The Press: Half-Century

In 1881 the New York Evening Post, already 80 years old, was merged with Editor Edwin Lawrence Godkin’s Nation. The small New York Times (published by Raymond & Jones) was 30, and Adolph Ochs was editing his Chattanooga Times. James Gordon Bennett the Elder was dead, succeeded by his son as publisher of the Herald. Joseph Pulitzer was about to leave St. Louis (after one of his editors shot a prominent citizen) to go to Manhattan and, as things turned out, to buy the World. Frank Munsey was a telegraph operator in Augusta, Me. Edward Wyllis Scripps had started his Penny Press in Cleveland three years earlier; young “Bob” Scripps and Roy Wilson Howard were not born. In Chicago the “World’s Greatest Newspaper” (Tribune) astounded its readers by printing in a single issue the entire New Testament, just revised; and the Herald (now Hearst’s Herald Examiner) was established. Also in 1881, in the overgrown pueblo village of Los Angeles, was born the Los Angeles Times, which shortly was acquired by General Harrison Gray (“Old Walrus”) Otis, a goateed, long-mustached turkey-cock who loved a fight and was sometimes compared to Editors Jones of the New York Times and Greeley of the Tribune. With true Southern Californian fervor the Los Angeles Times this week was celebrating the soth anniversary of that birth.

Although a half century is a much longer measuring stick in the West than in the East, about a dozen metropolitan dailies on the Pacific Coast are that old, or older. The Express was alive in Los Angeles for ten years before the Times came along. In San Francisco, in 1880, Senator George Hearst accepted the nearly worthless Examiner in lieu of payment of an old debt, negligently kept it for seven years until his son William, home from Harvard by expulsion, astounded him by asking to have the paper for his own. The Chronicle’s stormy career under the brothers Charles and Michael De Young was already in its second decade, and the brothers had engaged in individual pistol duels with a traitorous, roustabout reporter, a Communist candidate for Mayor, and the latter’s son, who killed Charles.

The San Francisco Call and the Bulletin, which survived a strange variety of in carnations before being merged by Hearst two years ago (TIME, Sept. 9, 1929) had been going since the swashbuckling, law less 1850’s. James King of William, editor of the Bulletin and the West’s first crusader, had been assassinated by James Casey, leader of the corrupt politicians.

The vigilantes were formed to avenge King of William; and “when Casey’s body swung from a rope, law was born.” In the next few years the Call and Bulletin together fought many a sensational campaign, notably that of 1875 against financier William C. Ralston, pride of San Francisco, builder of the famed old Palace Hotel. The papers accused him of dishonesty, ruined him, supposedly drove him to suicide, were nearly mobbed by the inflamed populace.

In the San Joaquin Valley the long-powerful Fresno Republican was five years old. And in Sacramento the Union was 30, the Bee 24. Portland’s respected Oregonian was older than any of the others; and the Telegram was in existence, too. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had been there since 1863 and Hearst was not to get it until 1921.

In such a journalistic world. General Otis began building his Los Angeles Times. He lived (until 1917) to make it the most rabid Labor-baiting, Red-hating paper in the U. S.; a potent builder of Southern California resources and of Los Angeles civic pride; dominant in influence, if not in circulation; and, for all its claims of independence, a hidebound Republican organ. General Otis was a rabid fighter, a walking terror in his own newspaper plant; but for the most part he retained the respect of even his enemies.

When the Times was four years old it acquired a new circulation hustler, one Harry Chandler, who three years before at the age of 18 had quit Dartmouth and journeyed west to cure himself of tuberculosis. In storybook fashion young Chandler did his job so well that he attracted the General’s eye, got a promotion, married the General’s daughter. In 1917 he succeeded his late father-in-law as president & publisher.

Publisher Chandler was much less truculent than the swaggering General. It was the Chandler influence that gradually made the Times the righteous conservative which it now is. A story is told that it was Son-in-Law Chandler who contrived to have Otis—then a civil war lieutenant-colonel—made a brigadier general by President McKinley and sent happily to the Philippines, to get him out of mischief while Chandler was trying to steady the paper.

Whatever national fame the Times needed it got in 1910 when its plant was dynamited and 21 printers killed. The McNamara brothers were sent to prison and their defense lawyer Clarence Darrow indicted for perjury, all as a result of the paper’s sustained campaign to keep union labor out of Los Angeles. According to Lincoln Steffens in his Autobiography, Business Manager Chandler and even fire-eating General Otis agreed to let the McNamaras go free, and call a truce between employers & labor for the sake of peace in the city. But to this day the Times remains non-union and proud of it.

Hearst marched into Los Angeles in 1903, reputedly at the behest of union labor, to fight the Times with his Examiner. For many years the Examiner found it nearly impossible to get advertising. The Times’s advertisers were more than loyal. But after the War, when the Hearst-pro-German talk had died away, the Examiner began to step out, now has a big circulation lead over the Times. (Times: 171,066 daily, 262.904 Sunday; Examiner: 205,818 daily, 457,317 Sun day.) Publisher Hearst delights in calling the Times “The Old Lady at First & Broadway.”

The Times’ ‘s circulation is, of course, of a higher class than Hearst’s. The paper gives far more thorough news coverage than its competitors, and a few years ago claimed to print more news and more advertising than any other paper in the U. S. It would like to subordinate news of crime but has found that such practice does not pay. In the recent murder case of Winnie Ruth Judd, who dismembered two women friends in Tucson, Ariz, and was captured in Los Angeles, the Times got and front paged for three days, under her signature.Mrs. Judd’s “confession.” The paper, like Publisher Chandler, is bone Dry.

Unlike Arthur Brisbane, Publisher Chandler, 67, is not a great newspaper man; like him, he is a smart real estate man and has made millions from it. As early as 1899 he launched a syndicate which bought up 862,000 acres of Lower California. He and his associates helped build Hollywood, founded the border town of Calexico. Chandler, Ariz., is of his making. He has a 280,000-acre ranch* in Los Angeles & Kern counties, stocked with fine cattle. Recently he and a group of sportsmen bought the half-million-acre Vermejo ranch in New Mexico. Ten years ago the Los Angeles Realty Board voted him “most useful citizen.” Many still share that opinion.

For all his vastness of property, Pub lisher Chandler does not affect the majesty of his neighbor, Publisher Hearst. His tastes are simple. On a recent visit to Manhattan he stayed in a $3-a-day hotel room. A stickler for exercise, he disdains golf, mows his lawn.

Of Publisher Chandler’s eight children, I four are employed on the Times: Norman as assistant publisher; Constance, a reporter ; Harrison Gray in the job printing department; Philip in the engraving department.

* Hearst’s ranch at San Simeon is 240,000 acres.