Radical L.A.: From Coxey’s Army to the Watts Riots, 1894–1965 (review)

Errol Wayne Stevens positions Radical L.A.: From Coxey’s Army to the Watts Riots, 1894–1965 as an examination of the “conflict between the radical Right and the radical Left.” The breadth of subject and period forced some undoubtedly difficult choices upon the author. The book offers sufficient depth on the period between the 1890s and the 1950s, but unfortunately the Watts Riots are only mentioned in a short conclusion. It also offers a much deeper consideration of the labor and leftist movements than it does of the right. More problematic than either of these questions of scope is the author’s loose conception of radicalism and his lack of attention toward the non-Anglo and non-Anglophone left. On the whole, the predominantly synthetic work manages to provide a solid overview of the socialist and reformist left in Los Angeles from the 1890s through the first decade of the Cold War.

The center of Los Angeles’s radical left community, in the author’s view, consisted of predominately Anglo socialists and liberals in reform focused movements. He constructs a compelling narrative of the L.A. left, beginning with the leading West Coast position in the unemployed movement that became known nationally as Coxey’s army. He continues through the strong role that a number of prominent Anglo socialists played in city politics from both within and outside of unions, the high drama of the Los Angeles Times bombing, World War One era repression, the rise of the Communist Party as an insurgent force on the left in the 1920s, and finally through the shift to New Deal and then post-war, race-centered reformist politics. The author’s clearest argument is that class politics transitioned to race-centered concerns around the time of the second World War. This is presented in a smooth, tightly argued narrative that will surely introduce young scholars and students to the rich and foundational history of the left in a city better known for the success its business community had in maintaining an open shop.

As a history of conflict between political poles, however, Steven’s choice of the term “radical” to describe his subjects on the left and the right is problematic and never clearly defined. He presents an undernuanced group of actors on the right including the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, the Los Angeles Times patriarch Harrison Gray Otis, and other elites. With little examination of their support base, we are left with a “radical” group of private business and government actors. On the left, his focus on English speaking trade unionists, socialists, and Industrial Workers of the World locals in the first and more thoroughly researched half of the book leaves out a significant number of people on the left, most notably anarchists and non-English language organizers. Drawing on a larger and multilingual source base would have certainly opened this work to include the breadth of activity of anarchists, syndicalists, and left socialists in Los Angeles who organized in Spanish, Italian, Yiddish, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Armenian, and Japanese among other languages. This oversight results in the book missing people with arguably more “radical” positions than those included. Without these voices, the narrative is driven by a well-entrenched, radical right, city power elite and a radical left that often looks as reformist as they do radical. But this is a call for further research, hopefully by scholars with the linguistic skills to understand the remarkable diversity of Los Angeles.

There is one unfortunate mistake that deserves note. In chapter 4, on the Los Angeles Times bombing, the author claims that the Norwegian immigrant Olaf A. Tveitmoe, a long time stalwart in California’s craft union movement and a member of San Francisco’s Cement Workers Union Local 1 at the time, was an anarchist. While a jury convicted Tveitmoe for illegally transporting dynamite in connection to...