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Article Excerpt
Harrison Gray Otis and Job Harriman were part of the flood of Midwesterners who came to Los Angeles for health and wealth in the late nineteenth century. The two men rose to prominence in their adopted city, each pursuing very different visions of what kind of city it should be. Both men were radicals on opposite ends of the political spectrum-Otis on the far right and Harriman on the left. Otis was a hard-line Republican, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, a dedicated enemy of labor unions in any form, and the patriarch of a family dynasty that wielded enormous influence in the city for most of the twentieth century. Harriman was a founding member of the Socialist Party of America, an attorney who spent a lifetime defending the victims of capitalism, a steadfast champion of unionism, and the guiding spirit behind a utopian community that aspired to show how much better life could be in a Socialist society. Hundreds of mourners crowded into the sanctuary of the First Congregational Church at Otis's funeral in 1917. Harriman passed away nearly unnoticed in 1925, a forgotten man in a city that once nearly made him its mayor.
Los Angeles has long had a reputation as a place where the political far right has flourished as luxuriantly as the palm trees that line its streets. While it is true that the city has been a stronghold of conservatism, this is not the whole story. The conflict between Otis and Harriman reveals a long and vibrant progressive tradition that extends back to the beginning of the twentieth century.
THE CAPITALIST
Harrison Gray Otis arrived in Los Angeles in 1882, forty-five years old, with a long but not particularly distinguished newspaper career behind him. Born in Marietta, Ohio, he started out as a young apprentice at the Nobel County Courier and later worked for the Louisville Journal, a Whig paper that opposed slavery. An early supporter of the Republican Party, he was a delegate to the 1860 convention in Chicago that nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency. When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted as a private in the Union army and served with distinction. Twice wounded, he mustered out in 1864 with the rank of brevet lieutenant colonel.
Otis was inordinately proud of his wartime service and his devotion to flag and country was a hallmark of his subsequent public and private life. In 1898, despite his age, he volunteered for service in the Spanish-American War. President William McKinley, one of his Civil War subordinates, granted the newspaper publisher a commission as brigadier general in the United States volunteers. Otis never saw action against Spanish forces, but he played an important part in the bloody suppression of the Filipino insurrection after the war. Upon his return to Los Angeles, he insisted on being called General Otis, referred to his Los Angeles home as the Bivouac, his country house as the Outpost, and his staff on the Times as the Phalanx. (1)
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After the Civil War, Otis returned briefly to his hometown in Ohio, where he edited a small newspaper. Dissatisfied with small town life, he soon moved to Washington, D.C., where he found work with the Government Printing Office and the U.S. Patent Office. In 1876, an offer to become editor of the Santa Barbara Press brought him to southern California. This was the year of the hotly contested presidential election between the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, one of Otis's superior officers during the Civil War, and the Democratic Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Otis vigorously supported Hayes in the bitter contest, expecting a lucrative office as a reward. The appointment he received, however-the Treasury Department's special agent for the Alaskan Seal Islands--was a cruel disappointment. His three years spent chasing poachers on the remote islands must have seemed more of a punishment than a prize. Following his stint in the north, he returned to Santa Barbara, but soon decided that he had had enough of that quiet town and moved to the comparatively booming city of Los Angeles. (2)
Otis became editor of a struggling newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, at a salary of fifteen dollars a week. He shortly assumed joint ownership of the paper in partnership with H. H. Boyce, another Civil War veteran and staunch Republican. The two men disagreed on basic issues and soon became irreconcilable enemies. Otis opposed unions and favored the importation of cheap Chinese labor while the pro-union Boyce supported Chinese exclusion. By 1886, Otis managed to borrow enough money to buy out his partner and become the paper's sole owner. He never got over his animus to Boyce, referring to him in print years later as a "rat" that "bites savagely at everything within reach." (3)
As a newspaperman, Otis displayed an aggressive and combative journalistic style. His vitriolic editorials enlivened the pages of the Times. He showed no quarter to his enemies--and he made plenty of them--but his opinionated journalism also won him many readers. His confrontational approach on the editorial page carried over to the paper's management. There was only one boss at his newspaper and Otis tolerated no challenges to his authority. Temperamentally unwilling or unable to share power, he moved as soon as he was able against the one group in his employ not completely under his control: the union printers in his shop. In 1890, the Times joined the three other daily Los Angeles newspapers in an attempt to reduce the wages of their unionized workers. The newspaper owners claimed that the printers' wages were too high because they were set during the boom decade of the 1880s, which had long since gone bust. Predictably, the International Typographical Union (ITU) resisted a wage cut and threatened a strike. In response, the newspapers locked them out. (4)
For Otis, the strike was more of a struggle to remain, in his words, "masters of our own business" than simply a fight over pay. He felt that if the newspapers gave in to the union, it meant turning "the management of their businesses over to their employees, minus the cares and responsibilities." The other publishers did not have the stomach for an expensive strike and settled with the union. But Otis refused to compromise. He brought in replacements for the union printers and hunkered down for a long fight. The war between the Times and the printers dragged on for over three years. The ITU sought community support by advocating a boycott of businesses that advertised in the paper, but in the end, in the words of the historian Grace Heilman Stimson, the union had to "to acknowledge itself unequal to its adversary." The printers ended their strike in January 1895 and the Times became a nonunion paper. Otis's unwillingness to compromise with organized labor made him the champion of the Los Angeles open-shop community. In southern California under Otis's leadership, the term "open shop" came to mean not just the fight of employers to hire workers without regard to union membership, but no union at all. (5)
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Whether Otis's anti-unionism stemmed from the shared values of the laissez-faire business culture of the late nineteenth century or simply from his desire to crush anyone who stood in his way is an academic question. There is no question that his views on unionism changed over time. While working at the Government Printing Office, he had joined the ITU, a decision he later dismissed as youthful "folly." As the owner/manager of his own business, his views on labor-management relations became as simple as they were self-serving. In testimony before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations in 1914, he expressed the belief that an agreement between an employer and an employee was a negotiation between individuals. "In employing men we come face to face ... [and] we find out what he is and what he can do, and he finds out whether he wants to work for us, and we get together a good deal like two men trading horses. And we say to him, 'What wages do you want?' Well, he wants so and so. Well, we dicker with him, and finally get together." No one really believed in the fiction that the employer and individual workman were equals at the bargaining table, but it became the basic premise behind the Los Angeles open-shop movement. (6)
Otis may have denied that workers had any reason to organize to protect their interests, but he had no objection when employers did that very thing. Under his leadership, Los Angeles merchants and industrialists formed the Merchants and Manufacturers Association (M & M) in 1896. The association's secretary was Felix J. Zeehandelaar or to friends and enemies simply "Zee." In addition to the formation of a citywide employers association, numerous business groups formed associations of their own that assisted their members in systematically applying a host of anti-union strategies, including refusing to employ union members, making use of lockouts and blacklists, hiring labor agencies to recruit nonunion workers, and offering financial assistance to firms that unions targeted with strikes or boycotts. (7)
The employers exerted considerable influence with the city government. The Los Angeles Police Department could always be counted on to provide assistance in breaking up pickets and protecting strikebreakers. The chief of police routinely deputized private security men hired by the associations during strikes. In dealing with its own members, the M & M wielded both a carrot and a stick. It provided generous financial support to members...
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