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.
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).
2.
and Tom Sitton, Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron’s Urban Reform Revival, 1938-1953 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).
3.
Leonard Joseph Leader, “Los Angeles and the Great Depression” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1972), 259, 261.
4.
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.
5.
and Woodiwiss, Crime, Crusades.
6.
Starr, Dream Endures, 164-164.
7.
Mullins, Depression, 67-68.
8.
Caplan, “CIVIC Committee,”10-16.
9.
On Hollywood movies, see John Springhall, “Censoring Hollywood: Youth, Moral Panic and Crime/Gangster Movies of the 1930s,”Journal of Popular Culture32 (1998): 135-155.
10.
Caplan, “CIVIC Committee,”34-44.
11.
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).
12.
and Woodiwiss, Crime, Crusades, 82-88.
13.
and Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967).
14.
and Estelle Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960,”Journal of American History74 (1987): 86-86.
15.
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).
16.
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.
17.
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.
18.
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.
19.
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.
20.
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 Reporter1, 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.
21.
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.
22.
and “Reaction versus Liberalism,”Allied Democrat, scrapbook 11, p. 6-6, CCP.
23.
Clinton’s files on communism are marked as files 14 and 15, box 3, CCP. Chamberlain, “Civic Committee,” 63.
24.
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.
25.
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.
26.
Bob Shuler to Dr. A. M. Wilkinson, February 12, 1938, in file 9, “CIVIC—internal affairs,” box 1, CCP.
27.
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.
28.
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York, 1994), ch. 11.
29.
“Night Club Reviews: La Boheme,”Variety, October 4, 1932, 52-52.
30.
On the pansy craze crackdowns, see Brett Abrams, “Hooray for Hollywood” (Ph.D. diss., American University, 2000).
31.
Press releases, July 20 and July 26, 1937, in file “Campaign PR,” box 8, JSP.
32.
Press release, August 30, 1937, in file “Campaign PR,” box 8, JSP.
33.
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 Sciences56 (2001): 3-35.
34.
and Chauncey, Gay New York, ch. 12.
35.
See Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires,’”103-103.
36.
“Psychiatrist, Sex, Bombing Case Engage Council,” unidentified clip, mid-April 1938, scrapbook 6, p. 56, CCP.
37.
Ibid.
38.
and “Upton Sinclair’s Ravings,”Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1916.
39.
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.
40.
and Peter Filene, Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, 3rd ed. (Baltimore, 1998).
41.
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.
42.
“Police Form Sex Offense Bureau Here,”Los Angeles Examiner, July 30, 1938.
43.
J. Nielsen-Lange, letter to Clinton, August 1, 1938, Clinton Papers, box 24, file “Letters of Appreciation, Recall Election.”
44.
Allied Democrat, September 7, 1938, 2, Clinton Papers, box 14, scrapbook 11, p. 47.
45.
as cited in Caplan, with “large cross-section,” in “CIVIC Committee,”115-115.
46.
Tom Sitton, “Another Generation of Urban Reformers: Los Angeles in the 1930s,”Western Historical Quarterly18 (July 1987): 315-315, 316-316, 322-323.
47.
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.
48.
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.”
49.
See also David Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago, 2004), 31-31.
50.
See also Randolph Baxter, “‘Eradicating This Menace’: Homophobia and Anti-communism in Congress, 1947-1954” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1999.)
51.
in file “Mattachine Society: Early 1950s,”ONE Institute and Archives, University of Southern California.
