claim didn't belong. And an easy target was all the newcomers driving into LA on Route 66. Some folks began to say, all right, folks who aren't working now, they have different options. Maybe they should be getting back to work. And if they aren't, then why not? Newspapers and

politicians at the time often referred to these migrants as indigents, vagrants, transients, or bums. People are exhausted and I think some of their sympathy is starting to run out. In 1933, LA elects a new mayor. His name is Frank Shaw and he has a reputation for being anti-migrant. Shaw advocated for a county-wide anti-indigent ban in the 1930s and sort of the early days of the Depression. But there's a catch. The problem is that Shaw was born in Ontario, Canada. Shaw is Canadian.

He is ironically a migrant himself. And also... There's not good evidence that his parents ever had him or his brother naturalized. And if that's the case, it means he's not actually eligible to be L.A.'s mayor. It's a scandal in the making. And when Harry Chandler, the publisher of the L.A. Times, catches wind of the story, he sees an opportunity. He goes to Shaw and says,

let's make a deal. As the story goes at least, he agrees to hold back these reports that are alleged to prove that Shaw is in fact a Canadian. In exchange, he gets Shaw to agree to reinstall Davis as chief of police. James Davis, as in the recently fired police chief, who tends to play it loose when it comes to people's civil rights, all in the name of preventing crime. Chandler and others, people in the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce,

want someone like Davis, who isn't as concerned about the criticisms that happen with anti-labor activity, to be there at the head of the LAPD. And it works. Davis is reinstated as the LAPD's chief of police, with the express purpose of picking up where he left off. The gloves are off, I guess, and he runs with it. Davis hits the ground running. It's not long before the Red Squad, the anti-communist policing unit, is again starting to infiltrate political movements and things like that and starts to try to smear people perceived to be labor agitators.

War. War to the finish. War in which every radical head will be stomped back into the earth as quickly as it rises. And of course, Davis keeps the interests of Chandler and other business leaders of LA in mind, and they in turn scratch his back. We appreciate that Chief Davis and his coworkers in Los Angeles are fighting the battle

of all of Southern California when they hold firmly in check the subversive activities of radical agitators. The Los Angeles Times, which as much as anyone really supported them, would report how they how they were sort of controlling the Reds and getting rid of the criminals and all of that. Suppression of violence commended. Colonial War Society praises Chief Davis and local police force. This time around, Davis gravitated to the attention. He wanted everyone to know that he meant business. He was a very media-friendly person. He loved to take pictures of himself looking tough, pointing guns at the camera. He really

embraced the image. The state's incoming migrants quickly became the focus of his policing work. By the mid 1930s, these efforts were particularly pointed at single men, which Davis and critics would call hobos or vagrants. Those were the folks who were considered a threat. They're unattached. They're potentially prone to criminality.

They're prone to labor disruption. And if you have a single male who doesn't have a family to provide for, no children to provide for, all those types of responsibilities tend to engender not only sympathy but responsibility. Speaking to a group of Hollywood women in 1934, Davis made it clear that his fight to rid the city of vagrants was an clear that his fight to rid the city of vagrants was an extension of his work to rid the city of communists. Americans are asleep in two to six years.

Communism will be a reality in the United States if drastic steps are not taken to check it. Davis and LA's business elites feared that poor migrants coming into the state were more likely to join a labor movement or vote for socialist ideas, which they saw as a growing threat in California. We mean mass production under modern conditions. The land workers have to have the best land and the factory workers the best machinery. In 1934, Upton Sinclair. Most famous as a muckraking journalist, he wrote a book called The Jungle about the Chicago

meatpacking industry. And until very recently, a socialist. He runs in the Democratic Party. And to everybody's shock, he wins the Democratic primary, and he runs for the governor of California. And he devises a plan called EPIC. And poverty in California. This is Upton Sinclair, speaking later in his life about his Upstart campaign. And of course, EPIC suggests something important and something wonderful. And this stuns the civic leadership in Los Angeles

and across the state. They're scared to death because these policies seem to reflect a direct assault on business as usual. They fear that their hold on power is gonna falter. So they get to work on a smear campaign to discredit Sinclair. They develop a message to counter Sinclair's campaign. They paint him as a radical, they paint him as a leftist. They even suggest he's a Russian agent.

