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

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

1945: An African-American couple, Anna and Henry Laws, was found guilty, fined and imprisoned for violating a restrictive covenant on their small home at 1233 East 92nd Street. The covenant stated that the premises should not "be used or occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race." With Henry Laws in jail, reformers and radicals formed a "Committee for the Defense of Henry Laws," chaired by Daniel Marshall, leader of the Catholic Inter-Racial Council of Los Angeles. Ironically, the Laws had tried to rent or buy another house, placing ads in the African-American press, interviewing real estate agents, and spending evenings and weekends looking for a home, to no avail. African-Americans accounted for only 7% of Los Angeles' postwar population (nearly doubling during the war years), but they comprised 46% of all the applications filed for the city's tiny inventory of government-subsidized public housing.

Growing awareness of these racist and anti-Semitic restricted covenants coincided with a severe postwar housing shortage. The Laws' case triggered a grassroots crusade for civil rights and better housing. This movement ultimately prevailed in the courts (a 1948 Supreme Court ruling found restricted covenants in violation of the 14th Amendment, although the practice informally continued for more than another decade) and in the neighborhoods (where a vibrant movement sought to promote centrally located, affordable public housing for African-Americans, Latinos, and other working class residents of the city).

Charlotta Bass

Racist politics were revived during the war years when reactionary forces launched fear campaigns, particularly directed against Japanese-Americans and Mexican-Americans. While conservative civic leaders beat the drums to horde Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II, a new generation of activists joined with progressive voices such as writer Carey McWilliams, the American Civil Liberties Union's A. L. Wirin, Occidental College President Remsen Bird, and State Attorney General Bob Kenny to fight for the civil rights and the civil liberties of Los Angeles' diverse residents. In the fall of 1947, in the wake of the internment, a group of Japanese-Americans activists formed "Nisei Progressives" to support the 1948 candidacy of former Vice President Henry Wallace. Wallace was running for President on the Progressive Party ticket, on a platform that challenged the Cold War, the arms build-up, and racial segregation.

These issues spilled over into the barrios when another racial campaign led by the Hearst press attacked Los Angeles' Mexican-American residents as "greasers," "pachucos," and "zoot suiters," conflating cultural identity with hostile racial imagery. The police, using the pretext of the death of a young Mexican-American near an open reservoir called the "Sleepy Lagoon," rounded up hundreds of Mexican-Americans and provided an open season for anyone to bring charges against those in the improvised line-up. Twenty-three Mexican-American youth were subsequently charged with the Sleepy Lagoon murder. Despite an inspired legal defense led by Carey McWilliams and a community organizing campaign led by his protégé Alice McGrath, the Sleepy Lagoon defendants were found guilty. Coverage of the trial further inflamed the city's racial climate. Months later, a "white riot" occurred involving servicemen stationed at Los Angeles' large naval and marine bases. Soldiers randomly attacked the "zoot suiters," transforming Los Angeles' east side into a racial war zone. Later, the U.S. District Court of Appeals overturned the Sleepy Lagoon convictions as a miscarriage of justice and all the defendants were acquitted and freed in October 1944. By then, eight of the defendants had spent two years in San Quentin, but the case represented a major organizing victory in the city's Mexican-American community.

These racist campaigns were part of a growing effort to undermine the progressive gains made since the 1930s. These efforts gathered steam after the war and became part of the fabric of anti-communist politics that dominated the political landscape during much of the next decade. In fact, from the late l940s through the early l960s, Los Angeles became a volatile cauldron of both reaction and reform. The mainstream assault on civil liberties - what came to be known as McCarthyism - began in Los Angeles, with Congress' investigation of alleged Communist infiltration in Hollywood. In May 1947, Congressman J. Parnell Thomas held secret hearings at the Biltmore Hotel to probe "Communist infiltration" of Hollywood, the initial investigation that launched the House Un-American Activities Committee's ubiquitous political onslaught against progressives.

Months later, the "Hollywood 10" became among the first victims of the domestic Cold War, but the red scare and the blacklist cast a much wider net. Included were trade unionists, academics (such as UCLA history professor John Caughey, who was fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath), school teachers, public officials, and other writers, actors, and filmmakers. Among other targets, Los Angeles' burgeoning housing movement became one of the key victims of the Cold War hysteria. Plans developed by city housing official Frank Wilkinson to build mixed-income racially integrated public housing throughout the city, including at Chavez Ravine, were thwarted by real estate industry interests who linked government-sponsored housing to "socialism."

Against this backdrop, however, progressives kept pushing. While the major Hollywood studios caved in to the Red Scare and viciously fought efforts by employees to unionize, some writers, directors, and producers made films such as "Crossfire" and "Gentlemen's Agreement." In May 1948, 31,000 people jammed into Gilmore stadium to hear a speech by Progressive Party candidate Wallace. As part of Wallace's campaign, Los Angeles radical Harry Hay, a union organizer and Communist, developed an ingenious strategy to mobilize a nearly invisible constituency. Planning on calling his group "Bachelors for Wallace," Hay attempted to signal gays that the Progressive Party campaign provided a political home not available elsewhere. Though this effort never did get off the ground, two years later, using the political skills he'd learned within the progressive and union movements, Hay formed the Los Angeles-based Mattachine Society. This was the nation's first modern gay rights organization - the first group to insist that lesbians and gay men be treated as equals.

During and immediately after the war, the civil rights movement also began to embrace the increasing diversity of the new Los Angeles. The struggle for black civil rights was the initial cutting edge in this process. In 1941, the newly formed Youth Council of the NAACP organized protests against racial discrimination. The next year, hundreds of African-American women flooded the downtown U.S. Employment Service office, forcing the end of racial and gender discrimination in the war industries. Charlotta Bass, the editor of the California Eagle, the city's longest running black paper, was at the center of a wide range of community-based progressive movements. Her paper served as a voice for both civil rights and labor activism. At the 70th anniversary party for The Eagle, on October 1, 1949 10,000 people filled LA's Wrigley Field to hear Paul Robeson speak and sing, and to affirm Robeson's right to perform across the country. (This was soon after the "Peekskill incident" in upstate New York when Robeson supporters were attacked after a concert.) Ultimately, Los Angeles became one of the first cities outside the South where anti-discrimination and civil rights struggles incorporated the mosaic of racial and ethnic groups, a precursor of multicultural politics.

There was perhaps no more compelling figure of Progressive LA during the 1940s than Carey McWilliams (1905-1980). A journalist, housing commissioner, and political activist, McWilliams effectively chronicled and captured the moods and contradictions of pre-war and post-war Los Angeles. His advocacy work and his writing (including the 1939 Factories in the Field about the exploitation of California farmworkers, and the 1946 Southern California: An Island on the Land) drew attention to the problems of economic injustice, racism, and anti-Semitism. He was the leading interpreter of the region as an incubator of progressive movements and ideas. He also chronicled the ways Los Angeles' political and social elites sought to resist labor and civil rights demands, while promoting sprawling development. McWilliams, whom the agribusiness interests called the "number one pest of California," championed farmworker rights and gave voice to the vision of Los Angeles as the center of innovative progressive thought and action. His departure at the end of the decade for New York to become editor of The Nation never diminished his attachment and connections to Progressive LA.