A History of the Progressive Movement in Los Angeles: the Fifties

1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s

1958: Frontier magazine, the idiosyncratic, muckraking Los Angeles-based journal (a kind of western soulmate of The Nation), beat the drums for a progressive revival in Los Angeles and in California. Inside and outside the Democratic Party, progressive groups emerged to revive the notion that government could solve problems and create opportunities for jobs, education, and livable communities. The momentum that began with EPIC, but was submerged during the McCarthyite era, emerged fully during the 1958 campaign, when Edmund "Pat" Brown was elected Governor and Claire Engle was elected U.S. Senator. Progressives formulated a new agenda, including a commitment to higher education for all Californians, fair housing opportunities, a renewal of civil rights and civil liberties, and new forays into land use and environmental planning.

Slim Connelly, Dorothy Healey, and Rose Cernin at L.A.'s Hall of Justice

The counterattack against progressives reached a crescendo during the early and mid-1950s. Corporate, media, and political power brokers decided to consolidate their reactionary, red-baiting agenda. The LA business elite, led by Pacific Mutual Life Insurance's Asa Call (who had helped orchestrate the anti-EPIC campaign of 1934), Norman Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, and James Beebe of the powerhouse O'Melveny & Myers law firm, enlisted Los Angeles Congressman Norris Poulson to run for mayor. Enticing him by promising ample campaign funds, a raise in the mayor's salary, and a Cadillac and chauffeur to "strut around in," as they put it in a letter to their prospective candidate, this backroom group orchestrated Poulson's election victory in 1953.

Once again, the changing face of Los Angeles inspired new collaborations, new constituencies, and new movements. In 1953, the same year Poulson was elected, and a year before the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v Board of Education decision, Buddy Collette, an accomplished jazz musician, led a successful effort to merge Local 767, the black local of the American Federation of Musicians union, with the all-white Local 46 to form one of the first integrated union locals. Outside the studio system, director Herbert Biberman (one of the Hollywood 10), producer Paul Jarrico, writer Michael Wilson, actor Will Geer (all victims of the blacklist), and famed Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, along with a cast of local community residents, completed the film Salt of the Earth under great duress and political harassment. This film, which chronicled the real-life strike of Latino and Anglo mine workers in New Mexico, was shunned by distributors and had to attract its own audience by showings outside the commercial movie houses. Salt of the Earth represented one of several alternatives to the increasingly saccharine and homogenized Cold War cultural fare that dominated Hollywood and other forms of mass culture. In 1950's LA, these also included Geer's theatrical productions at his playhouse in Topanga Canyon, the postwar cultural scene at Central Avenue, and a vital new art form of jazz and poetry readings that took place in Venice and Echo Park.

Los Angeles was emerging as a center for alternative cultural voices. For example, the work of progressive African-American writer Chester Himes - especially his novels If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947) - described the daily struggles, frustrations, and triumphs of the city's black community as well as the ambivalent relationship between the civil rights and union movements. A vibrant mural movement, especially in Latino neighborhoods, had also taken root. Initially inspired by Mexican muralist David Siqueiros who had lived briefly in Los Angeles during the 1930s, the movement extended through the mural projects of the New Deal's Works Project Administration during the Depression. "Muralistas" created a visual feast on post offices, libraries, and other public buildings, and ultimately became a key element of the Latino cultural and political scene in East LA during the next several decades.

Latino politics took a new turn in the postwar era. In 1947, organizer Fred Ross built the Community Service Organization (CSO), a civic group that led Ed Roybal's unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council, and was the driving force behind his 1949 victory. Roybal, a social worker and community organizer, was the first Latino since 1881 to be elected to that body. During the l950s, Roybal became a prominent participant in the protracted housing battles and community activism associated with the fights against the redevelopment of Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine. These two working class Latino communities near downtown were bulldozed to make way for new downtown cultural centers and corporate offices as well as the new Dodger Stadium. Despite the defeats, these struggles forged a new Latino political identity and helped build progressive coalitions. In 1959, Latino activists formed the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) to mobilize Latino voters and by 1962, Latino activism helped secure Roybal's status as the first Mexican American in the U.S. Congress.

Perhaps more than any other figure, Dorothy Healey spanned the city's progressive movement from the l930s through the l960s. As a teenager and Communist Party member in 1933, Healey helped organize the Mexican and Japanese berry pickers in El Monte. As head of the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party after 1946, she helped build bridges between unions, civil rights movements, and progressive electoral coalitions. During the Red Scare, she was one of the original Smith Act defendants, tried, arrested, and jailed until the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional. During the mid- and late- 1950s, Healey re-emerged as an effective behind-the-scenes figure in the efforts to create new grassroots coalitions of progressive Democrats, such as the California Democratic Council. Her disenchantment with the Soviet Union, such as the invasion of Prague in 1968, ultimately led her to quit the Communist Party in 1973. However, she continued her political activism through the New American Movement as well as by hosting a current events program on KPFK radio. Healey was one of the key "Old Left" activists who helped mentor a new generation of "New Left" activists in the 1960s. Like Upton Sinclair and Carey McWilliams before her, she became a link between progressive movements and across political generations.