Los Angeles – scene of corruption, organized crime, falling-apart infrastructure, cronyism and stealth. Could apply to almost any decade, any set of years. Maybe Los Angeles is just like any other city in America and always has been. In the post-war 1940s, Los Angeles was a hotbed of Communist conspiracies and was plagued off and on from the late 1940s through to the 1950s by threats of Communist subversion, especially in the Entertainment Industry and rumors were rife over how deep this subversion ran.
But Los Angeles was also a hot bed of the haywire and high-strung in the realm of politics, and had been that way for many decades going back to the 19th century when Los Angeles was little more than dirt roads and the promise of year-round sunshine.
Of the many figures adding their names to the colorful history of Los Angeles was one Jack B. Tenney; a man with a colorful past and a penchant for taking up causes.
Jack Breckinridge Tenney (April 1, 1898 – November 4, 1970) was an American politician who was noted for leading anti-communist investigations in California in the 1940s and early 1950s as head of the California Senate Fact-finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities (“Tenney Committee”); earlier, he was a song-composer, best known for “Mexicali Rose”.
While he was a bandleader and professional musician 1919-1933 in Calexico, California and Mexicali, Mexico, he composed the popular “standard” “Mexicali Rose”. In 1922, he wrote the lyrics, putting them under the name “Helen Stone”, a singer who put up the money for the first publication, by W.A. Quincke & Co., Los Angeles, on March 10, 1923.
However, Tenney turned his energies towards night law school, and moved back to Los Angeles in 1928. The 1929 sound film Mexicali Rose, starring Barbara Stanwyck, came and went. He reportedly sold his interest in “Mexicali Rose” for two to three thousand dollars to M.M. Cole Company of Chicago. In December 1932 Tenney was elected to the lucrative post of president of Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians. In 1935, he passed the California State Bar examination and became successful in practice. He went on to be elected to the California State Assembly and Senate on multiple occasions.
Tenney was instrumental in forcing the University of California to implement loyalty oaths on its faculty when he introduced legislation requiring such oaths. In 1949, as the head of the Un-American Activities, Tenney drafted legislation that would introduce a constitutional amendment to be placed on the state ballot that would give the state legislature authority over the university in matters of loyalty. Tenney’s Senate Bill 130 would have forbidden the teaching of un-American subjects in the public schools of California, which would be required to teach “Americanism.”
Tenney ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1944, and in 1949, the year he was removed from the chairmanship of his committee, he ran in the Los Angeles mayoral election, placing fifth. The conduct of the hearings, by a later account, “egregiously violated due process”, and of the hundreds of people subpoenaed and interrogated in its eight years, not a single one had been indicted, much less convicted, of any sort of subversion.
In this Paid Political Announcement from March 30, 1949, Tenney is praised by none other than Frederick C. Dockweiler just ahead of the Mayoral elections. Dockweiler was from the prominent Dockweiler family, considered one of the Pioneer families of Los Angeles and whose father, Isidore had a beach in Southern California named after him.
Dockweiler as well as Tenney are just two of the names associated with Los Angeles during the formative years. Tenney is all but forgotten now and Dockweiler is probably best known for the Beach. But during that period of the late 19th to early 20th centuries, they were an indelible part of the history of Los Angeles. Broadcast by KNX-AM on March 30, 1949.
