UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Something New Under the Los Angeles Sun: UCLA’s Early Years, 1919-1938 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7k61h3m7 Author Purdy, William Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Something New Under the Los Angeles Sun: UCLA’s Early Years, 1919-1938 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education by William Charles Purdy 2016 © Copyright by William Charles Purdy 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Something New Under the Los Angeles Sun: UCLA’s Early Years, 1919-1938 by William Charles Purdy Doctor of Philosophy in Education University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Patricia M. McDonough, Chair Here we argue that UCLA’s first two decades show it to be a unique historical case: it was a state normal school that quickly became a research university, not just a teaching college, a branch campus quickly achieving parity with its parent institution, the first elite research university comprised of a large majority of women students, the first major public research university founded in the twentieth century, the first public/private partnership, even if silent, to plan a public university alongside a private commercial village or college town, and one of the first colleges to be used as a prime filming site for Hollywood film studios using it to portray a typical American college. Unlike most, if not all, histories of specific universities, much of the study is devoted to the broader historical ii education context in which UCLA is embedded, and therefore, the popular new public high schools in Los Angeles, UCLA’s predecessors and later competitors in the private sector such as Caltech, USC, Pomona, Occidental, and new junior (later, community) colleges are discussed and examined here. This study is not limited to the standard academic schedule and is not restricted to UCLA’s campus, but also concerns the 1918 flu pandemic, rise of summer session programs, and shows the silent real estate development partnership between public and private sector actors when UCLA moved to its new campus in Westwood. UCLA moved its campus in the 1920s from a few miles north of USC on Vermont Avenue all the way to then pastoral Westwood. Its historical identity was fixed then, as a flagship public university set in the city, but not really of the city. (USC, conversely, embraced its role as the city's university during this period, even though a private institution). Neighboring Westwood Village was the first privately planned college town, nestled among the tony neighborhoods of Bel Air to the north and Holmby Hills to the east. Located in such an exclusive area, UCLA was from the start a difficult environment for students of color and students coming from low-income backgrounds, but still offered great opportunities to many Southern Californians who had until then lacked a local public sector choice for college, and later, for graduate school. UCLA’s early institutional saga was cast in power and prestige, with the ambitions of its faculty and students matching those of its rapidly growing host city. iii The dissertation of William Charles Purdy is approved. Stephen A. Aron Robert A. Rhodes Linda J. Sax Patricia M. McDonough, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv To Avalon v TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I Chapter One: Introduction 2 Chapter Two: Historical Sketch of Los Angeles 33 Chapter Three: Historical Background of California Public Education 53 Chapter Four: History of Private Higher Education in Los Angeles 95 Part II Chapter Five: Summer Sessions in Southern California 122 Chapter Six: World War I and the 1919 Flu Pandemic 138 Chapter Seven: College Films in the 1920s and 1930s 167 Part III Chapter Eight: The Young Life of a New University 190 Chapter Nine: The Once and Future Majority: Women Students at UCLA 230 Chapter Ten: UCLA’s Move to Westwood 255 Epilogue 292 Conclusion 295 Plates 300 Bibliography 329 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work would not have been possible without the love and support of my wife Kier and daughter Avalon. UCLA’s Department of Special Collections and University Archives are full of information that has only just begun to be explored, and it is thanks to former University Archivist Charlotte Brown that I had the chance to work as a graduate student archivist and to explore from that inside perspective the riches buried in the university’s holdings. The Los Angeles Central Public Library is the source of the photographs contemplated for use in this study, and this library has been a tremendous complement to UCLA as I have forged through the study. I am grateful to all the help provided by so many different librarians, archivists, and other staff persons at these libraries. The idea for this study came from my master’s thesis “The History of Higher Education in the Western United States,” where a more focused study on UCLA’s early history appeared to me as just too vital an L.A. story to ignore. Art Cohen chaired that master’s committee, with Pat McDonough and Rob Rhoads serving as well. Several years later, Pat welcomed me back to UCLA, agreeing to serve as my doctoral advisor, and she changed my career and life. There is no finer scholar, mentor, or person than Pat McDonough, and I am fortunate to have worked and studied under her guidance. At UCLA’s year-long 299 seminar, Mitch Chang and Walter Allen helped me develop the core concepts explored in this dissertation, and I learned from Linda Sax the powerful effects of college on students. As Rick Wagoner’s volunteer teaching assistant in ED 209, vii History of Higher Education, I explored the national context of the historical issues presented here. Stephen Aron has welcomed me for years to the Western History Workshop meetings he conducts at the Autry Museum of the American West, and I have learned a great deal from these seminars and from his professional model generally. While not working with her directly, Sylvia Hurtado has always been very supportive of my work and a wonderful mentor figure in her leadership role at the Higher Education Research Institute. Finally, I learned so much, albeit from a distance as I did not work with them directly, from Sandy Astin and the late Helen Astin, and I cherish the small time I spent with the late Bob Clark; in the few moments I spent carrying his books out to his car at the Faculty Center, I learned more than from reading many thick volumes. This work grows directly from his brilliant and lasting scholarly example. If the sinews of war are infinite money, than the sinews of graduate education are at least a steady flow of funds, and I could not have completed this work without working at Holland & Knight, LLP’s Los Angeles office. My office there is a stone’s throw from the original location of the Los Angeles State Normal School, now the site of the Los Angeles Central Public Library, and our building is O’Melveny & Myers’ headquarters, the law firm that played such a strong supporting role in UCLA’s early history. The work assigned to me by Nick Zotos and Gilda Russell, and my association with my co-workers Susan Thompson and Sally Somers has kept me sharp in a private sector kind of way; there simply is no way to wander off into abstract academic clouds when the work of a major law firm keeps one rooted to reality. While I have studied higher education for many years, I knew nothing about it, not really, until I taught with UCLA’s Scandinavian Section. As a Teaching Fellow and viii Summer Instructor, I lived the life of a humanities scholar, and it is terribly sweet, difficult, and delightful. Kim LaPalm, Anna Blomster, Chip Robinson, Tim Tangherlini, Arne Lunde, Pat Wen, Kendra Willson, and Kimberly Ball have been wonderful colleagues, friends, and mentors, and I would be blind to the true life of the university without the knowledge they imparted to me. I carry Hans Christian Andersen, Henrik Ibsen, Isak Dinesen, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius, Amalie Skram, and Pär Lagerkvist in my heart now, all good friends and companions. Many thanks to the administrative offices of the Royce Humanities Group and the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, especially to Kerry Allen at Royce and to Amy Gershon in Moore Hall. I never could have finished my dissertation and defended it successfully without your help. I owe you both a very deep debt of gratitude. Much of this work was presented as various research papers at meetings of the American Educational Research Association, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and the History of Education Society, and the comments and critiques of the discussants for these presentations have improved this work tremendously. The late Les Goodchild, Dot Finnegan, Amy Wells Dolan, Eileen Tamura, and John Thelin have been especially helpful and generous in their time and effort at these conference meetings. In the early stages of this project, Richard Longstreth was very kind to offer me his views on Westwood Village as a real estate development, and his work on Los Angeles has led me in highly useful directions, and I am very grateful to him. I come from a family of teachers, and acknowledge the great examples provided to me by my dad, Charles Purdy, sister, Heather Moskowitz, and my Uncle Bob Purdy.