| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron's Urban Reform Revival, 1938–1953. By Tom Sitton. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xvi, 256 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-8263-3527-6.)
Compared to the reformism of the Progressive Era and the upheavals of the 1960s, midcentury Los Angeles city politics might seem to have transpired in a time of relative normalcy. Yet the period saw some of the city's greatest economic and physical changes, as well as conflicts focused on race, labor, and governmental power. Much of this controversy occurred under the administration of Mayor Fletcher Bowron, who served from 1938 to 1953. In this political biography, Tom Sitton seeks to trace the changing political coalitions that put and kept Bowron in office and ultimately put him out again.	1
Sitton begins with the legacy of Progressive reform, which left Los Angeles with powerful municipal bureaucracies but without strong party organizations. By the 1930s, democratic city politics had fallen to a succession of transitory interest-group coalitions led by individual political operators, including religious entrepreneurs such as the Reverend Robert "Fighting Bob" Schuler. Corruption and favoritism in city government came to a head in the regime of Mayor Frank Shaw. In the 1938 recall election that ousted Shaw, an array of liberal and conservative reform groups united to give Bowron an overwhelming victory.	. . .

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