Harrison Gray Otis
Harrison
Gray Otis (1837-1917) was publisher of the
Los Angeles
Times for three decades, a powerful conservative force in
turn-of-the-century
Southern California
, and
an unrivaled promoter of regional growth.
Otis
was born on a farm near
Marietta
,
Ohio
, and named after his uncle, a U.S. Senator from
Massachusetts
. At the
age of 23, he was a member of the 1860 Republican national convention that
nominated Abraham Lincoln for President. With the outbreak of the Civil War,
Otis enlisted as a private in the Union Army, fought in 15 battles, and was
wounded twice and cited for gallantry. Discharged as a lieutenant colonel, he
worked at various jobs, including compositor in the government printing office
and editor of the Grand Army Journal, before leaving for
California
. Like more
than a few Civil War veterans, for the rest of his life, he liked to be referred
to in military terms; first as Colonel, and later General, Harrison Gray
Otis.
By one
account, Otis came to
California
in 1876 to
raise
Angora
goats. Historian Carey McWilliams
described him simply as "a man without resources, a typical drifter of the
period." He ended up as editor of a
Santa
Barbara
newspaper, the Press. When the publication
failed, he took an appointment as a treasury agent on the
Seal
Islands
off
Alaska
. In his book Newspapers of
Los Angeles
: The First Fifty Years: 1851-1900, Henry
W. Splitter writes that Otis came to
Los Angeles
when he heard that its newest paper, the
Los
Angeles
Daily Times, was for sale. The first
four-page issue of the Times had appeared on December 4, 1881, but the
owners faced financial problems. Scraping together $6,000, Otis bought a
quarter interest in the paper in 1882 and became its editor, as well as editor
of a sister weekly publication, the Mirror.
For a
weekly salary of $15, Otis wrote the editorials and much of the local news. His
wife Eliza, whom he married when he was 20, contributed columns about women,
morals and religion. In 1883, Otis and entrepreneur H. H. Boyce became
co-owners of the Times, now grown to eight pages, and formed the Times
Mirror Company. Otis set about transforming the newspaper. As John Weaver
writes in Los Angeles: The Enormous Village: "He dropped
‘Daily’ from the Times masthead, ordered up livelier headlines,
doubled the telegraphic news coverage, made room for letters to the editor and
added a column, ‘Political Points’ which collected editorial barbs
aimed at Democrats by other Republican journals."
In
1885, the Times put out its first "Midwinter" edition
extolling the climate and other virtues of Southern California, even as cheap
cross-country railway fares, for a short time as low as $1.00, drew thousands
of visitors and homesteaders to the area. Otis saw a glorious future for
Los Angeles
whose
population totaled about 12,000 when he joined the Times. "
Los Angeles
is in a
transition state," he wrote in an early editorial. "She has finally
waked up from the dull lethargy of those old days when she was one great
sheep-walk and cattle range. All she needs now is men of brawn and brains to
grow up with her."
To
ease his workload, Otis hired Charles Fletcher Lummis as the Times’ first city editor. The flamboyant Lummis, Harvard drop out
and editor of a small-town weekly in
Ohio
, had
walked 3,507 miles from
Ohio
to
Los Angeles
in 143 days,
writing a weekly series of letters about his journey for the Times. Otis
met Lummis at Mission San Gabriel on February 1, 1885, and walked with him the
last eleven miles into the city. Lummis became city editor the next
day. "Col. Otis and I hit it off from the start," he later
wrote. "He hated anybody who was afraid of him. Because of his
dominant and overbearing way a great many good people were afraid of him. One
of the reasons he liked me was that I wasn't."
In
1886, Otis bought H.H. Boyce’s half-interest in the paper and named
himself president, general manager and editor-in-chief.
In his
1932 book
Los Angeles
,
writer Morrow Mayo had this to say of Otis: "He was a large, aggressive
man, with a walrus mustache, a goatee, and a warlike demeanor. He resembled
Buffalo Bill, General Custer and Henry Watterson. The military bee buzzed
incessantly in his bonnet. He was a holy terror in his newspaper plant; his
natural voice was that of a game-warden roaring at seal poachers. He was
politically ambitious all his life; though he never ran for an office, he asked
for many. When McKinley, his former army commander, was elected President he
asked to be appointed an Assistant Secretary of War, but Secretary Alger would
not have him." When the Spanish-American War broke out, Otis, then in his early
60s, volunteered for service and was assigned to the
Philippines
, at which time he was
promoted to Brigadier General.
