Charles
Fletcher Lummis |
A Newspaperman's Nirvana Charles Lummis showed up for work at the office of the Times at 10 a.m. on Monday Feb. 2, 1885, ready for work, less than 12 hours after completing his 3,507-mile walk from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. He had hoped to have a week off to unpack, unwind, spend some time with his wife and get acquainted with his new home town. But the Times was seriously short-staffed. Editor and publisher Harrison Gray Otis needed his new man on the job without delay. Lummis obliged. A newspaperman looking for good stories couldn’t have picked a better place and time than Los Angeles at the start of 1885. The town still bore strong markings of its Hispanic origins, the era of Spanish-Mexican rule having ended just 38 years before Lummis arrived. But the process of rapid Americanization was well underway. Los Angeles was bursting at the seams, and seething with excitement. Old adobes still stood near the plaza in a district that the Americans called Sonoratown. But the commercial heart of the city was the thriving American section that stretched in a long plume to the southeast, fading into a comfortable residential quarter that reached as far as the five-year-old University of Southern California three miles south of the plaza. There was plenty of news in the burgeoning city. In just his first few days in the office, a horse team that had been left untethered on a downtown street ran amok sparking cries for enforcement of the city’s hitching ordinance; a state senator said he would go to jail before submitting to a woman’s demand for alimony; a stack of valuable otter skins stored on one of the nearby Channel Islands was devoured by wild hogs; a group of Mormons complained of discrimination; six white orphans were rescued from Chinatown, reportedly just in time to save them from being sold to China as concubines; a man found howling in the Arroyo Seco was declared to be incurably insane; a Mexican man hung himself on Alameda Street; and 372 citrus growers turned in a petition calling for the county to be subdivided into pest control districts. Those were just a few of the smaller news items that appeared in the Times. The big stories in the spring of 1885 included the first executions in Los Angeles in a generation. Rodolfo Silvas and Francisco Martinez were hanged one after the other on March 20, drawing an enormous throng that "blackened the hills" and roof tops around the low-walled prison compound. Men, boys and even women jostled to get a better "glimpse of this tragedy of death." The macabre skeptical prompted the Times to run an editorial several days later remarking that the crowd was a "pitiful commentary upon humanity" and calling for private executions. |
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Lummis, Otis, and the
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A 19th Century Police Scandal
Another
big story, above all others, dominated the Times -- and Lummis’s attention -- in the
spring of 1885. It was a bitter dispute pitting Edward McCarthy, the new Los Angeles chief
of police, against the combined forces of a disgruntled City Council minority, a majority
of his own officers, notorious Sonoratown madame Anita Sanchez, Chinatown gambling
racketeer Ah Toy, and the Times’ two daily competitors, the Los Angeles Herald and
the Evening Express. In this colossal brouhaha, Otis was the sole diehard defender of the
chief of police.
Whatever his merits as a police chief, McCarthy was targeted from his first days in office primarily because he was a Republican, selected by the new Republican majority of the city council. Whatever his demerits, Otis defended him to the hilt for the same reason. For Otis, the battle over Chief McCarthy, like all such battles with political overtones, was a holy war. His intrepid new front-line warrior Lummis had arrived just in time. Otis and Lummis managed to fend off the all-out assault on McCarthy for months. But it didn’t help his cause that the chief and his son beat up an attorney named Glowner, who was helping organize the effort to oust him. The Times insisted that it was Glowner who had jumped the chief and his son. But the circumstances strongly suggested otherwise. The council scheduled a hearing about this latest incident May 8, but the chief didn’t show up. He sent word that he was sick in bed. The hearing proceeded anyway. More than a dozen officers testified about McCarthy's unfitness for the job. Most of the Republicans on the council joined all of the Democrats in an 11-2 vote forcing the police chief out of office.
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| Otis
Was a 'Choleric' Bully
The Chief McCarthy controversy made for an ignominious debut for Lummis in his career in journalism in Los Angeles. He had spent his first three months on the Times staunchly defending an incompetent tyrant as chief of police at the behest of his boss, whose own judgment and motives in the matter were suspect. Indeed, Otis was widely regarded as a tyrannical bully in his own right, a man who didn’t hesitate to use underhanded tactics and the pages of his newspaper to unfairly attack and undermine his opponents. As one of his biographers, David Halberstam, in The Powers That Be, described him, Otis was "a zealot, an angry choleric man…an impetuous swashbuckler, poised for the provocation, ready to punch it out with either his fists or his newspapers at all who dared offend him." Some of his contemporaries were even harsher in their assessment of the Times’ editor and publisher. Theodore Roosevelt, writing in Outlook magazine some years later, would say of Otis that he "is a consistent enemy of men in California who have dared resolutely to stand against corruption and in favor of honesty." Hiram Johnson, the Progressive governor of California, campaigning in Los Angeles in 1910, offered the most scathing denunciation of all. San Francisco has its own "dregs of infamy," Johnson said. "But we have nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy." |
The publisher of |
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