Abraham Hoffman

Joseph Barlow Lippincott and the Owens Valley Controversy: Time For Revision

At a crucial point in the development of Los Angeles a decision was made that resulted in unprecedented growth and helped make the city a major metropolitan center. The decision to obtain water from the Owens River has formed the basis of a long-standing historiographical controversy. The construction of the aqueduct from the Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley also created an unending argument concerning the people involved, the issues at stake, and the unsolved riddle whether Los Angeles committed a moral, if not legal, crime against the residents of Owens Valley.1 To date no attempt has been made to evaluate the scholarship on the Los Angeles-Owens Valley controversy. The most detailed treatment of the subject, by Remi Nadeau, was a narrative account based in large part on interviews with the participants in their old age. Although his description of the events was vivid and his research respectable, Nadeaus work lacked footnotes, and the references in his bibliographical essay were unclear in a number of citations.2 Three schools of historical writing have attempted to deal with the Owens Valley problem. The most outspoken of these, and the most sensational, charges that a group of Los Angeles citizens conspired to swindle the Owens Valley settlers out of their water, and in the process of doing so these conspirators made tremendous profits out of San Fernando Valley real estate.3 A second school of writing insists that no such conspiracy existed and that the charges were meretricious and untrue. This second interpretation sees no connection between the water plans and real estate schemes.4 The third approach seeks a middle ground, noting the human errors of the people involved while objectively evaluating their accomplishments.5 In spite of the large number of works published dealing with the aqueduct debate, remarkably few primary sources have provided the information on which partisans have based their arguments. Except for

The Los Angeles Aqueduct Investigation Board of 1912: A Reappraisal

The aqueduct connecting the Owens River to Los Angeles, celebrated in its time as a marvel of engineering construction, did not escape the heat of politics. The three years preceding the aqueducts completion in 1913 were filled with tragedy and controversy that inevitably touched the aqueduct and its builders. Such events as the bombing of the Los Angeles Times, die arrest of the McNamara brothers for the crime, the 1911 municipal election, tensions between Socialists, labor union organizers, and archconservative Republicans, and reports of huge profits to land speculators benefiting from the aqueducts construction these events and more aroused the political passions of the citizens of Los Angeles. To investigate recurrent charges of mismanagement and malfeasance in the building of the aqueduct, the Los Angeles City Council appointed an Aqueduct Investigation Board early in 1912 to inspect construction, take testimony, and determine the accuracy of the allegations.