Newspaper
In 1926, Boddy was hired as editor of the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News, a failing newspaper originally been founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. The following year, with the newspaper bankrupt, he persuaded a stockholder committee and then, a federal judge to allow him to take over the newspaper. Within years, it became immensely profitable with Boddy as editor and publisher.
Boddy assumed ownership of the newspaper on August 5, 1926. Its plant, at Pico Boulevard and Los Angeles Street, was deeply in debt. He rejected Vanderbilt’s editorial philosophy of emphasizing good news by turning the Daily News into a crusading newspaper that addressed police corruption, gambling and prostitution. He quickly earned the enmity of Los Angeles Police Chief James E. Davis, who attempted to silence the News by arresting Boddy. Davis used an obscure municipal law that made it illegal to publish horse-racing entries and results in a general circulation newspaper. The charges never got beyond the arraignment stage, and Boddy continued reporting vice and corruption in his paper.
Boddy was a Republican and supported Herbert Hoover in the 1932 Presidential election. He believed the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt was a “terrible mistake.” Still, he recognized that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies had merit and could lift the country out of the Depression. The Daily News was the only Los Angeles newspaper to openly endorse Roosevelt and give him balanced coverage. It also devoted considerable coverage to Technocracy, a type of scientific management of society and the economy. Boddy gave news space to Robert Noble’s “Ham ‘N Eggs” plan and Dr. Francis Townsend’s “Townsend Plan,” which proposed that state and federal governments would issue funds to people over age 60. The Daily News also extensively covered Upton Sinclair’s run for California governor and his controversial End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign. Competing newspapers either ignored the campaign or wrote vehement editorials against Sinclair’s programs.
Just before World War II in October 1941, a disastrous explosion and fire in Fall River, Massachusetts destroyed a large plant of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company and with it a large part of government's supply of raw rubber, necessitating scrap drives to collect rubber. Boddy was on the air every night for more than four months, appealing to the public to collect and turn in their old automobile tires and other scrap. In a memo to President Roosevelt, Boddy outlined a plan to get rubber out of Japanese-held Malaya. Three weeks after he had written the memo, Boddy received a letter from the President thanking him for the idea and telling him that the operation was under way. Whether or not the operation actually took place, the story became the basis of the 1950 Hollywood film Malaya, in which the character "John Manchester," portrayed by Lionel Barrymore, was based on Boddy.
Boddy’s editorial policies in these early years established the Daily News as the city’s only liberal journalistic voice. After the end of World War II, Boddy’s interest in the newspaper began to wane. His efforts to stimulate interest in various plans to boost the country’s economy and his crusades for noble causes had ended with the war. Los Angeles had become a mecca for job-seekers and a refuge for new arrivals from the frozen East Coast. Postwar Los Angeles was emerging as an increasingly cosmopolitan city, and many of Boddy’s editorial policies seemed quaint to the city’s new residents.
Boddy spent less and time at the newspaper as he focused his energies on his estate, Descanso Gardens, in La Canada. He eventually turned the day-to-day operations over to his general manager, Robert L. Smith. Without Boddy, the newspaper lost its spunk and no longer tilted at windmills, reported newspaper researcher and writer Rob L. Wagner. By the fall of 1953, the Daily News was losing $75,000 a month, and it folded in December 1954. The assets were purchased by the Times Mirror Company. The Los Angeles Mirror, a Times-owned afternoon tabloid newspaper, took the Daily News name to become the Mirror-News.
Read more about this topic: Manchester Boddy, Career
Famous quotes containing the word newspaper:
“Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors.... I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man’s door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)