I have posted several of these People’s Voice broadcasts over the years – the theme is pretty much the same; corruption in Los Angeles and a cesspool of graft in City Hall.
Clifford Clinton (who also owned and ran Clifton’s Cafeteria) was one of the city’s biggest muckrakers – regularly assaulting City Hall with revelations and accusations of bribery and evil doings among elected officials.
On these two broadcasts (from March 16 and 17, 1939) a city election was underway and Clinton was busy endorsing candidates while warning against others.
Clifford Clinton was target of numerous lawsuits and even a few assassination attempts while he was broadcasting his People’s Forum program. But as owner of one of the most visible restaurant chains in California, Clinton not only had financial resources to continue his fight, he also had much of the voting population of Los Angeles on his side too, since Clifton’s was one of the more popular restaurants in post-Depression America.
These two broadcasts amply characterize Los Angeles as being “a nice place to visit, but maybe you wouldn’t want to live there”. Tales of illegal gambling, prostitution and gang activities were the stuff of tabloids. The seemingly endless bribes, threats of physical violence – actual violence in the form of bombings and arson – this was the seamy underbelly of a Los Angeles who fought to maintain it’s squeaky clean innocence and the place where “anyone could be a star”.
Los Angeles was, after all, just a city like any other – only boasting a better climate and endless vistas.
So to get a better idea of what L.A. and muckraking was like in the 1930s – supplying evidence that fictional films like Chinatown were based, in places, on fact – here are two episodes of The People’s Voice as broadcast on March 16 and 17, 1939 by radio station KEHE (before it became KFI).
Back to work.
