This is the second-to-final blog post for this series about the founding of the Cooperative Center in Boyle Heights in 1925 by the local Yiddish branch of the communist party. The previous post looked at the center’s presence as a hub of leftist activism until it began to transition into a dance hall and nightclub in the 1930s. A venue that,100 years later, still thrives today as a music concert hall and community teaching center.
This post will briefly look at how some organizations on the political left in Boyle Heights continued to organize and engage the local community beyond the Cooperative Center through a series of public events and presentations in various spaces around the Brooklyn Avenue corridor.
But first, the post will briefly examine the dissolution of the LAPD’s anti-communist Red Squad unit, and the changing fortunes of its acting captain William Hynes, who led the city’s ruthless suppression campaign against Eastside socialists during the 1930s. But its demise was also linked to events surrounding a sensational car-bomb explosion in Boyle Heights, closing the chapter on the Red Squad in dramatic fashion.
Clifford Clinton and Harry Raymond were unlikely allies against city corruption in Los Angeles in the 1930s. It was a time when city-wide vice and bribe payoffs, all the way up to city hall, were at their most brazen, and the stuff of hardboiled fiction. Born to a missionary family in 1900, Clifford Clinton is mostly remembered today for the chain of Clifton’s Cafeteria restaurants he started in downtown Los Angeles in 1931. On the other hand, private investigator Harry Raymond was a former vice officer who was fired twice from the LAPD. Raymond had a reputation for being ruthless with street criminals, but also a dark history of unsavory conduct that included a too-cozy relationship with the city’s vice underground.
Clinton emerged as a prominent activist for government reform when he led a citizens’ group in 1935 that discovered fraud and spoiled food was prevalent in the food operations at Los Angeles County General Hospital. (The massive Art Deco building was opened in Boyle Heights in 1933.) In 1937, he headed another court-approved public interest group known as the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC). Made up of several prominent, well-connected citizens interested in government reform, CIVIC was tasked with a mandate to submit a report within a year to a city grand jury looking into vice and government corruption.
At the same time, cop-turned-private investigator Harry Raymond was using his unique knowledge of the local criminal underworld and LAPD vice operations to assist attorney A. Brigham Rose, who was representing a state witness named Ralph Grey. Grey was a former aide with L.A. Mayor Frank Shaw’s campaign and was preparing to testify about his intimate knowledge of the “Shaw spoils system.” Although the Republican mayor embraced FDR’s New Deal policies, the Shaw administration reputedly collected and doled out underworld payoffs to the mayor’s political allies, with Joe Shaw, the mayor’s brother and personal secretary, acting as the lead bagman.
With the CIVIC report and Grey’s testimony, along with Raymond’s invaluable detective work, all threatening to “blow the lid off Los Angeles,” a shockingly violent scheme was planned to intimidate these two efforts into silence. The first action took place on the evening of October 28, 1937, when a bomb went off at the Los Feliz area home of Clifford Clinton. No one was hurt, but a large hole was left in the wall of the house. Unfazed, CIVIC released a scathing report to the city grand jury in late December 1937, detailing their findings about city-wide graft and vice operations.
Around the same time as the bombing of Clinton’s home, Earl Kynette, Captain for the LAPD’s Special Intelligence Unit (a separate unit from the Red Squad), plus two other unit officers, had set up a rotating surveillance operation from an empty duplex adjacent to an alleyway across the street from the Boyle Heights home of Harry Raymond. On the morning of January 14, 1938, Raymond walked into the garage of his rented house at 955 Orme Avenue and climbed into his Chrysler Royal. When he stepped on the starter, a huge explosion shattered the vehicle and practically demolished the entire garage. Although severely wounded with several broken bones and dozens of shrapnel wounds, Raymond survived.
The flagrant act of a car bombing had now made it publicly impossible for city authorities not to act against the corrupt and criminal elements within City Hall and the LAPD. An investigation soon uncovered evidence connecting Earl Kynette to the car bombing, and in June 1938, he was found guilty of attempted murder and malicious use of explosives and sentenced to ten years in San Quentin. The two other unit officers were also sentenced, with the entire unit abolished later that month by Police Chief James Davis. (Along with investigating serious crimes, the intelligence unit was reportedly also used to dig up compromising dirt against political enemies, Hollywood notables, and others.) Ultimately, Mayor Frank Shaw was not charged with any crimes but was recalled in a special election in September, making him the only Los Angeles mayor to ever be recalled from office. The mayor’s brother, Joe Shaw, was convicted for his involvement in a bribery scheme, but his verdict was overturned two years later.
