TWENTY-FOUR HOUR PARTY PEOPLE: A GENDERED SOCIAL HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA COMMUNISM

A thesis submitted to the faculty of As San Francisco State University 3 0 In partial fulfillment of 20^ the requirements for the Degree I415T •133 Master of History

In

Gender in History

by

Lisa Michelle Jackson

San Francisco, California

Spring 2015 Copyright by Lisa Michelle Jackson 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Twenty-four Hour Party People: A Gendered Social History of

California Communism by Lisa Michelle Jackson, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of History in Gender at San Francisco State University. TWENTY-FOUR HOUR PARTY PEOPLE: A GENDERED SOCIAL HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA COMMUNISM

Lisa Michelle Jackson San Francisco, California 2015

This thesis explores the gendered social world of California Communism through an examination of the radical educational system, Party literature, and the marital and reproductive practices of its members. Working class women particularly used radical education as a means of gaining entree into the inner circle of Communist leadership in California. Idealized visual representations of muscular militancy, intellectualism, and radical maternity in Party newspapers showed members appropriate gender presentation and practices. Party-sponsored heterosexual socialization afforded male and female operatives the opportunity to form intimate relationships that went beyond middle-class notions of the companionate ideal. Communist leaders created this insular, gendered social world to teach collectivist thinking in all aspects of their lives and to shape working-class men and women into the next generation of Party operatives.

I c e ...... is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Chair, Thesis Committee Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Returning to school after a twenty-five year absence may have been the most frightening career move of my life. Luckily, I met Sherry Katz and Robert Cherny early in this process, teachers and mentors who fostered my interest in history and helped turn this layperson into a scholar. Sherry renewed my love of women’s history and taught me how to write a research paper. With Dr. Cherny’s guidance, I came to love California history, the Communist Party in the United States, and the ladies of District 13. He also kindly agreed to be a member of my thesis committee even though he has retired from teaching. Sherry introduced me to the Labor Archives and Research Center where I met

Catherine Powell, whose infectious enthusiasm for the Left and San Francisco’s rich labor history kept me engaged in the lives of California’s Communists. Her knowledge of the archival material and helpful suggestions for my research made this work possible.

Finally, Dawn Mabalon broadened my understanding of the intersectionality of identities and the social construction of those identities. Without these four I would not be the scholar I am today or the teacher I hope to become.

On a personal note, I would never have embarked on this endeavor were it not for the goading of my friend Dr. Lewis S. Davis, Associate Professor of Economics at Union

College. Beside many a backcountry campfire, as we enjoyed the fruits of our (mostly his) fishing expeditions, Lewis encouraged me to return to school and pursue a degree in history. Nearly ten years passed before I dared to accept his advice, though I have no idea now why I ever questioned his sagacity. I am eternally grateful for his friendship.

Finally, my wife Shari and daughter Emma have endured with grace and humor countless changes in routine, numerous readings of my work, and the emotional rollercoaster that is graduate school. All things are possible because of their support. I love them both dearly. TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures...... ix

Chapter 1—The Body in Parts...... 1

A Note on Terms, Names, and Capitalization...... 11

Chapter 2—The Radical Mind...... 13

Communist Pedagogy and the Workers School...... 19

Communism and Intellectuals...... 21

The San Francisco Workers School and Radical Education...... 29

Conclusion...... 40

Chapter 3—The Body Politic...... 41

Radical Manhood...... 47

Race and Radical Masculinity...... 55

The Radical Male as Victim...... 58

Radical Womanhood...... 61

Maternity and Radical Female Bodies...... 66

Conclusion...... 68 TABLE OF CONTENTS CONTINUED

Chapter 4—Radical Hearts...... 70

The Depression and Companionate Marriage...... 76

Marxism and Marriage...... 79

District 13 Marriage Practices...... 80

Maternity and Reproductive Practices...... 86

Conclusion...... 92

Chapter 5—Conclusion...... 93

Bibliography...... 94 LIST OF FIGURES

Figures Page

1. The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword...... 22 2. Hail National Youth Day...... 49 3. The Agricultural Workers Answer!...... 50 4. Mike Marvos and Pat Calihan...... 51 5. They Asked for Food—And Got This!...... 53 6. Leo Gallagher...... 54 7. Bosses Tricks Cannot Break Workers Ranks...... 56 8. Smash the Barriers!...... 58 9. “They’re Starved General”...... 59 10. “Spread the Strike!”...... 62 11. To Win—Organize and Fight!...... 64 12. Ethel Dell...... 65 13. The First Check...... 87

