by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It has occasionally been noted here that the newspaper business, especially in smaller communities, in 19th century America was a particularly competitive and tough industry and it was quite common for publishers, editors and journalists to live peripatetic lives frequently moving from place to place and paper to paper.
Greater Los Angeles was no exception to this rule, particularly in the suburban sections outside the Angel City, and the story of Lemuel Thomas Fisher (1831-1909) is emblematic of the challenges faced by those whose pursuit of journalistic success was filled with challenges. This post features, from the Museum’s holdings, the 5 August 1875 edition of the Wilmington Enterprise, the journal of the town next to the rudimentary harbor that became the mighty Port of Los Angeles in subsequent decades.
Fisher hailed from Louisville, Kentucky, and, in a fascinating autobiographical sketch in his last years, wrote that he and a brother were orphaned by the time Lem, as he was known, was just eight years old. With three cousins who were also left orphaned, the siblings moved in with their grandparents and he recalled “the entire family consisted of some twenty blacks and ten whites” on a “grand Kentucky bluegrass farm,” though he added, “the blacks scarcely realized that they were slaves [one wonders how he knew that], and the whites rarely noted the fact that they were masters.”
For a half-dozen years he was raised with “a life full of fun and childish adventure,” until, at fourteen, he went to a nearby town to work in a printing establishment. Chafing under the brutish behavior of his boss, Fisher went to another community and a new print shop, remaining there for three years. This was followed, he reminisced, by stints as “a journeyman printer, college student,” attending the newly founded Antioch College in Yellow Spring, Ohio, “and county school teacher.”
Then came the outbreak of the Civil War and three years serving in the Confederate Army, though Kentucky was neutral. Part of the state was controlled by the rebels, but most of it was under Union control. Fisher was a member of Company C of the Ninth Kentucky Cavalry and explained that “my friends went into the fight, and I drifted with them,” and simply followed his commanding officers’ orders so that, “when they said fight I fought; when they said run, I ran; and I proved to be as good a runner as a fighter.”
With the defeat of the Confederacy when he was 24 years old, Fisher returned briefly to teaching and “I then entered into journalism, which has been my principal work ever since.” His hometown, Louisville Courier, reported in its 6 February 1868 edition that Fisher and a partner, F.L. McChesney, purchased the Paris Western Citizen. For half a decade, the pair ran the sheet, but, in March 1873, Fisher sold his interest to McChesney, with the paper praised him:
we will say that he is one of the best combined newspaper men we know of, having by a collegiate education and teaching school qualified himself for editing, and by a regular apprenticeship as a printer become an adept in that line.
In his review of his life, Fisher recollected that “in my early printing days I learned to chew tobacco, smoke cigars and drink whisky,” though he added that “being something of an idealist I contracted the early habit of reading novels and going to the theatres.”
During his tenure in Paris, he served as secretary to an 1870 meeting that discussed the need for importing “white labor,” specifically from England, though one speaker remarked “there was not so much objection to the negro personally,” but, in the post-war period following emancipation from slavery, Black people were said to be “seeking to become a controlling element, instead of being subject to the will of his employer.” Insisting that white labor had more value, the gathering not only sought to “wholly displace the negro” with British imports, but there was comment about opposition to “Chinese and mongrel tribes being brought into this country for any purpose,” a sentiment that was dominant in California, as well.
Fisher traveled to the Golden State, leaving Kentucky in early May 1873, with the Citizen commenting that Fisher would be a correspondent from the west and adding “he is a vigorous writer, a gentleman of fine descriptive powers” and someone who could be trusted when it came to realistic accounts of life in California. He arrived in San Francisco late in 1873, but, after examining conditions there, decided to head south to a Los Angeles that was nearing the peak of its first development boom.
There were a trio of Angel City English-language dailies, the Express, the Herald and the Star, so the transplant took up the management of a sheet, the Wilmington Enterprise, from a proprietor who stepped aside for health reasons. The Express of 4 August made brief note of it, while the Citizen back home followed eight days later with congratulations and expectation that Fisher would turn the Wilmington sheet into “one of the best country papers in the Golden State.” It also hoped he garnered many friends as well as “accumulating a fortune and—a wife.”
The former never happened and the latter took a baker’s dozen of years, but, as we turn to the pages of the Enterprise for this date in 1875, we note Fisher’s editorial on “Our Agricultural Interests” in Los Angeles County with all of the enthusiastic boosting of someone who’d lived in the region for some time. He observed that “the great substratum” of the wealth of any locale was in agriculture, but there was some concern from the editor about what “seems to be a mania for establishing towns.”
