The New World
(See Cover)
Los Angeles wants no dudes, loafers and paupers; people who have no means and trust to luck, cheap politicians, failures, bummers, scrubs, impecunious clerks, bookkeepers, lawyers, doctors. We need workers! Hustlers! Men of brains, brawn and guts! Men who have a little capital and a good deal of energy--first-class men!
Goatee aflutter, walrus mustache aquiver, Colonel Harrison Gray Otis, 48, late of the Union Army and--in 1886--editor of the Los Angeles Times (circ. 2,500), fired his editorial cannon ball into the boom-frantic town by the Pacific. To the pueblo settlement seething with rainbow chasers, this shot barked out a gruff prophecy: thenceforward, the Times and her guardians would man the lanyard of Los Angeles' destiny.
Today--only 71 years later--Los Angeles groans in the echo of that cry. A once meager patch of sand in Southern California, its rubber-band boundaries stretch past a natural basin rimmed by mountains, flow over the hilltops and peaks into the valleys and deserts beyond, nudge the very Pacific beaches.
Satellites & Earaches. The "city," essentially, is no more; its 455-sq.-mi. area with 2,000,000 inhabitants is only a mother country, and its satellites sprawl around its perimeter for 4,853 sq. mi.--more than three times the size of Rhode Island--overreaching Los Angeles County, enveloping adjacent Orange County to the south. It is the nation's fastest-growing megalopolis, with a population (6,000,000) exceeding that of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada combined. And, like an energized amoeba, it is bewilderingly fertile.
Nourished by a generous soil and a benign climate, this open-toed, pastel empire last week beat with a great hum-thrumming vitality. On Wilshire Boulevard, rivet guns prattled into the fresh steel of new office buildings. The reiterated whop of the hammered nail rang out in a 6,000-house development on San Fernando farmland, in a 17,000-house subdivision in the tawny hills 40 miles to the southwest in Palos Verdes--and wherever bulldozers sliced down citrus groves to make room for more. From the swarms of workers in electronics and aircraft plants came one big, tumultuous earache. And millions of nerves throbbed with the nightmare of 3,000,000 cars (one for every 2.2 people v. Detroit's one for every 3.2) cascading over 204 miles of multilaned freeways. Added to this was the arrival in Los Angeles last week of 4,200 popeyed newcomers (25 every hour of the year). Like the ever-moving, ever-changing populace that moved aside to make room for them, the new Angelenos eagerly got set to join the scurrying rhythms and busy polyphony: to work more change, to make more moves, more money, new houses, new businesses--and to crowd out of the way of next week's horde of 4,200.
Monolith & Catalyst. In this bouncing scenery, the one unchanging force is the Los Angeles Times. Each morning it drops with a thick, self-assured plop on 462,257 doorsteps from Anaheim to Azusa,* like a faintly welcome striped-pants uncle (wealthy but voluble). Neither a great newspaper nor a poor one, the Times, from its downtown limestone monolith, serves as an unshakable herald, chronicling the region with loving detail, goading Angelenos toward the megalopolitan destiny ordained by Harrison Otis.
Presiding today over the Times is Norman Chandler, 57, a brawny, silver-haired man (6 ft. 1/2 in.) with the sun-coppered frame of a Laguna Beach lifeguard. Grandson of Harrison Otis, Norman Chandler directs much more than the day-to-day region-raking of the Times. Individually, and with his wife Dorothy--and through the share holdings of four sisters and two brothers--he rules a multi-million-dollar business network that glitters in paper manufacturing, real estate, securities, television, commercial printing, ranching and oil. With his heritage and his holdings, Norman Chandler is the megalopolis' catalyst.
Beneath the foam spray of Los Angeles' motion, Chandler and the Times represent the floorless depths of calculated energy. Where other big cities grew at first into distinguished monuments only to lapse often into monumental despair, Los Angeles surges into endless patterns of change. Beginning with Harrison Otis, its builders reached out for new waves of pioneers, swept them into the dry-bed land, let in the waters and kept them churning. In shifting currents, they flooded new places and brought still more currents behind them. An endless stream of industry flowed in to tap the new buying power, and as industry expanded on a wide base of diversification, new manpower flowed in to energize it. Thus change begat change, and in an inexplicable response to the call of change, thousands of dissatisfied or adventurous Americans, rebuffing the peace of familiar surroundings, crossed the mountains and deserts to glory in a peace of change.
