The Line at Hornbrook

On the night of February 6, 1936, eight men were rounded up in Hornbrook, California, and held overnight in an abandoned hotel. Hornbrook was a sleepy rail stop serving a few hundred people about a dozen miles below the Oregon line. The hotel there had recently been pressed into service as a makeshift jail.

That night, the men were made to sleep on the floor. In the morning each was given half a loaf of bread, walked to the tracks, and herded aboard a freight car headed north, out of the state of California.

None of them had been charged with a crime.

One was a professional wallpaper hanger, traveling south from Oregon to see his sister and her son, a gardener at the San Diego Zoo. Another, James Taylor, had lived in California for years and was simply trying to get home.

He gave an address on Normandie Avenue in Los Angeles, a city where his mother had lived for 30 years. He and his wife had traveled north two months earlier to see an ailing relative in Washington state. He was riding a boxcar back because it was all he could afford. He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and the First World War, drawing disability for tuberculosis he had contracted in the latter.

He had papers on him that verified both his identity and his military service.

It made no difference.

The officers took the men’s fingerprints and wrote down detailed descriptions of their clothing, belongings, and baggage. Taylor later told a Medford, Oregon, newspaper that while the questioning went on, the policemen kept making motions as though to hit them with blackjacks.

Although this little mountain town was roughly 700 miles from Los Angeles, the interrogating officers were from the Los Angeles Police Department.

The operation had begun three days earlier. The Los Angeles Times announced it on the front page with evident satisfaction. One hundred and thirty-six LAPD officers had been dispatched to sixteen crossings along California’s borders with Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona. They covered highway junctions, bridges, and rail yards.

The press affixed a name to this operation almost immediately. It stuck because it was honest in a way official language never is. This was the Bum Blockade.

The program’s author was Chief James Edgar Davis, known as “Two-Gun” Davis for his marksmanship. He instructed his officers to use their own judgment in identifying transients, and he encouraged Los Angeles residents to report beggars to the police.

Davis had no legal authority beyond the city limits of Los Angeles. And he knew it. He wrote to sheriffs in the border counties asking them to deputize his men, which would at least gesture at legitimacy. Three said yes. The rest either declined or never answered. He sent the officers anyway.

For justification he reached back to a state anti-indigent statute passed three years earlier, though the statute didn’t authorize what he was doing.

The people running it understood that.

California’s own attorney general said the blockade was illegal within a day of its launch. The district attorney of Siskiyou County (the county where those eight men slept on the floor) called it unconstitutional. The Times ran an editorial on February 5 dismissing the objection: the courts might stop it eventually, but in the meantime a good many undesirables could be turned back, and a good many more discouraged from setting out at all.

It’s a pattern that shows up in other decades, against other people: the law isn’t the reason for the action. It’s thrown over the action afterward, like a coat, to make it look appropriately dressed.

What’s remarkable about the Bum Blockade isn’t the cruelty. Cruelty, unfortunately, is common. What’s remarkable is the absence of any of the usual justifications.

The men held at Hornbrook were citizens of the United States.

Most were white. They were, overwhelmingly, Protestant, English-speaking, native-born. Many likely came from families who had been on this continent longer than the state of California had existed. They were Americans crossing from one American state into another, something the Constitution was generally understood to protect.

There was no scripture to cite against them. No foreign tongue, no unfamiliar rite, no ship’s manifest, no quota. Every conventional marker of foreignness was missing, and the machinery worked anyway.

What this program had instead was a criterion so elastic it could be applied by eye: whether a man appeared to have visible means of supporting himself. That was the whole of it. An officer standing at a bridge in Siskiyou County looked at a face, a coat, a pair of boots, a car with a mattress lashed to the roof, and made a determination on the spot about whether the person in front of him was the kind of American who could enter California.

There was no court date or hearing. There was no measurable standard of criminality. The discretion wasn’t a flaw in the program. The discretion was the program.

A category of criminal was manufactured in real time, by men with blackjacks: not immigrant, not infidel, not alien. Simply the poor, rendered foreign by nothing but their poverty, at a border that ran between two parts of the same country.

James Taylor found out what that meant when he tried to get back into his home state. He obtained a letter from a Medford attorney stating that the Los Angeles police had no right to stop him. So he tried again. He said afterward that the officers beat him with clubs, knocked out his teeth, and chased him into Oregon. They tore up his driver’s license and the registration slips for two vehicles he owned in California.

He hitchhiked to Portland and found a U.S. attorney, who told him this was a state matter and outside federal reach. His best option, he was advised, was a civil suit.

It would have to be filed in California.

Taylor gave up. He went north to rejoin his wife in Olympia, and his name left the papers.

The blockade didn’t go unchallenged. The pushback came from lawyers, from civil libertarians, from California’s own northern counties, and from across the state line.

Attorneys began preparing the constitutional argument that Davis had never bothered to answer. Can a police chief invent a border and then criminalize crossing it? The American Civil Liberties Union took an interest, and a suit was filed. Northern California officials were furious, less at the injustice than at the trespass. Armed men from another jurisdiction were standing on their doorstep, stopping and arresting their citizens. The sheriff of Modoc County ordered them out of his county entirely.

Someone put up a billboard near the state line outside Reno: a cartoon policeman swinging a baton, and the words STOP, LOS ANGELES CITY LIMITS.

The blockade lasted about two months. By April the officers had come home, quietly, without ceremony, and Davis moved on to other enthusiasms.

The attorneys’ question did get an answer, five years later and in a different case. In 1941, in Edwards v. California, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down California’s law against bringing “indigent” non-residents into the state. A state, the Court ruled, could not wall itself off from the poor of other states.

In the spring of 1936, the blockade was front-page news across the American West. Thousands of people were stopped, questioned, jailed, or shipped back to where they came from. It was photographed. It was editorialized about, defended by the Chamber of Commerce, denounced from pulpits and union halls.

And then, within a few years, the story was gone.

Not suppressed, not disputed, simply dropped, the way any of us drops a memory that no longer flatters us.

In 1919, a train carrying President Wilson paused briefly in Hornbrook on its way from Portland to San Francisco. There is a plaque by the railroad tracks commemorating the stop. It is still there.

There is no marker for what happened in the winter of 1936.

Gary Mellon, a carpenter who has lived in Hornbrook for years and reads local history for pleasure, told the Los Angeles Times this year that he’d never heard of the blockade. He has a gray beard and wears work boots, and he said he looks like a bit of a bum himself sometimes. If he’d been living there then and crossed into Oregon, he wasn’t sure they’d have let him back in.

That’s the last step, and the one that makes all of this possible next time.

The blockade ended in April 1936.

The forgetting is still going strong.