William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles by Catherine Mulholland

Author:Catherine Mulholland
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE CHIEF TILTS WITH HARRIMAN

Five days before the election, on December 1, the McNamara brothers confessed to bombing the Times building. Establishment figures breathed more easily, but Harriman’s followers were grief-stricken and angry over the reversal of fortunes. Amid the tears and gloom of campaigners in the Labor Temple, an angry group felt that the McNamaras had betrayed their cause while the most dedicated believed them simply martyrs of the class struggle. The day after the McNamara confession, Mulholland was scheduled to defend his position against Harriman’s accusations at a City Club luncheon. Instead of a somber affair, a spirited crowd of three hundred gave three cheers when Meyer Lissner made the introduction. “I want to present the biggest man in Los Angeles—Bill Mulholland.” In the spirit of the occasion, the Chief had brought with him a demijohn of Owens River water left over from ceremonies the previous October when President William Howard Taft had dedicated the Buena Vista Bridge. Offering it around to those sitting at his table, he asserted its purity by declaring that it was as sweet now as then. His speech was long and repeated many of the points he had already presented to an audience of six hundred women on November 27. He said he was before them “as parliamentarians say, on a question of personal privilege.” He did not intend a campaign speech but wished to elucidate “some matters that were falsely presented to the public. Not only he, but the present administration, his associates, and the work of the aqueduct had been maligned and their acts distorted.”18

He began with Harriman’s charge that Mulholland had put a valuation of $3 million on the private waterworks in 1901. Not true, he protested, going through the old valuations presented long ago at the arbitration hearings and recalling that his had been $1,732,541. He had heard that Mr. Harriman referred to him as Saint Mulholland. “Well,” he mused, “I got to looking at myself in the glass and I couldn’t see much semblance to a saint, a man past middle age, with a tendency to corpulence and all the other features that a man of my time of life who has lived an active life usually presents.” But, he explained, after the laughter died down, “I found he is addicted to that sort of thing. I can excuse him for his representations of me being a saintly man, because he refers to himself in the placards all over the city as the modern Abraham Lincoln.” This brought down the house, as Mulholland proceeded to answer more Harriman accusations. He said a famine was created “not by God all Mighty who controls the rain … but by the Board of Water Commissioners of the City of Los Angeles and the saintly William Mulholland.” After refuting various charges with a battery of figures for rainfall and water consumption, he apologized for the length of his speech but then continued with documentation of water use, pointing out that Los Angeles

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