Enter: The Bum Blockade.<\/p>\n
The LAPD dispatched 136 officers to 16 ports of entry in California counties that bordered Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. Their mission, per one front-page story in The Times, was to turn back \u201cmigratory indigents, among whom are believed to be scores of criminals and disease-carrying ne\u2019er-do-wells.\u201d <\/p>\n
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Los Angeles Police Chief James E. Davis, seated at left, meets with other LAPD officials on Oct. 26, 1936, to discuss plans to keep impoverished migrants out of the city.<\/p>\n
(Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
The Bum Blockade, as the public and press dubbed it, is now mostly forgotten. But it \u201cis a warning to us\u201d of the perils of scapegoating the downtrodden, said Bill Lascher, author of \u201cThe Golden Fortress: California\u2019s Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees.\u201d <\/p>\n
There are chilling parallels, he said, between the LAPD officers, who were deputized by county sheriffs, and the federalized National Guard troops<\/a>, U.S. Marines<\/a>, and federal border agents deployed to American cities in President Trump\u2019s aggressive immigration crackdown. <\/p>\n And the \u201chostility toward houselessness, toward poverty,\u201d Lascher said, is as potent a force in L.A. today as it was then.<\/p>\n Amid the 1936 crackdown, a satirical billboard<\/a> was erected at the California-Nevada state line near Reno, with a baton-wielding cartoon cop and the warning: \u201cSTOP. LOS ANGELES CITY LIMITS.\u201d <\/p>\n Rural places like Hornbrook \u2014 a remote Siskiyou County town of some 260 people between the Klamath and Cascade mountain ranges \u2014 tend to have a long memory<\/a> for significant events. <\/p>\n In 1919, a train carrying President Wilson, who was traveling from Portland, Ore., to San Francisco, paused in Hornbrook. A plaque by the railroad tracks commemorates the stop to this day. <\/p>\n But the LAPD officers whose arrests here garnered front-page headlines across the West have faded from memory. <\/p>\n Gary Mellon, a gregarious 60-year-old carpenter and local history buff, said he had never heard of the blockade. If he had lived in Hornbrook back then and crossed into Oregon, \u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019d be able to get back in,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cI look like a bit of a bum sometimes,\u201d said Mellon, who has a bushy gray beard and wore a plaid shirt and well-worn work boots. <\/p>\n On their way out of California, men on a freight train suspected of being transients speak with Los Angeles Police Officer A.J. Sommers, left, on Feb. 10, 1936.<\/p>\n (Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n On Feb. 6, 1936, eight men traveling through Hornbrook were rounded up and forced to stay overnight in an abandoned hotel that had been turned into a makeshift jail, the Medford Mail Tribune reported. <\/p>\n They were made to sleep on the floor and given half a loaf of bread each. The next day, they were \u201cherded aboard a freight car\u201d and sent back to Oregon. <\/p>\n Among them was a professional wallpaper hanger traveling to Southern California to visit his sister and nephew, a gardener at the San Diego Zoo. <\/p>\n Another traveler was Taylor, who insisted to a reporter that he resided at 1274 Normandie Ave. (misidentified in the Medford newspaper as \u201cNormandy Street\u201d) in Los Angeles, a city his mother had called home for 30 years. <\/p>\n Taylor said he and his wife had left California two months earlier to visit an ailing relative in Washington state. Trying to get home cheaply, he had hopped aboard a boxcar. <\/p>\n Taylor told officers he was a veteran of both the Spanish-American War and World War I, drawing disability benefits because he had contracted tuberculosis during the latter conflict. He showed papers to prove his military service, to no avail.<\/p>\n \u201cI have never been arrested or in trouble before in California and am anxious to return to my home,\u201d Taylor said, \u201cbut now I don\u2019t know what to do or where to go.\u201d <\/p>\n In the 1920s, Los Angeles civic boosters lured tourists and new residents<\/a> by bragging of a veritable paradise filled with orange groves and eternal sunshine. The city\u2019s population surged<\/a> from 576,000 to 1.2 million that decade, thanks to the burgeoning film industry and an oil boom<\/a>. <\/p>\n But in the 1930s<\/a>, jobs dried up. Migrants were blamed. <\/p>\n People of Mexican descent \u2014 many of them American citizens \u2014 were swept up in mass deportations<\/a> or coerced to leave<\/a> the country in order to save jobs for \u201creal Americans,\u201d as President Hoover\u2019s administration put it. Okies, too, were accused of stealing jobs, sucking up public resources and being communist sympathizers. <\/p>\n Los Angeles Police Sgt. Earl F. Heintzleman, left, and Colton Police Chief J.A. Miller question and register young men stopped in Colton on Oct. 27, 1936. The men had traveled there by train, and officers warned them that forced labor camps awaited unemployed migrants traveling to Los Angeles.<\/p>\n (Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n The Bum Blockade was the brainchild of then-Los Angeles Police Chief James E. Davis, an expert marksman nicknamed \u201cTwo Guns,\u201d who gave his officers broad discretion in how to suss out transients. He also encouraged L.A. residents to report beggars to police. <\/p>\n Davis had \u201ca huge ego\u201d and little oversight from corrupt city leaders who, like him, viewed impoverished migrants as undesirables, said John Thomas, a retired LAPD lieutenant, former UCLA police chief and amateur historian.<\/p>\n In a Feb. 5, 1936, editorial, The Times blasted then-California Atty. Gen. Ulysses S. Webb and other state officials for calling<\/a> the just-launched blockade illegal. It might be halted by the courts, the editorial read, but until then \u201ca lot of undesirables can be turned back and a lot more discouraged from even starting in this direction.