Let’s Throw Out the Charter and Start All Over

If you can stop yawning long enough to read about Los Angeles charter reform, it offers a fascinating glimpse of the Southland’s transformation from a teetotaling white Protestant enclave into a hodgepodge of many races and cultures.

What, some readers may ask, does charter reform have to do with race, culture and alcohol? And why single out white Protestant teetotalers? Well, if you read Los Angeles history, it’s easy to see how these issues are relevant to the growing fight over revising a 71-year-old City Charter that divides power between a mayor and a City Council in a hopelessly confused manner that leaves nobody in charge.

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The City Charter was born of a Progressive reform movement that swept through California in the early part of the century.

Its stated goal was to destroy crooked politicians in Los Angeles, San Francisco and the state capital.

But in his enlightening book, “Inventing the Dream,” historian Kevin Starr explains how the Progressives had a second agenda. It was a moral agenda, stemming from their Protestant religious beliefs. Combined with this was a nativist, anti-immigrant tinge to the movement, a hostility to the flood of newcomers from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe who tended to be Catholic or Jewish.

“Progressivism . . . reasserted by implication (and occasionally by overt statement) an embattled conviction of the essentially Protestant nature of American society,” Starr wrote.

An example of the Progressives’ fixation with moral issues was their strong attachment to the temperance movement.

“To the Progressive mind the saloon, especially the urban saloon, epitomized the sort of society . . . foreign, corrupt--they loathed,” Starr said.

Progressives were among the leaders of the Anti-Saloon League, which, even before Prohibition, pushed through saloon bans throughout Los Angeles County. In 1910, George Alexander, a Progressive reformer and avid prohibitionist, was elected mayor of Los Angeles.

Their attitude of moral superiority influenced their view of public life. Progressives tended to be affluent young professionals, the yuppies of the day, and felt superior to the brawling roughhewn mix of frontier capitalists, militant union members and politicians who ran the state and its major cities.

In short, the Progressives were uptight elitists, and they brought this attitude to their writing of the 1925 City Charter. They devised a government structure that denied power to politicians.

Instead, power was split between the City Council and the mayor and part-time citizen commissions. These commissions were to be composed of nonpolitical elitists of the sort acceptable in Progressive circles.

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A government run by upper-class philosopher kings doesn’t work in today’s L.A. Not in this point in our history, when we are one of America’s great non-elitist cities where many ethnic groups and neighborhoods are seeking their share of power.

That explains demands for a new City Charter. Many ideas are surfacing. One of the most adventurous comes from attorney Dave Fleming, a leader in the rebellious San Fernando Valley and himself a bit of a philosopher king as a city fire commissioner.

Fleming envisions roughly 30 or 40 neighborhood councils, elected by residents. Each one would have a president and would handle such matters as zoning and building permits. You could get a building permit by computer.

Presidents of all the councils would serve as a legislature, meeting once a week or so to consider broad policy. The mayor’s power would be greatly strengthened. Meanwhile, the present 15-member City Council would be abandoned.

Obviously, the City Council doesn’t like such ideas. So Fleming and other reformers are planning to bring their plan to the people with a voter initiative, a difficult, expensive proposition.

For the next few months, their efforts will be L.A.’s most important political movement. I hope they succeed. It’s time to discard the unworkable government left us by a narrow group of Progressive elitists determined to remake society in their own image.