The Tiger. Bull-voiced Harrison Otis.* who thumped into Los Angeles in 1882, planned it just that way. He was, wrote a contemporary, "a remarkably even-tempered man--his temper is always that of a hungry tiger." A onetime compositor and foreman in the Government Printing Office as well as a short-term editor of the Grand Army Journal, Otis, 44, bought up a quarter-interest in the little Times, took over as editor. Within four years he owned the paper lock, stock and type drawer. An implacable Republican in a field of Confederacy-bent Democrats, he thereupon began to carve his name in the sand with his editorial cannon balls.
New life stirred in the town. The prophetic arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and then of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, had peeled back the eyelids of a languid 11,000 populace. Thousands of newcomers poured off the trains. The Times recorded the furious rate war between the two roads, and the day came when an adventuresome pioneer in Kansas City, Mo. could buy a one-way ticket to Los Angeles for only $1.
Gee Strings & Opportunity. For two years the big boom thundered on. "Los Angeles people," Editor Otis loftily assured prospective settlers, "do not carry arms. Indians are a curiosity, the gee string is not a common article of apparel here, and Los Angeles has three good hotels, 27 churches and 350 telephone subscribers." But the boom grew voracious. Real estate was traded over and over in a day; men sold their places in the restive land-office queues, joined the end of the line to begin buying again. Mountaintop lots made paper millionaires out of penniless speculators. Before Harrison Otis could slow the tempo, it was too late: in 1888 the boom cracked open like an avalanche. Crowds by the thousands streamed for the trains, and the Times recorded the news of suicides and scandals.
Once again, Harrison Otis' Times stepped up the booster campaign, this time in harmony with a newly founded Chamber of Commerce, which rounded up the best brains in town, dedicated them to making the city bigger. The new bugle call--climate, opportunity--blared into Iowa and Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Minnesota. Droves of families heeded it and headed West.
The New Century. As the city grew, so did the power of Otis and his friends. In 1890 Otis proclaimed that bustling Los Angeles (pop. 50,000) must have a "free" harbor, thereby threw himself and the Times into a seven-year battle with the powerful Southern Pacific and its boss, Collis P. Huntington. The S.P. bitterly insisted on a harbor to be located at Santa Monica, where, providentially, S.P. owned the only access route; the Times pounded its fist for a site to the south, free of S.P. domination, at the coastal inlet of San Pedro. With the eager Santa Fe railroad in his corner, Otis won his impassioned fight, watched with satisfaction when the dredges moved into San Pedro and turned a few acres of mud flats into one of the busiest harbors in the world. The city of Los Angeles then annexed a 20-mile-long shoestring of land (see map) to bring the harbor within its limits.
After he earned a brigadier's star in the Spanish-American War, Harrison Otis settled down again to the task of building the city. Jubilantly, he wheeled the Times into the new century, dragging Los Angeles with him. Readership, thanks to an energetic, imaginative circulation boss named Harry Chandler, flourished beyond dreams. So did Chandler, for he had married the general's daughter Marian.
Leeches & Eagles. Otis and his son-in-law braced for a mighty war against the growing labor movement, a struggle whose deep gashes, even in today's highly industrialized Southern California, remain open and sore. Unions, charged Otis, were insidious; growing Los Angeles would be stultified and set at naught by the closed shop. Late one night in October 1910, at the height of the mountain of recriminations, two union men--James B. McNamara and his brother John--planted 80 sticks of dynamite in the Times basement. The explosion killed 20 Timesmen, injured 21, wrecked the building. But the Times missed not an edition; next day, from a nearby plant in which General Otis had prudently stored stand-by printing facilities, he brought forth his paper with blaring headlines and a purple-rage editorial ("O, you anarchic scum, you cowardly murderers, you leeches upon honest labor, you midnight assassins"). Says grandson Norman Chandler, who at the age of eleven jumped from bed in the family home on Fort Moore Hill when he heard the explosion: "I watched for a long, long time, and sometimes when I close my eyes now, I can still see the building burning."
