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