ix 1

Chapter 1—The Body in Parts

In her mock biography of the fictional Communist cadre Jimmy Higgins, author

Aileen Kraditor maintained that the Communist Party appealed to three types of personalities: those “driven by hostility” toward capitalism and the upper class; those driven by “genuine love for the People”; and those driven by their own intellect.1

Whatever their reasons for entering the Communist world, she argued, once they became ensconced in it, “the Party’s totalistic ideology covered every aspect of life, thought, and feeling.”2 This makes for a compelling analytical framework, as those three descriptors—hostility, love, and intellect—while indicative of emotional states and not explicitly tied to the physical world, have nevertheless become synonymous with specific body parts, namely a person’s musculature, heart, and brain. It also speaks to three rhetorical tropes that American Communists upheld as symbolic of true Bolsheviks—the working class intellectual, the muscular militant, and the matemalist radical female. The

California Party did not simply wish to attract members who fit into these neat categories, however. They created an insular political, gender, and social culture that included a workers school, a labor newspaper, and a cultural center where social and political events guaranteed working-class heterosexual socializing. These three created an atmosphere in which working-class women and men learned not just Marxist doctrine, but how to think, look, and socialize like a professional revolutionary.

1 Aileen S. Kraditor, Jimmy Higgins: The Mental World of the American Rank-and-File Communist, 1930- 1958 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 41-42. 2 Kraditor, Jimmy Higgins, 73. 2

The Communist Party has garnered significant attention from historians considering that the institution never established a foothold in United States politics.

Many studies published during and near the end of the Cold War offer variations on

Theodore Draper’s assertion that the American party served merely as a puppet of the

Soviet Union. According to Draper, one need look no further than the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in the United States (CPUSA) to understand American Communism.3 Building upon this logic, Draper’s acolytes focus almost entirely on the Party’s national leadership as representative of both the

Communist International (Comintern) and regional affiliates of CPUS A. Adherence to this notion of a monolithic foreign entity controlling the mainly white men in charge of the American Party has caused most of these scholars to overlook many examples of individual and group disregard for orders from the national office and the Comintern.4

The availability of new archival material after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s gave researchers the opportunity to reexamine this contention and to broaden the scope of their enquiries. Many concentrate on radical activity at the local level and show that Communist policies and practices varied according to the needs of specific radical communities. The Party had some success recruiting African Americans

3 Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (New York: The Viking Press, 1960), 5. 4 Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis o f American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1961); Harvey Klehr, Communist Cadre: The Social Background o f the American Communist Elite (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978); Harvey Klehr, The Heyday o f American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984). 3

in Alabama during the depression, Robin D.G. Kelley maintains, because their egalitarian relief activism appealed to Black women’s matemalism and CP advocacy for Black self- determination appealed to Black manhood. When these concerns became less important to Communists at the institutional level, African American Alabamans turned away from the Party.5 Robert Cherny argues that during the early 1930s, California Communists demonstrated a measure of autonomy by ignoring some Comintern directives and amending others to suit the organizational needs of District 13.6 Similarly, Randi Storch maintains Chicago Communists practiced united front strategies before the advent of the

Popular Front, but they were also quite successful in following Party directives to organize the unorganized.7 All three complicate the notion of outside influence and control, while Storch and Kelley demonstrate that, contrary to Harvey Klehr’s contention that the Party remained an organization of white immigrant men, in certain localities women and minorities attained significant influence over policies and practices.

