LOS ANGELES TIMES
The growth of the twentieth-centuty century metropolis,
Los Angeles, was in no small way aided and abetted by the
Los Angeles Times and its four-generation Otis-Chandler
dynasty. In eight decades a sleepy goat herding village of
twelve thousand inhabitants was transformed into America’s second largest city, and a former third-rate partisan
rag was transformed into one of America’s top five daily
newspapers.
The Los Angeles Times began publishing in December
1881 as a four-page daily that was primarily advertising content. A few months later Harrison Otis, a printer and
Civil War lieutenant colonel, settled in Los Angeles and
began working at the paper for $15 a week. He later bought
a share of the paper. In 1886, Otis with $18,000 bought out
his partner and took control of the Times.
Harry Chandler left New Hampshire for southern California’s warmth in order to heal his pneumonia-damaged
lungs. Chandler sold fruit to farmhands and prospered.
His next venture was buying newspaper circulation routes,
including the Times’ entire fourteen hundred-member list
at that time. Chandler became Otis’s business manager, and
son-in-law.
The Otis-Chandler duo approached empire-building differently. Otis was blustery and welcomed fights with real
and imagined foes. Otis attacked political adversaries in
adjective-laden editorials and he violently resisted union
labor. Chandler avoided fights, yet he strategically used
the newspaper as an instrument of an expanding economic
order.
Otis co-founded the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which recruited thousands of midwestern farmers to
head West for sunshine and cheap land.
As Los Angeles’ population swelled to more than 102,500
by 1900 and then to 319,200 a decade later, its inhabitants
needed a reliable water supply. Otis and Chandler became
silent partners in a group that bought land then diverted its
fresh water from the Owens Valley, two hundred miles west
of Los Angeles. Otis and Chandler were stridently antiunion. Their Times competed against unionized city dailies. In 1910, the Times building was rocked by a pre-dawn
bombing that killed twenty-one workers. The Times pinned
the crime on “unionites” who had “committed one of the
worst atrocities in the history of the world” (Los Angeles
Times, Oct. 3, 1910, I4). Two union activists were convicted
after a sensational trial in which Clarence Darrow served
as the defendants’ lawyer. The attack hardened Otis’s and
Harry Chandler’s resolve to keep their newspaper and most
of the city free of union activity.
Harrison Gray Otis died in 1917 and much of the Times’s
shrill editorial voice left with him. Harry Chandler became
chief executive of the Times Company. His considerable
influence in Los Angeles resulted more from cunning than
from bluster. Harry Chandler profited from a real estate
syndicate he arranged with a handful of partners. Their
customers were tens of thousands of new arrivals that the
Times beckoned to come west. Like the growing movie and
aircraft industry, the Los Angeles Times prospered. From
1921 to 1923, the Los Angeles Times led all American newspapers in display and classified advertising lineage and later
hit highs of four million classifieds in 1964 and five million
in 1977. In 1935, the Times emerged as a high-circulation
U.S. daily at 186,423, up 20,000 from 1930. The newspaper
went on to hit circulation highs of 757,776 in 1962 (fourth
highest among American dailies) and 1,043,000 in 1980
(second).
Despite business success, the Los Angeles Times in the
first half of the twentieth century was a journalistic disgrace. Its editors ignored an oil company swindle in the late
1920s that fleeced 40,000 Southern Californians of $150
million. The Times was co-conspirator in a smear campaign against Upton Sinclair, the celebrated muckraking
journalist and socialist who ran for governor in 1934. The
Times ran stories that branded Sinclair a “radical Socialist” and that linked him to a “huge Communist army in
America” (Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1934, A4; and
Oct. 5, 1934, A1). The Times newsroom in the 1930s looked
the other way and coddled two mayoral administrations and
their complementary police chiefs.
Harry Chandler’s son, Norman, ascended to vice president and general manager in 1936 after a lengthy apprenticeship. In 1941, he advanced to president and general
manager. When Norman’s father died in 1944, he assumed
the role of president and publisher. Norman was bland
compared to his deal-making father, yet the son led like a
patriarch. His newspaper and company was standard bearer
for the Southern California status quo. Norman Chandler’s
wife Dorothy Buffum Chandler became a director of the
Times in 1948. She was a shaper of Los Angeles civic life.
“Buff” Chandler’s relentless fundraising resulted in the
Music Center of Los Angeles County, the rescue of the Hollywood Bowl from a wrecking ball, and the elevation in
status of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
The Los Angeles Times of the 1940s and 1950s Norman Chandler-era was closely identified with the California Republican Party. Its political stories “read like memos
to and from the GOP National Committee,” said a March
2006 Los Angeles Times account. Kyle Palmer, the Times’
political editor, was known for his staunch support of Richard Nixon, the U.S. Senator and then two-term vice president under Dwight Eisenhower.
