# Red Hynes

William Francis Hynes (July 30, 1897 – May 16, 1952), known as Red Hynes, was an anti-communist and anti-labor American police officer who led the Los Angeles Police Department "Red Squad" in the 1920s and 1930s. The LAPD Red Squad generally and Hynes specifically were known for both their violence and their corrupt profiteering as enforcers for hire. Hynes personally pioneered a number of "anti-subversive" propaganda techniques and became a nationally recognized expert on anti-communism with a side hustle as a regional strikebreaker.
Hynes was a U.S. Army veteran who first came to public notice when he infiltrated the IWW in San Pedro, California and contributed significantly to disrupting a strike action there in 1923. Hynes was then promoted within LAPD and ultimately given control of the anti-radical half of the department's Intelligence Division, functioning as both a detective and as a police commander. Hynes, who was described as a proto-fascist mercenary by his targets and opponents, was just one element of a larger system wherein LAPD worked not so much for the general public as for a close-knit group of L.A. businessmen. The Red Squad's aggressive investigation, infiltration, and physical attacks on liberal groups and labor organizers in the Greater Los Angeles area successfully protected the area's "open shop" system and suppressed the labor movement and left-wing political organizations in Southern California during the Great Depression.
In 1938, when a new reform-minded chief of police came to power, Hynes was demoted from acting captain back to patrolman and spent the remaining years of his LAPD career as a local beat cop. Hynes died of hepatoma in 1952. Evidence collected by Hynes was still being cited in Congressional anti-communist hearings in 1957. The long shadow cast by the Red Squad continued to influence popular perception of the municipal police in Los Angeles until at least the 1960s if not until the 1992 Los Angeles riots and beyond.

## Life and work

Red Hynes, who worked for the LAPD under Chief James Davis and Mayor Frank Shaw, was "notorious for his sometimes violent, legally questionable pursuit of suspected Communists, and he was believed sympathetic toward far-right extremists." During his time on the public payroll in Los Angeles, Hynes was perhaps the "most potent force in the Police Department and city" and "one of the first crusaders against the 'evils of communism'." According to Davis in the 1933 LAPD annual report, the Red Squad's "primary function was the 'investigation and control of radical activities, strikes, and riots'. These duties included raids on 'radical' headquarters, prevention of open discussion in public parks and streets (violation of city ordinance), denial of permits for protest marches, and any other activities which would help to disrupt communists." Davis was authoritarian by temperament and "As the Record put it after a lengthy interview: 'Davis quite honestly and sincerely believes that the country would be much better off if the whole question of constitutional rights was forgotten, and everything left to the discretion of the police...It is an axiom with Davis that constitutional rights are of benefit to nobody but crooks and criminals, and that no perfectly law-abiding citizen ever has any cause to insist upon 'constitutional rights.'" Hynes and the Red Squad were symptomatic of a broader "surge in hyperpatriotic and antiunion thinking among the state's business interests" in the aftermath of World War I. California business interests, through the state Republican Party, also promoted high tariffs and exclusion of Japanese migrants to the United States.
The Red Squad was really two separate entities, although Hynes had a hand in both: the Red Squad was the muscle that focused on suppressing "enemies" of the city power structure, while the Intelligence Squad did the legwork "to spy on, compromise, and intimidate critics and foes of the department and the mayor" and keep the whole operation afloat. The Intelligence Squad was reportedly staffed with 19 men. Davis' key enforcers included Hynes, Luke Lane, and Max Berenzweig, a vice squad commander who was never able to pass the civil service exam. Another key figure in the Intelligence Squad was Earl Kynette.
According to an investigator of police corruption under the Hoover administration, Hynes and Davis participated in a not-uncommon system of corruption: "I asked a Western detective what drew young men into police work. He answered without hesitation: 'Adventure'; then after a pause, added 'and graft.'" According to a history of Red Squads in the U.S., these institutions were anti-subversive and anti-communist in part as a grift run by police departments against corporate interests; promoting capitalist fear of workers and unions created an income stream for police officers willing to use violence for a modest payoff. Countersubversive units like Hynes' Red Squad also served as a sort of municipal secret police, creating dossiers on the citizenry under the guise of public safety but ultimately for the benefit of private entities and Hynes himself. Hynes made a name for himself testifying before various government subcommittees about alleged communist infiltration of American institutions, presenting the materials accumulated by the Red Squad intelligence network as evidence.
Hynes joined the department in 1921 or 1922. Hynes in particular did lots of anti-labor work, hiring men to work undercover within businesses that might have a union-curious workforce; his "customers," as it were, were "Los Angeles area business owners concerned about a rising tide of unionization in the 1930s, and who were willing to pay to prevent or disrupt it." The LAPD Red Squad made arrests on criminal syndicalism charges in some cases but also found that "simple intimidation or a good beating could get the job done just as effectively." After starting out in labor suppression by infiltrating the IWW, Hynes worked regular crime for a while in the middle of the 1920s, but returned to the Red Squad in 1927, "this time as the acting-Lieutenant in charge of the unit; he would not leave the unit again until its dissolution in 1939." Hynes' Red Squad had separate offices in the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce building, and he had a side hustle consulting for private companies on effective labor suppression.
Intimidation tactics under Hynes were described by the journalist Carey McWilliams: "Typical of these years is a little boxed story that appeared in the Los Angeles press: 'This will be a 'shove Tuesday' for the Los Angeles police. The communists plan to stage another demonstration today, according to Capt. Wm. Hynes, which means that 500 police will be held in readiness. If the communists demonstrate, the police will shove and keep on shoving until the parade is disrupted.' The 'shove days' were of regular occurrence in Los Angeles."
The Red Squad disrupted the screening of films it considered subversive with Hynes shrugging to a Congressional committee in 1930 that they did so under "no particular law." They also spied on "Industrial Workers of the World; Italian anarchists; Mexican Obreros Libres (Free Workers); ACLU members; pacifists; radical intellectuals; the local branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association; radical churches and women's clubs; and a veritable host of trade and labor union locals, including carpenters, painters, butchers, and bakers." Hynes also surveilled local Nazi-aligned groups using funds provided by the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles. In 1939 Marxist muckraker John L. Spivak alleged that both the Italian and Japanese intelligence services had paid Hynes for reports on assorted California communists and trade-unionists. The Communist Party was always a weak entity in Southern California and it stayed such under Hynes' effective attacks on meetings and assemblies. Infiltrating workers' groups at oil refineries and factories was also part of the Red Squad's bread and butter. During the social upheaval of the Great Depression, even meetings of the jobless were targeted: "a group of the unemployed, under the auspices of the National Federation of Unemployed Workers League of America, arranged a demonstration in honor of President Roosevelt's inauguration, but the police, led by Captain William F. Hynes, were present to disband the participants."
The LAPD Red Squad was finally shut down following the conviction of Earl Kynette for conspiring to plant a bomb in the car of a civil reform advocate, and more broadly "by World War II, the scattered, sometimes competing, sometimes amateurish anticommunist efforts of the American Legion, red squads, the National Guard, MID, and INS during the 1930s had all largely given way to the programs of the FBI-which were typically more centralized, better funded, and often more professional." An obituary for Hynes published in The Nation in 1952 recognized him as "one of the first of the mercenaries in the crusade against 'communism'".

