Column Campaign

Having gone through a grueling Presidential campaign last fall, Los Angeles had little wind left for its municipal primary last month, still less for its runoff election last week in which Mayor Frank Lawrence Shaw was returned to office for four more years with a majority of 25,000 votes over his opponent, County Supervisor John Anson Ford.

Los Angeles municipal candidates run without party labels, but everybody knew that Mayor Shaw is a nominal Republican and that Candidate Ford is currently Chairman of the Democratic County Central Committee, although he made an unsuccessful race for Congress as a Republican in 1932. Because 53-year-old Candidate Ford, an oldtime newshawk, was identified as a liberal and Mayor Shaw, a former grocery salesman, was known as a tried and true conservative, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. In Los Angeles, no one damned as a liberal can count on the all-powerful support of the Red-hating Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants' & Manufacturers' Association.

The two candidates did their best campaigning in the Los Angeles Daily News Editor Manchester Boddy saved himself a lot of trouble by giving them each a battle column after the fashion of the New York News in the last Presidential campaign.

There, side by side, in columns headed "Shaw Says:" and "Ford Says:" they had their daily say. They addressed each other as "my friend next door," "my fellow columnist." Candidate Ford had need of more ingenuity than his opponent in conducting his column. Not being the incumbent, he could not fill space by telling how he helped perform such municipal miracles as supplying "230 million gallons of pure water" daily to Los Angeles. Columnist Ford frequently ended each column with a direct question. Sample:

"Today's question: In the light of your currently professed friendship for Mr. Roosevelt's policies, Mr. Shaw, why do the labor-baiting Los Angeles Times, the howling Hearst press, the local Liberty Leaguers, the Partisan non-partisan Republicans, the professional patriots, the underworld forces and all the reactionary elements, which in 1936 waged a slanderous, slimy, insolent, stupid and disastrous communistic campaign against President Roosevelt, plus a few nominal Democrats of mercenary inclination, now wage precisely the same sort of campaign against me and in support of you, as they supported Merriam in 1934 and Landon in 1936?"

Wrote Columnist Shaw after Columnist Ford had chided him for having a great amount of billboard space and literature donated by friends: "Perhaps I do have more literature than you, more billboards, more radio time. Perhaps I have more friends." Columnist Ford had his harshest words with his fellow columnist when a batch of obviously faked circulars bearing a red hammer & sickle and purporting to be an official Communist endorsement of Candidate Ford were dropped on the city from an airplane.

Best laugh of the campaign was provided by a widely circulated picture showing grey, bespectacled Mayor Shaw seated in an automobile with President & Mrs, Roosevelt with the National Capitol in the background. The picture's caption: "This heretofore unpublished photo shows President and Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Los Angeles' dynamic Mayor, Hon. Frank L. Shaw, motoring near the National Capitol during Mayor Shaw's recent visit in Washington." Candidate Ford offered "final and conclusive" proof that Mayor Shaw had not motored with the Roosevelts in Washington, that a picture taken when Mayor Shaw rode through Los Angeles in the Roosevelt car during the Presidential campaign was superimposed on a Capitol background.

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