Ocean Park

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.

Part I: 1881-1917

2. A Viable Port

     "In the fall of 1888  . . .

     " . . .

     " . . . Los Angeles had a new Chamber of Commerce.

     " . . . among many of those who had seen more than a decade on the coast that Southern California would never be able to support the great horde of people that had crowded into it, and that under no circumstances should any more be invited to come."

     " . . . chamber officials disagreed . . .

    "Since the founding of the city of Los Angeles in 1781, fur traders, travelers, and immigrants had been making use of the natural habor afforded by San Pedro Bay, twenty miles south of the city. Until the gold rush, San Pedro had been one of the most important shipping points on the West Coast. "It was the only port for a distance of eighty miles," Richard Dana wrote of San Pedro in Two Years Before the Mast, "and about thirty miles in the interior was a fine plain country, filled with herds of cattle, in the center of which was the pueblo of Los Angeles-the largest town in California-and several of the largest missions; to all of which San Pedro was the seaport."

     "By 1869 . . . Los Angeles voters passed a bond to finance a . . . public-owned railroad . . . The line was subsequently given to the Southern Pacific in 1876 as part of the deal to get the SP to make Los Angeles its southern terminal . . .

     " . . . In 1872, a small initial congressional appropriation . . .

     "The need for the harbor became more pressing with the anouncement of the government's plans to help construct a canal across the Isthmus of Pananma . . . In the fall of 1889, the chamber helped organize an expedition of United States senators to the port. The group included California Senators Leland Stanford and George Hearst (father of William Randolph Hearst); Senator William Frye from Maine, chairman of the Rivers and Harbors Committee; Senator John P. Jones from Nevada; and several other officials  . . .

      " . . .

     "In 1890, the Southern Pacific's monopoly over harbor lands in San Pedro was about to be broken. That year, a syndicate of St. Louis capitalists incorporated the Los Angeles Terminal Railway Corporation . . . from Glendale . . . to a point just opposite San Pedro.

     ". . . In April 1890, at a SP board of directors' meeting, Collis (C.P. Huntington replaced Leland Stanford as president of the company . . .

     ". . . Huntington . . . began to buy and lease land in the Santa Monica area. Twenty-five miles up the coast from San Pedro, the community of Santa Monica had become a favorite beach resort of many inland residents of Southern California. In 1875 Nevada Senator John P. Jones, a Santa Monica landowner, in conjunction with several local businessmen, had constructed a 1,800-foot wharf and a railroad to connect the town to Los Angeles . . . the Southern Pacific bought Jones' properties.

      ". . .

     "The Craighill report, released in October 1892, supported the San Pedro site. Senator Jones, who still maintained an interest in the Southern Pacific's Santa Monica holdings . . .

      ". . . a new antimonopoly coalition emerged in Los Angeles to fight for a "free harbor". . . Democrats and Republicans, as well as the growing populist People's Party; most of the business interests; nearly the entire labor movement; and the Los Angeles Times . . .

     ". . .

     "In a clever move, playing off vested interests, Huntington proposed that Congress fund both the San Pedro site and the Santa Monica Long Pier. California Democratic and junior Senator, Stephen White blocked the Senate Committee vote.

     ". . .

      "During the double appropriations controversy, the Herald, whose publisher, U.S. Senator Cornelius Cole, owned land in Santa Monica, came out in favor of the Santa Monica site . . .

     " . . .

     "On April 26 and 27, 1899, Los Angeles celebrated with a giant Free Harbor Jubilee as the first rocks were dumped in San Pedro Bay . . ."

Chapter 4 "The Pestiferous Reformers"

     " . . .

     ". . . in 1904 . . .

     ". . .  Los Angeles reformers prepared to challenge the Southern Pacific hold-through its local power broker Walter Parker-on the city administration. Many of the earliest efforts were led by John Randolph Haynes, a wealthy doctor whose patients included Harrison Gray Otis. Haynes believed that the first goal for social and political reform in Los Angeles was to take control of the government away from the Southern Pacific. Back in 1895 Haynes had organized the Direct Legislation League, a nonpartison organization whose goal was to institute the initiative, the referendum, and the recall as a means of ousting the SP from power. The group hoped to incorporate those reforms into the city charter, and in 1898 it joined with the League for Better City Government, led by Charles Willard, and several other reform organizations in a bid to reform the old charter. But that attempt and a second one in 1900 were unsuccessful.

     "Otis's son-in-law Harry Chandler was among those elected to the 1900 Board of Freeholders, which attempted to introduce the reforms into the city charter . . .