\u201d <\/p>\n Many in Northern California chafed at the presence of L.A. lawmen. This area, after all, is the site of the mythical State of Jefferson, a breakaway state proposed in the early 1940s by small-town denizens fed up with big-city influence and deteriorating roads they deemed \u201cnot passable, hardly jackassable.\u201d Residents today still fly the green Jefferson flag with its pair of X\u2019s, called a \u201cdouble cross,\u201d that represent a sense of rural abandonment. <\/p>\n Los Angeles Police Officer Mona Rehling, left, Police Chief James E. \u201cTwo Guns\u201d Davis and Officer Mabel D. Stevens pose with confiscated guns on July 18, 1935.<\/p>\n (Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n The sheriff of Modoc County refused to deputize the LAPD officers. In Siskiyou County, the district attorney called the blockade unconstitutional. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at what was happening back then, it was about, \u2018We don\u2019t want certain people here; these people are a threat and they don\u2019t represent what we see as American,\u2019\u201d Thomas said. \u201cI think that if we\u2019re not careful, we can find ourselves in the same place. All it takes is one leader, in this case James E. Davis, willing to compromise his oath to the Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n Thomas\u2019 interest in the blockade was piqued by one of his favorite books, John Steinbeck\u2019s classic \u201cThe Grapes of Wrath.\u201d <\/p>\n Singer, songwriter and composer Woody Guthrie in October 1940.<\/p>\n (CBS Photo Archive via Getty Images)<\/p>\n In it, an unnamed character warns an Okie about to travel west: \u201cEver hear of the border patrol on the California line? Police from Los Angeles \u2014 stopped you bastards, turned you back. Says, if you can\u2019t buy no real estate we don\u2019t want you. Says, got a driver\u2019s license? Le\u2019s see it. Tore it up.\u201d <\/p>\n Woody Guthrie immortalized the blockade, too, in his song \u201cDo Re Mi,\u201d a cheeky but furious warning to Dust Bowl refugees that if they had no \u201cdo\u201d \u2014 as in, \u201cdough,\u201d or cash \u2014 they would not be welcome in California. He sang: <\/p>\n \u2018Cross the desert sands they roll, gettin\u2019 out of that old dust bowl<\/p>\n They think they\u2019re goin\u2019 to a sugar bowl, but here\u2019s what they find<\/p>\n Now, the po-lice at the port of entry say: \u201cYou\u2019re number fourteen thousand for today\u201d<\/p>\n In the Great Plains, California was seen as a wonderland at a time when \u201cpeople were dying, starving, getting black lung from the dust in the wind,\u201d said Cady Shaw, director of the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa.<\/p>\n Guthrie was \u201cletting them know, there are harsh realities\u201d in California, Shaw said, and that \u201cthis isn\u2019t the promised land we were told.\u201d <\/p>\n As for James Taylor, he tried to get back into California without success, despite obtaining a letter from a Medford attorney who said the L.A. police had no right to block him.<\/p>\n \u201cThey beat my ribs with police clubs and knocked my teeth out as they chased me into Oregon,\u201d Taylor said in an account published in the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin. <\/p>\n He said the officers tore up his driver\u2019s license and registration slips for two California vehicles. He hitched a ride to Portland and sought out a U.S. attorney, who claimed to have no authority to interfere with a state matter. He told Taylor his best option was a civil suit \u2014 which would have to be filed in California. <\/p>\n Taylor said he would hitchhike to his wife in Olympia, Wash., and had given up on California.<\/p>\n His story disappeared from the headlines. The statewide Bum Blockade, an expensive, legally challenged<\/a> caper, fizzled out after a few months, with Davis calling his officers home. A smaller, local effort that autumn, in which officers threatened poor migrants headed into L.A. with jail or forced labor, was short-lived.<\/p>\n There is debate about how many<\/a> people the LAPD officers actually arrested, Lascher said, but they are believed to have encountered thousands \u2014 and likely discouraged thousands more.<\/p>\n Nine decades after the expulsion of poor travelers from Hornbrook, the town is better known for its generosity.<\/p>\n There is a lot of need in Hornbroo<\/a>k, where the median household income of $32,222 is a third of the statewide median. <\/p>\n Inside the former-diner headquarters of the nonprofit Hornbrook Community Assn., one word is painted in huge, bright yellow letters: WELCOME.<\/p>\n Every Friday, volunteers host a free community breakfast of pancakes and French toast. Most weeks, there are more than 40 people \u2014 a huge number in this little town \u2014 and for many seniors, it\u2019s their only social outing.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody is turned away,\u201d said Helene Blazier, the nonprofit\u2019s treasurer. <\/p>\n Gary Mellon, 60, works as a carpenter and lives in Hornbrook.<\/p>\n (Jason Armond \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n 1 <\/p>\n 2 <\/p>\n 1. Inside the Hornbrook Community Center, Helene Blazier organizes letters for a road sign advertising a free Friday breakfast. (Jason Armond \/ Los Angeles Times) 2. Volunteer Mickey Blazier sets letters for a sign outside the Hornbrook Community Center. (Jason Armond \/ Los Angeles Times) <\/p>\n Last Thanksgiving, the volunteers had planned to take the holiday off. But when a few people at the pancake breakfast the week before said they had nowhere to go and no family, \u201call of us just flipped, and we had Thanksgiving dinner here, and we served 20 people,\u201d Blazier said. <\/p>\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1777978453_635_.jpeg\")
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