A History of the Progressive Movement in Los Angeles: The Twenties

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

1923: Striking dockworkers, including members of the Industrial Workers of the World, were continually harassed. In defense of their rights, Upton Sinclair - journalist, novelist, political activist, Socialist candidate for Congress, screenwriter and film producer - joined a rally in San Pedro and tried to read from the Bill of Rights. "This is a delightful climate," Sinclair began his talk, and was promptly arrested along with hundreds of others. "We'll have none of that Constitution stuff," said the arresting officer. Sinclair was held incommunicado for eighteen hours. The scandal that ensued lead to an expose of police corruption and the arrest of the chief of police. It also led to the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. Since then "Liberty Hill" has been associated with the rights of labor and the defense of free speech.

Dockworkers at Liberty Hill, 1923

In Los Angeles history, the 1920s has been viewed as a time of reaction - overt racism against Asians and Mexicans, the triumph of the big studios in Hollywood, the oil boom and the environmental degradation that went with it, and the consolidation of business' plan to decimate the labor movement and make Los Angeles a safe haven for cheap labor. Indeed, by the end of the decade, John Porter, auto-parts dealer and secret klansman, was elected mayor.

But the 1920s also witnessed the re-emergence of a progressive environmentalism, when working class communities, sought, sometimes successfully, to restrain "Big Oil" from drilling - and destroying - their neighborhoods. In various corners of Los Angeles, political radicals and literary bohemians formed circles in places like Pasadena, Venice, on the Eagle Rock campus of Occidental College, in Boyle Heights, in the back room at Musso and Frank's restaurant in Hollywood, and at Jake Zeitlin's At the Sign of the Grasshopper bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. There and elsewhere, journalists, planners, essayists, novelists, union organizers, and others crafted an alternative vision of Los Angeles as a place of possibility and experimentation.

Dora Haynes organized the city's League of Women Voters chapter in 1920, six months before the historic ratification of the Women's Suffrage Amendment. She and her husband John Randolph Haynes played major roles in the city's progressive crusades and extended the progressive reform movement into such areas as public health and city planning. The late 1920s also saw a major push by urban planner Frederick Law Olmsted and others to establish urban greening principles for Los Angeles. This included a call for large-scale development of parks and limits on urban sprawl and inappropriate development. The Olmsted group's approach contrasted with the push by real estate developers and other commercial interests to "penetrate the wild virgin areas" of the region, as the Los Angeles Times put it, and make Los Angeles into a permanently expanding - and fragmented - metropolis.