Under
Otis’ leadership, the Times became the region’s leading
business promoter and its most strident Republican, conservative and anti-union
voice. As George E. Mowry writes in The California Progressives:
"It is possible that no man in all the United States hated organized labor
more, and it is certain that few did more to obstruct its advance." For
years, the Page 1 banner of the Times included the phrase, "True
Industrial Freedom," while editorials and news stories reflected
Otis’ uncompromising opposition to the union shop. As John Weaver notes,
labor leaders called
Los Angeles
"Otistown" because it was "the country’s most impregnable
open shop fortress."
Otis
claimed that he never objected to "lawful or legitimate organizations
formed and maintained by laborers in any branch of industry," only to the
"gross and mischievous abuse in the management of the organizations by the
leaders of them." In fact, he'd even been a member of the typesetters
union -- briefly. Nevertheless, the Times’ position as an
anti-labor lightning rod led to the bombing of the Times’ 1st and Broadway building on Oct. 1, 1910. Twenty people were killed and 17
injured. The Times labeled the bombing "The Crime of the Century" and
blamed it on "unionists," even though labor leaders vehemently
denounced the bombing. Two brothers, John and James McNamara (John was a labor
union official), represented by legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow, later
confessed to the crime.
Over
the years, Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler became the city’s
unrivaled power brokers, "the single most important force in
Los Angeles
aside from
government itself" -- in the words of historian Andrew Rolle. (
Chandler
had joined the Times in 1885 as a circulation department clerk. He soon became circulation manager
and, in 1894, husband of Otis’ daughter, Marian.
Chandler
went on to become vice president and
general manager of the Times before succeeding Otis as publisher.)
Together they shaped the growth of the city and region.
In the
historic struggle over federal funds to build a breakwater at San Pedro harbor
in the late 1890s, a move opposed by the powerful Southern Pacific railway
which favored building a new harbor in
Santa
Monica
where SP had waterfront interests, the Times
vigorously supported San Pedro. Its backing was instrumental in carrying the
day for San Pedro, making
Los Angeles
a major
west coast port, now the busiest in the
United States
.
Otis,
Chandler
and the Times were also early backers of a
$23 million bond issue, approved in 1907, to build an aqueduct that would carry
Owens River water to
Los Angeles
.
The 225-mile aqueduct, built under the supervision of William
Mulholland, delivered its first water in 1913.
By
then, a 30-man syndicate that included Otis and
Chandler
had acquired 47,500 acres of grain fields in the
San
Fernando Valley
from the I. N. Van Nuys family for $2.5 million.
Anticipating both the arrival of water and Valley annexation to
Los Angeles
(which the Times also promoted), they
divided the acreage into town lots, mostly suitable for small farms, and
launched a sales boom that formed the foundation of the
Chandler
family fortune. Otis took 550 acres
at
Ventura
and
Reseda boulevards for a ranch home. The property was later sold to writer Edgar
Rice Burroughs and became known as Tarzana. Otis also invested heavily in
Mexican real estate.
Otis
died on July 30, 1917, at the age of 80. He bequeathed his
Wilshire Boulevard
home to the city for
use in "the advancement of the arts." Until 1997, the site housed the
Otis Art Institute, now re-located to
L.A.
’s
Westside, and known as the
Otis
College
of Art and
Design. After Harry Chandler's death, his son Norman became the
newspaper's publisher.
Norman
's wife, Dorothy Buffum Chandler also played an important role
in the life of modern
Los Angeles
.
Until
Harrison Gray Otis' great grandson, Otis Chandler, the son of Norman and
Dorothy, became publisher of the Times in the 1960s, the Times retained
its outspoken and openly partisan conservative voice. Afterward, under the
younger
Chandler
's
leadership, the paper adopted a more balanced approach to the news, although
some long time readers complained that the paper too often took a liberal
editorial stance. It's likely that "the General" would have
agreed.
Directly
across
Wilshire Boulevard
from the site of Otis' former home, in a corner outside
MacArthur
Park
,
stands an imposing but often overlooked bronze statue of Otis in army uniform.
Next to him is the statue of a young boy selling newspapers, presumably copies
of the
Los Angeles
Times, which remains the region’s most powerful and
internationally respected journalistic voice.
---
contributed by Albert Greenstein, 1999
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