19th Century Los Angeles

With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the Catholic and Spanish speaking pueblo of Los Angeles came under control of the United States, a generally Protestant and English speaking country. The Gold Rush brought immigrants from that America and from around the world to Northern California and it brought some wealth to Southern California. Los Angeles, for a time, became a “cow town,” growing wealth from the provision of beef to the gold fields and the growing cities of San Francisco and Sacramento.

This wealth accrued to the Californios early on. The vast land grants that they had received under Spanish and Mexican rule provided the land to support that industry. A few Protestant men had shown up and they married into the Californio community. There were a few Jews and soon a few Blacks and Chinese. In this environment there grew up a community where inter-religious cooperation was a hallmark. WASPs weren’t the one who built the West in Los Angeles, but when it got easier to get there they came in large numbers, swamping the societal order that had grown up in the era when they were a smaller piece of the place.

In his book, “Frontier Faiths: Church, Temple, and Synagogue in Los Angeles 1846-1888,” Michael E. Engh chronicles this early period of Los Angeles’s faith history. The religious foundation of Los Angeles comes from the Catholic church for good and for ill. The missions essentially wiped away the structure and familiarity with the indigenous spirituality of the Tongva and Gavrialino populations. The tree that centered their spiritual and physical geography was located at the center of the pueblo. As it was the case in many places throughout the world, the indigenous spirituality was buried under the new order that the church brought.

The early population of the pueblo came from the local natives, the European clergy, soldiers and immigrants from Mexico to the south. American soldiers arrived after the American takeover of California. Jews came from the east and from Northern California where their families had already established a beachhead. The first two Chinese, Ah Luce and Ah Fou, came as servants with the household of Joseph Newmark when they came south from San Francisco.

In 1855, the Jewish community was able to secure land for a Jewish cemetery. That land is now within the footprint of Elysian Park. There is an LA Fire Department training site in the small valley that was once the Home of Peace Cemetery. The graves were moved in the first decade of the 20th century to the new location of Home of Peace in Boyle Heights. Newmark was instrumental in establishing Congregation B’nai B’rith (now Wilshire Boulevard Temple), at about the same time. He and Moritz Morris recruited Rabbi Abraham Wolf Edelman from his first pulpit in San Francisco. Edelman served as Rabbi and Cantor from 1862-1889. He and Newmark, who long served as the president of the congregation, were able to build the sanctuary at Broadway (Fort St.) and Second Street.

The Jewish community was very small in this period, numbering only in the low hundreds. However, it was very influential in the development of local institutions. I have written previously about Isaias W. Hellman’s Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank which provided much of the capital that underwrote major projects in Los Angeles in the 1880s. Jews supported the construction of the Cathedral of St. Vibiana, which became the seat to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles after it was completed. St. Vibiana replaced an adobe structure on the central square to the north that had been the center of the pueblo.

The Catholic church had not been well served by clergy in early times. The missions were established by fathers rather than priests and it had not been the seat of an archbishopric. In 1853 Tadeo Amat became the bishop of the diocese that included all of Alta California, from Monterey southwards. This would bring a wave of change in the way that Catholics of Los Angeles practiced their faith.

“The clergy disapproved of the Christmas-season play of Los Pastores, peppered as it was with irreverent comments and asides, as well as the boisterous mock execution of Judas Iscariot, during Holy Week. … No longer were wakes to include drinking and dancing in the home where the body of the deceased was laid out, because such festivity ‘offends against gentility.’ The processions to the church and cemetery with the corpse were to be more dignified, which meant a prohibition against the usual firing of guns and the lighting of firecrackers. Henceforth all coffins were to be closed, during the processions and the funeral mass. The clergy were to refrain from allowing burials within the church building itself, despite the long tradition that had accorded this honor to deceased infants and prominent citizens. … all liturgical ceremonies [were to] conform to the rubrics of the Roman Ritual. [It was forbidden to baptize] children with ‘the Name of Jesus, the Divine Persons or mysteries.’ Those [names] now under the ban included Jesus, Trinidad, Espiritu, Salvador, Encarnacion, Conception, Ascencion, Asuncion, Presentacion, Engracia, Altagracia, Cruz, Libramiento, and Resurreccion.”

Up to that point, Catholic children were educated together regardless of race, but Amat began to segregate. He worked hard to raise money in order to replace the humble Alavera Adobe church that had been the seat of Los Angeles Catholicism and was located in the center of Californio settlement. (A demographic that was finally erased through Urban renewal and highway construction in the mid-20th century). Even Dias de los Muertes traditions were attacked.

The problem with Amat’s actions was two fold. For the first part, his actions separated the folk practices, which were emotionally satisfying, from supervised religious observances. This alienation made most of Catholic Los Angeles feel even more separated from the new English speaking arrivals. As American legal and legislative controls shifted the law to the disadvantage of the Californios and the economic climate turned on them, the Spanish speaking Catholic population went into a steep economic decline. The groups that had once been at the top of the social hierarchy slipped towards the bottom at precisely the time that their faith institution demanded an assimilation to customs that were unfamiliar to them, but also unhelpful in allowing them to assimilate into the evolving social environment around them.