Commercially, the Times was prosperous. It was the
dominant morning newspaper in a fast-growing metropolis. The Times battled the Hearst-owned morning and
afternoon papers for the circulation, but led in advertising. In the late 1940s, Chandler’s company launched the
Los Angeles Mirror, a politically independent afternoon
tabloid catering to working-class readers. In the late 1950s,
Otis Chandler, Norman’s son, was nearing the end of his
seven-year apprenticeship for future leadership of company.
Otis Chandler was keenly aware of the paper’s journalistic shortcomings because unlike his father, he worked as a
reporter and editor.
In 1958, Norman Chandler signaled major change at the
Times when he replaced editor L.D. Hotchkiss with Nick
Williams, a long-time night editor who seemed like an
ordinary foot soldier, but actually was a well-read newsman and authority on southern California life. “I want the
Times to be fair,” Chandler instructed his new editor, “and
I want it to dig, investigate and report what it learns.” Dorothy Chandler was determined to change the image of the
paper too. She groomed her son Otis to be the next leader of
the empire. Although Otis Chandler was not the first choice
of the more conservative Chandler family members, he was
installed as publisher in 1960. Norman Chandler became
chairman of Times Mirror Co.
Otis Chandler signaled that a new day had dawned at the Los Angeles Times when in 1961 the newspaper published a
five-part series critical of the ultraconservative John Birch
Society. The Times withstood fifteen cancellations and
consternation from Chandler family members who had
well-heeled Birchers as friends. Journalistically, the Times
in the Otis Chandler era applied East Coast standards in
order to upgrade the newspaper. Top editors such as Robert Donovan and Edwin Guthman recruited talent for the
Washington bureau. National and foreign bureaus opened
and then expanded. Frank McCullough nurtured investigative reporting. Paul Conrad, an acerbic editorial cartoonist,
was added to the opinion pages.
The Times won six Pulitzer Prizes during the twentyyear Otis Chandler era. Bill Thomas succeeded Nick Williams as editor in August 1971. Chandler improved the
marketing of the newspaper and added zoned editions in the
expanding southern California suburbs. The first computer
operated by a newspaper in the United States was installed
at the Los Angeles Times, and offset printing soon replaced
linotype production.
During a two-decade run of journalistic and publishing
triumphs, Otis Chandler suffered a blow. In the early 1970s,
he was implicated the GeoTek oil- and gas-drilling scandal.
Chandler’s friend Jack Burke was convicted for defrauding
investors. Chandler, who received thousands of dollars in
finder fees from GeoTek, was fined by the Securities and
Exchange Commission. The embarrassing details were
initially reported in the Wall Street Journal instead of in
Chandler’s newspaper.
Chandler stepped down as publisher in 1980 and Tom
Johnson, the first non-family member, led the paper. In
1990, circulation topped 1,225,000, making the Los Angeles Times America’s largest daily metropolitan newspaper.
In the 1990s, Mark Willes, a cereal company CEO with
no publishing experience, became CEO of the Times Mirror Company. In June 2000, Times Mirror was acquired by
the Tribune Company of Chicago. That $6.4 billion merger
ended 119 years of hometown ownership. If in the quarter
century following Chandler’s retirement there were changes
in leadership, the Times reputation for quality journalism
continued. Between 1981 and 2006, the Times had won
twenty-seven of its thirty-seven Pulitzer Prizes.
In August 2005, Dean Baquet was promoted to editor of
the Times, one of the few blacks to ever lead a major metropolitan U.S. newspaper. Despite declining circulation,
Baquet vowed to make the newspaper a compelling read
and sharpened its focus on coverage of southern California
and the entertainment industry. In June 2006, the Times had
a showdown with the administration of President George
W. Bush: The newspaper published details on how the
United States attempted to track overseas bank transfers by
suspected terrorists. Despite government officials’ protests
and threats, the Times’ editors explained that U.S. citizens
had a right to know what their government was doing.
Further Reading
Bellows, Jim. The Last Editor: How I Saved The New York
Times,The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times from
Dullness and Complacency. Kansas City, MO: Andrews
McMeel Publishing, 2002.
Dawkins, Wayne, “Newsmaker: Dean Baquet.” The Crisis
[NAACP], September/October 2005.
Halberstam, David. The Powers That Be. New York: Knopf,
1979.
King, Peter H., and Arax, Mark. “As Dynasty Evolved, So Did
Power in L.A.” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 2006.
McDougal, Dennis. Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and Rise and
Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty. Cambridge, MA: Perseus
Publishing, 2001.
Talese, Gay. The Kingdom and the Power. New York: Bantam
Books, 1970.
The full run of Los Angeles Times articles can be accessed electronically by using ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Wayne Dawkins