Running Thread on the ignominious history of the Los Angeles DA’s Office

Isaac Ogier, DA from 1851-1852, organized the first vigilante squads responsible for making early Los Angeles a “Lynchocracy” in the words of contemporary accounts. This is currently presented on the official LA DA website.

What is not mentioned is Ogier - who came from South Carolina - was also a legislator who, in 1850, introduced a bill “against the emigration to [California] of free negroes.“ http://www.metnews.com/articles/2011/perspectives051111.htm

Ogier’s successor, Kimbal Dimmick, was DA from 1852-53. He was an early colonizer of California. His papers are full of letters describing an almost fanatical desire to kill Mexicans and indigenous people. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf1t1n98w6/entire_text/

Dimmick was obsessed with prosecuting indigenous people for possession of alcohol, which was a legal method for enslavement. Other accounts of his life are Truly pathetic. http://metnews.com/articles/2006/perspectives071206.htm

Dimmicks successor was Benjamin Eaton, namesake of Eaton Canyon in Pasadena. His son owned a ranch in the Owens Valley and worked with Mulholland to create the LA water system.

Eaton’s daughter was married to the son of Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, who was a leader of LA’s secessionist militia, the Mounted Rifles, and was appointed by Jefferson Davis to command the Western Theater of the war. https://books.google.com/books?id=YSkPAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA482&lpg=PA482&dq=benjamin+eaton+los+angeles+district+attorney&source=bl&ots=F36Iu_zLx1&sig=ACfU3U061OUMdKmaRBnBlGqMhaGQeWfeZg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiE_8LD2snrAhUHv54KHWJmAA44HhDoATAHegQIChAB#v=onepage&q=benjamin%20eaton%20los%20angeles%20district%20attorney&f=false

Next came Cameron Thom, another soldier of the Confederacy. https://twitter.com/LADefenders2020/status/1300953048307494912?s=20

Thom was a large landowner whose ranch in Glendale is now Rossmoyne. The homes built in the tract all came with racial restrictive covenants, making a direct thru line from LA DA’s trying to ban Black people from California to those trying to ban Black people from neighborhoods.

Thom owned slaves before the war, and was only able to serve as DA because of a pardon obtained in a notoriously corrupt process from President Johnson that Intentionally undermined Reconstruction. Now there’s a street named after him in DTLA.

Next up is Ezra Drown, one of the only non-secessionist officials of early LA. He made a name for himself prosecuting sex workers, most of whom were of Chinese descent, events which led to the infamous Chinese Massacre of 1871. https://books.google.com/books?id=qJGNgL_HJ-4C&pg=PT83&lpg=PT83&dq=%22ezra+drown%22+los+angeles&source=bl&ots=W2g9lvcqY1&sig=ACfU3U0qPse0SsjJyXQih8l-gl2PO3zTUA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjuoqjq4snrAhVxMX0KHfAMD3c4KBDoATAHegQIAhAB#v=onepage&q=%22ezra%20drown%22%20los%20angeles&f=false

Drown survived a shipwreck and became a celebrity / man of many hats -- he sat on the City Council, Police Committee, helped formation of the Gas Company, oversaw the Water Loan Ordinance Committee, etc., all before serving as DA. https://cityclerk.lacity.org/ChronoLA/index.cfm?fuseaction=app.FacultyDetail&OfficeHolderID=52

Next up was Edward J.C. Kewen, LA DA from 1859-61. He was CA's first AG, then a DA in LA. Then in 1862, the 2nd year of the Civil War, he was imprisoned in Alcatraz for advocating secession.

Gonna spend a time with Kewen. Orig from Mississippi, his parents died when he was just 8 years old. While a student at Wesleyan, he discovered he was swindled out of his inheritance -- his family's large estate in Mississippi, so he locked himself in a room and studied the law.

After moving to CA in 1849, he joined William Walker, an American mercenary who tried to invade Nicaragua in 1855 in the spirit of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. He was later commissioned as a financial agent of the Republic of Nicaragua.

As the head of a Nicaraguan tribunal, Kewen authorized force to seize steamships owned by the Vanderbilts then operating in the country. It was a bad call, and led to the Vanderbilts arming Costa Rica to attack the Walker government in Nicaragua.

Walker then sent Kewen to Southern States to raise more money to underwrite their cause. He mobilized 800 men to travel to Nicaragua to fight back, but abandoned the mission after learning that Walker had been arrested.

Utterly defeated, Kewen moved back to California in 1857, where he took up residence in LA and soon became DA, and then an Assembly member, where he advocated or secession and imprisoned. The racist newspaper in town, LA Herald, honored him as a political prisoner.

When he died, he was living in the Old Mill at the Mission San Gabriel. He took ownership of the property just a year before becoming DA. One can imagine how he acquired the former Mission property. A street now bears the Kewen family name in San Marino. http://www.old-mill.org/history 

Kewen's probably stolen Mission property was eventually acquired by the Huntington Family, and became the golf course and club house of the Huntington Hotel (now the Langham). In 1965, it became the HQ for the California Historical Society.

Indeed Kewen came to own the Old Mill - El Molino Viejo - through litigation before the Land Commission, even though it had been sold by the Mexican govt to somebody else... proceedings widely recognized to be the legal means by which Americans stole the Land on which LA sits.

Btw this is how the California Historical Society describes the construction of the mill... white supremacy and capitalism are inextricably linked.

Next is Alfred Beck Chapman, LA DA and real estate attorney and cofounder of Orange,CA with land he is said to have been paid in lieu of legal fees.

Chapman owned a large, 1600 acre ranch in San Gabriel, from which he famously forced the removal on indigenous people living upon the land.

I won’t draw a direct link from Chapman to the rise of the KKK in Orange County in the 1920s, after he died. But it is argued his anti-labor attitudes of his family which managed the development had something to do with it. https://fullertonobserver.com/2019/01/07/a-brief-history-of-the-ku-klux-klan-in-orange-county-notes-on-the-banality-of-evil/

Chapman must have owed his success as a real estate speculator to his knowledge of title transfer issues in the early American period of California — one of the mechanisms by which property was dispossed from the Mexican and indigenous populations. https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.clta.org/resource/resmgr/Docs/Consumers/HistoryOfTitleIns_Briscoe.pdf

He also must have owed his success in real estate to being the District Attorney — he knew how to use criminal laws to oust squatters and indigenous communities from open ranchos, privately owned land.

Looking back, it’s clear what shaped the LA DA’s offices formative years: racism, slavery, colonization, secessionism, violence, land and wealth transfer, all of which lay the groundwork for the system of suburban apartheid that would emerge in the 20th century.