Letters to the Editor: L.A. needs more politicians? How a bigger City Council makes government smaller
Los Angeles, Aug. 28
For several months now, I have been writing about the issue of Los Angeles’ smallness, and what must be done to make a Los Angeles larger, better and more prosperous. You can be assured that the majority of our readers in L.A. consider this our civic duty.
In my recent book, The Los Angeles Way: A Life of William Randolph Hearst, I quote a number of eminent Los Angeles journalists of the early 20th century such as George T. Stocking, who described the city as a “small town” where “the small town people have nothing to do with the big business men.”
And to show how people have really “nothing to do” with big business, I quote from my book, the great journalist and reporter Earl J. May, who was reporting for the New York Times: “There was no city where big business was so busy as Los Angeles and where, if there were, the big business men would have as little to do with the city government as the little town people.”
This is the case for one simple reason: Los Angeles is a small city, with a few hundred, or even fewer, people. The people who are on city councils, and on the boards of supervisors, are, as a class, the most mediocre and uninformed citizens of this country. And of course, these people are never elected to any high office.
This is especially true of the city’s political leaders. The people who serve in the Legislature are the richest, most uneducated, most disorganized, most contemptuous, most ignorant and most incompetent politicians of this country.
We have seen how this has worked out, and the results of letting the people who are elected to city council and the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors continue to serve their selfish agendas.
What Los Angeles used to be, was a small city.