Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [47]
Sesquipedalian tergiversation was the strong suit of Harrison Gray Otis, along with slander, meanness, biliousness, and the implacable pursuit of a good old-fashioned grudge. Under his ownership, the Times was less a newspaper than a kind of mace used to bludgeon and destroy his enemies, who, and which, were many. (Otis often said that he considered objectivity a form of weakness.) The Democratic Party was “a shameless old harlot”; labor leaders were “corpse defacers,” labor unions “anarchic scum”; California’s preeminent reformer, Governor (later Senator) Hiram Johnson, was “a born mob leader—a whooper—a howler—a roarer.” The newspaper owned by Otis’s former partner, H. H. Boyce, was the “Daily Morning Metropolitan Bellyache,” while Boyce himself was “a coarse vulgar criminal.” William Randolph Hearst and his Examiner, more serious rivals than Boyce, were, interchangeably, “Yellow Yawp.” Even innocent bystanders were vaporized by the General’s ire. One morning Otis was greeted by a new neighbor who happened to mispronounce his name. “Good morning, General Ah-tis,” said the man cheerily. “It’s O-tis, you goddamn fool,” the General bellowed back.
General Harrison Gray Otis. Otis’s military coronation had come through the offices of President William McKinley as a reward for volunteering to send young men into the Philippine jungles during the Spanish-American War. By the time he returned to the States, the twentieth century had dawned, and Otis was utterly unprepared for it. Unions were organizing, the open shop was threatened, and even in Los Angeles the Socialists—the Socialists—were getting ready to run a candidate for mayor. Anti-unionism became breakfast fare for Times readers, as predictable as sunrise, and Otis was soon ordained public enemy number one by organized labor in the United States—no mean feat for a newspaper publisher in a remote western city. It was a notoriety he loved. To celebrate it, Otis commissioned a new headquarters that resembled a medieval fortress—it even had a parapet with turrets and cannon slots—and had a custom touring car built with a cannon mounted on the hood. The effect of all this on his enemies was inspirational. Hiram Johnson was addressing a crowd in a Los Angeles auditorium when someone in the audience, who knew that Johnson’s talent for invective surpassed even the General’s, yelled out, “What about Otis?” Johnson, all prognathous scowl and murderous intent, took two steps forward and began extemporaneously. “In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy,” he said in a low rumble. “We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. But we have had 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 the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent—that,” concluded Johnson in a majestic bawl, “that is Harrison Gray Otis!”
The vitriol that Otis and his rivals hurled at one another, however, could be turned off instantly if some more important matter was at hand. In the avaricious social climate of southern California, that usually meant an opportunity to make money; and in the dry climate of southern California, money meant water.
The first sign something was afoot came in the weeks following the Times’s disclosure of Mulholland and Eaton’s daring scheme, when Otis’s newspaper took time out from its usual broadsides to laud the future of the San Fernando Valley, an