In October of 1938, Chief Davis acted to reduce the number of officers deployed to the Red Squad by reassigning a portion of the unit’s officers to other stations. Nevertheless, the following month, Davis was forced to resign as Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, while three LAPD lieutenants were convicted for their involvement in a civil service bribery scheme connected to police examinations. One of the convicted lieutenants, Pete Del Gado, fled the country but was later apprehended in Mexico.
In another act of “house cleaning,” several local newspapers reported on December 1, 1938, that Acting Police Chief David Davidson officially disbanded the Red Squad unit, with some of the papers noting the squad’s well-known history for its violent methods. Their long-time leader, Captain William Hynes, was demoted to detective and reassigned to the West Los Angeles Police Station. Hynes retired in 1943 and passed away at Good Samaritan Hospital in 1952 at the age of 55.
Harry Raymond and his wife Beulah continued to live at their Orme Avenue home in Boyle Heights until 1942, when they moved a few blocks away to 2800½ Oregon Street. In 1950, they moved to 316 S. Rampart Blvd., where Raymond died in 1957.
While the Cooperative Center, the hub for Eastside leftists, started to transition to more commercial interests with a series of new owners beginning in the early 1930s, other venues centered around the Brooklyn Avenue corridor continued to host politically progressive and pro-labor programs during the 1930s and 40s. This was especially true for the Soto Street Folk Shul, which was established in 1920 by the socialist-oriented Labor Zionists at 420. N. Soto Street. Starting around the 1950s, the building became a well-known labor union hall for local Mexican American workers until at least the 1980s.
Another venue was Abramson Hall. Primarily run as a commercial business starting around 1931, the hall was located on the second floor of a furniture store at 2111 Brooklyn Avenue. From 1938 until it ceased operating in 1941, it was renamed Everybody’s Hall when the furniture business downstairs became Everybody’s Market. Notably, the hall hosted an event featuring Staten Island-born socialist and author Ella Reeve Bloor, known internationally as Mother Bloor, as well as the scene of a front-page-grabbing street melee between local communists and the LAPD’s Red Squad in 1931. Another interesting item about the history of this address occurred in the mid-1970s when the site was home to the burgeoning Eastside community arts center, Self-Help Graphics.
Another long-running Boyle Heights venue that hosted the branches of local labor unions and socialist organizations, and briefly discussed in a previous post, was the Vladeck Educational Center at 126 N. St Louis Street (located at the T intersection of St. Louis and Pennsylvania Ave). In 1926, the local Jewish Socialist Verband (JSV) purchased a one-story structure at the site that formerly housed the Electric Company Training School.
Aligned more with trade unions and democratic socialists, the Workmen’s Circle-affiliated JSV had split from the more militant Jewish socialists who supported Soviet communism and global revolution, such as the communists who operated the Cooperative Center on Brooklyn Avenue. But, reflecting the complexity of the various strands of Yiddish-centered socialism at the time, the Vladeck Center hosted events sponsored by various groups across the ideological spectrum. Along with the Soto Street Folkshule, the Vladeck Center also became a crucial center for building the local Jewish-Mexican American political coalition in the post-WWII years.
The September 20, 1940, issue of the Jewish weekly, B’nai B’rith Messenger (founded in Los Angeles in 1897), described the very first meeting held at the newly built Vladeck Educational Center on the St. Louis Street site. By 1942, the L.A. City Directory listed several Workmen’s Circle-affiliated community groups regularly meeting at the Vladeck Educational Center.
In 1952, the Vladeck Center held the funeral services for socialist Julius Levitt, a long-time community activist who founded the Jewish Labor Committee in 1935 and was one of the earliest local citizens to warn about the growing horrors and virulent antisemitism of Nazism in Germany. Levitt was also the West Coast manager for the New York-based Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward), founded in 1897, which became the largest Yiddish language socialist newspaper in the United States.
The Vladeck Center would continue to operate at the site until 1960, when it was purchased by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church the following year for Spanish-language services.
Beginning in the late 1930s and into the end of the 1940s, several factors, plus, as the newspaper item above indicates, a demographic shift, would bring political and cultural changes to Boyle Heights, marking a crucial point in the history of the city’s second-oldest neighborhood. These events will be examined in the next and final post about the post-Cooperative Center years.