What if Harrison Gray Otis, the founder of the Los Angeles Times whose ambition, foresight and ingenuity helped mold L.A. into the great city it is today, had settled in San Diego? San Diego would have become Los Angeles, speculates Bill Boyarsky, former L.A. Times writer and editor, and author of ‘Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times’ (Angel City Press). The story of the making of Los Angeles is the Chandler family story, which has been vividly told and illustrated in ‘Inventing L.A.,’ based on the film by Peter Jones. Boyarsky will talk about this remarkable family and sign the book on Thursday, October 22, 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. Otis predicted that the next big phase of development in the United States would occur along the south coast of California, and, as luck and fortune would have it, when the paterfamilias of the great Chandler dynasty accepted the job of editor at the Los Angeles Daily Times in 1882, he found the place where he could materialize his dreams. For those new to Los Angeles, evidence of the Chandlers’ mark on the area can be found from the harbor to the San Fernando Valley. And while the Los Angeles Otis and his wife Eliza found in the 1880s was a dusty little town of 12,000, with unpaved roads, few businesses, and a puny four-page newspaper, the area was rich in the one thing that would make L.A. a Mecca for decades: land. ‘Climate and real estate make a most intoxicating mixture here in Los Angeles,’ Otis wrote. ‘Just enough has been done with the varied and rich resources to show the mighty possibilities of the region.’ A restless man, who had fought in the battle at Antietam, and had run a small newspaper in Ohio, Otis found his vocation when he followed a business opportunity to California. At the request of his friend and fellow Ohioan W. W. Hollister, who had moved West, Otis ran the Santa Barbara Weekly Press, which ultimately failed to make money. But running a newspaper became a model for Otis as a way to achieve power and wealth. Hollister was a power in Santa Barbara, economically, politically and socially. In figuring out his approach to writing the book, Boyarsky needed to find an alternative to the talking-heads technique that worked well in the documentary. ’I went through oral histories in the Times archives looking for stuff,’ Boyarsky says. He discovered several rich sources, including letters between Otis and Eliza, an oral history with Norman Chandler and his wife Dorothy ‘Buff’ Chandler in the 1960s, and an oral history Randy Liffingwell did with Otis Chandler, Otis’ grandson and the last Chandler publisher. Boyarsky, who worked at the Times in various positions including columnist, reporter and city editor from 1970 to 2001, found enough material to permit him to tell their story through family members’ words. After Otis, whose daughter married Harry Chandler, each successive Chandler played a powerful role in expanding the dominance of the paper not only through circulation and advertising, but also by its influence politically and economically in the region. Otis built the name and established the kind of audience the Times sought, men close enough to the pioneer line to have courage, initiative and adaptability. With the help of his young and eager employee Harry Chandler, who would later become successor, the Los Angeles Times, no longer the Los Angeles Daily Times, became the city’s most influential paper. Otis understood that the key to building a prosperous city was by expanding immigration’white folks moving West’and that necessitated infrastructure and jobs. Two pivotal developments were the free port at San Pedro, a victory over the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the creation of the Owens Aqueduct that brought water into the San Fernando Valley, and with it enormous growth. But one cannot discuss the impact the Chandlers had in defining Los Angeles without addressing the often ruthless and vicious means employed to achieve their ends. Otis used his connections with city government, the Chamber of Commerce and even Washington, D.C. to meet his ambitions not only for the city but also for himself. While Harrison Otis built a newspaper and cemented its powerful influence in Los Angeles, Harry Chandler expanded the empire, taking over as publisher after Otis’ death in 1917. He promoted and encouraged the airplane industry by supporting Donald Douglas’ airplane manufacturing company in Santa Monica. In rapid succession, Chandler promoted Southern California through special editions of the paper, touting the area as the land of ‘Eternal Sunshine.’ He and his business colleagues persuaded tire manufacturing and automakers to build plants in Los Angeles. He even formed the Los Angeles Steamship Company and used the paper relentlessly to promote his enterprises. orman Chandler, who followed his father as publisher in 1945, was least interested in the newspaper, focusing his energies on bringing financial stability to the business and expanding the Times enterprise into the nation’s largest newspaper company and raising millions of dollars by going public. While the Times handily dominated the news in Los Angeles, the paper was identified from its inception as staunchly Republican, guided by the tastes of its wealthy white owners and readers. It wasn’t until Otis Chandler became publisher in 1960 that the editorial mandate shifted to serious journalism, freed from conservative political doctrine, rabid anti-unionism, protecting sacred cows and blind boosterism. There are many threads to this story, each worthy of a chapter or even an entire book, not the least of which was the Times’ opposition to unions made vivid by its corrupt and vitriolic campaign to defeat Upton Sinclair’s bid for governor in 1934, and the paper’s racist posture. ’Race was behind everything that happened in L.A.,’ Boyarsky says. ‘I covered the riots of 1965 and 1992, Tom Bradley’s election and school integration.’ In fact, Boyarsky spends more time on race in the book than does the documentary, dedicating pages to the Japanese internment during World War II and the fight between Mexican-American boys and girls and the police in 1942, known as the Sleepy Lagoon case, which escalated into a riot with one death and the arrest of 600 people, most of them Mexican youth as suspects in the killing. The Times was pro-police and condoned the behavior of the servicemen and police, condemning the ‘Zoot Suiters’ in one editorial as ‘gamin dandies’whose garish costume had become a hallmark of juvenile delinquency.’ Boyarsky says that the city’s history of racism has ‘left a legacy that LAPD Chief Bill Bratten is still wrestling with today. The LAPD has historically been anti-black, and anti-Latino.’ While the Chandlers certainly are a complex example of human nature, wealth, ambition and opportunity, Boyarsky credits them with the best things and the worst things about the city. ’I would say water,’ Boyarsky says. ‘While they violated every ethical precept in achieving the aqueduct, it did make the growth of L.A. possible. I would also credit them with making L.A. harbor a free harbor, which it would not have been had the Southern Pacific Railroad won its bid to expand the harbor [off Santa Monica Canyon]. And building the aerospace industry showed the Chandlers’ foresight. And certainly, Buff’s support of the arts community and successful fundraising effort to build the Music Center.’ But, for Boyarsky, the sheen dulls with the fierce anti-unionism on the part of the Times, particularly after the 1910 bombing of the Times building downtown, which was initiated as a pro-union protest. In addition, all liberal thought and progressive dissent never found its way into the paper until Otis Chandler’s reign, something that was supported by a notoriously corrupt police department. Finally, the Times under the Chandlers left a legacy of poisoned race relations. The Chandler dynasty came to an end when Otis Chandler resigned in 1980, which was not good news. What followed was the last chapter of the sad final decade of Chandler control. On March 13, 2000, Times-Mirror was acquired by the company that owned the Chicago Tribune. That is another book.
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