Red Flags Over Los Angeles, Part I: Socialism and the Election of 9

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a proud democratic socialist, has achieved a remarkable series of victories in this year's presidential primaries. Equally remarkable, he's brought socialism back from political irrelevance.

In Los Angeles at the turn of the 20th century, the war of Capital and Labor seemed to be turning in favor of Labor, with socialists in the vanguard.

It was otherwise in Los Angeles at the turn of the 20th century. Socialism then was a growing movement, attracting both working people and reform-minded members of the city's middle class. The war of Capital and Labor seemed to be turning in favor of Labor, with socialists in the vanguard.

The unexpected outcome of that war is hardly remembered today. But the glum slab of the Times building on Spring Street remembers for us. The paper's antiunion rallying cry of True Industrial Freedom is carved deeply into its granite fa ade.

The Los Angeles Times building is more than the memory of a crime in stone. It was intended to be a blunt assertion of the paper's victory in bending the politics of Los Angeles toward conservative reaction.

Completed in 1935, the Times building is a cenotaph for the twenty-one press operators and linotype operators who were blown up in October 1910 and flung into fire and collapsing masonry by a union-laid bomb. But the Times building is more than the memory of a crime in stone. It was intended to be a blunt assertion of the paper's victory in bending the politics of Los Angeles toward conservative reaction.

For the Times and the paper's business allies in the Merchants and Manufacturers' Association, industrial freedom would mean freedom from organized labor.

Dynamite in Ink Alley wrecked more than the adjacent Times building in 1910. Reputations were wrecked, too, principally Clarence Darrow's, the crusading lawyer who defended the two union organizers implicated in the Times plot. Also in ruins was a coalition of socialists and union members whose representative was the charismatic Job Harriman, who might have become the city's first socialist mayor.

Part 1: Organized wage-workers should, and ultimately will, lead the Socialist movement Harrison Gray Otis, the Times' belligerent owner, and Harry Chandler, his son-in-law and the paper's general manager, led a decades-long campaign to keep organized labor out of Los Angeles. By 1910, they had made industrial Los Angeles militantly antiunion, enforced by a corrupt city administration and a compliant police force.

In reaction, union leaders made Los Angeles the focus of aggressive organizing. From 1901 on, union members rallied, struck, and picketed for shorter hours, better pay, job security, and a closed union shop.

The Socialist Party had other ambitions. The Los Angeles branch of the party campaigned for municipal ownership of utilities (including telephone, gas, electricity, and street railways), reservation of Owens Valley water for city residents, public ownership of the industrial property around the new Los Angeles Harbor, a graduated property tax for homeowners, and better services for the working poor.

Socialism in Los Angeles in 1900 was distinctly middle-class, nativist, and uninterested in union organizing. Although the socialist movement shaded into progressive reform at its less radical edge, the Socialist Party was initially opposed to good government reformers and their willingness to compromise with city hall. The party had grown out of political discussion groups; Marxist theory meant more than coalition building.

Portrait of the office staff of the Western Union Telegraph Company, 1891. Courtesy of USC Libraries - California Historical Society Collection.

Inevitably, resistance to labor demands - backed by the Times' fiery anti-Labor editorials - turned to repression: strike breaking, goon squads, police raids on union offices, and city ordinances that threatened union organizing. Repression radicalized union members and energized support for the political aims of the Socialist Party. In 1902, over the objections of some union officials, the Los Angeles Council of Labor adopted the Socialist Party program, and the socialists, still thinking of themselves as a radical vanguard, became ardently pro-union.

A new Union-Labor Party, a fusion of union members and socialists, ran a slate of mostly Socialist Party members in the 1902 municipal election. On Election Day, socialist supporters were out in force, but the election results were disappointing.

The Democratic candidate for mayor drew 9,000 votes; the Republican trailed with about 6,000. The Union-Labor candidate was a distant third with just over 3,000 votes.

Failure deepened a split within the Socialist Party that nearly destroyed the state apparatus. Purists in the Los Angeles branch rejected the economic aims of union organizers and saw the proliferation of competing unions as undermining working-class solidarity. Accommodationists (based in the powerful San Francisco branch) argued that support for union interests had won municipal elections for socialist candidates in San Francisco and elsewhere.

By 1905, the north/south rift had hardened into inflexibility. Socialists - at least the leaders of the tightly disciplined Los Angeles branch of the party - stepped back from the union cause.

In 1908, the cause came to the socialists. A city ordinance already outlawed unpermitted street meetings and gave the Los Angeles police commission, packed with Merchants & Manufacturers' Association sympathizers, authority to issue permits to whomever the commissioners chose. During the panic winter of 1907, when the New York Stock Exchange fell 50 percent and some Los Angeles banks failed, worried commissioners chose to silence those who argued on street corners for better wages and workers' rights.

The Salvation Ar

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/red-flags-over-los-angeles-socialis...
	See more stories from kcet

Most recent headlines