While some use community studies to develop new threads in the fabric of US

Communist history, others broaden their definition of what constituted Communist activity in order to include numerous front groups and CP-affiliated unions. This approach not only enriches the historiography of American radicalism, it also joins local

5 Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 13 and 20-21. 6 Robert Cherny, “Prelude to the Popular Front: The Communist Party in California,” American Communist History 1, no. 1 (2002). 7 Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Roots, 1928-1935 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 2-8. 4

histories in deemphasizing the significance of the white male-dominated New York power structure. As did Kelley in his analysis of Communist Alabama, Judith Stepan-

Norris and Maurice Zeitlin demonstrate the difficulty of maintaining a cohesive organizational strategy in places where race, gender, and class interests often clashed.

They apply statistical analysis to determine which affiliates of the Congress of Industrial

Unions (CIO) most closely aligned themselves with Communist Party doctrine and conclude that radical unions within the CIO offered women more access to education, increased potential for economic growth, and the opportunity to become trade union leaders.8 Erik MacDuffie uses front group activism to link interwar radicalism with the mainstream civil rights movement of the 1950s. He contends that mass organizations offered African American women alternate sites to “agitate for Black freedom and Black women’s dignity outside women’s clubs, the church, and civil rights and Black

Nationalist groups.”9 Dayo F. Gore makes similar assertions, but argues that African

American women radicals also challenged mass organizations to “embrace an intersecting analysis” of the struggles for “black liberation, women’s equality, and workers’ rights.”10 Each of these books bridges the gap between the Old and New Left

8 Stepan-Norris, Judith and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12-15 and 189-211. 9 Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. 10 Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011), 4-5. 5

and expands our understanding of radicals who functioned in spaces adjacent to but not within the Communist Party.

Much like scholars who focus on the long civil rights movement, historians of feminism use Communist women’s activism to complicate the wave paradigm of feminist history. Kate Weigand reveals the legacy of the second wave of feminism in the writings of 1940s and 50s women activists. The women of her study, she posits, worked for women’s liberation on the inside of the CP during arguably the most repressive period in

US history. Mary Triece concurs and notes that radical women writers combined the needs of the domestic sphere with those of production, and, in doing so, brought a “new understanding of solidarity into the 1930s labor movement.”11

Recent biographies prove that radical women also employed Marxist rhetoric to articulate unique perspectives on women’s emancipation and civil rights. Helen C. Camp agrees with Weigand that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn should be considered a feminist because her written work divulged beliefs in “economic independence for women, in sexual liberation, in birth control, and in self-assertion.”12 Claudia Jones looked beyond the limitations of class analysis, asserts Carol Boyce Davies, and formulated a political philosophy that embraced gender, transnationalism, and culture as equally important to

11 Mary E. Triece, On the Picket Line: Strategies o f Working-Class Women During the Depression (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 1. 12 Helen C. Camp, Iron in Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995), xviii. 6

revolutionary struggles.13 Moreover, she framed black women’s exploitation within the context of race, gender, and class, or what scholars now call the intersectionality of oppression. Jones used the term “superexploitation,” and in doing so created the structural basis for black feminist scholarship for the next sixty years.14

Weigand ends her study in 1956, the year Khrushchev revealed to the world the extent of Stalin’s brutality and the flood of defections from the Communist Party began in earnest. Studies of the ensuing period typically center on the prevailing anti­ communist sentiment fueled by Cold War rhetoric and the campaigns waged by governmental bodies like the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Robbie Lieberman frames her discussion of radicalism and repression around the burgeoning peace movement and maintains that although American Communists were active participants, their devotion to the Soviet Union forever tainted their discourse and negatively impacted their contributions.15 Landon Storrs argues that federal investigations and loyalty programs caused many bureaucrats to move to the political center and to sometimes hide past leftist activity. The inherent anti-feminist and repressive ideological base of the loyalty program, she contends, succeeded in upholding

13 Carol Boyce Davies, Left o f Karl Marx: The Political Life o f Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 27. 14 Davies, Left of Karl Marx, 2. 15 Robbie Lieberman, The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism, and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945-1963 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 1. 7

white male supremacy by driving women and people of color out of civil service jobs.16

These studies continue the current trend of utilizing expansive definitions of Communism and radical activism in order to showcase left-leaning influence on American politics and culture.