     "Los Angeles was the first city in the United States to adopt the recall and the first to put it into use . . ." p. 67

     ". . .

     ". . . in 1906  . . .

     " . . . Otis and Chandler had become more closely aligned with the new head of the Southern Pacific, Edward Henry (E.H.) Harriman, who had joined several Otis/Chandler land-buying syndicates." p. 69

     " . . . the Public Ownership League candidate Stanley Wilson. The Public Ownership League . . . was a coalition of labor, socialist, and municipal ownership advocates . . . called for the municipal ownership of both the Owens River water power plant and the electric railway to San Pedro, and fair wages for labor . . ." p. 69

     " . . .

     "Adjutant General Moses Sherman, who had come to Los Angeles with his brother-in-law Eli P. Clark in 1889, held extensive interests in real estate, public utilities, and the streetcar and interurban railways and was a close associate in many of Harry Chandler and General Otis's financial deals . . ." p. 77

     "San Francisco Special Prosecutor Hiram Johnson, a leader of the state's progresssive 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

     ". . . The progressive-influenced 1910 Republican state platform . . . recognized "the wage earner has the same right to organize for the improvement of the conditions under which he labors that the capitalist has to use his capital in corporate enterprises." The progressive Republicans hoped to pass an employer's liability act; to institute the initiative, recall and referendum on the state level . . .

     " . . .

     "Hiram Johnson won the election. . . .

     " . . . His administration enacted the initiative, referendum, and recall measures, and . . . "cross-filing" for primaries . . . the reorganization of private utility regulation with rate-fixing determined by the state; a water and power conservation act; the establishment of a railroad commission; a pure food act; the approval of women's sufferage; old age pensions; reorganization of the state's tax system; and some thiry-nine labor laws such as workman's compensation, minimum wage requirements, and the eight hour day for women . . ." p. 80

     " . . .

     "A year before he died, [July 30, 1917] Otis had deeded his Wilshire Blvd. home, the Bivouac, to Los Angeles County, to be used as a center for art and music. After the county picked up an option on the adjoining Earl estate, [Otis' archenemy] it began construction on a school for the arts, which was eventually called the Otis Art Institute." p. 117

Part II: 1917-1941

"The Richest Man in Southern California"

     "If Harry Chandler had the same moral shrewdness and character as his commercial intelligence, county supervisor John Anson Ford said of his long-time opponent, "Los Angeles would now be the finest city in America."

     " . . .

     ". . . When a temporary lull in Southern California immigration occurred during and immediately after World War I, Chandler worried that the decrease in tourism might have been partially responsible . . . Out of discussions came the idea for the All Year Club, an organization specifically designed to encourage year round tourism and permanent immigration . . . The hotel owners contributed the initial funds to the organization . . . Afterwards the business group arranged for the county board of supervisors to give funds to the organization in the public interest. Each year the businessmen who served as directors of the All Year Club hosted a luncheon for the supervisors at the elite California Club and each year the supervisors earmarked larger and larger appropriations to keep the club going . . . The subsidies lasted over thirty-five years, until the late 1950s . . ." p. 124

     ". . . secretive, Chandler [Otis' son-in-law] was a Congregationalist and a Mason-he abstained from alcohol, backed organizations like the Salvation Army . . .

     ". . . reserved manner. But behind the scenes, he [associated] with the roughest and meanest provocateurs, police spies, and speculators . . ." p. 126

Chapter 8 The Empire Builder

     "When the Huntington interests-owners of both street car lines and utility companies-merged with the Kerckhoff interests to form Southern California Edison, a near-monopoly in utilities . . . for wherever the Huntington railways extend their lines, the Huntington electric and gas companies are preparing to furnish fuel and light." p. 145

     ". . . We have received great assistance from the employers," real estate speculator Edwin Janss testified before a governmental commission in 1914 . . .

     "Los Angeles bootsters actively promoted Los Angeles as the city with more wage earning home owners than any other city in the country. But many of the new suburban homes, Janss admitted, were little more than shacks of two-room frame construction, and although payments frequently lasted up to seven years, families were often unable to maintain them. Keying the policy to the open shop notion, employers were able to utilize the real estate situation to their benefit . . ." p. 145

     " . . .

     "By World War I real estate, according to one observer, had become "our chief stock in trade in Los Angeles." The city had almost five thousand real estate agents, that number increasing rapidly in the next decade  . . .

