Southern California ACLU was born on 4th and Beacon streets on the issues of free speech and striking workers in 1923
By Paul F. Irving
Following the intro below, we reprint the story of this incident from our June 1991 edition, which Upton Sinclair scholar Lauren Coodley called, “the most accurate reporting,” albeit 70 years after it happened.
— James Preston Allen, Publisher
When the soldiers came back from the Great War in Europe in November 1917, they not only brought back victory but also the Spanish Flu pandemic. As with the COVID-19 pandemic, bars, restaurants, churches, and other gatherings were closed down and masks were protested. As the pandemic subsided (it never really ended) the economy came back to life with what is called the Roaring Twenties. Women’s suffrage had passed, but also the prohibition of alcohol, and in San Pedro, bars and brothels became “speakeasies” and rum running became its own underground economy. Fortunes were made smuggling and selling contraband whiskey.
The war years had been a boom to the LA Harbor Area with fishing, shipbuilding, and cargo handling feeding the growing population of the region. But for the working-class dockworkers and many others wages were low, hours were long and child labor was rampant. Unions had few protections and organized meetings were outlawed. It was in this context that the Industrial Workers of the World, I.W.W. or Wobblies, arrived on the waterfront to organize the immigrant workers here as elsewhere.
Just like today, progressive reforms were also in the air with the election of Hiram Johnson as governor and the socialist Job Harriman almost winning the 1910 election for mayor of Los Angeles. And similarly, the countervailing forces resisted, often under color of law by the police, the mayor, and the power of the shipping companies who ran the dispatch hall on the waterfront.
The similarities between then and now are too many to list fully, but it was in this context that the Wobblies went on strike, idling some 100 ships in San Pedro Bay and bringing the full force of the Los Angeles Police Department down to the harbor to stop Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, from speaking to a gathering of thousands protesting at Liberty Hill on May 15, 1923.
RLn, June, 1991 on Upton Sinclair and Liberty Hill—
From coast to coast, civil liberties have been put to the test and defended in the U.S. and the city of San Pedro has played a considerable role in these annals. An important occasion was on May 15, 1923, when famed novelist and social activist Upton Sinclair came to San Pedro to address striking longshoremen. Sinclair, together with Hunter S. Kimbrough, his brother-in-law, Prince Hopkins, and Hugh Hardyman were arrested for reading from the “Bill of Rights” of the U.S. Constitution at a place called “Liberty Hill,” presently thought to have been located near 4th and Beacon streets.
Throughout the country in the 1920s, the “Red Scare” was on. The Bolsheviks had taken control of the Russian Revolution, and in 1919, the American Communist Party had formed. Socialists, under the leadership of Eugene Debs, held various political offices. And to the public, the word socialism became synonymous with communism, and communism, an earlier Christian belief, became synonymous with totalitarianism. Many state governments reacted by passing criminal syndicalism laws which were applied to the I.W.W. and those who were against the war. But, as Samuel Walker states, in his recently published, In Defense of American Liberties, A History of the A.C.L.U., “Although most states stopped enforcing them [syndicalism laws] by 1921, California continued to use its law aggressively.”
The waterfront was tense when the strike was called. The employers’ fear of unions and eagerness to cut back on union gains made during the war, was set against keen union interest not to lose benefits and to continue the fight for better pay and working conditions. As Walker says, “Strikers filled the jails and the remnants of the I.W.W. joined the fight…”
Events leading to the 1923 strike
At the turn of the century, when the robber barons had played their hands and forged their wills across this nation, Europe was preparing to wage the great war, and the feudal reign of the Czar in Russia was about to be overthrown, shiploads of Europe’s poor were sailing for this promised land, migrating here from the other Americas as well. Foreign-speaking people fanned out across the U.S. The living and working conditions for the “great unwashed of the world” were deplorable. Poor pay, fear, intimidation, and kickbacks were the order of the day. The working man and woman competed for the meager jobs, queuing up, afraid to say a word about bad conditions and unsafe practices, lest the hungry worker, in the line behind, takes their place.
In 1904, a young Sinclair chronicled the misery of poor people in a fictional account of work and filth in the Chicago slaughterhouses and meat packing plants. Poet Carl Sandburg wrote of Chicago:
Hog butcher for the world
Tool maker, stacker of wheat
Player with railroads and the nation’s
Freight handler
Stormy, husky, brawling
City of the big shoulders…
The Chicago that Sinclair wrote about in The Jungle shocked the world. President Theodore Roosevelt called for federal action and the Pure Food and Drug Act was born. Sinclair the “muckraker” came into national prominence. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident, I hit it in the stomach,” he wrote.
