The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks, and Scandal During the Roaring Twenties - Hardcover

Tygiel, Jules

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019505489X ISBN 13: 9780195054897

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1994

Synopsis

In Los Angeles in the 1920s, C.C. Julian and the Julian Petroleum Corporation were household words, and the Julian Pete swindle ranked with Teapot Dome as one of the great scandals of the era. It symbolized not merely what FDR would call "a decade of debauchery of group selfishness," but the failed hopes and dreams of the great boom of the 1920s. Indeed, no single story captures the essence of that decade in America--its boosterism and rampant speculation, its entrepreneurial mania for mergers, its overlap of business and politics, and its infatuation with wealth, whiskey, and Hollywood glamor--quite so well as the Julian Petroleum swindle.
The Great Los Angeles Swindle begins with a murder (the sudden courtroom shooting of banker Motley Flint, the debonaire movie financier and city booster), ends with a spectacular suicide in Shanghai (where C.C. Julian downs a vial of poison after a lavish champagne dinner), and, in between, takes as many unexpected twists and turns as any mystery novel. Jules Tygiel offers a gripping account of this wonderfully complex scandal, which features such legendary figures as Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin (who decks Julian in a fistfight in Hollywood's posh Cafe Petroushka), Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, H.M. Haldeman (grandfather of Watergate's H.R. Haldeman), and pioneer radio evangelist "Fighting Bob" Shuler. Conmen, bankers, underworld kingpins, political bosses, a corrupt district attorney, bribed jurors, and other colorful characters round out the cast.
At the book's center stands the flamboyant C.C. Julian, a likable if unscrupulous promoter, whose life was flavored with controversy. Tygiel follows Julian to Los Angeles, where during the spectacular oil boom of the 1920s, his innovative newspaper advertising and early successes (Julian No. 1 still pumped oil decades after the promoter himself had died) won him a devoted following. Force to cut back production by major oil companies, he created Julian Petroleum, which he promised would soon rival Standard Oil. Dispensing "Defiance Gasoline" from its pumps, Julian Petroleum fought off the efforts of state regulatory agencies and federal investigators to shut it down, before Julian had to surrender ownership to oilman S.C. Lewis. Lewis and his crafty associate, Jacob Berman, over-issued millions of shares of counterfeit stock while pyramiding stock pools and loan schemes into a $150,000,000 fraud. The infamous Million Dollar Pool (which included Flint, Mayer, Haldeman, and other prominent Los Angeles businessmen) delivered lucrative profits to its elite members, while tens of thousands of small investors lost their nest eggs when Julian Petroleum collapsed in 1927. The aftermath of the scandal included the longest trial in the history of the county (which produced 99 volumes of trial transcripts, cost in excess of $250,000, and convicted no one), unseated a district attorney and a governor, enthroned a former Ku Klux Klansman as mayor of Los Angeles, and filled the courts with related cases and scandalous revelations well into the Depression decade.
The Great Los Angeles Swindle is a saga of the roaring twenties, with its glorification of business, its get-rich-quick mentality, and its paucity of government regulation, which bred speculation, corruption, and corporate chaos throughout the nation in a manner not dissimilar to the financial chicanery of our own era. Above all, it is a compelling story and swiftly moving narrative that readers will not soon forget.

About this title

About the Author:

About the Author:
Jules Tygiel is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the acclaimed volume Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A lackluster retelling of a celebrated stock-rigging case and its aftershocks, which rippled through Los Angeles for the better (or worse) part of a decade, from the author of Baseball's Great Experiment (1983). Tygiel (History/San Francisco State Univ.) offers a detailed albeit uninflected account of the Julian Petroleum fraud that flowed from Southern California's pre-Depression oil boom. He recounts how a Canadian hustler yclept C.C. (for Courtney Chauncey) Julian parlayed folksy newspaper ads and some fortuitous wildcat successes into the dubious energy enterprise bearing his name. Despite a devoted following among trusting souls with high hopes and short bankrolls, the master of the promotional game ultimately lost control of his precariously capitalized company to an even shiftier predator, S.C. Lewis. Lewis routinely released false financial statements, rhapsodized about illusory mergers, and issued appreciably more shares than authorized by the corporate charter while pools organized by rival brokerage houses made huge profits trading in the watered stock. The bubble finally burst in mid-1927, resulting in a wealth of recriminations, several tabloid- quality deaths, scores of indictments, but precious few convictions. Tygiel does a tolerably good job of tracking those who played peripheral as well as leading roles in the megabuck ripoff. Unfortunately, his fact-filled narrative (with illustrations throughout) lacks any systematic perspective on either the socioeconomic factors or absence of regulatory restraints that permitted white-collar scofflaws to prey on the investing public in the anything-goes environment that led to the 1929 market crash. Nor does the author place the West Coast racketeers in a broader context that might have prefigured their latter-day counterparts on Wall Street, in Beverly Hills, or elsewhere. The bottom line: a linear take on an oldish rogues-to-riches tale, conspicuously deficient in the resonance that could have made it worth retelling. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 019505489X
• ISBN 13: 9780195054897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432