     ". . . They have no organized connection with one another," novelist Upton Sinclair bitterly wrote of an expanding Los Angeles. "Each is an individual desiring to live his own life, and to be protected in his own little privileges. The community is thus a parasite upon the great industrial centers of other parts of America. It is smug and selt-satisfied making the sacredness of property the first and last article of its creed . . . Its social life is display, its intellectual life is 'boosting,' and its politics are run by Chambers of Commerce and Real Estate Exchanges." p. 146

     " . . .

     "In the summer of 1936 Chandler organized his last major syndicate. In the name of the Rancho Santa Anita Corporation, Chandler and associates purchased what remained of the Lucky Baldwin ranch in the area called Arcadia, east of Los Angeles. In a complex series of transactions, the Chandler syndicate purchased the valuable 1,300 acres with its historic buildings on July 1, and three months later made the Chandler holding company, the Chandler-Sherman Corporation, trustee over the property after it had made a $450,000 loan at 71/2 % interest to the Rancho Santa Anita syndicate.

     "The syndicate then sold nearly one-fifth of the property to the Los Angeles Turf Club, a syndicate operation involving local real estate people and Hollywood investors such as Hal Roach. The Turf Club had built a racetrack on another portion of the Baldwin property it had purchased a few years earlier, just after the California Legislature had legalized racing. The Turf Club syndicate had also been involved in the acquisition and development of Lake Arrowhead on the California/Nevada border . . ." p. 152

Chapter 10: The Red Menace

1. Bolsheviks at Home and Abroad

     ". . .

     ". . . 1919-1920. Employers saw "Red" behind every strike, as the Red tag became a convenient way to consolidate the business establishment's resistance to socialists, labor unions, and reformers." p. 186

     "Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, a businessman close to the National Association of Manufacturers, in an attempt to destroy the country's radical movements, extended-with the aid of his assistant J. Edgar Hoover-the Red scare campaigns through his infamous nighttime raids in 1919 and 1920, which rounded up an estimated 10,000 men and women in cities all over the United States . . ." p. 187

     " . . .

     " . . . A strong anti-IWW sentiment developed, which ultimately manifested itself in an outbreak of vigilantism . . . The vigilantes gave the Wobblies an ultimatum to leave town, loaded them on trucks, threw their furniture into the street, and escorted them to the city limits of Los Angeles, where many were arrested for disturbing the peace . . .

     ". . . A group of conservative Southern California business men, organized as the Commercial Federation, pressured state authorities to move against the radicals. State legislators responded by passing the California Criminal Syndicalism Act." p. 187

     "The act, specifically aimed at the IWW, defined criminal syndicalism as anything which advocated the commission of crime, sabotage, force, violence, or terrorism to effect changes in the industrial or political order. Anyone who even circulated literature or belonged to a group which advocated such beliefs would be subject to felony charges, punishable by one to fourteen years in prison. Mere membership in a group lik the IWW was thus grounds for arrest.

     "Other states had passed similar laws between 1917 and 1920, but none were used with such vehemence as California's . . . Over five hundred people, primarily IWW members, were arrested on syndcialism charges, with more than one hundred going to jail . . . In the climate of the postwar anti-Red hysteria, Los Angeles employers were able to employ . . . "legal terrorism." p. 188

     ". . . The American Legion . . . set up a "Law and Order" committee to work with the police . . .

     ". . . fifteen legionaires were sworn in as special deputies, and Burton Fitts, one of the leaders of the California Legion, was made special district attorney. Later, the police established an "anarchist and bomb squad," forerunner of the infamous "Red Squad" . . . Then the Los Angeles City Council passed a "Red Flag Law" which made display of any flag or banner or symbol of opposition to organized government a felony. The law was quickly overturned.

     "The liaison between the American Legion, the police and the city's business leaders-with the cooperation of the AFL-soon succeeded in undermining IWW strength in the city . . . In 1920 Mayor Snyder praised the Legionaires for their part in ridding Los Angeles of the IWW "nuisance."

2. The American Plan and the B.A.F.

     "The methods that worked so well in destroying the radical movements were also applied against the regular labor movement and its sympathizers, as well as against any liberal political movement. A well-organized campaign against trade unions developed out of a national network of open shop organizations, many of which sprang up overnight after World War I, which gathered in Chicago in January 1921. The basic strategy-offically adopted in the name of the "American Plan"-was to equate the open shop with Americanism, while labeling unionism and the closed shop "un-American" and equating every demand for better pay, shorter hours, or regulation of child labor as the first stage of a Communist takeover.

     "The American Plan involved a lot more than just propaganda. In the name of protecting the American way, employer organizations made frequent use of strongarm measures such as the discharge of union members, the blacklist, the "yellow dog" contract (under which a worker was forced to sign a statement as a condition of employment that he or she would not join a union), professional strikebreakers, company unions, and outright violence . . ." p. 189

     ". . .

