Eternity Street Lecture on Frontier Los Angeles Violence and Justice

This afternoon at the Homestead Museum in the City of Industry, Yale professor emeritus John Mack Faragher gave a stimulating presentation based on his new book Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, published by W.W. Norton and Company.

With accompaniment from PowerPoint slides, Faragher began by noting that, whereas in Europe over the centuries homicide has dropped precipitously, there was a major spike in American homicide in more recent generations, though a noticeable decline has taken place since 1990.  He then moved to the local scene, stating that, after considerable research, he was able to document 468 homicides in Los Angeles between 1850 and 1875.

Courtesy of W. W. Norton and Company.

While this is a far cry from the claims of Horace Bell and Harris Newmark that there was a murder a day at a certain point in the early 1850s, Faragher reminded the audience that, per 100,000 residents, it was still extraordinary to have an average of, say, 20 homicides a year in a frontier town as small as Los Angeles.  This rate dwarfed most homicide rates in major areas of the United States and within California at the time and today.

Faragher then talked about something that has not received nearly as much attention (and that goes for this blogger's work, as well) when it comes to examining violence in society generally, much less that of Los Angeles during the 1850s through 1870s.

Much has been said about the preponderance of young men, free from tethers of home, imbued with copious amounts of alcohol, supplied with advance weapons of destruction (like the new Colt revolver, introduced in the late 1840s), surrounded with people of many other ethnicites and races, and unrestrained by a dysfunctional and poorly-supported government and criminal justice system.

However, what Faragher did in his book and explained in his talk was that the little-known effects of domestic violence have a connection to individual and larger-scale violence.  He reviewed some of the many cases in Los Angeles's civil court records that document spousal abuse from the Mexican era through the early American years.  While in some cases, judges granted divorce and other petitions from women abused by their husbands, a good many did not.

In one notable incident cited by Faragher, Phillip Rheim, a German known as Felipe Reim by Angelenos and who owned the Los Dos Amigos saloon, was particularly abusive to his wife, who finally secured a divorce by default when Rheim failed to appear in court.  Rheim then committed suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum, an opiod, with the suggestion being that the divorce pushed him over the edge.

Faragher proceeded to cover some of the more notorious incidents of vigilante activity in Los Angeles, from the first lynching to take place in the town in 1836 when Maria Rosario Villa de Feliz and her lover Gervasio Alipas killed her husband and then were hung by a committee of citizens, up through the horrific Chinese Massacre of 1871.  Faragher talked about a number of incidents, detailing the operations of vigilantes, and the responses by those in support of and opposed to mob law.

The one-hour talk held the rapt attention of about fifty audience members.

The presentation concluded after about an hour and there were plenty of questions from an audience that clearly was impressed by what they heard.  A reception was held on a warm winter afternoon and copies of Eternity Street were sold and signed.  This blogger picked up a copy and is raring to get reading tonight.  More on the book will be posted on this blog soon.

For those who did not get to see this talk at either the Huntington Library on Friday or the Homestead today, Faragher is giving his talk tomorrow at the Autry Museum at 11 a.m., so there'll still be time, for those interested, in watching the Super Bowl later.  He'll also be interviewed on Larry Mantle's Air Talk on KPCC 89.3 on Monday around 12:30 or so--check listings for that.  Finally, he'll be doing a talk and book signing at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena on Tuesday at 7 p.m.