In the spring of 1926 the voters of Los Angeles were asked to decide whether to accept a modern rapid transit system for their metropolis. The referendum campaign, a watershed moment in American urban history, forced citizens to choose whether their rapidly growing city should develop into a centralized conurbation of skyscrapers linked by an extensive transit infrastructure, like New York and Chicago, or become a metropolis dominated by low-density development. Crucially, the campaign—charged with vivid rhetoric and metaphor, mobilized primarily by local newspapers—ultimately turned on Angelenos' conceptions of race and class and on their notions of what cosmopolitan urbanism entailed. By election day, urbanity no longer connoted for Angelenos towering skyscrapers and unlimited progress, but the specter of slums, ghettoes, and darkness, both metaphorical and literal, as Southern Californians chose to abandon Jazz Age modernity for a mythology of whiteness and suburban sunshine.