Moving Metal

During the 1930s, thousands of Americans headed west seeking work and a better life, but California’s businesses were also struggling.

whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath , was published that year. Included among the local enterprises reeling from the Depression were the Los Angeles metals service center com- panies. The city’s mild climate, emerging industries, and deep water port rendered it ripe for a building boom, but a frustrating lack of capital, chronically fluctuating prices, and distant sources of supply hampered the many companies that sold steel sheet, plate, and structural components for

The city’s population of 1.5 million people was increasing rapidly as refugees from droughts and dust storms, mortgage foreclosures, and factory shutdowns fled to the West. The sit- uation was so dire that Los Angeles Police Chief James Edgar “Two-Gun” Davis had dispatched officers to man a “bum blockade” of the state borders, forcibly turning back migrants seeking a better life in the “City of Angels.” The plight of these desperate, homeless “Okies” was becoming a national embarrassment, thanks to California author John Steinbeck,

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