Progressive Reform in Los Angeles
under Mayor Alexander, 1909-1913

MARTIN J. SCHIESL
Professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles

PROGRESSIVISM, THE FIRST MAJOR REFORM MOVEMENT of twentieth-century America, has experienced a long and checkered historiographical career. Formally ushered in on the national level in 1901 by a youthful Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, and virtually a dead issue by the advent of World War I during Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s two-term presidency, progressivism raised high hopes for the future of just and efficient government. In recent times its disappointments have triggered severe criticism and damaging behaviorist interpretations as well as evoking more sustained positive evaluations of the movement’s achievements.

Rejecting both the traditional view that reform-minded activists in the Progressive Era could be understood as idealistic crusaders seeking honest government and newer theories that they comprised a psychologically confused elite seeking to reclaim lost social status, historians are now offering more searching and critical analysis of reform activities on various governmental levels in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Especially important are the studies of J. Joseph Huthmacher, Samuel Hays, and Robert Wiebe which see municipal reform attempts in these years as a struggle among social classes for control of the metropolis. While Huthmacher claims that urban workers and middle-class elements collaborated for a time to achieve reform and later parted company over particular ethnocultural issues, Hays and Wiebe contend that progressive reform resulted from the efforts of middle and upper-class groups to apply to city government the techniques of systematization and administrative control being developed in business and the professions. [1] Building on these conceptual frameworks, students of municipal progressivism have recently studied reform movements in the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Toledo, Cincinnati, Seattle, and San Francisco. [2] Curiously enough, the largest city of the western United States, Los Angeles, has received little attention, despite its leadership in various areas of reform and its solid record of accomplishment in the early twentieth century. [3] Progressivism in Los Angeles and its attempts at municipal reform are the subjects of the study which follows.

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From the standpoint of nonpartisanship, it was logical for the progressives to maintain the rhetoric of “classless” politics and continue appealing to a vague notion of public interest. Office-holding reformers, however, found the framework difficult and were forced to adapt to and function within an apparatus of decision-making quite different from the lines of authority associated with business and professional life. Furthermore, growing hostility between labor organizations and major business interests required specific policies that would effect the main sources of support for the administration. In keeping with the sentiments of the middle and upper classes who interpreted democracy in terms of property rights and assumed that social control should be in the hands of well educated and respectable people, the “structural” progressives in Los Angeles were unreceptive to the desires of workers to improve the social and economic status of the underprivileged in the city and, as elected officials, pressed mainly for a government to be conducted by experts according to the corporate ideals of economy and efficiency. “We are going to have area business administration not narrow and illiberal in the sense that the machine tried to make people believe it would be,” Lissner declared, “but just the sort of an administration Mayor Alexander has been giving so far as a machine council would permit him to. The new Council will do public business like great private business is done.” [25] Similarly, S. C. Graham, former chairman of the recall campaign committee and member of the police commission, spoke of the “freedom in the administration of public affairs from the dictation of political bosses and the influence of partisan considerations …. ” [26]

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