In 1905, the I.W.W. was formed in Chicago. The labor union was radical and opposed to the conservatism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), an affiliation of craft and trades unions. As San Pedro labor historian Art Almeida points out, the I.W.W. was a union for the “pick-and-shovel guy, the mine and forestry, the factory worker… little, young kids exposed to hazardous conditions.” It was a union established for all the workers without regard for skill trade or color, rapidly increasing its ranks and finally coming out West.
By the end of World War I, Los Angeles and the harbor were experiencing an economic boom and the harbor was expanding at a phenomenal rate. Unions had made gains to facilitate the war effort, but now the drive was on to cut back on wages and benefits. Shipping firms and stevedore companies had set up the Sea Service Bureau, a hiring hall to facilitate open shop registration of seamen and waterfront workers. It also served to check the infiltration of I.W.W. members into the workforce. Employers could select the workers they wanted. On the waterfront, the bureau was better known as “Fink Hall.”
Almeida’s article, “Pedro Waterfront/Center of Post WWI Union Activity,” appearing in the first issue of Random Lengths News (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1979), points out that, “The 1923 strike came about as a result of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce’s clamor to extend open shop conditions and rid the waterfront of union influence.” The Chamber was backed by the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, the Shipowners’ Association, and the Southern Pacific, Salt Lake, and Pacific Electric Railroads.
On April 25, 1923, the strike was called, “A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement.” Louis B. and Richard S. Perry write that Police quickly started to round up known I.W.W. agitators. Four-hundred Wobblies ended up in jail. Leon Harris, in his biography of Upton Sinclair, The American Rebel, states that strikers “were being brutally repressed by the police at the command of the Los Angeles Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association. The police were said to be taking orders from A.B. Hammond, the president of Hammond Lumber Company, who was one of the leading members of the Shipowners Association and a strong opponent of unions.
The event
On the evening of May 15, 1923, Sinclair and his entourage arrived in town. The next day, the San Pedro Daily Pilot, under a frontpage headline, “Parlor Pinks Invade San Pedro,” reported that “Shortly after arriving here, [Sinclair, Kimbrough, Hopkins, and Hardyman] went into a conference with Chief of Police Louis Oaks and Captain Plummer. At this meeting, they were told that an emergency existed in this city and public meetings were prohibited.” The paper went on to say that Sinclair and the others “persisted in their demands that they be allowed the right to address a gathering but were firmly told by the police chief that no meeting would be allowed under any circumstances and that their arrest would follow any attempt to hold a meeting.’ [Sinclair], retiring to a conclave with his lawyers and other members of his group… again visited Capt. Plummer stated that they had decided to go ahead with their plans to speak. ‘But we’re in no hurry to get arrested,’ Sinclair told newspapermen.” After a delay of about an hour, Sinclair’s party moved to the public arena.
At that time, there were still portions of the bluffs adjacent to the bay in the old downtown district of San Pedro that had not yet been excavated, and one high place was being used by union people as a public meeting ground. This was Liberty Hill. The parcel was owned by Minnie Davis, a wealthy sympathizer who gave her permission to Sinclair to speak to the strikers and inform them of their rights. The strikers were longshoremen belonging to the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union 510, a local of the I.W.W.
Sinclair’s party moved towards Liberty Hill, climbing the steep path to the top. The San Pedro Daily Pilot reported that “Sinclair was greeted affably by a score of policemen that formed a blurred rim against the lights of the harbor below.”
“I will read Article One of the Amendment of the Constitution of the United States,” Sinclair began. “It says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.”
Officer Henry stepped out of the circle of semi-darkness.
“You’re under arrest,” he said, firmly but courteously.
“I thank you,” replied Sinclair. And so it went when each of the others tried to speak. They were taken one by one down the slope to waiting police cars.
The San Pedro Daily Pilot reported that, “Chief Oaks in a formal statement to newspapermen today said, ‘I hope Sinclair goes to jail if convicted. He is rich and a fine would mean nothing to him. I would rather deal with 4,000 I.W.W. than one man like Sinclair, who is what I consider one of the worst types of radicals. He will not be allowed to read the Constitution or speak at a public gathering against the law if he carries a copy of the Constitution in every pocket. If he believes the rights of the I.W.W. and the striking element were being imposed upon, he should have availed himself of legal methods of redress.’”