On a positive note, the nuns of The Sisters of Charity arrived in the 1850s and founded the early medical facilities and educational facilities. They met their co-religionists where they needed to meet and served selflessly, but cannily. They ran the medical services that dealt with the repeated smallpox epidemics with support from Jewish donors and the city. Most of these women learned Spanish and some even eventually came from the local Spanish speaking community.

Various Protestant clergy came through Los Angeles in the 1850s, but none were able to establish a church. There were some bright moments in the 1860s, but the first Protestant Church was not erected until 1862 by the Episcopalians, though the congregation did not endure. Congregationalists and Northern Methodists moved into meeting houses (humble buildings) in 1868. The general conclusion of those Protestant clergy who spent time in Los Angeles into the 1870s was that prospects were bleak until the “right kind of people” arrived in sufficient numbers to civilize the place. There were efforts to evangelize the existing population towards Protestantism, but there was a general unwillingness to bother learning Spanish (or Chinese) in order to be understood. And the Jews weren’t buying either.

The Chinese practiced syncretic religious beliefs that combined Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism with additional folk beliefs. The first successful efforts to reach the Chinese by Protestants came through offers that were made to teach English. The later converts to Christianity that were built on these efforts can be seen through the lens of assimilation. English language proficiency allowed these Chinese who hoped to remain in the U.S. to gain better employment. It might also allow them to better communicate with non-Chinese and prevent the sort of horrible miscommunication that ended with massacre of the Chinese in the Calle de los Negros in 1871 (which I also wrote on previously). The Presbyterian minister, Reverend Ira M. Condit, who had worked as a missionary in China and learned the language, had real success on Wilmington Street. Christianity also offered, according to historian Gunther Barth, as cited by Engh, “some Chinese a measure of freedom from within the highly regularized and tradition-bound way of life.” Engh also cites historian Shih-Shan Henry Tsai, who points out that “many of the Chinese converts to Christianity long maintained syncretic religious beliefs.” This would hardly be surprising. Since Chinese were comfortably syncretic in their native religious beliefs, it would be hard to train that state of mind out, particularly in the first generation.

In the early period, the establishment of any church or synagogue brought out a crowd to celebrate. Charitable events were often held to raise the money for these projects, and support came from those of other faiths. Bishop Amat’s construction of St. Vibiana received support from the Jewish community for instance (just as the new Cathedral that succeeded it in 2002 did). The University of Southern California was founded through grants from Isaias Hellman, John G. Downey, a Catholic, and Ozro W. Childs, a Protestant. The Sisters of Mercy received regular support from the Jewish community as well. Rabbi Edelman was a Mason and belonged to other fraternal orders and involved himself in all sorts of efforts to help develop the city.

Edelman was quite unlike Bishop Amat. He was an Eastern European like many of those in his congregation. He was a traditionally educated Orthodox rabbi, but he adapted to American mores. He gave sermons in English, had a choir and made opportunities for women. He was outward facing, as his non-Jewish affiliation indicates. Even still, he ultimately was not able to fully accommodate the move towards the full program of Reform Judaism and retired from the pulpit in 1885. Somehow, that date seems less random than it did to me initially.

Bishop Francisco Mora, Amat’s successor, remarked on his retirement in 1896 about “‘the fading spirit of the ‘sympathy, tolerance, and good feeling’ that he and other pioneers had once known.” When the Atchinson, Topeka and Sante Fe Railroad reached Los Angeles in 1885, it set off a fare war with the Southern Pacific Railroad that brought explosive growth, particularly among “the right sort of people.” Protestant congregations began to grow in size and power with the arrival of the Southern Pacific, but they really took off in 1885. While Bishop Amat had told his community that they could not continue as members of the Masons and other non-Catholic fraternal orders and pressured Catholics to separate themselves socially his intentions didn’t really succeed.

As Protestantism began to take hold, it brought with it movements like Temperance and other “civilizing” interests. At the same time, Jews and Catholics began to be excluded in ways that they had not been previously. This was true both socially and politically. Jews had held public office in early Los Angeles, but this ceased in the 1880s and there were a few Jews in the city bureaucracy. Hispanics and Jews didn’t return to elected office in Los Angeles again until after the Second World War. The sense of broader cooperation in Los Angeles politics didn’t fully manifest until the Tom Bradley mayoralty.

As Los Angeles has developed, the dominance of different religious groups and different approaches to inter-religious relationships continually shift. The relative power of specific ethnic, racial and religious communities also ship. “He who is first will later be last [sort of].” Laura Pulido, in her book, “Black, Brown, Yellow & Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles,” discusses how the relative order of power and influence of different minority communities has shifted over time, due to changes in demography, territoriality and economics. While her concern is political, her understanding dovetails with what we learn from Engh in his writing. We are not at the end of anything.

“Frontier Faiths” models an awareness of the consequences of the combination of demographic factors in revealing the depths of the individual experience of a place bound community. It would be interesting to see more detail of later periods and of the ever widening range of religious and social expression within Los Angeles. Of more direct relevance to my own interests and self-interest, it would be interesting to chart out the consequences that have come from the waves of Jewish immigrants to Los Angeles, to see how they have affected Jewish observance and the nature of Jewish experience. The recent Jewish Federation “2021 Study of Jewish LA,” provides some data as a starting point. It breaks down the demographic of the LA Jewish Community. Now, it would be interesting to research how that creates the Jewish experience here.