Harrison Otis stubbornly rebuilt his fortress-like plant. At the top was fastened an apoplectic bronze eagle, and beneath that, a plaque proclaiming the Otis credo: "Stand Fast, Stand Firm, Stand Sure, Stand True." Having thus proved the indestructibility of the Times, he gradually turned his ballooning empire over to his son-in-law.
The Siren. Long before the general's death in 1917, New Hampshire-born Harry Chandler, a tougher, stronger man, had coolly taken the Times in one hand, Los Angeles in the other, and begun to make his more permanent mark upon the city. Working steadily into the early-morning hours, he barred visitors from his office until 1 a.m. press time, whirred a rooftop siren to announce big news, ran his paper with dour conservatism and a fascination for the smallest regional stories, e.g., the annual grape festival in Escondido, the most infinitesimal rainfall figure from Fontana.
He even took small note of the appearance, in 1911, of the Horsley Brothers of New Jersey, who rented a barn on Sunset Boulevard, started to manufacture something called a western movie. A few years later, when Jesse Lasky filmed The Squaw Man, the Times allowed that movies were the coming thing.
The Valley. But Harry Chandler had something more explosive than flickers on his mind. The winding Los Angeles River, which flowed through the area, carried most of its water underground; a growing city would need more water. Rounding up powerful business friends--Union Pacific Railroad's E. H. Harriman, Promoter Moses Sherman, Banker Joseph Sartori and Collis Huntington's nephew Henry--Chandler set out to locate a new source. He found it: 240 miles to the northeast lay a lush valley of orchards and farms fed by the Owens River. Chandler and his friends quietly bought up the water and land rights from the prosperous, unsuspecting Owens farmers. In Washington, the syndicate got the U.S. Forest Service to declare vast portions of the Owens Valley a forest district, thus further weakening the water rights of the farmers. Meanwhile, Chandler & Co. privately bought up 108,000 cheap acres in the desolate San Fernando Valley, just across the Santa Monica Mountains from burgeoning, thirsty Los Angeles.
Then the group tipped its plan to the public: for $22.5 million, the city could build a 233-mile aqueduct from Owens Valley. The voters overwhelmingly approved a bond issue to pay for it. In 1913 the aqueduct was completed, spilled its water into the "vast stubble field" of the San Fernando Valley*--and to ensure the promise that the water would reach Los Angeles, the little city annexed the valley. In the years that followed, the Owens Valley dried out, San Fernando bloomed, and Los Angeles, which still gets 69% of its water from the aqueduct, crept beyond its boundaries like a flood tide, bringing into its fold other nearby cities, which had to annex themselves to the city to get the water.
The Promoter. Whatever the personal profit made on the water deal (some say $100 million, others $6 million), the parallel fact was that Harry Chandler placed his faith in growth. When, shortly after World War I, Times Reporter Bill Henry brought a young, Brooklyn-born plane builder in to see the boss, Chandler's eyes brightened. Donald Douglas, Reporter Henry explained, had worked for Glenn Martin on planes for the Army and Navy; now he wanted to open his own aircraft factory in Los Angeles. Said Chandler: "I don't know much about either aviation or Mr. Douglas, Mr. Henry, but if you think they're both O.K., I'll help. How much do you need, Mr. Douglas?" Replied the awed plane builder: "Fifteen thousand."
Chandler scribbled the names of nine top L.A. businessmen on a piece of Times stationery. If each of these men would sign a bank loan for $1,500, Chandler said, he would sign for the balance. Thus was born the company which Donald Douglas engineered into the world's biggest (1956 net sales: $1,073,515,000) airframe company; Douglas set off a chain reaction that made Los Angeles the center of a $2.5 billion aircraft industry (Lockheed, North American, Northrop), as well as the base for the newer missiles and electronics industries.
