by Edward Humes

Bakersfield Diary

Bakersfield is less than a two-hour drive from downtown Los Angeles, yet it has always existed in happy isolation, kept separate from the smog and sprawl of its southern neighbor by the iron gray of the Tehachapi Mountains and the treacherous asphalt snake of the Grapevine Pass, its one connection to the urban centers of Southern California. To cross the Grapevine with its sparse brown brush and stony thumbs of granite jutting through thin soil is to enter a different world, the antithesis of the California of popular imagination.

On the northern side of the Grapevine lies the vast brown and green checkerboard of Kern County, a fertile flatland dominated by big farms and small towns and a people who take outsized pride in being not Los Angeles. It is a land not of glitter or oiled bodies on white–sand beaches or any of the other icons of the California Dream, but of crude oil and tractors, of black dirt under the fingernails and molten, breezeless summers, a place virtually unknown to tourists, though the fruits of its oil derricks and furrows can be found in most every American’s gas tank and pantry.

The City of Bakersfield and its 212,000 citizens preside over an otherwise rural county larger than many states, once a wonderland of lakes, streams and riparian forest, blasted seventy years ago into desert by the voracious faucets of Los Angeles, then irrigated just as voraciously into some of the most productive farmland on earth. As a boy, Pat Dunn ran home from his summer job through a dense, green jungle of trees and brush lining the riverbed that divides the city. The chapped landscape of Bakersfield was known to its frontier settlers as Kern Island, but the river that cut through and enveloped it long ago became a dry and empty sand lot most of the year. Gone, too, is the vast Tulare Lake, where fishermen once caught giant terrapin for turtle soup served in San Francisco restaurants, and where steam–driven paddle boats once traveled from Bakersfield to the San Francisco Bay. Now the ghost of that lake rises only in years of record snow fall, when spring comes to the Sierras and snowmelt flows down to flood the farmland now claiming the ancient lake bed. The rest of the time, the water is given to the carrots, almonds, grapes, citrus and vegetables of every shape and color — most of the nation’s table food comes from Kern and the neighboring counties that make up California’s Great Central Valley.

The place and the people north of the Grapevine evoke the Great Plains more than Hollywood. Immigrants fleeing the midwestern Dust Bowl of the Thirties — Pat Dunn’s family among them — boosted Kern County’s population by half during the Depression. The newcomers’ descendants, once derided as Okies by the same folks who denounced Steinbeck and banned The Grapes of Wrath (in large part set in a mortified Kern County), now run the place. Theirs is the heartland of California — the real California — conservative, law–and–order, the toughest jurisdiction in the toughest state in the Union when it comes to cracking down on crime, no small claim in a state with a prison system that dwarfs every nation in the world save China. Here, the most powerful and feared politician in town is not the mayor or the local congressman. It’s the District Attorney.

The region clings to its frontier legacy, a rough–hewn place built by gold and oil fever, where gunfights and lynchings continued well into the Twentieth Century, and where a fierce desire for law and order still competes with an intense distaste for government, regulations and outside interference in local affairs. Homesteads are still sold by the acre here, not the square foot. Horse ownership is common, gun ownership, more so. Huge banners along Highway 99 politick against conservation and in favor of subsidized water for farmers: “Food Grows Where Water Flows,” they say. Smaller, hand–lettered signs dot the side roads with more iconoclastic messages: “IRS stands for In Range Shooting.” The American Civil Liberties Union may have closed down its Bakersfield office, citing lack of interest, but the tax–protest and militia movements have flourished here. Indeed, a flamboyant local state senator suffered no loss of popularity for associating with white separatists or for rising in the Capitol Rotunda to inveigh against the “one–world government” conspiracy so popular with his militiamen admirers. Around the same time Pat Dunn’s legal travails began, this senator tried to avoid paying the IRS $150,000 in back taxes by renouncing his U.S. citizenship in favor of something he claimed took precedence: “white man’s citizenship.” The senator served eighteen years representing Kern County in the California State Capitol before term limits — not the voters — forced him to retire in 1997.