     "Open shop employers also had the aid of a new organization-the Better America Federation (BAF). BAF, under its previous name, the Commercial Federation, had organized to combat socialism, Bolshevism, the IWW, trade unions, and the Progressive party, all of whom were seen as closely related. The group claimed credit for the passage and implementation of the California syndicalism law.

     "Shortly after the war, the group, headquartered in Los Angeles, adopted the name of the Better America Federation. Under the leadership of its chairman, Harry Haldeman, it became the political arm of the antiradical, antilabor, antiprogressive forces in the state. Haldeman, the city's leading pipe and plumbing supplier, was involved in a number of Chandler-related activities including the Yosemite Park and Curry Company and the Beverly Wilshire Investment Company. His son and Harry Chandler's son Norman became close friends (and his grandson, H. R. Haldeman, developed a reputation of his own as Richard Nixon's chief of staff.) . . ." p. 190

     " . . .

     "BAF put out "educational" materials against labor demands such as the eight-hour day, the minimum wage, and other social welfare legislation . . .

     ". . . Katherine Phillips Edson [a Progressive Party member wrote in 1920] "They are trying to make it appear that every man who joins a trade union is both an anarchist and a socialist, and at the same time they are subtly undermining the social welfare legislation inaugurated by Johnson."

     "The BAF attacks ranged through every sector of society in its attempt to undermine any progressive activity. The group denounced teachers and professors "who have infected our boys and girls with the poisonous psychology of revolution; "they also kept watch over newspaper editors "who have prostituted their columns to the propaganda of the "reds" and who "have taught the masses that the possession of wealth is a crime.". . .

     ". . . In Los Angeles, the Republican-oriented BAF worked through its political front, the Association for the Betterment of Public Service . . . formed . . . in the hope of saving the state from progressives. Since Hiram Johnson's 1910 victory, political differences had widened considerably, with the south becoming increasingly conservative. "We have the whole campaign blocked in Southern California by the activities of an organization camouflaged under the name of the Better America Federation," Katherine Phillips wrote. "It is a powerful group of non-union employers. They have large money interests back of them and they are controlling public opinion through the press; are putting their stamp of approval on candidates for the legislature and congress and even the judges are crawling to their chairman Mr. Harry Haldeman, and explaining why they make the decisions they do. It seems the ultimate debasement of Southern California and you could never believe it was at one time the seat of the Progressive movement of this state." p. 191

     "The Conservative forces won the 1922 gubernatorial election, and cut back the progressive programs.

     ". . . April 25, 1923 . . . "Great San Pedro Strike(s)" [demanded] repeal of the Criminal Syndicalism Law and release of all IWW members imprisoned under it, recognition of the Marine Transport Workers Union, a minimum wage for seamen, abolishment of the Shipowner's Association employment office, the granting of a worker's hiring hall, and other benefits for longshoremen and harbor workers." p. 194

     " . . .

     "Los Angeles's liberal community protested the unconstitutional treatment of the San Pedro strikers. A campaign led by the recently organized Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) . . .

     "Figures like writer Upton Sinclair came to express their sympathy and support. Sinclair had informed Mayor Cryer and Chief Oaks of his intention to speak at a meeting to be held at a small tract of privately owned land that had been dubbed "Liberty Hill." While reading the Bill of Rights, Sinclair was arrested. Chief Oaks declared that Sinclair would not be allowed to read any of "that constitutional stuff" . . .  No reprimands were made against the police who had held Sinclair and the others incommunicado until their release on a writ of habeas corpus." p. 195

     ". . . "

Chapter 11 The EPIC Challenge

1. The Depression

     ". . .

     "The depression exposed the 1920s Los Angeles boom cycle, where the entire credit-based structure of easy money and financial and real estate speculation collapsed. Some of the city's largest manufacturing and financial institutions went bankrupt and/or reorganized, including Richfield Oil, Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company, the U.S. National Bank, and the Mortgage Guarantee Insurance Corporation. Tens of thousands of workers were thrown out of work." p. 202

     ". . .

     "By 1932 the Southern California Methodist Minister's Conference voiced fears that the [L.A. Police Department's] Red Squad embodied the vanguard of fascism in the city . . . [In 1933] city councilman Frank Shaw, who had directed the county's unemployment relief program . . . was elected mayor of Los Angeles . . .

     ". . . the city's unions, which were then enjoying a sudden resurgence in response to the recent passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act . . .

