by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Moving on to other content from the 15 March 1924 edition of the Municipal League of Los Angeles Bulletin, published by the longstanding civic organization, and also carrying on with its discussion of matters related to the city-owned electric power and water delivery systems, the publication offered a piece titled “Who Said ‘White Magic’ Was ‘Propaganda?” This concerned a Public Service Commission film that touted the “white magic” of electricity and water supplied by the municipality’s Bureau of Power and Light and it was also the subject of a 13 March editorial in the Los Angeles Record, the most left-leaning of the city’s several daily newspapers.
The Record reported that the Board of Education was to decide that day whether “White Magic” was a propaganda piece by the city, but, if not, the picture “recently excluded from showing in the city’s schools, will be restored.” Notably, the decision was to be made after the board looked at a film, “The Giant of Progress,” by Southern California Edison, which “shows the accomplishments in power development under private ownership” and which “is accused of having a ‘stock-selling appeal” and “was ousted from the school with the city’s film.”
When, however, “White Magic” was screened at a meeting the prior Monday, a stenographer’s notes showed some notable discussion among board members, with John R. Beman commenting “I think something should be on record to show this board is not opposing the [city’s] power bond issue,” while Frederick R. Feitshans remarked that he was surprised that former board member Frank O. Bristol, who’d resigned several months prior, would be fighting the campaign, saying that this was not the board’s position. This was seconded by Mrs. George H. Clark.
After the secretary announced that the SCE motion picture had not arrived and would be shown at the Thursday confab, the screening of “White Magic” began and a jovial attitude subsided and “evidently [everyone was] greatly impressed.” Once the projector was turned off, Clark observed that the Boulder Dam project portion comprising the second half “is not what has been shown in the schools” and “the whole thing doesn’t go as an entity” because what was shown in classrooms was “merely the story of what has already been done.” Susan Dorsey merely noted that “it’s a most beautiful story.”
Robert L. Burns, after Beman asked if a decision should be held off until the Thursday gathering, offered that “each picture should be decided on its individual merits, while Clark asserted “I am absolutely favorable to placing this picture in the schools,” though Burns cautioned that it should be determined if so doing was actually legal, adding that anything considered political was prohibited. Assistant County Counsel J.H. O’Connor specified that the issue was partisanship and Burns stated that the Public Service Commission propounded that the picture was “of an economic nature.”
Beman asserted that “any of you looking at that film can see that there is nothing that in itself would be called political or propaganda,” to which Burns concurred, but then added, “they say they want it shown before the election for the influence it will have” and that the Commission would not allow its airing afterward. Beman opined that it was best to bear this consideration in mind and asked O’Connor for his view and he opined that there was “no propaganda of a sectarian or partisan nature” as there was no argument being made. This led Beman to recommend buying both movies and screening them together “with our own lectures,” to which Dorsey answered that instruction on the city’s Los Angeles Aqueduct was part of the curriculum and “White Magic” included that project and its history and operations.
In its discussion, the Bulletin employed a sardonic tone, remarking,
‘Tis a deep, dark secret, fellow citizens, so far. We have tried to uncover the guilty party but have failed.
Yes, we confess it—failed ingloriously, teetotally [soberly, as in not drinking], and without even so much as a reportorial “clue” to solace us . . .
Then some one cried “propaganda” and the picture was unceremoniously booted out of our institutions of learning. The Southern California Edison Company’s stock-selling film went, too, but it had been shown two and a half years whereas the city’s film was just getting a good start.
Who cried “propaganda”?
Quoting Beman and board member Arthur W. Bent as insisting that there was no such intent with the film, this agreed to by others, with four, including Clark and Macbeth along with Beman and Bent, stating that it was a matter of courtesy to allow “White Magic” to be viewed, it was commented that no protest was formally filed with the Board, but that “Hist! Some one complained to the visual education department” of the school system.
Clark, it was noted, suggested that the propaganda claim came out the superintendent’s office, but the assistant countered that the complaint came from something brought to Clark. The League decided there was no use in chasing the question in a circular fashion and wondered “if it was not ‘propaganda’ in July,” presumably when the film was first publicized, “why is it such in March? After commenting that four board members saw “White Magic” on the prior Saturday and the full assembly two days later, the publication concluded “we are hoping that in consequence this reel may at once again be permitted to be shown in the public schools.” In its edition of the 14th, the Record recorded that, with editing, both pictures could be viewed in classrooms.
In its Editorial section, the publication addressed “The Policy of the Harbor Board” observing that citizens in June 1923 approved $15 million in bonds for improvements at the Port of Los Angeles. When the League supported the campaign, it announced that the Harbor Commission agreed to scale up payments on the interest and sinking fund “so that these bonds may cease in time to be a charge against tax payers” and to do so out of revenues from concessions, leases and permits and other means.
Yet, once the League learned that the port was losing money on some leases, it discovered that there was a movement that, in effect, asserted that “the people of Los Angeles should be willing TO TAX THEMSELVES to support their harbor. While subsidies were conceded to sometimes be a good idea, this was “provided we all understand what we are doing, but the remarks of its president, David Woodhead, to the City Club was laden with sarcasm,
In order that gratitude may glow perenially in the hearts of those enjoying at the hands of the voters special privileges in the form of subsidies at the harbor, we should, once a year, appoint a day of general rejoicing self gratulation when, before the assembled multitudes, the Dohenys, the Wrigleys, the Garbutts [Frank A. Garbutt was a Union Oil founder and official with Famous Players—Lasky, soon to be Paramount Pictures, among other capital ventures], etc., would be presented with checks in varying amounts, representing the varying depth of affection of our citizens for these men whom we delight to subsidize.
