This series consists primarily of undercover agent reports and other documents, documenting the activities of labor organizations and organizations on the left, 1934-1940, including the Communist Party of San Francisco, and labor leader Harry Bridges. The materials were possibly gathered or created by Harper Knowles during his tenure as director of the Subversive Activities Committee of the American Legion in San Francisco, and Stanley M. Doyle, an associate of Harper Knowles.

Correspondents include William Hynes of the Los Angeles Police Department, head of that department's anti-radical unit; John Keegan of the Portland Police Department, and Raphael Bonham of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. For additional information on Knowles, Doyle, Haynes, Keegan. and Bonhan, see Knowles's testimony at the 1939 hearing regarding Harry Bridges's citizenship; box 1 and box 11, folder 30 of the Harry Bridges Legal Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles; Stanley I. Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang. 1982), chapter 5; Charles P. Larrowe, Labor in the United States (New York: Lawrence Hill Bnd Co, 1972), pp. 191-201; Estolv E. Ward, Harry Bridges on Trial (New York: Modern Age Books. 1940), chapter 10.

Some material refers to the Industrial Association, a San Francisco organization of banks and employers created in 1921 to promote the so-called American Plan, an anti-union effort based on the open shop. For information on the Industrial Association, see the hearings of the La Follette Committee (74th Congress. Senate. Committee on Education and Labor. Hearings. Part 60, pp. 21943-22263); Frederick L. Ryan, Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Building Trades (Norman. Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935); and William IsseI and Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1986), pp. 95-99. Some of the material refers to the La Follette Committee; for more information (but none touching on this material), see Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: the La Follette Committee and the New Deal (lndianpolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., lnc., 1966).