This study builds upon the work of Paul Mishler, who argues that the failures and successes of the American Communist Party matter less than the social system its members created.17 Programs, songs, and activities of the Communist youth groups he examines demonstrate that American Communists struggled between their wish to maintain ethnic identities grounded in cultural practices and the need to embrace America and American culture.18 Yet Communists who inhabited that world rarely ventured outside of it, preferring to work and play with people who thought and acted in ways similar to their own. California cadres, for the most part, exemplified this myopic vision of community. Not only did they work together, they also went to school, participated in intramural sports leagues, and became personally involved with others inside of this tiny group. Despite repeated exhortations to befriend non-radical workers and infiltrate AFL trade unions, many Communists in California shunned mainstream society for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was their total commitment to radical pursuits.

,6 Landon R. Y. Starrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking o f the New Deal Left (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 14-15. 17 Paul C. Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 18 Mishler, Raising Reds, 10. 8

This study focuses on California and District 13 of the Communist Party in the

United States during the early 1930s when Comintern directives demanded that member organizations practice isolation tactics in political and union activities. Samuel Darcy, who transferred to the San Francisco district office at the end of 1930, wrote some fifteen years later, after being expelled from the CP, that, as a “federation of voluntary affiliates,” the Comintern had “no physical way of enforcing its decisions,” which were often accepted by the leaders of those affiliates “formally with tongue in cheek.”19 At most the Comintern exercised its limited authority by removing leaders who objected to their policy decisions, as happened to James P. Cannon in 1928 and national chair Jay

Lovestone in 1929. Darcy believed that the expulsions of Lovestone and Cannon affected California more than any other section in the country, so much so that there were fewer than three hundred dues paying members when he assumed leadership of the district in 1930.20 His attempts to alleviate factionalism included an immediate purge of perceived troublemakers followed by the acquisition of a building large enough to accommodate many of the Party’s cultural organizations. He christened this new

19 Samuel Adams Darcy, "The Storm Must Be Ridden" (unpublished manuscript, circa 1945), typescript; Samuel Adams Darcy Papers, box 3, folder 17, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Libraries (hereafter cited as SAD MS). 20 Samuel Adams Darcy, “History of the Communist Party in California” (unpublished manuscript, 16 July, 1939), typescript; SAD MS, box 2, folder 51, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Libraries. The report of the 1929 district convention is replete with examples of the factionalism that gripped the region. Report of District Convention, District 13, Workers (Communist) Party, 26 January, 1929, Files o f the Communist Party o f the USA In the Comintern Archives, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii, Microfilm collection, fond 515, opus 1, reel 136, delo 1791, Green Library, Stanford University. This follows the original citations from the RGASPI archives and will henceforth be abbreviated as RGASPI: 515-1-136-1791. 9

workers’ cultural center Ruthenberg House in honor of American CP founder and education advocate C.E. Ruthenberg.21

Because Communist theorists prized education as central to the class struggle, I begin this consideration of the California Communist gendered social culture with a chapter on radical brains and the multi-faceted educational system created to train new operatives. The workers school gave radical men and women the chance to educate themselves, but more importantly it fostered a change in their understanding of what education meant and allowed them to imagine themselves capable of scholarly pursuits. I argue that women in particular took advantage of these educational opportunities and in doing so became the intellectual nucleus of District 13.

In the second chapter, I examine the rhetorical construction of the muscular militant and the radical mother in Party literature in comparison to the lived experiences of District 13 operatives. Self-representation of radical bodies reveals much about

Communists’ conceptions of themselves as both warriors in and victims of the war against capitalism. Gender formation among California Communists, I posit, diverged

significantly from the gendered iconography of muscular militancy and radical matemalism.

21 Pamphlet for the New York Workers School, 1929-1930; SAD MS, box 2, folder 19, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Libraries. 10

Finally, I look at Communist gender theories regarding personal relationships and reproduction to determine if Communist women and men used them as the basis for the formation of unique gender systems or simply variations on hegemonic themes.

Communist women especially benefitted from radical interpretations of middle-class companionate ideologies, as they sought out and secured intimate partnerships with men who supported their career goals and made reproductive choices that allowed them to remain professional revolutionaries.