I'm going to vote for Upton Sinclair. Will you tell us why? Upton Sinclair is the author of the the Russian government and it worked out very well there and I think it should do here. And then they enlist the Hollywood studios who obviously want to be part of this as well. A lot of Hollywood bigwigs do not want radical politics. They want a nice business-friendly L.A. So they chip in and help produce so-called newsreels

that would run before feature films at movie theaters. They create these fake newsreels, they have these actors hired to portray unemployed workers coming into California, riding the rails and saying, I'm coming to California because I heard Upton Con Sinclair is going to be governor and once he's in there, I'm going to be able to take advantage of these great resources that are going to be able to provide for me. California is going to be playing in poverty and everybody gets things for nothing.

Upton Sinclair tries to fight it, calling it the lie machine. But it's a loud and inescapable campaign. And it works. He's defeated fairly easily. James Tugun Davis is watching this election unfold. He sees the growing fear of migrants. And he gets an idea. On February 3rd, 1936. on February 3rd, 1936. 135 officers in squads of seven and seven leave Los Angeles.

They drive to 16 stations around the state of California. So anywhere where there's a domestic state line. Arizona and Nevada all the way up to the Oregon border. So he spread them out along this huge border hundreds of miles long. Alongside highways and near rail crossings. And he arranged for all of them to be deputized by the local police or sheriff's office up there. To legally work as law enforcement officers in those counties. The papers call it the bum blockade. those counties. The papers call it the bum blockade. And all along the California border, LAPD officers set up and wait. Hello, my name is Jeff Cooper from Bozeman, Montana.

I love through line, usually listen to it on the way home from skiing with my two young daughters, or you'll catch me listening to it on the way to my job as a flight paramedic. Keep up the good work, I love ThruLine, and it's a great job, thank you. Are you like me suddenly using words like conclave, cardinal, and papa billet in casual

conversation? Well, friend, you too may be Pope-pilled. I have a whole list. I was starting with like 25, 30 names and I was like whittling it down. I'm imagining you like Claire Danes in Homeland, like the full board, like some strings connected. For everything you need to know about picking a new Pope, listen to the It's Been A Minute podcast today. Part Three. That Do-Re-Mi. While the worker on the survey observed the officers, about half the automobiles were allowed to pass without any inspection. In 1936, the California state government released a nearly 400-page report on migrants to the state.

And an entire section of it was devoted to surveyors' eyewitness accounts of the LAPD's border blockade. A beautiful new Packard sedan with four passengers was signaled to pass, the officer turning to the worker, remarking, we would make enemies if we stopped people like that. A 1929 Ford Roadster, dripping water and oil with a homemade trailer attached, came to a stop under the canopy. The police beckoned them to halt. They would try to discourage people who looked like they were very poor from coming into California.

It's being enforced very subjectively. The old car was lacking paint in spots, spattered with oil-soaked dust, and probably not washed for a year or so. If it's a run-down car, it might be stopped. The man traveling alone is more likely to be stopped. The family totaled nine. The oldest boy, 18, sat alone in the middle of the trailer, heaped around him for what appeared to be all the worldly possessions the family owned. Questioning them, asking why they're coming and to say where they're coming from, who they are, what their name is, proof of work, proof of means, or proof you have somewhere to go.

A check with the police revealed that the family were coming to California for the first time to see the wife's sister. They had $30 in cash. The captain of the highway patrol informed the travelers that it would cost $20 to clear the licenses on the car and trailer. For 10 minutes or so, the scene was tense. The mother clutched her baby girl to her as she broke out in sobs. The boys sat quietly staring into space, waiting for their parents to decide. The father, unshaven and unwashed, silently took his place behind the wheel. The battery was

low and the motor did not respond but when it did it sounded as if it too was undesirable and in need of assistance. The father turned the Ford around and the family of nine went back over the road they had traveled having denied police the privilege of fingerprinting them as not wanted in California. Surveyors' reports of the blockade told a story of inconsistency. The police stopped hitchhikers, cars, trains, and buses coming into the state. In some places, migrants were fingerprinted, and those prints were sent off to LA and to Washington, D.C. to check for a criminal

background. Some were detained in local jails. Others were just turned around and sent back across the state border. To pull off the blockade, from a legal standpoint, the LAPD was relying on an anti-indigent state law that had been passed in 1933. That prevented the importation of people in the state, quote unquote, likely to become a public charge. A public charge. Meaning they would be a drain on the city's coffers. So the law itself is sort of representing that ideology and that then becomes the legal