     "In Los Angeles, after the NIRA was signed into law, thousands of new members joined the unions in a matter of weeks. By the spring of 1934 a strike wave had spread throughout the state. Celery and berry pickers walked off their jobs, a protracted garment workers' strike began in October 1933, furniture workers, millinery workers, meat packers, the movie studios, and the relief workers at the Department of Charities all went out . . . Twelve major strikes, each involving more than a hundred employees, occurred in Los Angeles in 1933, and eighteen more in 1934. In May 1934, a seamen and longshoremen's walkout tied up the entire Pacific Coast and led to the historic general strike in San Francisco . . ." p. 204

2. "I, Governor of California"

     ". . . By the fall of 1933 . . . Los Angeles County, with more than 300,000 unemployed . . ." p. 205

     ". . . In California, the left-leaning Roosevelt followers joined under the banner of the Democratic candidate for governor, socialist writer Upton Sinclair.

     "Sinclair, the author of The Jungle and numerous popular tracts and novels, had lived in Southern California since World War I . . . p. 206

     " . . .  

Chapter 13 Crime Waves, High Powers, and Union "Gorillas"

1. Times Fundamentalism

     "Los Angeles, Harry Chandler's Times had often reminded its readers, was the "White Spot of America," blessed by the absence of crime and labor unrest. The message appealed to those middle-class Angelenos of the 1920s and 1930s who identified with the paper's Midwinters, its Monday morning religious sermon reprints, its weather reports on the "storms back east." its "oil news" and "shipping news," its Southland provincialism, and its constant barrrage of anti-radical, anti-union reports.

     "The Times was a fundamentalist newspaper. It backed prohibition and vigorously attacked the "wet" Al Smith in 1928 . . . When Aimee Semple McPherson opened her Angelus Temple in 1923, the Times heralded Los Angeles's new evangelist. Like the other papers in town, the Times loved Aimee for her news value. When the evangelist disappeared in the ocean near Ocean Park beach in 1926, the Times carried lengthy page one stories for several weeks." p. 227

Part III 1941-1960

"Principals Don't Change"

     ". . .

     "While attending Hollywood High School, part of the class of 1917, Norman [Chandler] became good friends with Harry "Bud" Haldeman, Jr., the son of the chairman of the Better American Federation. Norman went on to Stanford, where he developed ties with a number of individuals, such as Goodwin Kinight and John McCone, who would later constitute the Southern California establishment. At Stanford Norman dated . . . Dorothy Buffum . . . " p. 241

     " . . . He [Norman] joined an organization called the Economic Roundtable, which was set up in 1925. The group met . . . at the exclusive University Club . . . Members included Bud Haldeman, Al Robbins (whose sister married Haldeman), John McCone, lawyer Frederick Warren Williamson (who would soon marry Norman's sister Ruth Chandler), Reese Taylor (the future president of Union Oil), Preston Hotchkin (Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. and heir of the Bixby Ranch), and local business leader Emerson Spear (whose son would marrry Norman Chandler's daughter.) . . .

Chapter 14 Big Red Dies

     ". . .

     ". . . Although the problem of pollution had been identified by local health authorities as far back as 1906, the distinct shift in the type and quantity of the pollution had begun with those "gas attacks of 1943 . . ." p. 248

1. A Transportation Nexus

     ". . . Harry Chandler, as a charter member of the Southern California Automobile Club . . . the "Good Roads" movement, the first expression of California's highway lobby . . .

     "Even in the period before World War I when the auto was more novelty than industry, Chandler had foreseen the advantage of the automobile system in the suburbanization of Southern California. Chandler's Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company in the San Fernando valley made a major effor to develop wide boulevards and streetways-primitive highways-to accommodate both the auto and the streetcar. He was successful in the construction of an interstate highway connecting Bakersfield and points north with Los Angeles-a highway which conveniently passed through Chandler's Tejon "Right of Way" Ranch.

     "Chandler and his business allies saw the development of the automobile as a complementary system to the city's massive rail and interurban network. Chandler had numerous ties to the streetcar interests. His close colleague Moses Sherman had set up Southern California's first interurban systems, which he sold to Henry Huntington in 1901.  Huntington, a nephew of the SP's Colis P. Huntington and frequent syndicate partner of Chandler, was committed to the expansion of the region through the interurban streetcar empire he established. Huntington's streetcar lines, like Sherman's before him, laid tracks to link up new subdivided communities-where Huntington had frequently purchased land-to the central city. The practice gave Los Angeles a vast rail system, the largest in the country. In the peak years in the twenties and early thirties, the network encompassed 1,000 miles of track and 700 miles of service.

