Red Flags Over Los Angeles, Part : Bombs, Betrayal, and the Election of 9

Labor organizer and Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) is a hero to Sen. Bernie Sanders. To a broad range of policies - workers' rights, regulation of corporations, finance, taxation, and benefits for the poor - both Debs and Sanders apply socialist principles. But their socialisms are very different.

That they're not the same begins with the events of 1910.

Bombs, betrayal, and Job Harriman's failed campaign for mayor of Los Angeles helped determine what American socialism became in the 20th century.

Part 2: The election of Harriman would result in an orgy of evil. Also in this series

Red Flags Over Los Angeles, Part I: Socialism and the Election of 1911

Job Harriman's gifts for organizing and oratory had helped the Los Angeles branch of the Socialist Party grow from just seven affiliated clubs in 1890 to a countywide network with members in Santa Monica, San Pedro, Glendale, Long Beach, Bellflower, Buena Park, Fullerton, and other communities. He had barnstormed the state while running for governor on the socialist ticket in 1898. In 1900, as the party's vice presidential candidate, Harriman ran with Debs on the Socialist Party ticket.

Harriman was even better known in Los Angeles as the defender of union members jailed for violating the city's anti-organizing and street meeting ordinances.

Harriman's true opponents, however, weren't at city hall. They were at the Los Angeles Times building on First Street, personified by Harrison Gray Otis, the paper's fiery antiunion publisher, and in the boardroom of the Merchant and Manufacturers' Association, whose members were just as reactionary as Otis. According to the San Francisco Bulletin, the members of the Merchant and Manufacturers' had only one principle: We will employ no union man.

In addition to being an advocate of progressive causes, Harriman was on the right side of the ideological split within the socialist movement which separated the moderate majority that followed Eugene Debs from a faction led by Daniel De Leon, one of the founders of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

For Harriman, capitalism would be reformed by union solidarity, Socialist Party leadership, and the ballot box, not by bombs and bullets. 1910 tested each of these propositions.

The Socialist Party's Los Angeles headquarters, 1911. Courtesy of the Photo Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.

It was a year of labor militancy. Garment workers were on strike in Chicago and New York. Transit workers led a citywide general strike in Boston and Philadelphia. Miners picketed in Colorado and Texas and steel workers in Pennsylvania. In Los Angeles, members of the press union local were still on strike against the Times. By the end of 1910, with the support of the member unions of the city's Central Labor Council, butchers, trolley car drivers, painters, brewers, and workers in other trades would join them.

The Merchants and Manufacturers' Association, 1897. Courtesy of the Photo Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.

And it was a year of labor violence. Police used billy clubs to break up picket lines in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Strikebreakers used their fists. Union members fought back, sometimes with greater violence. Since 1906, the Iron Workers union had conducted a campaign of dynamiting non-union plants. By the -end of 1910, bombs set at 110 iron works around the nation had caused several thousand dollars' worth of damage but as yet no injuries or deaths.

In June 1910, workers in the metal trades in Los Angeles, including members of the Iron Workers union, went on strike for a minimum wage guarantee and an eight-hour day. The Merchant and Manufacturers' Association raised $350,000 from its members to break the strike with scab replacements. The scabs repeatedly clashed with union picketers through the summer and into the fall.

The city council, goaded by Otis and the Times, unanimously passed an anti-picketing ordinance (drafted by Merchants and Manufacturer's Association lawyers) that additionally criminalized speaking in public streets in a loud or unusual tone. Union picketers refused to obey, and nearly 500 were arrested, crowding both the city jail and the courts. Harriman renewed his defense of jailed strikers, and few were convicted.

Union organizers made use of public sympathy for the strikers, forming 13 new locals by September and more than doubling union membership overall. The Los Angeles branch of the Socialist Party, with Harriman as its appealing image, nearly doubled its membership. Harriman - defender of free speech, crusading socialist, champion of progressive reforms like votes for women - was a natural candidate to be the next mayor of Los Angeles. The next municipal election would be at the end of 1911.

A socialist victory, mayoral candidate Job Harriman promised, would make private utilities public, reserve Owens Valley water for city customers (not real estate speculators), put the industrial property around the new harbor under city management, and make property taxes progressive.

Harriman and his slate of city council candidates (one of whom was African American) campaigned on a platform of reforms that were already popular among middle-class Angele os. A socialist victory, Harriman promised, would make private utilities public, reserve Owens Valley water for city customers (not real estate speculators like Otis), put the industrial property around the new harbor under city management, and make property taxes progressive. To rally union member support, Harriman distributed 20,000 copies of a pro-union pamphlet written by the celebrated labor attorney Clarence Darrow.

Harriman's opponent was incumbent Mayor George Alexander, a respected good government reformer who had won a re

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