Stealing Home by Eric Nusbaum

Author:Eric Nusbaum [Nusbaum, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

49.

THIS WOULDN’T BE A BOOK ABOUT LOS ANGELES IF THERE WERE NOT a good conspiracy somewhere in it: powerful forces working in the shadows to manipulate the lives of oblivious everyday people. But the thing about the plot to kill public housing in Los Angeles is that there was nothing particularly secretive about it. For decades the city’s richest industrialists, executives, attorneys, and landholders met in private clubs and boardrooms with leather chairs and shiny oak tables and cigar smoke in the air.

At the head of those shiny tables sat Norman Chandler, whose family had owned the Los Angeles Times for three generations and now also ran the afternoon Mirror. The papers were not just a business in and of themselves; they were also a tool to advance the Chandler family’s other business interests, especially real estate. In the 1950s a former councilman named William Bonelli published a book about the Chandlers and the Times-Mirror Company called Billion Dollar Blackjack, the title referring to the fact that the family wielded the paper as a blackjack, a medieval cudgel, demolishing all opposition to get what it wanted. The (ghostwritten) book consists of hundreds of pages of invective and accusations, some of which are backed up by fact and many others with circumstantial evidence or none at all.

“For almost three quarters of a century, the Times-Mirror hierarchy has stolen from the many to enhance the power and fortune of its few. Impudence and hypocrisy have been its weapons; arrogance and vindictiveness its trademarks,” Bonelli writes in the introduction. He continues: “The corrosive effect of the Chandler creed to rule or ruin reaches into every home; touches the life of every person in California.”

In the late 1930s the Times dismissed the civic crusading of people like Clifford Clinton and Dr. A. M. Wilkinson in order to uphold a corrupt mayor, Frank Shaw, who did its bidding. By the 1950s, the mayor who replaced Frank Shaw, the incorruptible former judge Fletcher Bowron, was still in power and was a willing builder of public housing. The paper became the fulcrum of an organized effort to oust Bowron and kill public housing in one fell swoop by tying the mayor, the program, and all of its supporters to Communism. This effort also included Police Chief William Parker and business interests led by Fritz Burns.

Burns and an attorney named Frederik Dockweiler, himself the scion of one of LA’s founding families, started a group called Citizens Against Socialist Housing (CASH). The group’s acronym was also essentially its cause. CASH was a vehicle to organize opposition to public housing among the city’s business interests.

CASH hired a public-relations firm called Baus & Ross to run the actual campaign against housing. Baus & Ross took out billboards and newspaper ads. Their slogan was “Don’t Pay Somebody Else’s Rent.” Meanwhile, Baus & Ross worked hand in hand with the Los Angeles Times, especially its City Hall reporter, Carlton Williams. “We conferred daily or many times daily,” recalled Herbert Baus. “Our campaign figured heavily in the Williams coverage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.