ON THE OTHER HAND, WE'RE NOWHERE NEAR AS SHAMEFUL AS OUR GRANDFATHERS:

When California Flirted With Fascism (Conor Friedersdorf, 11/13/10, American Scene)

On several occasions, I’ve recommended Kevin Starr’s multi-volume history of California. Here’s a passage that is particularly striking, from page 176 of Endangered Dreams:

In early 1935 the City of Los Angeles established a Committee on Indigent Alien Transients, which reflected the bias of the city. Astonishingly, the committee openly defined an indigent alien transient ‘as being a transient entering the state of California without visible means of support and whose legal residence is foreign to the state of California.’ Thus the Committee, for all practical purposes, took California out of the Union. The City of Los Angeles would soon attempt to seize control of the state.

Long skilled in the techniques of rousting transients out of town after jailing them on vagrancy charges, the Los Angeles Police Department played an important role on the committee, on which the deputy chief of police sat as chairman. On 4 November 1935 the Committee on Indigent Alien Transients issued a report calling for the establishment of checkpoints manned by police and health officials at every major point of entry into the state. Transients who could not prove California residence, the report recommended, should be put into camps, preferably operated by the State Relief Administration, where they would be fingerprinted and their backgrounds checked for a criminal record. The report also called for “Vagrancy Penal Camps” for transients arrested on vagrancy charges. These penal camps would serve as labor pools for work upon roads, parks, and other public projects. Police should monitor all common carriers, railroads especially, and all main arterial highways in an effort to apprehend indigent alien transients seeking to enter the state. State and local officials, meanwhile, should form a statewide committee to supervise these activities: an extra-parliamentary task force responsible for sealing off the borders of California from transient migration.