Word: chandler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Transformation of the Modern Economy," Alfred D. Chandler Jr. (omitted next year...
...power comes down to his extravagant hyperbole of language, which, time and again, overwhelms his command of narrative and the telling (and telling, and telling) anecdote. In the relatively unploughed terrain of Los Angeles Times history (the most interesting parts of the book), Halberstam details how the unscrupulous Harry Chandler in the 1880s hooked and crooked his way to control over subscription lists for L.A.'s three morning dailies. Then, by combining forces with one of them, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis's Times, Chandler forced the Times's main competitor out of business. Later, with the help of a bribed...
HALBERSTAM has the makings of a great historical novel here. But after all those years of having his rhetorical flourishes cut by The New York Times's good, gray copy desk, he can't resist opening the floodgates. He writes of Harry Chandler as though he were the archetypical tycoon, when, actually, even more grotesque immorality founded thousands of American fortunes in these same years--Horatio Alger and Benjamin Franklin notwithstanding. Halberstam goes on (and on) to maintain that the Chandlers "in effect invented" Southern California, just like their political hired-gun/reporter Kyle Palmer invented Richard Nixon...
...puts it in quotes. It would have been just as easy to check A.J. Leibling's Earl of Louisiana (1961), in the chapter "Henry Luce's Shoestore," to get the quote right. In another case, 100 pages after Halberstam has convinced the reader that Kyle Palmer was the Chandlers' right hand in matters political, he reveals that Norman Chandler refused Palmer a pension when the latter was retired and destitute. Either Palmer wasn't as powerful as Halberstam makes out, or there was more to the Chandler/Palmer relationship than Halberstam would have us believe...
...wife Katharine into the job of publisher. To nearly everyone's surprise, she rose to the challenge, hired the editors who hired the reporters who took on, eventually, the house that Nixon built. Similarly the Los Angeles Times achieved a monopoly in its morning market; already rich under Norman Chandler, it grabbed for respectability under Son Otis. Democrats seeking office in California soon had the unaccustomed thrill of reading about their efforts in the news columns of the Times...