     "In 1911 Huntington's system was bought out by the Southern Pacific railroad, which had finally decided to join with Los Angeles's booster businessmen. Huntington maintained a smaller company, the Los Angeles Railway Company, which he called the "yellow cars," in contrast to the SP subsidary Pacific Electric Railroad's "Big Red" cars . . ." p. 249

     "Soon after World War I, Chandler began to promote the rapid development of the automobile system as the primary transportation system for Southern California . . .

     ". . . By the early 1920s, Harry Chandler had an economic interest in every related aspect of the automobile operation except the production of the automobile itself." p. 250 [I wonder what connection he had to Henry Ford? kr]

     ". . . When the first gasoline tax bill-providing a one-cent a gallon tax for highway construction purposes-passed in 1927 . . . the state had 1.6 milllion registered cars, far more than any other state . . . "At a tremendous rate," another Times article . . . in 1933, "the wild virgin areas of Southern California are being broken down to the uses of progress and yielding up their beauties to the motoring public."

     ". . .

     "A conspiracy of General Motors (GM) and several other companies provided the coup de grace for the transit system's deterioration. In 1936, a consortium of corporations, including General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire and Rubber, B.F. Phillips Petroleum and Mack Manufacturing company, organized a company called National City Lines (NCL). NCL was in the business of converting existing electrical rail systems-trolleys and streetcars-to motorized buses.

     ". . .

     "In 1938, NCL set up a West Coast affiliate called the Pacific City Lines (PCL), which immediately began to buy up the Los Angeles Railway system . . ." p. 252

Chapter 16: Republican Fortunes

1. The Little Governor

     ". . .

     ". . . [Kyle] Palmer [the Los Angeles Times Political Reporter] foresaw more than a year in advance the emergence of Sam Yorty as the Democratic choice for the Senate in 1954.

     "Palmer's influence was greatest at a time during the 1940s and 50s when California Republican fortunes were at their peak. Earl Warren, William Knowland, Richard Nixon, and Goodwin Knight-any one of whom might successfully run for the presidency-were all national figures. Yet . . . as grass-roots Democratic organizing took hold in the mid-1950s while Republican powerhouse figures dabbled in presidential politics.

     ". . ." p. 273

2. Mr. Nonpartisan

     "Earl Warren, the son of a Swedish teamster, was a most extraordinary politician. He was a political oddity; part reactionary, part progressive, and at all times a tremendous vote-getter. As an officeholder in California, in the context of his right-wing California backers and the inner circle of the Republican party, Warren was a conservative. Once freed from his former supporters in his position as Chief Justice, he actively pursued a liberal, interventionist role for the Supreme Court that made the Warren Court respected and admired by the justice's former opponents and detested by anti-Communist Republican party regulars." p. 273

     "Warren first came to the attention of the state's two most influential newpapermen and Republican powers, Joe Knowland of the Oakland Tribune and Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, around the time of his victory for the post of district attorney of Alameda County, in northern California, in the early days of the Depression. Unlike most Republicans in the 1930s, Warren, who projected himself as a low-key, proficient, nonpartisan official interested in getting the job done, did not seem to fit the label of spokesman for the rich. Though some of his actions as D.A. were controversial and subject to attack by liberal and labor critics, he managed to avoid the reactionary Republican caricature that FDR had so successfully exploited in Depression days. His antilabor activities, however, were sufficient to meet the political criteria of his new, wealthy backers.

      "In 1938, after incumbent California Attorney General U.S. Webb announced he would retire, Warren entered the race, cross-filing in all three parties-Republican, Democratic, and Progressive. The cross-filing system was ideally suited to Warren's style. Since 1934 the Democrats had been the state's majority party, holding a three-to-two edge in registration. In order to maintain their influence, Republican power-brokers led by Asa Call formed a new organization in 1936, the California Republican Assembly . . .

     ". . .

      "Yet Warren was just as much an extension of . . . other Republicans in that period. In 1934, attacking Upton Sinclair and the EPICS, he called for "non-partisan unity to destroy the spectre of socialism." He remained strongly hostile to labor and radical movements and sponsored an antisabotage bill that included a curtailment of a union's right to picket or strike. He refused to recommend clemency for three labor organizers imprisoned on a murder charge, a cause célèbre in labor's ranks. And he helped guide a "hot cargo" bill through the state legislature which banned secondary strikes and boycotts." p. 275

     "Warren's nonpartisan appeal swept him to victory in all three 1938 primaries, precluding a runoff in the general election against a Democratic opponent. Four years later Warren ran for governor, cross-filing against Democratic incumbent Culbert Olson . . .

