City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California

Chapter 3: In the School of Power

53  3 In the School of Power If the cathedral was the Age, then a formidable explosion had indeed overthrown its most solid walls. —Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral Jim Stafford’s civics education continued under the tutelage of Los Angeles County’s infamous and visionary supervisor Herbert Legg. Legg represented the first district, a huge political-economic jurisdiction that stretched east from downtown Los Angeles, following the contours of the San Gabriel Valley, to the San Bernardino County line. The LeRoy, New York, native held that powerful position for nearly three terms—from 1934 to 1938 and again from 1950 to 1954—practically a political lifetime, until a heart attack ended his career. Jim’s habits of secrecy obscure the early roots of his relationship with Legg, but their first contact appears to have occurred in the early 1950s via several lifelong friends who were Legg staffers.1 The most likely matchmaker was Robert S. Rope, then an administrative assistant on Los Angeles County’s powerful regional planning commission. Jane Stafford credits Rope with cultivating her former husband’s interest in politics. Suddenly, she said, Jim “began attending political functions and fundraisers that had previously meant nothing to [him]. . . . [He] got involved in politics because he saw it as a way to make money. Bob Rope showed him the way and [Jim] took it from there.”2 Jane herself never understood what either Legg or Rope saw in her husband, whom she deemed to be unqualified for government service.3 Yet clearly they sensed he had the necessary qualities to help them drive Industry toward incorporation, and Legg appointed him to the regional planning commission in early January 1954.4 54 city of industry Why was Legg interested in Jim Stafford? Surely real estate was a major reason. Along with his family and friends, Jim owned significant acreage in the La Puente Valley, which was located in the middle of Legg’s district. Rope’s job required knowledge of the biggest property owners in the supervisor’s district, and he certainly would have passed on that information to his boss. Just as important, the Stafford family had a history in the corridor, and Jim would be likely to inspire the loyalty and respect of the smaller property owners that Legg would need to recruit to the cityhood campaign. But another fact is also clear: the frantic land rush sweeping through the La Puente Valley was threatening to devalue Jim’s property holdings if he didn’t find some way of taking action. After 1945 the number of subdivision plans submitted for the valley’s southeastern quadrant increased significantly, as did newspapers articles promoting the land boom. Even before the end of World War II, returning GIs were searching for ways to escape from congested metropolitan Los Angeles, with its increasing population of ethnic and racialized minorities, and to raise families in the new pastoral suburbs. To attract this clientele, postwar Los Angeles bankers, real estate developers, newspaper publishers, and politicians revived the previous decade’s alluring sun-drenched narratives. Real estate retailers promised their customers the wholesome virtues of hobby farming, a small-town lifestyle defined by personal relationships, responsive local government, and the racial and class exclusivity needed for the invention of a respectable middle class. Federal housing policies condoning the creation of racially exclusive housing developments and restrictive housing covenants underlay these “vanilla suburbs.”5 It did not occur to policymakers that their exclusionary goals would some day clog freeways with traffic and carpet the valley with shoddy tract homes and poorly designed communities.6 Not all of the valley’s large landowners saw the onslaught as a chance to fleece a new class of suburban suckers. Land adjacent to the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific lines was too valuable to clutter with houses. Some of the valley’s other absentee landowners also worried about the trend. During World War II, they had been planning for industrial development in the valley. As part of a strategy to decentralize arms production, weapons factories had begun to relocate outside the Los Angeles city limits; and wartime publicity scares had convinced military planners of the region’s susceptibility to aerial bombing and the need to scatter and duplicate these factories to make them less vulnerable. Planners reasoned that by breaking up assembly lines into smaller units, in the school of power 55 factories could continue...