A Mayor Who Stood for Reform

Los Angeles’ mayors may be legally weak, but they have seldom lacked for personal color.

And few among them were more colorful than John Clinton Porter, whose unique mixture of reform politics and xenophobic Protestant populism took him quite literally from the junk yard to City Hall.

On his way to victory in the 1929 mayoral election, the Bible-quoting Porter, a teetotaler used-auto parts dealer, made his share of enemies--one a newspaper publisher who called him a “nincompoop” in print and the other a disgruntled citizen who became the only person in history to attempt the assassination of the city’s chief executive.

Others clearly were taken with the Iowa-born Porter’s pledge to maintain Los Angeles as “the last stand of native-born Protestant Americans.”

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In a city of big-bucks political muscle, Porter campaigned to clean up the then-legendarily corrupt municipal politics and to reform the equally corrupt Los Angeles Police Department. His bold initiative won not only votes, but also the support of Los Angeles’ most influential Methodist minister, “Fighting Bob” Schuler.

But Porter was hounded by death threats from the moment he took office. One such written threat adorned with knife cuts through hand-drawn hearts dripping in blood, read: “ ‘lay low’ or you’ll be a ‘dead man’ ” and it was signed “A Gangster.”

Unwilling to be bullied, Porter began reviving the Depression-ravaged city by reducing municipal taxes three times during his single four-year term and by slashing the salaries of city workers.

As the Great Depression spread and unemployment engulfed Los Angeles, which had the nation’s highest personal bankruptcy rate, Porter saw it as “merely a temporary deviation from a divine plan for the metropolitan area.”

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Decades before strict campaign disclosure laws were enacted, Porter had his own code of ethics. By then-prevailing local custom, the Fire Department and its commissioners presented him with a diamond and jewel studded badge, worth about $2,500. He returned it the next day, saying it was too expensive a gift.

He also refused the financial support of a Brooklyn mobster, who enclosed in a letter two checks, one for $10,000 and the other was blank so it could be filled in for any amount up to $75,000. All the gangster wanted in return was for Porter to open the city to Eastern racketeers. The mayor promptly turned the checks over to investigators.

In 1931, as a member of the U.S. delegation to France, Porter and his wife created an international incident by refusing--on religious and legal grounds--to join in a champagne toast to their host, the French president.

“We believe in following the American Constitution even when on foreign soil,” said Porter, a strong supporter of the 18th Amendment’s imposition of Prohibition.

Back at City Hall, the controversial mayor was protected from verbal and physical abuse by his gun-toting son, Lee, who also doubled as his secretary.

On Feb. 19, 1932, Jacob Denzer, a security guard--who worked at a federal warehouse filled with confiscated supplies of alcohol--sat in the mayor’s outer office, waiting to deliver a message. But the mayor kept him waiting too long. Denzer stood up, drawing his gun, threatening to “shoot out the lights” unless the mayor came out of his office immediately. “I am a messenger of the Lord,” he proclaimed, and he had a recent vision of a “divine plan of salvation” that he wanted to dedicate to the city of Los Angeles.

Just then 50 students from Fullerton Junior High School on a City Hall tour started crowding into the room. “Get out of here, all of you,” he shouted, waving his gun. At that point, a city janitor rushed in and snatched the revolver from Denzer’s hand.

Porter also survived perjury charges and a recall campaign, presiding over the opening of the 1932 Olympic Games, where big-wig guests had to be content to toast the festival with nonalcoholic beverages.

Ironically, the reformer that he was and true to his principles--as bizarre as they were--he lost the 1933 mayoral election to the man whom most historians characterize as the most corrupt chief executive in city history--Frank L. Shaw.