page_title: Fletcher Bowron
section_title: Mayor
hierarchical_section_title: Fletcher Bowron / Life and career / Mayor
caption_attribution_description: English: Judy Garland at piano with Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron publicity for Proclamation of Music Week, Calif., 1952
context_page_description: Fletcher Bowron was an American lawyer, judge, and politician. He was the 35th mayor of Los Angeles, California, from September 26, 1938, until June 30, 1953. He was the longest-serving mayor to date in the city, and was the city's second longest-serving mayor after Tom Bradley, presiding over the war boom and very heavy population growth, and building freeways to handle them.
context_section_description: He was then elected mayor of Los Angeles on a fusion ticket in 1938 in the wake of the corruption arising from the previous administration of Frank L. Shaw, and earned the reputation of being lawful, unlike his predecessor. This was part of what he called the Los Angeles Urban Reform Revival.
  Los Angeles grew enormously during the war years, with very large defense industries.  After the war Bowron  began construction of the Los Angeles International Airport and the 1st phases of the elaborate freeway system.  He obtained hundred million dollars from the Federal Housing Authority for the construction of 10,000 units.  As president of the American Municipal Association, representing 9500 cities, he was the leader of the nation's mayors in their dealings with the federal government.  A high priority was eliminating organized crime from the city's police department.  He forced the resignation of numerous officers, and prevented Los Angeles from becoming a wide open town. Bowron ran on nonpartisan fusion tickets, but his popularity declined in his 4th term.  The Los Angeles Citizens Committee demanded his recall, claiming he was responsible for high taxes and continued police corruption.  In 1952 he lost his reelection bid in the Republican primary to Norris Poulson, a conservative opponent of public housing.
  He served during the era of World War II, most notably supporting the removal of Japanese Americans from California and their subsequent Internment. In January 1942 Bowron began to call for relocating Japanese Americans away from the coast and putting them to work in farm camps. He forced all Japanese American employees of the City of Los Angeles to take a leave of absence and circulated propaganda targeted at people of Japanese descent. By February he was pushing for internment on his radio show, quoted on Abraham Lincoln's birthday in support of the camps: "There isn't a shadow of a doubt but that Lincoln, the mild-mannered man whose memory we regard with almost saint-like reverence, would make short work of rounding up the Japanese and putting them where they could do no harm."  He continued by talking about "the people born on American soil who have secret loyalty to the Japanese Emperor." Bowron also attempted to pass a constitutional amendment under which American-born Japanese would be stripped of their citizen rights if they held dual U.S.-Japanese citizenship or if their parents were ineligible for U.S. citizenship. He additionally proposed allowing the government to ignore portions of the Selective Service Act and call Japanese Americans, including women and those whose age or physical status would otherwise exempt them, into non-combat military service if the war required it.
caption: With Judy Garland at piano. Proclamation of Music Week, 1952
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