justification for the bum blockade. They weren't trying to stop all migration into California. They were trying to stop certain people from coming in. As soon as the LAPD's border blockade was rolled out, it made headlines. Most public officials chatter at length in print about the desirable things they are going to do. A few do things first and talk about them afterward. While the interminable talkers at Sacramento are fuming and spluttering, 136 of the city's finest are on the job, turning back undesirables. I could find people who both supported and opposed it. Hobos of America will fight in the courts, if necessary,

to preserve their constitutional rights in this city's current border patrol campaign against indigent transients. The debate turned on a question of character of the blockade's targets. Were they victims of economic circumstance who deserve sympathy or were they arriving due to some cultural or moral flaw? Were they unwilling to work? Why should California become the stamping ground for undesirables? Professional bums, men and women who come here merely to

live off others. The phrase that Davis often used was, won't workers. That they refused opportunities that were available to them in their home communities or other parts of the country and that therefore we did not owe them entry. In this sense, the blockade was building on sentiments that already ran deep. Cities and towns had always struggled with the question of what to do when desperate people showed up on their doorsteps. And anti-vacancy laws had existed since before the US was even founded. In the 1930s, LA wasn't even the only place that tried out a blockade.

There were similar actual border blockades. The governor of Florida had sent the state police out to the state's border two years before the LAPD's blockade. But still. The LA border blockade attracts a huge amount of attention because of the theatricality of it. In some places, Police Chief Davis's blockade became a laughing stock. On the border with Nevada, some men from Reno put up a sign mocking the blockade that said, Stop! Los Angeles City Limits. Backlash against the blockade spread, and it was reported out in newspapers

across the region. Bum blockade is merely L.A. publicity, says Oregon Governor Martin. A California state senator called the program, Damnable, absurd, and asinine. Some of the sheriffs in border towns refused to deputize Davis's officers. I do not intend to place county officers and taxpayers in a position which almost certainly would lead to lawsuits. And a newspaper publisher near the border of Nevada said, People here are anything but friendly to the plan.

In fact, they don't like it a bit. So far, they think it's just a lot of hoey. In the pages of the LA Times, Davis was given space to defend his blockade and to keep people updated on how he thought it was going. February 5, 1936. I vowed if the people so ready with criticism of this plan know the facts. The hordes of indigents are coming with the idea of getting on relief rolls, begging, or stealing. February 10th, 1936.

Within 36 hours after placing a blockade, the tide of forging floaters was turned. And on February 12th, he took to the airwaves. Calling All Cars was the sort of predecessor to shows like Dragnet and other cop shows. The show was based on real cases from the LAPD. It's sort of a propaganda machine for the LAPD. And now we present Chief James E. Davis of the Los Angeles Police Department. Good evening, friends. That week, Davis had a special story prepared

for critics of his blockade. The killer, whose career of crime will be unfolded for you here this evening, was a typical migratory criminal who entered the state in the parlance of a hobo. The killer, a man named Eddie Griffith, had embarked on a crime spree, traveling from Seattle to California by hitchhiking and riding the rails. He came into California without money, without any visible means of support.

He sought the forage in green pastures, even if he had to rob and kill to do so. And before he launched into the story, Davis made his case. Tonight's story is the true story of one migratory indigent whose criminal career under a proper single-pen and border patrol program might have been nipped in the bud. If something like his border blockade had existed, Davis said Eddie Griffith never would

have made it to California. The only hitch was, there was no Eddie Griffith. The story wasn't true. It was a dramatized version of a couple of police cases, stitched together and embellished. And the same was starting to seem true of the entire premise of Davis's border blockade. His claims about hordes of dangerous migrants storming the border were seeming flimsier each day. While Los Angeles City cops huddled in the high Sierras engaged in a war to save California

from the hobos, a checkup showed the war was dying out due to an almost complete lack of hobos. Police Chief Davis claimed that they turned away thousands of migrants at the border. I think that's hard to verify. They only actually stopped a small number of people. On March 17th, the Attorney General of California finally issues an opinion and says that no, the police chief cannot do this. Calling the blockade unconstitutional. He says, Organized government, state, county, or municipal should not attempt the achievement of a laudable purpose by unlawful means. California is one state in a sisterhood of states.