Several types of primary sources gave me the opportunity to evaluate Depression-

era bodies and gender formation among California radicals. Speeches, pamphlets, and

articles revealed Marxist thought on ways to transform personal heterosexual

relationships into something akin to the companionate ideal and on the importance of

educating female bodies to expand the ranks of professional revolutionaries. Two Party

newspapers, The Young Worker and Western Worker, offered sites for exploring

gendered rhetorical strategies in labor disputes, electoral politics, and campaigns against

racial and social injustice. Finally, letters, committee reports, and unpublished memoirs

found in the manuscript collections of the Communist International and District 13

Organizer Sam Darcy supplied official, yet exceedingly personal, perspectives on gender

formation and radical bodies.

Together with oral histories, published memoirs, and radio interviews, these

recollections shed light on individual Communists’ interpretations of Marxist gender 11

theories and how those theories affected the bodies of California radicals. Reminiscences such as these present the historian with certain challenges, however. The passage of time affects memory, as can repetitive narration of events and changing opinions about co­ conspirators and organizations. Most of the people cited in this thesis left the Party sometime before recording memories of their activism. Sam Darcy’s expulsion from the

Party most assuredly affected his recollections, but it may also have provided him with enough distance to speak frankly about his disagreements with the national leadership.

The women in this study were interviewed in the late 1970s at the height of the second wave of feminism and in the wake of the Supreme Court decision decriminalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade. Their critiques about the Party’s lip service to the woman question seem especially influenced by 1960s and 1970s social movements, which probably also contributed to the ease with which many of them spoke about their own reproductive practices in the 1930s. To counteract the subjective nature of these recollections, I provide corroborating evidence produced in the 1930s whenever possible.

A Note on Terms, Names, and Capitalization

“Cadre,” “professional revolutionary,” “functionary,” and “operative” are all terms used by Party members and outsiders to describe employees or officers of the

Communist Party and its affiliated mass organizations. Although ostensibly independent bodies that served the working class, mass organizations or front groups were completely controlled by the Party, which placed reliable cadres in leadership positions. The editors 12

of Party literature capitalized everything, as did cadres in official and personal letters. To avoid confusion, I will capitalize the names of committees or titles like “District

Executive Committee” or “District Organizer,” but not terms like “national office” or

“organizer.” “Party,” “CPUSA,” “CP,” and “Communist Party” all refer to the

Communist Party in the United States. For organizational purposes, the party divided the

country into districts; California represented the bulk of District 13.

The names that operatives chose or used in the presence of authority figures

changed when they married, Americanized, or wished to remain anonymous. I have

opted to use the names under which they were best known in Party literature and to avoid the addition of married names. For example, Louise Todd, who during most of this period was married to Fred Doyer, will be referred to as Todd, the name by which she most often appears in the literature of the time. Likewise, though Caroline Decker was married to Jack Wamick while active in the Party, she will be referred to as Decker. The

sometime acting District Organizer, Morris Rappaport, usually signed correspondence

“Rapport,” so I will use this shortened version of his surname. 13

Chapter 2—The Radical Mind

Red Messengers

They walked neither fast nor slow, They moved in the shadowed night Like giants in a trembling wind On the backs of the men were books, In the hearts of the men was fire, On the tongues of the men Were live words of revolution. --Jim Waters22

In the inaugural issue of the Western Worker, the newspaper of District 13 of the

Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA or CP), a short, two-paragraph article announced the opening of registration for workers schools in the “main coast cities.”

