Policing the Red Scare: The Los Angeles Police Department's Red Squad and the Repression of Labor Activism in Los Angeles, 1900-1940

From the turn of the twentieth century through the end of the 1930s, the Los Angeles Police Department conducted a systematic campaign of repression against the working class in Los Angeles. Fueled by nativist fears of radical outsiders and a powerful determination to keep unions out of the city, the LAPD's aptly named "Red Squad" became the enforcement arm of the city's business community. This dissertation is an institutional study of the Los Angeles Police Department's Red Squad. Also known as the Intelligence unit, it was formed to infiltrate labor organizations, prevent unionization, provide information to employers, and prosecute supposed radicals within the city. The vehemence with which the Red Squad went about its duties is representative of the way Los Angeles's business leaders viewed the maintenance of open shop conditions in the city.;I argue, the LAPD used their ability to determine how the law was enforced to form a close coalition with the city's business interests that was predicated on the repression of labor and radical activity and enforcing, violently when necessary, the precepts of the open shop. The major conclusion of this study is that entrepreneurialism played a significant role in the development of American police forces. Local police forces played an active role in shaping and developing the role they would play in society. The role they created for themselves was not always based on the high-minded ideals of the reformers and progressives; but rather, was often a result of more base motives: financial gain, organizational growth, civic power, and personal aggrandizement. Sometimes, those supposedly organic police functions, such as preventing crime and arresting violators, were compatible with the role the police were creating for themselves. But often, as in the case of the Red Squad, they were not.