Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California, G.P. Putnam's Sons: NY, 1977, 603 pp.
"San Francisco Special Prosecutor Hiram Johnson, a leader of the state's progressive movement [1909] . . . duiring a mass meeting in Los Angeles's Simpson Auditorium, [in a response to a question about General Otis of the Los Angeles Times]:
"In the city from which I have come, we have drunk to the very dregs the cup of infamy; we have had vile officials; we have had rotten newspapers; we have had men who sold their birthright; we have dipped into every infamy; every form of wickedness has been ours in the past; every debased passion and every sin has flourished. But we have nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco, nor did we ever have, as Harrison Gray Otis . . .
"He sits there in senile dementia, with gangrened heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of Southern California; he is the bar sinister upon your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all California looks at, when, in looking at Southern California, they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked and putrescent-that is Harrison Gray Otis." p. 79