CALIFORNIA: Zoot-Suit War

For two nights the mobs of soldiers and sailors had found poor hunting. In long caravans of cabs and private cars they had toured the Mexican sections, armed with sticks and weighted ropes, crashing into movie houses, looking for zoot-suited pachucos, the little Mexican-American youths. But they had found only a few dozen, and not all of them even wore zoot suits. They had broken the jaw of a 12-year-old boy. Said the boy, in the hospital:

“So our guys wear tight bottoms on their pants and those bums wear wide bottoms. Who the hell they fighting, Japs or us?”

One Panzer division of the cab-and-car attack had rolled down a Mexican district side street, past the rows of mean, ramshackle frame houses. But they had only found a few victims to beat. One of them was a 17-year-old Russian boy, Pete Nogikoss, talking on a street corner to two Mexicans. The Mexicans fled. Pete stood still. The sailors beat him to the ground.

Scores of Mexican youths had been stripped of their pants (some of them on the stages of movie houses), beaten and then arrested by the Los Angeles police for “vagrancy” and “rioting.” (The police practice was to accompany the caravans in police cars, watch the beatings and then jail the victims. Their orders apparently were to let the Shore Patrol and the Military Police handle the rioting sailors. The service police were futile.) But now the rioting seemed to be diminishing. The zoot-suiters lay low, the sailors and soldiers had seemingly wreaked sufficient revenge for the several occasions when zoot-hoodlums had attacked and robbed them.

Hearst Moves In. But then the press took up the story. The Hearst newspapers, the Los Angeles Examiner and the Herald & Express, and Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles Times began to blaze. Late-afternoon editions printed black-faced leads about a purported anonymous call to headquarters: “We’re meeting 500 strong tonight and we’re going to kill every cop we see.” The Hearst Herald & Express bannered: ZOOTERS THREATEN L. A. POLICE.

The Mob Moves In. That night all Los Angeles stayed downtown to see the fun. When darkness came to the fog-chilled streets, the sidewalks and streets were jammed with expectant servicemen and civilians. Shore Patrol cars, Military Police and police and sheriffs’ cars patrolled in force.

Scores of cars loaded with soldiers and sailors poured into the area. Soon after dark a mob formed, surged down Broadway, crashed into the Orpheum Theater, went down the aisles shouting for pachucos to stand up. In the balcony the mob found 17-year-old Enrico Herrera, sitting with his girl. He and others were dragged downstairs to the street; the citizenry pushed back to give them room while he was beaten and stripped naked. The crowd howled. When the sailors had finished, the police dutifully edged up, took Herrera to the hospital.

The mob went happily down Broadway, repeating in every theater, the Rialto, the Tower, Loew’s. Others stopped streetcars, pulled off zooters, Mexicans or just dark-complexioned males. On went the mob, ripping pants, beating the young civilians, into the Arcade, the Roxy, the Cameo, the Broadway, the Central and the New Million Dollar theaters. The mood of officialdom (the Shore Patrol, the Military Police, the city police, the sheriff’s office) seemed complaisant.

Hoodlumism. The mob split all over Los Angeles, to Watts, Belvedere, Boyle Heights, El Monte, Baldwin Park, Montebello, San Gabriel — anywhere that Mexicans lived.

Hearst’s Examiner kept pounding: “Police Must Clean Up L.A. Hoodlumism.” The first paragraph of an editorial said: “Riotous disturbances of the past week in Los Angeles by zoot-suit hoodlums have inflicted a deep and humiliating wound on the reputation of this city.”

California’s zoot-suit war was a shameful example of what happens to wartime emotions without wartime discipline.

Some of Los Angeles’ young Mexicans, organized into zoot-suit “gangs” that were the equivalent of boys’ gangs almost any where, had got out of hand: they had robbed and used their knives on some lone sailors on dark side streets. But probably the trouble could have been ended right there. One who thought so was Eduardo Quevedo, a plump, cigar-chewing, shock-headed amateur sociologist, president of the Coordinating Council for Latin Americans, member of the Citizens’ Committee on Latin American youth.

Eight months ago, Goodman Quevedo went to work to stop youthful hoodlumism, started a kind of grown-up Boys Club for the zooters. He knew that they represented a basic American problem: the second generation. Their fathers and mothers were still Mexicans at heart. They themselves were Americans — resented and looked down on by other Americans. Jobless, misunderstood in their own homes and unwelcome outside them, they had fallen into the companionship of misery. They dressed alike, in the most exaggerated and outlandish costume they could afford: knee-length coats, peg-top trousers, yard-long watch chains, “ducktail” haircuts.

If the pachucos had asked for trouble, they got more than was coming to them last week. The military authorities were notably lax (all shore and camp leave could easily have been canceled), the Los Angeles police apparently looked the other way. The press, with the exception of the Daily News and Hollywood Citizen-News, helped whip up the mob spirit. And Los Angeles, apparently unaware that it was spawning the ugliest brand of mob action since the coolie race riots of the 1870s, gave its tacit approval.