     ". . . Warren . . . under Palmer's guidance, projected himself as a man of unity, who could bring the state together in wartime. Warren easily won the Republican primary and pulled an impressive 45 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. Warren swept to power in a landslide. . . .

     ". . . The new governor maintained a studied ambivalence for three terms in office, maintaining his progressive nonpartisan image through public health legislation; a veto of some of the more virulent anti-Communist legislation sponsored by State Senator Jack Tenney; liberalization of old-age benefits, unemployment insurance, and workmen's compensation . . ." p. 275

     ". . .

     " . . . 1944 . . . Earl Warren . . . opposed the [right to work] initiative. The "right to work" was defeated by a three-to-two margin." p. 276

     "In 1958, it appeared that the fortunes of the California Republican party was still climbing in Washington and Sacramento. California Republicans occupied the vice-presidency, the two U.S. Senate seats, and the office of the chief justice of the Supreme Court . . ." p. 280

     ". . . William Fife Knowland had been appointed by Governor Warren to fill out Hiram Johnson's remaining term in the U.S. Senate after Johnson's death in 1945 . . .

     ". . . He defeated [Will] Rogers, Jr. in 1946 and won reelection in 1952.

     ". . .

     "Lieutenant Governor Goodwin "Goodie" Knight had succeeded to the governorship in 1953 when the new Republican administration in Washington named his predecessor, Earl Warren, as the new chief justice of the Supreme Court." p. 281

     ". . .

     "Pat Brown defeated William Knowland and his "right to work" campaign as Knowland sought the governorship to position himself for the the presidency, and Knight lost to Clare Engle, in his bid for Knowland's Senate seat. Nixon went on to dishonor the Presidency." pp. 284-285

Chapter 18 Cold War Journalism

1. Relocation Camp

     "The Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, which opened the door for Los Angeles's massive industrial expansion and urbanization, also brought out a renewed racial hostility from the white Southern California population. Antiforeign/nativist movements had deep roots in the area. Since the 1860s the state's labor movement and small farmers, threatened by massive immigrations of cheap Asian and Mexican labor, had reacted with prejudice and attempts at exclusion . . . ."

     ". . . Chandler had attacked various racist-inspired moves to limit land ownership-the 1913 Alien Land Law, for instance-or to restrict immigration . . . " p. 296

    "By the late 1930s, as first- and second-generation Japanese and Mexican-Americans entered the job market, questions concerning immigration were replaced by the urban-based social and economic problems of acculturation and discrimination. With the outbreak of the war, some of the old tensions found new expression, and the Los Angeles press, led by the Hearst papers and the Times, contributed to one of the region's most shameful periods.

     "Within a month after the Pearl Harbor attack, California's press began a systematic campaign to evacuate all Japanese-Americans in California and the rest of the country into "relocation" camps for the duration of the war . . .

     ". . .

     ". . . Ninety thousand Japanese-Americans in California were uprooted from their homes and farms to live for more than three years in concentration camps . . ." p. 297

     ". . . more than $5 million in Japanese property was auctioned off in the city [Los Angeles]."

     ". . . Earl Warren [called] Democratic Governor Culbert Olson soft on Japanese-Americans and "identified the absence of any sabotage up to then as an attempt to create "a false sense of security."

     ". . ." p. 298

2. Zoot Suit

     "Only a few weeks after the Japanese evacuation orders, the Times and the Hearst press initiated another racial campaign. All through the spring and summer of 1942, the papers, referring to "greasers," "pachuchos," and "zoot suiters," raised the cry of spreading Mexican-American juvenile delinquency . . ." p. 298

     "Zoot suits were a stylized costume originally designed for fast "jitterbug" dancing, with tight trouser cuffs, widened coat shoulders, and heavy shoes. The men wore duck-tailed haircuts, and the women short black skirts, long black stockings, and a sweater. Though Anglo and black youths also wore zoot suits, their widespread use among Mexican-American youths created an identity for the young Mexicans.

     "On a Saturday night in August 1942 . . . a young Mexican-American was discovered unconscious in the east side of Los Angeles . . . the Sleepy Lagoon . . . the police decided to use the opportunity to conduct massive sweeps throughout the Mexican-American neighborhoods . . . set up roadblocks . . . brought in 300 Mexican-American youths . . . arrested twenty-three . . . on the charge of murdering the young man . . ."

     ". . .

