Luke Lane

[1] Prior to the formation of the LAPD Intelligence Squad in about 1929, in 1922 Lane was involved in mass arrests of IWW union members in the lead up to what became known as the 1923 San Pedro maritime strike.

"[3] By 1924 Lane and William F. "Red" Hynes were authoring weekly intelligence briefs on local "strikers, labour unions, anarchists, communists, syndicalists, socialists, the ACLU, and pacifists".

Lane's officers, menaced then by angry boys and co-eds, sneaked off the library steps and beat a hurried retreat away from the gathering for several minutes.

"[7] After the fact, "Frank Faxon, one of the club-swinging officers, said he was sorry if he was too rough; Lieutenant Lane told a newspaperman who asked him for an explanation, to 'go to hell', and Chief Davis declared that he would start an investigation.

[7] Stephen O'Donnell, a columnist for the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record wrote about how Stanford president Ray Lyman Wilbur was responding to similar campus actions up north:[11] His solution to the student pacifist strike problem will bear examination and imitation.

But Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur apparently took the point of view that this is a democratic and enlightened land and that an institution of higher learning is the proper place to discuss such matters.

It's a good thing he isn't a 17-year-old girl, or Luke Lane's plug uglies would slug him...It is here I believe that Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur has cased the situation accurately as the boys would say around First and Hill.

[15] In May 1937, the American Communist newspaper Western Worker reported that Lane claimed police officers had been hired by "studios and film favorites" to escort them through SAG picket lines.

"[19] A week later, local reformer Robert Noble told the Evening Citizen News that the Red Squad had not, in fact, been disbanded, just diminished, and transferred to the "Metropolitan Division under Det.

[25] A California activist named Ben Dobbs was interviewed for an oral history project at UCLA in 1987 and described a man who may be Lane, saying, "I was the representative of the Young Communist League on the executive committee, and we took part in several very, very important campaigns; the first of which was to change the political climate of Los Angeles.

Luke Lane WWI draft registration card (1917)
"L.A. Police Slug College Girls" (April 13, 1935)