Though the politics of water, taxes and fears of one–world governments may dominate behind the scenes at times, out front, on the stump and in the headlines, it is crime that most often concerns this community. It is a concern that, though shared with the rest of the nation, seems a special obsession here, part of a long and vivid history that has repeatedly drawn the nation’s eyes toward Kern County in ways both dramatic and bizarre. The pursuit of wild criminal conspiracies are a recurring theme, with widespread belief in them rarely hindered by a lack of evidence: Satanists, poisoned watermelons, killer bees, and a sinister shadow government dubbed the “Lords of Bakersfield” all have aroused fears and demands for harsh punishment in recent years.

Even a century ago, passing journalists remarked on the extremes of frontier justice in Bakersfield. In 1877, they took note of one sensational case of horse thievery that ended in the summary execution of five rustlers. The fate of the accused was not so remarkable for the era, perhaps, but the courtroom argument that led to their sentence was quite extraordinary, setting the standard for justice in Kern County for years to come: “If it please the court, and the gentlemen of the jury, of all the low, miserable, depraved scoundrels that I have ever come in contact with, these defendants, without any grounds for defense, are the most ornery rascals that I have ever met, and I think the best thing we could do is take them out and hang them as soon as possible.”

The extraordinary thing of it was that this passionate argument, which preceded the lynch mob’s handiwork by a matter of minutes, was made by the defense attorney appointed in the case.

Yet, this same town that could be so ruthless in its war on crime was at the same time also gripped by a breathtaking municipal corruption far more costly than any stolen horse. Open partnerships existed for years between police chiefs, elected officials, houses of prostitution, illegal casinos and the protection rackets that sustained them all. The civic corruption in Bakersfield became so institutionalized that, on certain downtown streets, one sidewalk would be reserved for “proper” citizens, while across the street, the promenade belonged to hookers, gamblers and drug dealers operating in plain sight. The situation continued for much of this century, surviving even a 1950s threat of occupation and martial law from the commander of a nearby Army base. The essential contradiction here — of a community fanatically intolerant of crime yet curiously accepting of official misconduct — would become another recurring theme in Kern County history.

This civic schizophrenia revealed itself again when a different and far more malevolent brand of corruption came to light in the 1920s, when the county battled a wave of terrorism, beatings and arsons sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan. The white–hooded riders of the KKK had taken over the county by night — and many government offices by day, as one after another elected official swore allegiance to the Klan. KKK violence in California and particularly in Kern County rivaled that of the Deep South in this era, though the West Coast version was aimed at whites as well as black and brown citizens. Doctors, dentists, detectives and businessmen were beaten, threatened and driven from town for opposing the KKK’s “invisible empire.” One evening in the Kern County city of Taft, an oil’laden desert town just west of Bakersfield where beer was priced cheaper than water, most of the police department and civic leaders turned out to watch the Klan torture several people in a local ballpark. They gathered as if viewing a spectator sport. Refreshments were served. (In 1975, Taft again made national headlines when thirteen black athletes were run out of town by a white mob, while neighboring Oildale became infamous for its “No Niggers Allowed” road signs.)

By 1922, avowed Klan members controlled the Bakersfield mayor’s office, various police departments, much of the sheriff’s force of deputies, several judgeships, the city school district, and the county Board of Supervisors, whose powerful chairman, once exposed, unabashedly wrote he was proud of “the good work” of the KKK, adding in a front–page newspaper column, “I make no apology for the Klan. It needs none.” He would serve a total of six terms and twenty–four years in office — most of it after his Klan affiliation was made public.

The Klan’s allure in Kern County and other parts of Southern California lay as much in clever marketing as in its traditional message of racial hatred: The group pitched itself as a Christian fraternity that could combat the frontier corruption plaguing Bakersfield and other cities of the era. As such, it was able to attract not only avowed racists, but ordinary members of the community who had tired of the open culture of vice — and who were willing to tolerate the Klan’s brutality if it meant cleaning up the streets, trading one form of crime for another. The KKK in Kern County billed itself as the scourge of immorality, but it simply recruited the corrupt, rather than combat them, then launched its own lawless brand of terrorism and thuggery on dissenters of every race.