It was announced that Sinclair and the others would be taken to Los Angeles, but according to Sinclair’s autobiography, they were taken around to several police stations and held “incommunicado” overnight and into the late afternoon of the next day. They were denied their legal rights to communicate with their lawyers and obtain bail. The idea was to bring Sinclair to court at the last moment, have the judge appoint defense lawyers, sentence Sinclair to jail without bail, and then hide him away in a cell. But someone on the force tipped off his wife, Mary Craig, who had attorneys present a writ when Sinclair arrived in court. So much for Chief Oak’s legal methods of redress.”
The founding of the ACLU
On May 17, the New York Times reported on the incident in San Pedro and stated that “Sinclair declared his arrest resulted from his activities as a member of the American Civil Liberties Union of New York. He said the purpose of the ACLU was to defend civil rights and make citizens acquainted with their rights…” He went on to say that, “the reason for the reading was because Southern California was building a ‘bullpen,’ evidently referring to plans for constructing a stockade … to house arrested Industrial Workers of the World.”
Sinclair says in his autobiography, “When I got out of jail, I wrote a letter to Louis D. Oaks, chief of police in Los Angeles. It was printed as a leaflet and widely circulated in Los Angeles. It was also printed in The Nation of June 6, 1923, along with an editorial note.”
In another letter, found in Sinclair’s My Lifetime in Letters, Bertrand Russell, English philosopher and mathematician, asked Sinclair, “Is it true you have got yourself into trouble with the authorities because they take the same view of the Declaration of Independence as George II took?”
For Sinclair, this episode was the catalyst for his forming the very first affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union here in Southern California. He wrote in his autobiography that, “A Congregational minister, Reverend Clinton J. Taft, resigned from his pulpit and served as director [of the ACLU] for the next 20 years or so.”
Singing Jailbirds, a play Sinclair wrote in 1924, recounts his experiences in San Pedro with the I.W.W. The drama centers around the incarcerated Wobblies. In the play, there is much singing of Wobbly songs, many written by the famous Wobbly martyr, Joe Hill, a waterfront worker whose own I.W.W. union card was issued to him by the San Pedro local. The first chapters of Sinclair’s The Goslings are also about the Wobblies in San Pedro.
In a postscript to Singing Jailbirds, an account is given about a conference called by the then-new chief of police of Los Angeles to discuss the increase in crime with his captains. A committee from the ACLU was invited to consult with them. Sinclair says that at the end of the conference, Police Captain Plummer stood up and stated, “Policemen have been made the tools of big business interests of this town who want to run things. I’m ashamed of myself for consenting to do their dirty work.” A few days after the conference, a mob of 300 men, including policemen, seamen, and out-of-uniform Ku Klux Klaners, raided the I.W.W. hall at 12th and Centre streets in San Pedro. Family members were beaten and union men were tarred and feathered. (The building that currently stands on the southeast corner is believed to be this very same hall.)
In the end, the story returns to that day in May when Sinclair was arrested in San Pedro, to his initial meeting with Los Angeles Mayor George E. Cryer. The Los Angeles Times reported, “A delegation of well-to-do radicals from Pasadena, headed by Sinclair, called on Mayor Cryer to protest against the arrest of I.W.W. strikers and agitators at Los Angeles Harbor…[and] to obtain authority to hold a meeting at the harbor.” “Nothing doing” was Cryer’s answer. “Too many of the foreigners who come here yap about their constitutional rights and forget their constitutional duties.” That’s when Sinclair and the others headed for San Pedro and Liberty Hill, with a clear idea about constitutional duties.
No longer is there a well-worn pathway leading to Liberty Hill. But in the shadow of the Harbor Department, there is ground that has been consecrated by a struggle for civil liberties. And the memory of a patriotic protest and the songs of the Wobblies linger heavily in the morning mist.
Postscript
Since this article first appeared in 1991, the monument at Liberty Hill was erected, the site was officially recognized by the State of California as historical and a bronze relief dedicated to I.W.W. songwriter and organizer Joe Hill was placed there. In December 2019, the donor plaques were stolen and a committee is fundraising to replace them with a ceremony this September. Art Almeida, the father of the Liberty Hill monument, died on April 12, 2023, and the memory of this incident persists in the very fabric of this town.