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Goody-Goodies, Sissies, and Long-Hairs

The Dangerous Figures in 1930s Los Angeles Political Culture

Hunter College

This article examines how allegations of vice intersected with late 1930s anxieties about communism and sexual deviance to mobilize the first successful recall of a major urban mayor. The article challenges the traditional narratives of the recall and their narrow focus on politicians. Instead, it offers an analysis that dwells on the impact of Los Angeles’ wider political culture on the recall election and beyond. Ultimately, it argues that the new cultural system lay the foundation both for massive waves of antihomosexual policing and for the start of a gay political movement.

Key Words: political culture • Los Angeles • communism • morality • homosexuality • perversion • deviance

References

• Mrs. U. J., letter to editor, in "Recall? Yes? No? Which?" letters column, September 1938, untitled Los Angeles newspaper, in scrapbook 11, p. 12, Clifford E. Clinton Papers (Collection 2108), Charles Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles (hereafter, CCP).
• The recall began being studied within a few years, and the events have been recounted again and again. See Ernest R. Chamberlain, "The Civic Committee of Los Angeles: Its Background, Activities and Accomplishments" (Pasadena, Calif., 1941), in an eponymous file, box 1, CCP;Guy Finney, Angel City in Turmoil: A Story of the Minute Men of Los Angeles in Their War on Civic Corruption, Graft and Privilege (Los Angeles, 1945);Jerry Saul Caplan, "The CIVIC Committee in the Recall of Mayor Frank Shaw" (master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1947);Fred W. Viehe, "The Recall of Mayor Frank L. Shaw: A Revision," California History 59 (Winter 1980-1981): 290-305;Thomas Sitton, "Urban Politics and Reform in New Deal Los Angeles: The Recall of Mayor Frank L. Shaw" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 1983);Michael Woodiwiss, Crime, Crusades and Corruption: Prohibitions in the United States, 1900-1987 (London, 1988);Kevin Starr, The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s (New York, 1997), 164-170;and Tom Sitton, Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron’s Urban Reform Revival, 1938-1953 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).
• Leonard Joseph Leader, "Los Angeles and the Great Depression" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1972), 259, 261.
• Historians disagree about the experience of Los Angeles during the Great Depression. For the argument that the city numbered among the most depressed in the nation, see Starr, Dream Endures, 165-165;and William H. Mullins, The Depression and the Urban West Coast, 1929-1933: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 5-5.For the counterargument, see Leader, "Los Angeles," x-x;and Greg Hise, "Industry and Imaginative Geographers," in Metropolis in the Making Los Angeles in the 1920s, ed. Tom Sitton and William Deverell (Los Angeles, 2001), 21-21, 36-36.
• For biographical information on Shaw, see Sitton, "Urban Politics," ch. 2;Caplan, "CIVIC Committee";Viehe, "Recall";and Woodiwiss, Crime, Crusades.
• Clinton’s biographical synopsis comes from Chamberlain, "Civic Committee";Caplan, "CIVIC Committee";Viehe, "Recall";and Sitton, "Urban Politics."Similar accounts appear in Starr, Dream Endures, 164-170;Woodiwiss, Crime, Crusades;and Finney, Angel City. Of Clinton’s two main cafeterias, one was decorated to resemble a redwood forest, even down to real redwood trees in the main dining room; the other, the Pacific Seas Cafeteria, had waterfalls, fountains, fake palm trees, and "a controlled rainfall every twenty minutes."Starr, Dream Endures, 164-164.
• Caplan, "CIVIC Committee," 8-8, 9-9, 20-23. According to Mullins, when Shaw was a county supervisor in 1931, he fought for the removal of the then head of the hospital.Mullins, Depression, 67-68.
• Caplan, "CIVIC Committee," 10-16.
• Ibid., 1-3, 25-31, 33. Sitton amended Caplan’s version, arguing that Clinton and Ford lobbied Bowron to name him to the grand jury.Sitton, "Urban Politics," 166-167. Antigambling efforts were also underway in New York City, and the FBI’s battles with the likes of Al Capone were being memorialized by Hollywood throughout the decade.See Roger Sharpe, Pinball! (New York, 1977), 43-54.On Hollywood movies, see John Springhall, "Censoring Hollywood: Youth, Moral Panic and Crime/Gangster Movies of the 1930s," Journal of Popular Culture 32 (1998): 135-155.