A sample of Fisher’s writing follows as:
A vast sheep pasture is divided up, a town site is laid off in the center, and the voice of the auctioneer is heard to ring out upon the desert, reaching only the ears of a few eager speculators, and disturbing the quiet of thousands of squirrels and rabbits, who rush away frightened at the unusual noise. It is perhaps very well to pay off a little town site in the center of a large ranch that is to be occupied by small farms. It will no doubt in time be convenient as a central point for a church, a school-house, a store and a few shops. But when particular stress is put upon the superior advantages of the town, while the importance of occupying the lands is neglected, a false step is taken.
The editor insisted that, in this way, “the cart is placed before the horse” as “speculators are too thick; and real estate agents are too prosperous.” Fisher observed that “you can stand in the streets of Los Angeles and look out upon thousands of acres of unoccupied lands; you can step out of Anaheim into a cactus desert,” while “several large ranch owners seem to be holding on to their vast tracts of land with the belief that Wilmington is some day to great enhance their value.”
At the new town of Santa Monica, whose prime mover was mining magnate and United States Senator from Nevada, John P. Jones, “a wharf has been extended into the open ocean,” with the branch of the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad, whose founding president prior to Jones was F.P.F. Temple and who took the treasurer position when Jones took control of the line, so that “a great commercial city in the near future is predicated upon this improvement.” New towns were not needed, farmers occupying unsettled land were.
Another interesting little bit of prognostication from Fisher was: “It is predicted that in less than ten years the traveler will be able to take a sleeping-car direct from Los Angeles to the city of Mexico,” that is Mexico City. This did not happen as predicted, but it is an example of the proprietor’s self-professed penchant for idealist mentioned above. What also set Fisher apart from most of his fellow publishers was his declaration that “we have no taste for politics” and, in another colorful expression, he professed “why, the cauldron of Macbeth’s witches never held a more conglomerate mixture than is embodied in the make up of our parties.”
He was responding specifically to a charge made by W.C. Wiseman, whose Anaheim-based weekly, The Broad-Axe, was indeed a cutting publication filled with invective against another temporary paper, the Independent, formed to promote Republicans in the coming county election, held on 1 September, including Temple, a candidate for county treasurer. Fisher asserted that he would not fuel the fire that was so easily lit by Wiseman and his incendiary journal.
In the “Local News” column, mention was made that the salt works, long established on the coast within the Rancho Sausal Redondo in modern Redondo Beach, were providing 800 tons for Angel City merchants Hellman, Haas and Company (forerunner of today’s Smart and Final) and which was to be ground in a couple of weeks at the new mill of the Wilmington Manufacturing Company. Fisher also reminded readers that the old name of “Port of San Pedro” was officially changed about a year-and-a-half before by Congressional fiat to the “Port of Wilmington.”
With respect to the forthcoming election, it was noted that “our highly esteemed fellow townsman, Don David Alexander, yesterday received the nomination for Sheriff at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.” Alexander was praised for his long years of residence in the region as well as his collection of many friends and the paper concluded with a wish for “success to our worthy old citizen.” Mention was also made of the candidacy for a seat in the state Assembly by Frederick Lambourn, foreman of William Workman’s portion of Rancho La Puente.
In more substantive news, under the heading “Cheap Fares and Freights,” the paper discussed the lowering of rates for passenger fares and freighting charges by the Southern Pacific Railroad, which took over the local Los Angeles and San Pedro line which terminated at Wilmington and operated newly built and in-process lines. A major motivation for the adjustment was the imminent completion of the aforementioned Los Angeles and Independence at Santa Monica and the new wharf there with all the competition that meant for the Southern Pacific.
Fisher, however, averred that the localized operation of the upstart line would not present much competition as the Southern Pacific had the three branch lines to Anaheim from Florence (South Los Angeles), Colton through the San Gabriel Valley, and to San Fernando with a northern connection to be completed in September 1876. It was claimed that “what Santa Monica will carry away will be more than compensated for by the increase from other sections.”
This was an argument, however, that was belied by the fact that the Southern Pacific tried to seize Cajon Pass before the Independence road and that the latter promoted its branch to Santa Monica as a way to grab a good deal of freight traffic in the area with its direct connection to Los Angeles. Still, Fisher noted that “cheap fares and freights touch every branch of industry beneficially,” which is exactly what competition is supposed to involve. Moreover, “what the road loses in rates will be made up in increased carriage” and:
The producer will increase his products; the consumer will buy more; the traveler will make his journeys more frequent, and those who could never afford [to] pay [a] high fare will take frequent trips on cheap rates; immigration will increase; and in many ways business will rapidly grow—all getting stimulus and vigor from cheap transportation.
We will return tomorrow with the second and final part of this post, including some of the very interesting history of Fisher over the remaining 35 or so years of his life, so check back with us then.