| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.2 | The History Cooperative

*Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron's Urban Reform Revival, 1938–1953*. By Tom Sitton. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xvi + 256 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $32.50.)
Two eras of political reform in modern Los Angeles, separated by roughly sixty years, have received extensive scholarly treatment: the early twentieth-century Progressive period, notable for both political restructuring and fierce labor struggles, and the late twentieth-century ascendancy of Mayor Tom Bradley's biracial political coalition. Tom Sitton's new book sheds important light on a lesser-known reform interregnum, from the Great Depression through the onset of the Cold War, when Fletcher Bowron was mayor of Los Angeles. The biographer of L. A. philanthropist and civic activist John Randolph Haynes, Sitton here chronicles the political career of another little-remembered yet important L. A. reformer.	1
Even blander than unassuming Tom Bradley, Bowron had it said of him that "if the guy would give a fireside speech, he was so boring the fire would go out" (p. 184). A Superior Court judge, Bowron replaced disgraced and recalled Mayor Frank Shaw in 1938, and tried to solidify Los Angeles's place in the national New Deal urban coalition while having to cope with the explosive social tensions and burgeoning metropolitan growth that the city experienced during and immediately after World War Two.	. . .

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