• Caplan, "CIVIC Committee," 34-44.
• Ibid., 58-60. According to the chair of the recall committee, when people were approached to sign the recall petition prior to the conviction of Earl Kynette, head of the Intelligence Squad, 60 percent of them refused; afterward, 90 percent began to sign. See "Minutes of Committee of 25," July 7, 1938, item 110, box 134, Dorothy Healey Papers, Special Collections, California State University, Long Beach (hereafter, DHP).
• The Good Clinton versus Bad Shaw account came first, offered nearly simultaneously by Jerry Caplan’s master’s thesis and Guy Finney’s Angel City in Turmoil, but held enough sway that fifty years later, Kevin Starr offered the same drama in his wide-ranging portrayal of 1930s California, The Dream Endures. By contrast, thirty-odd years after Caplan and Finney, Fred Viehe offered a "revisionist interpretation" that set out to identify Clinton and his allies as "the real culprits." Although the "reformers claimed that [Shaw] was a corrupt machine politician in league with the underworld," Viehe wrote, "they failed to mention that they themselves engaged in illegal activities and that they, too, were allied with the underworld." Viehe’s reappraisal—Good Shaw versus Bad Clinton—was largely repeated by Michael Woodiwiss in his 1988 critique of American reformers, Crime, Crusaders, and Corruption.See Caplan, "CIVIC Committee";Finney, Angel City, 40-173;Starr, Dream Endures, 166-170;Viehe, "Recall," 290-290;and Woodiwiss, Crime, Crusades, 82-88.
• For cynical assessments of Clinton’s various claims, see Viehe, "Recall," 296-302;and Sitton, "Urban Politics," 171-172. Gerald Wood agreed with Viehe’s assessment of the politics of vice in Los Angeles, arguing that between 1915 and 1933, five Los Angeles mayors and a dozen police chiefs left office under a dark cloud of accusations.Gerald Wood, "A Penchant for Probity: California Progressives and the Disreputable Pleasures," in California Progressivism Revisited, ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Los Angeles, 1994), 109-109.His account is also supported in Finney, Angel City;and Tom Sitton, "Did the Ruling Class Rule?" in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, ed. Tom Sitton and William Deverell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 302-318.For broader analyses of the impulses behind social reform efforts, see David Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900 (Westport, Conn., 1973);Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978);Allison Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-censorship Activism, 1873-1933 (Chicago, 1997);David Langum, Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago, 1994);Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980);Richard Hofstatder, The Progressive Movement, 1900-1915 (New York, 1986);and Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967).
• CIVIC literature quoted in Chamberlain, "Civic Committee," 30. Los Angeles’ efforts paralleled New York City’s campaigns against slot and pinball machines. Nevertheless, Los Angeles stands out against Estelle Freedman’s claims that it was generally difficult in the 1930s to get Americans worked up about prostitution.See Sharpe, Pinball! 43-54;and Estelle Freedman, "‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960," Journal of American History 74 (1987): 86-86.
• CIVIC leaflet, file 12, box 1, CCP. The assault on pinball machines began after 1933, when pinball machines started competing with slot machines by paying out cash if players reached a certain score or hit a special target. Sharpe, Pinball! 43-54.Photographs in file 13, box 1, CCP. "Unremunerated" in Clinton column, "The Truth Can Set You Free if Expressed in Votes," August 7, 1937, scrapbook 1, pp. 44-45, CCP; "CITIZENS NEED NOT," column dated August 28, 1937, scrapbook 1, pp. 44-45, CCP. Mention of turned-over information even appeared in Shaw administration press releases. See press release, July 12, 1937, file "Campaign PR," box 8, Joseph Edward Shaw Papers (Collection 840), Charles Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles (hereafter, JSP).