Like a raucous adolescent tumbling through its first dance steps, Los Angeles sprang gingerly ahead, with Real-Estate Operator-Promoter- Organizer-Timesman Harry Chandler authoritatively egging it on. Just before World War I he decided that the area needed a school of science, rounded up his wealthy friends to turn a Pasadena high school into the now renowned California Institute of Technology, led the campaign to hire as its boss the late Robert Andrews Millikan, famed University of Chicago physicist.
With Chandler's powerful support, Los Angeles built the gigantic (capacity: 105,000) Memorial Coliseum in 1923--so that the city might one day house the Olympic Games (it did--with Times Reporter Henry in charge--in 1932). To end the jungle of railroad tracks and separate stations that marred the downtown area, Chandler helped push through the graceful, comfortable Union Station. Rolling briskly along, he pushed the "All-Year Club," which pulls more tourists (1,500,000) to L.A. in summer than in winter, as well as the mammoth (membership: 487,000), politically powerful Automobile Club of Southern California.
Hoover & Hot Dogs. With it all, Harry Chandler was an exceedingly practical man. Though he fought hard for the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River (7% of Southern California's water), Chandler, who had vast land holdings below the border in Mexico's Baja California, fiercely (but unsuccessfully) opposed the building of the All-American Canal in 1934-40, which diverted Colorado River water into the north-of-the-border Imperial Valley and thus robbed him of his Mexican development potential. He enraged his fellow Angelenos even more in the Depression-ridden '30s when he sold the Times's site at Broadway and First Street to the city for $1,193,345, when the property was carried on the tax rolls for only $300,000.
But there were few to criticize; and anyway, Harry Chandler's fellow Californians were too busy being swept into wonderful new worlds of magnitude: Signal Hill, in Long Beach, had suddenly erupted with oil discovery in 1921, and other strikes followed. Geologists, homeowners and hot-dog hawkers went wild with new oil finds; corrupt politicians and dogged reformers exchanged office in a frenzied game of musical chairs; under its own klieg lights, Hollywood shimmered and shimmied in its greatest days of bosom-rattling hedonism--and was busy cranking out the newfangled "talkies."
Heat & Urbanity. The blusterous lead of General Otis had long passed. Harry Chandler, pulling the lanyard ruthlessly, triggered his way into the heated, frantic days of the '20s and '30s, and, as World War II loomed, turned it over to his eldest son.
As today's scion of the Times, Norman Chandler is neither blusterous nor ruthless, casually fingers the Times lanyard with a friendly urbanity where his predecessors might well have shot the town to blazes. Under his father's no-nonsense hand, Norman plowed through boyhood farm chores, rode the range and punched cattle for a few happy years on the family's 300,000-acre El Tejon Ranch 75 miles north of Los Angeles, went to Stanford University (business administration). In 1922 he married Fellow Student Dorothy Buffum ('"Buffie"), dutifully settled down for a rough tour of workaday jobs at the Times, took over as boss when his father retired in 1941.
Ticks & Politics. "The difference between Harry and Norman," says one old-time Angeleno, "is that Harry sat in his office and ruled this city like a king. Norman doesn't rule; he isn't interested in ruling. What he wants is to become an institution." Yet in a town where the Times is one of the few enduring institutions, Norman Chandler knows better than to try to wield an overpowering political club. Today's Los Angeles is too amorphous for one man to rule, one newspaper to command,* or even one political organization to anneal. The Times itself is conservative, and, says Chandler, proud of it. "But no one can force anybody down anybody else's throat in this area. That's because we not only don't have, but can't have, anything resembling machine politics. If there's a bloc of votes that can be delivered in Southern California, I certainly don't know about it." Mayor Norris Poulson exerts little personal political force, runs the city with a multipartisan 15-man council. An ultraconservative, Poulson ticks along with the Times, but neither the Times nor Republican Chandler winds him up every day.