     ". . . Seventeen of the men on trial were found guilty and sent to jail. Finally, two years after the trial had begun, the U.S. District Court of Appeals threw out the guilty verdict and rebuked the trial judge. After two years in prison, the defendants returned home.

     ". . . p. 299

     "A number of servicemen stationed at Los Angeles' large naval and marine bases, were bored and easily influenced . . . On the night of June 3, 1943, several sailors, claiming they had been set upon by Mexican youths over the Anglos' flirtations with some Mexican-American women, went through the barrios with rocks, sticks, and clubs, beating up any zoot suiter they could find . . . the police later sent out their own "vengeance squad," which swooped down the edge of downtown looking for suspicious zooters.

     ". . . Over the next several nights, large groups of sailors, traveling in commandeered taxicabs, patrolled the barrios, beating up any Mexican-Americans they came across . . .

     "By the third evening, soldiers and marines had joined the sailors and together marched through downtown Los Angeles and into the east side, four abreast, attacking anyone int their path. The police followed at a distance, arresting, not the servicemen, but the badly beaten Mexicans.

     ". . .

     "A commission appointed by Governer Warren after the riots discounted any significant rise in Mexican-American juvenile delinquency and criticized the role of the press in creating the kind of environment which ade the riots possible." p. 300

Part IV: Transition

1. McCulloch Departs

     ". . .

     "David Kraslow and Stuart Loory [Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau Correspondents] published a series of articles detailing how the U.S. government had repeatedly failed to enter into peace negotiations under President Johnson. These papers were published as a book The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam, and later Daniel Ellsberg told the authors they'd find nothing new in the unpublished Pentagon Papers.

     ". . . " p. 386

2. A "Dangerous" Pen

     "While Times editorials during the Johnson years maintained a consistent proadministration position on the war in Vietnam, the attitude of the new Times cartoonist Paul Conrad changed from muted hawk to trenchant antiwar critic . . .

    "Sam Yorty was another Conrad target . . .

     ". . .

     "By the early 1960s, Paul Conrad, the cartoonist for the Denver Post, had secured a national reputation for his striking characterizations and critical perception of politicians. In 1964 he won the Pulitzer Prize. That year [Nick] Williams [the Los Angeles Times Editor] convinced Conrad to come to the Times.

     ". . .

     ". . . In 1967 a disclaimer was put on the masthead that dissociated the cartoons from the management's official pont of view. Conrad called it the "Reagan disclaimer," since Reagan, a frequent Conrad target, took office just before the disclaimer was instituted . . ." p. 387

6. "A Threat to Public Safety"

     ". . .

     "Problems with the police were not limited to the black community. As the Vietnam war escalated, university protests mounted, and Times reporters were frequently dispatched to cover campus demonstrations. After the Cambodian invasion and the Kent State shootings in May 1970, massive, spontaneous demonstrations broke out at UCLA and scores of other schools throughout the country. After a state of emergency was called, hundreds of police entered UCLA and made sweeps up and down the campus. One of the Times reporters, Stan Williford, witnessed an incident in which a student walking across the quad with books in his hands was caught in a sweep and beaten savagely by two police, who took the student behind some bushes . . .

     ". . .  [Noel] Greenwood [Times rewriteman] received a list of civilian and police casualties from the UCLA Medical Center, compiled other eyewitness accounts of beatings and arrests, and . . . UCLA Chancellor Young's statement, "very serious instances of excessive overreaction and overuse of force on the part of individual policemen." He produced follow-up stories that indicated that police used unnecessary force and arrested persons indiscriminately." . . ." p. 395 [Peter Ladefoged and Talmy Givon: KR]

Chapter 24 Politics in Flux

1. The Rise: Ronald Reagan

     "In 1965 the California Republicans were in a period of transition. The party's cohesiveness had broken down during the six years following the 1958 musical chairs campaign. The powerful individuals who had run Republican affairs since the days of Frank Merriam and Earl Warren had either died off or dropped out of politics, and a vacuum had developed . . ." p. 399

     ". . . the forces of incumbent Pat Brown, under attack from both the left and right wings within the Democratic Party, floundered. Sam Yorty opposed Brown in the Democratic primary, and criticized him for his failure to smash student protests and black rebellions. (To the surprise of many, Yorty polled 40 percent of the vote.) The largest grass-roots organization of Democrats, the CDC, also undercut the governor when it came out against the Vietnam War, despite the warnings of Brown and other mainstream Democrats . . .

     "In contast, Ronald Regan seemed to offer firmness and discipline . . ." p. 400

     " . . ."

2. The Resurrection: Richard Nixon