• For an example of the collapse of vice into mere politics, see Woodiwiss, who referred to Clinton as a "flamboyant showman with a flair for the dramatic," insisting that the "purpose of all CIVIC investigations into vice operations was to discredit the Shaw administration." Woodiwiss, Crime, Crusades, 83-84.Irene Dyer to Clinton, and T. Matt. Thompson to Clinton, in file 30, "Shaw recall—letters offering help in recall," box 3, CCP; and Lois Ford to Clinton, August 29, 1938, in file "Letters of Appreciation, Recall Election," box 24, CCP.
• J. A. Somerville to Clinton, in file 30, "Shaw recall—letters offering help in recall," box 3, CCP; and E. Zacariah Croxall to Clinton, September 19, 1938, in file, "Letters of Appreciation, Recall Election," box 24, CCP.
• Statistics in Clinton column, October 30, 1937, scrapbook 1, p. 45, CCP; and Clinton to Jane Bostwick, handwritten draft on letter from Jane Bostwick to Clinton, August 29, 1938, in file "Letters of Appreciation, Recall Election," box 24, CCP.
• Anonymous to Clinton, October 14, 1937; "A buddie" to Clinton, September 13, 1938; both in file "CLINTON:—Letters of abuse, criticism, advice, apology 1938-9," box 25, CCP. Among the various charges about Clinton’s morality, one spreadsheet, the Herald of Decency, in the spring of 1938 went so far as to claim that Clinton in fact showed his "great contempt for American womanhood" by arguing against abolishing vice and protecting it instead in a Red Light District. According to the recall organizers, Mayor Shaw also asserted that the recall campaign was funded by gambling interests.See "Clinton Gives Statement," Herald of Decency, April 4, 1938, 1-1, in file "Mayor Shaw Clippings," box 134, DHP. Reactions mentioned in "Minutes of Committee of 25," March 29, 1938, item 89, box 134, DHP; and "Minutes of Committee of 25," June 22, 1938, item 103, box 134, DHP.
• During the summer of 1938, Shaw supporters published a bilingual brochure to appeal to Jewish voters—one side English, one side Yiddish—demanding, "BOYCOTT Traitors [that is, Bowron] Who would take Nazi, Fascist and Ku-Klux Klan Money!" Scrapbook 12, p. 9, CCP. Similarly, the election-week headline of the Los Angeles Club Reporter, allegedly a black community paper, charged, "Bowron’s Backers Exposed: Does Bowron Offer Us ‘Clean’Government—or—KLeAN Government?" Los Angeles Club Reporter 1, no. 8, September 15, 1938, in scrapbook 12, p. 12-12, CCP. Perhaps most outrageously, the Herald of Decency insisted that "the nefarious purpose behind the muckraking activity" of Clinton was his desire to "legalize prostitution. He has publicly declared his great contempt for American womanhood." Item 2, file 3, box 1, CCP.
• Leader, "Los Angeles," 178-178, 141-141.On Sinclair’s campaign, see Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked (Los Angeles, 1995);and Greg Mitchell, Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s E.P.I.C. Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York, 1992).Dwight McKinney and Fred Allhoff, "The Lid off Los Angeles, Part Three: The Spy Squad That Floored Uncle Sam," Liberty, November 25, 1939, 24-24, in file 7, box 2, CCP. Fainer quoted in "Fainer Flays ‘Brother Joe’ in Bomb Case" and "Intelligence Squad Scored," unmarked papers, June 9, 1938, in scrapbook 8, p. 9, CCP.
• Anonymous to Clinton, n.d.; William Lewis to Clinton, May 5, 1938; Z. Alexander to Clinton, May 5, 1938; W. M. Bennett to Clinton, 10 August 1938; all four of these sources are in the file "CLINTON:—Letters of abuse, criticism, advice, apology 1938-9," box 25, CCP. S. M. Doyle, "Stalin and Clinton over Los Angeles," in folder 1-1 "American Legion, 17th Dist., LA: address 19 July 1940," Reverend Wendell L. Miller Collection 1926-1988, Urban Studies Collection, California State University, Northridge.For Bowron charges, see "Reiterates Charge Bowron Supported by Communists," Southwest News, scrapbook 11, p. 25-25, CCP;and "Reaction versus Liberalism," Allied Democrat, scrapbook 11, p. 6-6, CCP.