Nevertheless, in state and national politics the Times carries a lot of Republican weight at nomination time. It has been a strong backer in the past of such Republican sons as Governor Goodwin Knight, Senator Bill Knowland and Vice President Richard Nixon, and they well know that it can be a candidate's valued friend in an area that encompasses two-thirds of the statewide vote. For example, in the major fight that is shaping up between Bill Knowland and Dick Nixon for the 1960 presidential nomination, Norman Chandler's quiet word on 1960 may come as a political bombshell: "I think Dick Nixon would make one of the finest Presidents the U.S. has ever had. Bill Knowland is a fine man, but if they are both candidates for the G.O.P. nomination in 1960, Mr. Nixon will get the support of the Times."
Powers That Be. By virtue of its overlapping and horizonless geography, Los Angeles has also grown beyond the conn of single powers like the Chamber of Commerce or even the select, sacred California Club, whose once-powerful members coached the city from the sidelines (and relegated newsmen--even Timesmen--to the rear elevators of its pink brick sanctuary on South Flower Street). Instead, any random list of the most influential Southern Californians would include both native sons and latecomers whose only connection with each other is that they find themselves appointed more or less to the same civic committees. For example:
P:Asa Call, 64, president of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co., rock-hard conservative, long a behind-scenes Republican political operator and a big and respected voice with the Chamber of Commerce, Auto Club, Standard Oil of California and the California Bank, who runs the University of Southern California board of trustees with a firm hand.
P:Reese Hale Taylor, 57, president of the Union Oil Co. of California, conservative, tightfisted member of the Federal Reserve Bank Board, but an enthusiastic spender and adviser on projects dealing with Southern California development.
P:Edwin W. Pauley, 54, shrewd oilman and politico, onetime Democratic National Committeeman from California, a mighty force with Democrats during the Truman Administration, principal owner of the Los Angeles Rams pro football team, hardworking chairman of the University of California's board of regents.
P:Frank L. King, 59, president of the billion-dollar California Bank, conservative politically and fiscally, pioneer leader in bringing big capital investment into Los Angeles.
P:Edward W. Carter, 46, president of the Broadway-Hale department-store chain (14 stores), a handsome Ivy Leaguer (Harvard), a relative newcomer to the great circle; tough, confident, ambitious, hard worker for the university and community music activities.
P:Harry J. Volk, 51, who gave up his job as Western boss of Prudential Life Insurance Co. last fall rather than move to Eastern headquarters and the possibility of the presidency. Also a newcomer, now president of the Union Bank of Los Angeles and top ranker in citywide fund-raising ventures.
Geraniums & Blessings. But the people of Los Angeles, entranced by the magnetism of climate and the magic of a rootless but wholly accepted abandon, are beyond anybody's fiscal, political or intellectual control. They live on beaches (Malibu, Redondo), in canyons (Laurel, Coldwater), in foothills (Arcadia, Sierra Madre), on hilltops (Hollywood, Santa Monica), in valleys (San Fernando, San Gabriel) and on deserts (Antelope Valley, Palm Springs). Their new homes, built at the rate of 189 a day, range from picture-windowed crackerboxes, jammed together on vast tracts, to comfortable, everyday residences, to fancy ranches and split-level palaces perched on cliffs and ridges--and when grubby desert land 100 miles distant goes up for sale, they fall over each other in the grab. At home their gardens crawl with exotic plants, their lawns with flowers ("Goodbye, California," wrote one fed-up Iowan, "and your damn geraniums!").
Some segments of Los Angeles have yet to shake off the Pan-Cake Make-Up of the past: Forest Lawn cemetery ("You can have the dignity of a Forest Lawn undertaking for as little as . . .") still schedules funerals and weddings with split-second precision in its chapels; revivalists pray to order for anybody who fills in a newspaper ad coupon; $3 high colonies have not yet fully given way to hifi; Hollywood, nearly torn apart at the scenes by the new assortment of prosperity makers--avionics, oil, heavy industry--is behaving itself, and, like a needy laundress looking for work, is now taking in television.