But the Klan’s infiltration of Kern County government and law enforcement and its brazen attacks on ordinary citizens also led to one of the county’s finest moments in its long war on crime. A courageous District Attorney named Jess Dorsey, aided by a crusading local press, revealed the organization’s long reach and corrupting influence. The D.A. showed how members were required, among other things, to take an oath that superseded any vows of office or citizenship — police chiefs and sheriffs literally swore to protect the Klan before enforcing the law. Numerous police chiefs and officers, judges, and city and county officials had taken this oath and had attended meetings in which fellow Klansmen planned and described lynchings, beatings, kidnappings and arsons — yet none of these officials interceded or reported the crimes. Some took part in the offenses, while others used their official standing to cover for Klan members.

“Here the most brutal atrocities on the coast have been committed,” the Bakersfield Californian editorialized on May 19, 1922, in the wake of a scathing grand jury report on the KKK’s growing presence in Kern County. “Here the Klan has gained its greatest headway in official circles. And here lies the greatest danger for the future, unless the organization is destroyed while public sentiment demands its destruction.”

For a brief time, it seemed District Attorney Dorsey might succeed in bringing about that destruction. Blistered by headlines and public protests after years of acting with impunity, most of the KKK members in public office resigned or were ousted from official positions. But others, County Board of Supervisors Chairman Stanley Abel among them, simply grew a bit more discreet — clinging to their positions by razor–thin election margins, though their closets still held white capes and hoods. The furor ended anticlimactically, with Dorsey’s vaunted grand jury charging a mere three Klan members with assault, their trial dominated by a line of one hundred and fifty prominent citizens snaking out of the courthouse, each man eager to testify to the defendants’ good character. The three offenders, though convicted, walked out of court on probation, and a newspaper called the Kern County Klansmen smugly wrote, “Listen Mr. Dorsey, there are more Klansmen in Kern County today than there were thirty days ago… If you think that you have put the Klan out of business in this county you are badly mistaken.”

The controversy soon died and D.A. Dorsey found himself voted out of office. A decade later, not long before Pat Dunn was born in a farm camp north of Bakersfield, the luster came off the county’s war on crime, when another wave of beatings, false imprisonments and suspected murders hit Kern County. But this time, the justice system did little to combat the crimes, and much to protect the perpetrators. For this time, the target of the violence had shifted from local victims to outsiders who commanded far less sympathy — the Dust Bowl refugees and other impoverished migrant workers who arrived in Kern County in the 1930s from throughout the Southwest, desperate for work and easily preyed upon. It was a time of goon squads, red–baiting, labor riots and disease–ridden shantytowns built of cardboard and hunger.

The KKK members still in government found new favor in this era, for now the local press and a new D.A. joined in supporting “stern treatment” — a euphemism for beatings and union–busting — as justifiable and necessary to protect farm profits and to ward off the Communist menace the immigrants supposedly represented. Farm workers from Oklahoma, Arkansas and other drought–plagued states came to be reviled as shiftless lowlife who would overrun the good citizens of Kern County — then numbering only 30,000 — with far greater numbers. Signs sprang up in Bakersfield restaurants and other public places, proclaiming, “No Niggers or Okies.” In 1939, Kern County — still led by Klansman Stanley Abel —— banned the Grapes of Wrath from schools and libraries for its fictionalized portrait of the farm workers’ plight, inadvertently putting John Steinbeck on the national map and raising Bakersfield to national ridicule. (To this day, Kern County remains home to some of the riches farms and the poorest farm workers in America.)

Among the desperate and poor legions flocking to Central California during this era of Great Depression and Dust Bowl drought was the Dunn Family. They came three years before Pat Dunn was born, leaving behind a ruined farm and a foreclosed house. Toward the end of their time in Oklahoma, the dust’laden winds sweeping across the devastated land had become so thick and pervasive that it would swallow the sun for days at a time. Birds dropped from trees, suffocated. The Dunns had to sleep with wet rags covering their mouths and noses, lest they suffer a similar fate. When there was nothing left but debts and death and the sifting sound of dust, they packed up what belongings their aging car could hold, and headed toward the promised land they had heard so much about, California.

Their first home in paradise was a tent.