• Clinton’s files on communism are marked as files 14 and 15, box 3, CCP. Chamberlain, "Civic Committee," 63.
• Leaflet, in scrapbook 8, p. 43, CCP. Labor opposition to Clinton was underscored in the spring of 1938, when Clifton’s employees allegedly sent an open letter to the Labor Non-partisan League, complaining that wages and working conditions at the cafeterias were far below union standards. Letter, March 26, 1938, file 2, box 136, DHP.
• Clifford Clinton, "On Communist Charge," 1938, box 26, CCP. Note that even Paul Cline, executive secretary for the County Communist Party, got on the radio to insist that the party neither endorsed Judge Bowron nor was "affiliated with the Federation for Civic Betterment, and we had no voice in the selection of Judge Bowron." Paul Cline, radio address, in Communist Party of Los Angeles brochure, scrapbook 11, p. 48, CCP.
• Bob Shuler to Dr. A. M. Wilkinson, February 12, 1938, in file 9, "CIVIC—internal affairs," box 1, CCP.
• Shuler to Wilkinson, February 12, 1938; and A. M. Wilkinson to Bob Shuler, February 14, 1938, in file 9, "CIVIC—internal affairs," box 1, CCP.
• George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York, 1994), ch. 11.
• "Night Club Reviews: La Boheme," Variety, October 4, 1932, 52-52.
• Equalizer 4, no. 12, September 1937, 4-4. The paper’s subhead read, "Hypocrites Are Those Who Do Not Fear God, But Do Fear Printer’s Ink." It was published in Los Angeles. Although I have seen single issues in the Shaw and Clinton Papers, this one was found in the Rev Wendell L Miller Collection 1926-1988, folder 1-7, Urban Archives, California State University, Northridge.On the pansy craze crackdowns, see Brett Abrams, "Hooray for Hollywood" (Ph.D. diss., American University, 2000).
• Press releases, July 20 and July 26, 1937, in file "Campaign PR," box 8, JSP.
• Press release, August 30, 1937, in file "Campaign PR," box 8, JSP.
• Freedman, "‘Uncontrolled Desires’"; George Chauncey, "The Post-war Sex Crime Panic," in True Stories from the American Past, ed.William Graebner (New York, 1993), 160-178;and Stephen Robertson, "Separating the Men from the Boys: Masculinity, Psychosexual Development, and Sex Crime in the United States, 1930s-1960s," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56 (2001): 3-35.[Free Full Text]
• Freedman argues that the psychopath fever involved containing Depression-era single men not tied to jobs or family. Such men were also targeted by the Los Angeles Police under Shaw. See H. Mark Wild, "If You Ain’t Got That Do-Re-Mi: The Los Angeles Border Patrol and White Migration in Depression-Era California," Southern California Quarterly 83 (Fall 2001): 317-334, 324-324. Municipal concerns about sexual degeneracy had been increasingly appearing since the 1910s in cities as varied as Portland, Los Angeles, and New York.See Peter Boag, "Sex & Politics in Progressive-Era Portland & Eugene: The 1912 Same-Sex Vice Scandal," Oregon Historical Quarterly 100 (Summer 1999): 158-181;Sharon Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Los Angeles, 1997), ch. 3;Daniel Hurewitz, "Made in Edendale: Bohemian Los Angeles and the Politics of Sexual Identity, 1918-1953" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001), chs. 1-2;Leslie Taylor, "‘I Made Up My Mind to Get It’: The American Trial of The Well of Loneliness, New York City, 1928-1929," Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001): 250-286;Andrea Friedman, "‘The Habitats of Sex-Crazed Perverts’: Campaigns against Burlesque in Depression-Era New York City," Journal of the History of Sexuality 7 (1996): 203-238;and Chauncey, Gay New York, ch. 12.
