A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth

Starred review from May 20, 2024
The decision to build a port in Los Angeles’s San Pedro Bay was driven by commercial interests, local and national politics, and personal agendas, not by thoughtful analysis of geography and geology, according to this enthralling debut. Historian Tejani documents the mid-19th-century political maneuvering and “machines of the modern state and corporate capital” that heedlessly “tore apart” 3,400 acres of mud and salt marsh, which engineers at the time considered wholly unsuitable for a commercial harbor. But others—among them landowners, surveyors, railroad magnates, shipping merchants, and U.S. senators—saw opportunities to get rich via land speculation, lucrative government contracts, and monopolistic port access. Tejani’s narrative revolves around these men and the conflict, competition, and deception involved in their ambitious decades-long efforts to get the port built, which unfurled in parallel with America’s westward expansion and displacement of Native peoples and the acquisition of Mexican territory by force. Powerful players massaged government policy on these and other issues in the direction most beneficial to the port, which subsequently became central to U.S. imperial aspirations in the Pacific. Tejani astutely conveys the deep entanglement of political and economic interests at the highest echelons of power. The result is a beguiling history of Southern California, early industrial development, and U.S. empire.