Almost Mayor: When the Socialist-Labor Fusion Was on the Ballot in Los Angeles in 1911

The Labor History Corner

by Fred Glass

At 1:07 in the morning on October 1, 1910, a series of enormous explosions ripped through the Los Angeles Times building on the corner of First and Broadway streets in downtown L.A.  Firefighters arriving at the scene with their horse-drawn equipment could only watch helplessly as the fire raged out of control.  Twenty newspaper workers putting out the morning edition were killed.  The three-story fortress-like building was left a smoking ruin. 

Public opinion immediately divided between those who believed labor had the most likely motive to destroy the building of its most powerful enemy, and those who thought the disaster was either an accident or that publisher Harrison Gray Otis himself had a hand in it.  The division continued to animate political discussion in Los Angeles after a detective kidnapped Ironworkers union leader John McNamara and his brother James and turned them in to the authorities, claiming that they had engineered the bombing.

Socialist labor attorney Job Harriman was enlisted to defend the brothers. He turned over the reins of the case at the urging of AFL president Sam Gompers to Clarence Darrow, who had recently successfully defended Idaho union leaders against similar charges.  Darrow’s appearance was one reason Harriman stepped back from the lead role in the McNamaras’ defense.  There was another.  In late April, Harriman announced he was running for mayor.  He received the endorsements of the Socialist Party and the Union Labor Political Club, surrogate for the labor council. 

From this moment on, the McNamara case, Harriman’s run for mayor, and the Los Angeles union organizing campaign were tightly linked.  Although not a Socialist himself, John McNamara endorsed Harriman’s campaign, saying, “There is but one way for the working class to get justice:  elect its own representatives to office.”

Fusion Politics

Indeed, by the time Harriman ran for Mayor in 1911, socialism and the Los Angeles labor movement were so closely allied that it seemed the natural connection for thousands of workers, and Harriman was their hero and spokesman—and not the only one.  When Fred Wheeler announced his intent to run for City Council alongside Harriman on a full Socialist Party slate, he had just served the last of several terms as president of the Los Angeles Labor Council.  He left that office in the hands of a fellow Socialist (and strike leader in the metal trades council), machinist E. H. Misner.

Another member of the Socialist electoral slate was an African American, George Washington Whitley.  Born in Missouri in the last year of the Civil War, one of twelve children, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1903.  He set up and ran small businesses whenever he could scrape together the money, but experienced long stretches of wage labor between entrepreneurial efforts.  He also displayed considerable skills as a political operative.  Hired as the state organizer in 1906 for the Afro American League, a Republican-leaning political club for black Californians (and a predecessor to the NAACP), he expanded its membership from fifteen hundred to ten thousand, and set up twenty local chapters in addition to the eight he inherited.

Alongside his work with the League, Whitley ran an employment agency in the black community, and helped provide strikebreakers during at least one industrial dispute in the early years of the century.  By 1910 he had changed his thinking about sending black workers to scab on white workers.  In an article in the Labor Council’s newspaper, The Citizen, Whitley told the journalist interviewing him,

When the brewery workers went out I was asked for one hundred men to go to work in the breweries.  I told the agents of the companies, who came to me, that under no circumstances would we again be used as strikebreakers. […] We now know that we must organize industrially and politically along with our white brothers.

So convinced did Whitley become of his new perspective that he worked with unions to form the Mutual Organization League, for the purpose of organizing Black workers. The Labor Council affiliated the League, and offered it a home in the Labor Temple.

Other groups traditionally marginalized from politics were becoming involved with the Socialist Party.  Around the same time in early 1911 as Whitley and his comrades formed a Negro branch, special locals of young people, foreign language groups, Christian Socialists and women swelled the ranks of the Party. 

For working class women, the expectation of a statewide vote on suffrage by fall lent a new edge to their political activism.  In June Frances Noel, with Labor Council assistance, formed the Los Angeles Wage Earners Suffrage League, modeled on San Francisco’s.  Like that organization, the LAWESL brought together women from various unions and “ladies’ auxiliaries.”  And like Maud Younger, Noel acted as a link between working class and middle class women’s organizations to strengthen the movement for women’s enfranchisement. 

Noel was in her late thirties. Married to another Socialist and mother of a young son, she had been active in the Los Angeles Socialist Party for nearly a decade.  She worked part-time at the Labor Council, wrote and spoke out for years on the necessity to eradicate child labor, and participated enthusiastically in innovative efforts to convince working class men of the importance of suffrage. She argued with men on sidewalks outside bars about politics, and evaded the anti-picketing law, which prohibited outdoor political gatherings, by organizing picnics for suffrage.

Fundamental change in the offing?

Job Harriman Clubs erupted in neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County, which presently found itself host to fifty thousand registered Socialist voters.  The national Party leadership, recognizing the importance of the moment, sent organizers. By the end of summer, Harriman for Mayor rallies were taking place every few days, drawing large crowds and an excited feeling that fundamental change in the citadel of the open shop was possible. 

In an open primary on Halloween night, 1911, Harriman took first place, with a runoff scheduled for the following month against the number two vote-getter, the current mayor, George Alexander.  The other socialist candidates for City Council also surged to the front of the pack.

The Harriman campaign was staging seventy-five events each week, bolstered by union officers from San Francisco and Socialist organizers sent from as far away as the east coast. Los Angeles metal trades workers split their time between their own strike activities and volunteering with the Harriman effort.  Campaign leaders had reason to believe that passage of the California woman suffrage measure on October 10 would also work to the benefit of the Socialists. 

Until December 1, four days before the election.  On that day James McNamara confessed that he had blown up the Los Angeles Times building, pleading guilty to murder; his brother John pled guilty to conspiracy in another bombing, that of the Lewellyn Iron Works.  Harriman was stunned.  Concentrating on the political campaign, he had had little contact with the prisoners or Clarence Darrow for weeks.  From the moment he heard the news he knew his long quest for worker political power through labor-socialist fusion had ended.

Tied to the McNamara defense, the socialist-labor fusion candidates lost credibility and their biggest shot at municipal office in the country. The McNamaras were sent to San Quentin. The labor movement’s high tide in Los Angeles receded and the open shop reigned for another twenty years.

Fred Glass is the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (UC Press, 2016) and a former member of the State Committee of California DSA

Stay tuned for next week’s installment of the Labor Corner…