"Probably the Most Hated Man in Ragtime America"

"More is at stake than parochial Los Angeles history. Otis’s revised biography provides important clues to the larger mystery of how the Radical Republicans, once courageous advocates of human equality and free labor, ultimately became geriatric strikebreakers and jailers of dissent. Long before he became the embittered commander-in-chief of L.A.’s elites, Harry Otis was Eliza’s sweetheart and an Abolitionist knight on horseback."

Mike Davis in the Los Angeles Review of Books begins a nine-part biography of Harrison Gray Otis.