The editorial concluded that having a rate schedule that was fixed for all leases was wrong-headed and it was asserted that “there should be a minimum rate only fixed for the varying sized parcels of land leases, with the power left to the Harbor Commission to raise the same according to the values at different locations.”
While the questions of electric and water supply, as well as the operations of the port, were of some broad general interest, public awareness was literally out of sight and out of mind for the important matter of sewage dispersal. In this case, this involved outfall sewer project at what is now the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant on the shore of the Pacific next to Los Angeles International Airport. The City bought the land in 1892 and raw sewage was piped out to the site and dumped in the ocean, but it was not until three decades later that residents approved a $12 million bond issue for improvements.
The League, however, expressed its dismay that “thousands of citizens who voted for the north outfall sewer now under construction did so under the belief that there was to be coupled with the conduit an experimental treatment plat which should attempt purification of sewage waters if not salvaging of sewage values.” It scored the Community Development Association (more about that entity later in this post) for having “shut off discussion of this important question thru the association of the five newspapers” and worked on an alternative, even though “the people [were led] to believe that under its plan there was to be at least purification of the effluent.”
At its 31 March 1922 meeting, the League resolved that it would support the bond issue provided that at least a half million dollars was to go toward “adequate experimental work and treatment of sewage by the city, with a view to salvaging the same.” Moreover, it cited the wording placed on the ballot that supported this position and added that the tally was almost 68,000 votes for and under 15,000 against. Despite this, “we learn that the board of public works has apparently forgotten all about sewage purification and salvage” and the idea of a temporary treatment facility in Culver City was shelved, while the nearly finished plant at Hyperion “is nothing more or less than a screening plant, this allowing “into the ocean solids less than one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter.”
As the city’s sanitation department website curtly notes “a simple screening plant” was part of the treatment facility completed a century ago, but, over the next quarter century, “the screening plant was not effective in preventing beach closures” as “highly polluted wastewater was being discharged into near-shore waters.” In 1950, as the city was in its latest boom period following World War II, a “full secondary treatment plant” was completed, including biosolids processing to create heat-dried fertilizer and was one of the first plants to generate energy from biogas.
Soon, this was eliminated (!) as the plant released primary and secondary effluent along five miles of outfall sewers, while “digested sludge” that previously became fertilizer was discharged in a separate seven-mile outfall. Close to a decade ago, a bioenergy facility for renewable energy has opened, though a major July 2021 emergency from overflow discharge due to a massive amount of debris that led to the clogging of headworks and which included the release of some 13 million gallons of untreated sewage into the ocean.
Another editorial section piece concerned “Another Function Of The League” and employed a strange metaphor of a child refraining from taking “a tempting fry-cake” from a cupboard over concerns of a mother’s watchfulness over her creations and posited that “if mother were God, and like God had an eye that saw everything, even in the dark—the prevailing notion when we were boys—it might be assumed that Johnny would never take the forbidden fry-cake and thus uninterestingly grow up to man’s estate.”
The point seemed to be that
Now some people expect the Municipal League to be [the] ‘Very God of Very Gods” and to see and know everything, at least politically, both good and bad, and having seen, pass the word on to the sovereign people at election time so that at the polls they may administer the proper castigation to the derelict office holder.
Alas, it countered, this was too high an expectation to place on the League, as “the most we can do, at least with our present financial backing, is to stand in place of the parent . . . to light upon any piece of political sculduggery [sic] that is attempted against the people’s interests.” It added, though, that with more money, “the more light we can throw upon not only the seamy spots but the many bright spots of the body politic.”
“Introducing Our Associate Editor” informed readers that “the League has just annexed one of the best men the Los Angeles Record ever had” and asked Reuben W. Borough to explain why he left “the paper which for eight years he had been toiling to build up as a fearless, progressive, liberal organ.” Borough (1883-1970), a native of Ohio and raised in Michigan, moved to the Angel City with his wife. He was a progressive, supporting labor, civil rights, peace movements and public utility ownership and was a member of the city’s public works board. Later, he was a staffer on Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign during the Great Depression and led the effort to recall Mayor Frank Shaw and elect Fletcher Bowron.
Borough stated that “the Record is a moulder of public opinion and therefore an institution responsible to the public and if what happened to it throws any light on its policies or change of policies the public has a right to know it and I have not only a right, but a duty, to tell it.” Simply put, he disagreed with the paper joining the Community Development Association and a Crime Commission because this “would limit the newspaper’s usefulness as an independent investigator.”
Specifically, he continued, the Record “reversed its editorial policy favoring sewage salvage and came out for the proposed north outfall sewer,” while Borough “was ordered to write no further articles of editorials setting forth the developments in this controversy.” This was the first time that this was “editorial suppression following the formation of the strange alliance,” but there were others since and it was expected to continue, while the journalist added that his problem with the Crime Commission was that it a “reactionary business group dominating the commission had no solution for the crime problem.”
We will return with part three covering more contents of the Bulletin, so check back with us for that!