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In such a journalistic world. General Otis began building his Los Angeles Times. He lived (until 1917) to make it the most rabid Labor-baiting, Red-hating paper in the U. S.; a potent builder of Southern California resources and of Los Angeles civic pride; dominant in influence, if not in circulation; and, for all its claims of independence, a hidebound Republican organ. General Otis was a rabid fighter, a walking terror in his own newspaper plant; but for the most part he retained the respect of even his enemies.
When the Times was four years old it acquired a new circulation hustler, one Harry Chandler, who three years before at the age of 18 had quit Dartmouth and journeyed west to cure himself of tuberculosis. In storybook fashion young Chandler did his job so well that he attracted the General's eye, got a promotion, married the General's daughter. In 1917 he succeeded his late father-in-law as president & publisher.
Publisher Chandler was much less truculent than the swaggering General. It was the Chandler influence that gradually made the Times the righteous conservative which it now is. A story is told that it was Son-in-Law Chandler who contrived to have Otis—then a civil war lieutenant-colonel—made a brigadier general by President McKinley and sent happily to the Philippines, to get him out of mischief while Chandler was trying to steady the paper.
Whatever national fame the Times needed it got in 1910 when its plant was dynamited and 21 printers killed. The McNamara brothers were sent to prison and their defense lawyer Clarence Darrow indicted for perjury, all as a result of the paper's sustained campaign to keep union labor out of Los Angeles. According to Lincoln Steffens in his Autobiography, Business Manager Chandler and even fire-eating General Otis agreed to let the McNamaras go free, and call a truce between employers & labor for the sake of peace in the city. But to this day the Times remains non-union and proud of it.
Hearst marched into Los Angeles in 1903, reputedly at the behest of union labor, to fight the Times with his Examiner. For many years the Examiner found it nearly impossible to get advertising. The Times's advertisers were more than loyal. But after the War, when the Hearst-pro-German talk had died away, the Examiner began to step out, now has a big circulation lead over the Times. (Times: 171,066 daily, 262.904 Sunday; Examiner: 205,818 daily, 457,317 Sun day.) Publisher Hearst delights in calling the Times "The Old Lady at First & Broadway."
The Times' 's circulation is, of course, of a higher class than Hearst's. The paper gives far more thorough news coverage than its competitors, and a few years ago claimed to print more news and more advertising than any other paper in the U. S. It would like to subordinate news of crime but has found that such practice does not pay. In the recent murder case of Winnie Ruth Judd, who dismembered two women friends in Tucson, Ariz, and was captured in Los Angeles, the Times got and front paged for three days, under her signature.Mrs. Judd's "confession." The paper, like Publisher Chandler, is bone Dry.