A historian specializing in American radicalism and related areas, Stevens describes the conflict between the radical Right and the radical Left in the southern California city from the depression of the 1890s--the first large-scale crisis of capitalism that modern Los Angeles experienced--to the beginning of the civil rights era of the 1960s. The seven decades revealed for the first time, he says, the deeply different philosophical opinions on economic and political questions that separated the Socialist Left from the capitalist Right. He describes how the anti-communist crusade of the 1950s destroyed the Socialist Left, and how a new form of progressive politics rose in its wake that replaced class struggle with race and ethnicity struggle. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)