• This conclusion is supported by Freedman, who argues that the overlapping use of terms like sex criminal, pervert, psychopath, and homosexual indicated that they mostly were used to mean homosexual.See Freedman, "‘Uncontrolled Desires,’" 103-103.
• "Psychiatrist, Sex, Bombing Case Engage Council," unidentified clip, mid-April 1938, scrapbook 6, p. 56, CCP.
• Ibid.
• "Women’s Work, Women’s Clubs," Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1916;and "Upton Sinclair’s Ravings," Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1916.
• Kevin Murphy, "The Manly World of Urban Reform: Political Manhood and the New Politics of Progressivism in New York City, 1877-1916" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2001), chs. 1, 6;and Jennifer Terry, American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago, 1999).For an example of how this view was negotiated and challenged, see George Chauncey, "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York, 1990), 294-317.
• Beverly Hills "housewife" to Clinton, January 4, 1938, in file "CLINTON:—Letters of abuse, criticism, advice, apology 1938-9," box 25, CCP.On the growth of psychoanalytic thinking and practice in Los Angeles, which began with an informal study group in 1927, see Nathan G. Hale Jr., "New Heads for Freud’s Hydras: Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 37 (Spring 2001): 111-122.[CrossRef][ISI][Medline] [Order article via Infotrieve]On 1930s masculinity, see Freedman, "‘Uncontrolled Desires,’" 88-90;Joseph Pleck, "The Theory of Male Sex Role Identity: Its Rise and Fall, 1936 to the Present," in In the Shadow of the Past: Psychology Portrays the Sexes, ed. Miriam Lewin (New York, 1983), 205-225;and Peter Filene, Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, 3rd ed. (Baltimore, 1998).
• On petitioners, see unmarked clip, scrapbook 6, p. 34, CCP. Photo from Evening News appears on p, 39. Also, on recall effort to make women "realize that politics is really housekeeping on a large scale," see leaflet, scrapbook 11, p. 40, CCP (bold in the original). Echoes of that campaign can also be seen in Gene Johnston and Wes Woodford’s campaign song, "Let’s Clean House with Bowron," item 74, box 134, DHP.
• "Police Form Sex Offense Bureau Here," Los Angeles Examiner, July 30, 1938.
• J. Nielsen-Lange, letter to Clinton, August 1, 1938, Clinton Papers, box 24, file "Letters of Appreciation, Recall Election."
• Allied Democrat, September 7, 1938, 2, Clinton Papers, box 14, scrapbook 11, p. 47.
• "All things..."from Shaw, radio broadcast over KKHE, July 14, 1938,as cited in Caplan, with "large cross-section," in "CIVIC Committee," 115-115.
• Tom Sitton, "Another Generation of Urban Reformers: Los Angeles in the 1930s," Western Historical Quarterly 18 (July 1987): 315-315, 316-316, 322-323.
• According to recall petition circulators, prior to the bombing convictions, 60 percent refused to sign the petition; afterward, 90 percent agreed. "Minutes of Committee of 25," July 7, 1938, item 110, box 134, DHP.
• Reporter’s transcript, 129, 130-31, 1342, filed for The People, Respondent v. Edward Jordan et al., Appellants, Crim. no. 351, Court of Appeal of California, Fourth Appellate District, 24 Cal App. 2d 39. On institutionalization, see Freedman, "‘Uncontrolled Desires’"; Chauncey, "Post-war Sex Crime Panic"; and Robertson, "Separating the Men."
• Schlesinger cited in Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, Mass., 2001), 68-68.See also David Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago, 2004), 31-31.
• Johnson, Lavender Scare, 2-2;and Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, chs. 4, 6, p. 167-167.See also Randolph Baxter, "‘Eradicating This Menace’: Homophobia and Anti-communism in Congress, 1947-1954" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1999.)
• Johnson, Lavender Scare, ch. 8.See also John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago, 1998);and Paul Coates, "Well, Medium and Rare," Los Angeles Mirror, March 12, 1953,in file "Mattachine Society: Early 1950s," ONE Institute and Archives, University of Southern California.

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This Article Abstract Free Full Text (Free PDF) Free Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in ISI Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Hurewitz, D. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?