As other states must do unto California, so must California do unto them. By the end of March, things were looking grim for the blockade's future. The ACLU had organized a lawsuit against the blockade, which newspapers reported was only dropped after police intimidated the lead plaintiff. Bad press about the blockade continued to pile up. Most of all, it was expensive. And so in early April, after a little over two months, the blockade ended. Its demise came quietly without any fanfare or headlines in the paper. I think it was fairly obvious to most people at the time that this was for show, that this

was not making an appreciable difference in migration into the state. Lots of people were still coming in. It was fairly easy to get around the blockade if you needed to. Looking back from the perspective of history, no, it was not effective. In 1938, James Davis's career as police chief ended. For good this time. He was forced to resign after it was revealed that he'd helped cover up the bombing of a private investigator who'd been looking into corruption in the LAPD. Davis spent the final years of his life sailing aboard a tuna trawler and

collecting his pension. Meanwhile, California's attitude towards migrants changed. With the arrival of World War II, suddenly everything slams into reverse. The U.S. starts ramping up the war effort in 1940, sending supplies to allied forces in Europe. Suddenly, California and many other places state want as many migrants as possible because of the building war effort. And so communities that might have wanted to exclude people before are now desperate for them.

And in 1941, a Supreme Court case would cement that change. Edwards v. California. The case revolved around a 1933 law, the same anti-indigent law that Davis used as legal justification for his blockade. The plaintiff had been caught bringing his brother-in-law, who had no job and no money, into California.

And the justices ruled unanimously in his favor. It is a privilege of citizenship of the United States to enter any state of the union. We can no longer have any of these laws prohibiting interstate migration of citizens. If national citizenship means less than this, it means nothing. And so that eliminates that law precisely because of national defense. That this may be a barrier to sending labor to places where we're going to need it in case of a national emergency. The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run, prosperity and salvation are in union and not division. In some ways, Davis's legacy, the border blockade, lived on.

Just maybe not with the effect he intended. It really did lead people to try and interrogate the rights that they sort of instinctively felt were being violated by the blockade. People said if citizenship means anything, it means that I should be able to move about the United States and to be treated like I belonged where I ended up. I think the blockade shows the malleable definition of who deserves to belong or not belong in a community. Different people can come under attack, even those that you wouldn't expect, like native-born white American citizens. The sort of instrumental morality of attitudes towards migrants and homeless people depending on social demand, it really does turn on a dime. You want to buy you a home or farm that can't deal no body harm

Or take your vacation by the mountains or sea Don't swap your old cow for a car You better stay right where you are You better take this little tip from me Cause I look through the want ads every day But the headlines on the papers always say If you ain't got the do-re-mi boys You ain't got the do-re-mi Why you better go back to beautiful Texas Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee. California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see. But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot if you ain't got the dore mi.

That's it for this week's show. I'm Randabd Fattah. And I'm Ramtin Arab-Louis. And you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And. Laurence Wu. Julie Kane.

Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Kadiyama. Irene Noguchi. voiceover work in this episode was done by Mark Roth, Kevin Jones, Tessa Hall, Ari Steinberg, Bergen Hoff, and Alice Oryula. Thank you to Johannes Dergi, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. Special thanks to Shelly Lemons, Steve Kite, and the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at Oklahoma State University for access to the Dust, Drought, and Dreams Gone Dry collection,

to Ludlow Music for permission to use Woody Guthrie's Do Re Mi, and to the Balch Art Research Library at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for their recording of Upton Sinclair. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voeckel. The episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvi, Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show,

please write us at throughline at npr.org and make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app so you never miss an episode. Thanks for listening. thing. On this week's Wild Card Podcast, Weird Al Yankovic says there's something funny about being professionally weird. I think people realize, you know, Weird Al is almost ironic because I'm like one of the more normal people in showbiz, I think. I'm Rachel Martin.

Weird Al is on Wild Card, the show where cards control the conversation. These days, with all the information coming at you, it can be hard to know what's accurate, what's not, and what's worth your time. Here to help you navigate it all is 1A. Five days a week, the 1A podcast provides a forum for curious minds to explore different angles on the biggest headlines and give you a more balanced take on what's happening. Listen to the 1A podcast from NPR and WAMU.