Pockets & Baubles. Fast disappearing, like Hollywood's old mask, are other symbols of the city's callowness. Its taxpayers spend more per capita than any other major city for art centers, museums. Its big but scattered pockets of industry (current annual output: $6 billion) and topflight universities have attracted one of the nation's best pools of technical and scientific talent.
Some of the talent, like Norman Chandler's wife Buffie, is home-grown and thrives on achievement. Trim and smart (dresses by Dior and Balenciaga) at 56, Buffie Chandler first dived energetically into public life in 1935 as a volunteer at the Los Angeles Children's Hospital, inevitably became a trustee. Inevitably, too, she became a regent at the University of California, almost singlehanded rescued the foundering Hollywood Bowl concerts, collected civic committee chairmanships like baubles on a charm bracelet. It was she, says her husband, who steered the Times into its long war on the great Los Angeles blight: smog. "Buff and I were driving downtown one day in 1946," says Chandler, "and Buff's eyes started to stream. She looked at me and she said, 'O.K., Norm, when are you really going to do something about this?' So we went to work."*
The Assistant. Serene as a smogless moment in the city, Buffie and Norman start their day with a swim in the Chandler pool behind the square, concrete-block family mansion in the Hancock Park section of town. By 8:30 a.m. Norman rolls out his black Mercedes 300, heads off to the Times building five miles away, where he imperturbably juggles the deskload of problems that reach out from all his financial and civic connections.
Not far behind, grinding downtown in her little black Simca, is Buffie. Efficient, charming, she carries the informal title of "assistant to the president," works in a Chinese-modern office next to her husband's Spartan, oak-paneled room, "unofficially" runs the women's pages of the Chandler papers. Current pursuit: the drive to establish a $55 million civic auditorium and music center (against opposition that fairly cringes at the sound of her name).
Together, the Chandlers and the Times press their Otis-given faith in change and growth. In their phalanx too are the engineers, scientists, physicists, educators, artists and managers who one day, say the planners, will stretch Los Angeles for miles beyond its explosive perimeter, embracing perhaps 20 million souls, and very likely leading the nation in thought and achievement as well as sunglasses and kidney-bean swimming pools.
Something New. Foremost in this design is Los Angeles' cry for more water. Under way now, with a big push from the Times, is the $2 billion project to bring Feather River water from the northern part of the state 600 miles into Southern California. After that: more schools (needed: a 32-room schoolhouse each week for the next 15 years), smog research, a system to replace the area's laughably inadequate public transportation muddle, better medical and cultural facilities, and --Norman Chandler's pet project--more than 600 miles of new freeways.
Sums up Buffie Chandler: "I don't say Los Angeles is the most beautiful place on earth, or even the most desirable. I love San Francisco, for instance. But I could never live there, because everything that needed doing has long since been done. In Los Angeles, things will always need doing, things will always need to be made better. Los Angeles is a place for the kind of people who are willing to try something new. It's a place for people who want to build a new world."
*"Everything from 'A to Z in the U.S.A.' " *No kin to the elevator people. *As the water gushed forth at the historic ceremonies, Chief Engineer William Mulholland made his famed curt speech: "There it is; take it." *Sharply aware of that fact, Times Boss Chandler launched a breezy, halter-and-shorts afternoon tabloid, the Mirror (now the Mirror-News), in 1948, changed it in 1954 to full size. Editorially independent, the paper (circ. 308,594) is self-consciously middle of the road, still in the red ink. Chandler's Los Angeles competitors: the Hearst Examiner (circ. 350,739) and Herald & Express (344,028). *Ironically, Los Angeles' one big commodity, sunshine, helps infest the area with smog. Pollutants pouring upward give off hydrocarbons, react photochemically with the sunlight and oxygen in the air, creating ozone that burns Angeleno eyes like tear gas. City authorities now run a three-stage "smog alert," only the first of which has ever been declared: 1) when the ozone count reaches .5 for each million parts of air, all burning of rubbish is forbidden; 2) when it reaches one part per million, all but essential auto traffic may be halted; 3) at 1.5 parts, an emergency is declared (at which, presumably, a squadron of planes will sweep over the city and dust it with Miltown).
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