## Influence

By the end of the 1930s, "the LAPD would become far less a policy arm of the city's business establishment and the mayor than it had been before. But the tradition within the department of intolerance of political dissent, and of spying and keeping dossiers on anyone who criticized the status quo, would remain an integral part of the department's culture, one that would rise up again and again." Meanwhile, according to writer Carey McWilliams, "'Red' Hynes made a dozen radicals in Los Angeles for every arrest he ever made." A Mexican immigrant who worked in the orange groves said as much: "They hired the Red Squad from Los Angeles to quell that rebellion. They beat the hell out of him. They cracked his head open several times.... Boy, they treated him so bad [that] they made a Communist out of him.."

## Personal life

Hynes' father worked as a saloon keeper at the time of the 1910 U.S. census. Hynes served in the U.S. Army in from April 6, 1917, to April 2, 1919, as a second lieutenant in the quartermaster corps. Hynes was married in Los Angeles County in 1923 to Mary E. Bullock. When Hynes' son was born the following year, Hynes occupation was listed as detective on the birth certificate. His nickname was a reference to his "anti-communist activities" not his hair color. According to his World War II draft record, Hynes was 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m) and had "thumb off left hand." In 1938 his son ran away from home with plans to be a horse jockey. Hynes died on May 16, 1952, at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles of "hepatoma, primary."

## In popular culture

Red Hynes was the subject of a 2013 experimental documentary by Travis Wilkerson called Los Angeles Red Squad: The Communist Situation in California. According to Sight & Sound magazine, in the "stripped-down, essayistic" film Wilkerson characterizes Hynes' organization (and the 1920s–30s LAPD generally) as a "paid political militia, systematically breaking up left-wing meetings". Manohla Dargis described it as a "restrained if outraged" examination of how "explores how business interests and the police wielded power like a cudgel to prevent ordinary working people from congregating, organizing and speaking up".