Classes offered included Fundamentals of Communism, Trade Union Strategy and

Tactics, Political Economy, and English, each designed to appeal to specific, sometimes overlapping groups of workers.23 These courses, occasionally designed and always taught by District 13 operatives, were intended to expand and strengthen working class consciousness in California and the CPUSA.24 The Party did not limit instruction to the classroom, however, and sponsored guest lecturers on important dates such as May Day,

22 Jim Waters, “The Red Messenger,” The Young Worker, 27 March 1934. 23 “Registration for Spring Term Workers School Begins January 1st: Schools Now Operating in Main Coast Cities Prepare New Courses,” Western Worker, 1 January 1932. 24 Sal Erenberg to Agit-Prop Department, 14 May 1931, RGASPI: 515-1-176-2319; Kraditor, Jimmy Higgins, 106-107. While there is evidence that some operatives designed courses, a 1931 letter from District 13 Agit-Prop Director Sal Erenberg requesting “outlines” for the first series of classes suggests that the national office had a hand in setting the guidelines. Aileen Kraditor suggested that the national office supplied materials to labor schools in order to control content, but I found no evidence to support such a claim. 14

International Women’s Day, National Negro Week, and the anniversary of the Russian

Revolution. They also planned open forums in which operatives moderated discussions about health, unemployment, New Deal legislation, and other issues of interest to the working class.

The opening of the school and the first issue of the Western Worker came at the end of a difficult year for the district and District Organizer Sam Darcy. Only 285 dues- paying members remained when Darcy arrived at the end of 1930, the rest having been lost in factional infighting related to the national struggle for power.25 Young Workers

League representative Benjamin Fee, for example, was admonished in absentia in May

1929 for continuing to hold League meetings at 1212 Market St., the former headquarters of the district at the time occupied by Jay Lovestone loyalists.26 Other so-called

Lovestonites renounced the former leadership in heartfelt statements submitted to the national office in the hope that they would not be expelled, as were Lovestone and his

on most loyal followers. Upon arrival, Darcy began a systematic purge of “those who continued petty personal factional activity” and transferred others he believed held too much sway in their current positions.28 During this intense period of reorganization,

Darcy, who believed education imperative for stabilization and expansion of the movement, also initiated plans to reopen the workers school.

25 Darcy, “The History of the California Party,” 16 July 1939, SAD MS, box 2, folder 51. 26 “District Committee #13 Meeting,” 14 May 1929, RGASPI: 515-1-136-1791. 27 Mike Daniels, “Statement of Mike Daniels,” 27 October 1929, RGASPI: 515-1-136-1793. 28 Darcy, “The History of the California Party,” 16 July 1939, SAD MS, box 2, folder 51. 15

At its heart, Communist pedagogical philosophy centered on the need to create a radical education system operated by and for the working class, but this emphasis on working class intellectualism carried with it an anti-intellectual sentiment that negatively affected the Party’s willingness to embrace many of the people drawn to it. The Party’s complicated relationship with intellectual minds should not be misconstrued as their wish to control information through the indoctrination of brains less capable of grasping the more esoteric aspects of Marxism, however. CP theorists truly believed that bourgeois education corrupted even liberal thinkers and the only way to prevent the continued spread of bourgeois ideologies was through education of the working class. In

California, this also included periodic culling of perceived bourgeois intellectual elements and the development of a complex system in which the Party accepted advice and funding from sympathetic intellectuals, but usually kept them outside of leadership circles.

Both the purge and the school affected the makeup of the district’s professional staff, as new members moved into the spaces left by expellees and were enlisted to staff the Workers School and Cultural Center. The Party used a variety of educational techniques to train this new group of working-class radical intellectuals. They rejected the mainstream educational systems, creating tension between working class operatives and the liberal bourgeois intellectuals drawn to the CP’s class-based analysis of social

29 Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/worics/! 920/abc/index.htm. 16

and political problems. While this did not benefit the Party as an institution, the focus on working-class intellectualism and the foundation of the San Francisco Workers School gave California’s working-class women and men educational opportunities that contributed to their emergence as leaders in District 13.

Most works on education in the 1930s focus on the impact that the depression had on school funding, on the fight for control of public school curricula, or on the emergence

of social reconstructionism as the dominant pedagogical theory. Herbert M. Kliebard, in

The Struggle for the American Curriculum, shows the genesis and evolution of social

reconstructionism in the 1920s, but Kliebard does not comment on the burgeoning adult

education movement in the 1930s. He does, however, provide some context about the

state of child education during the period.30 The creator of social reconstructionism,

George Counts, believed that “rugged individualism” had failed as an economic

philosophy and argued that educators should reject this bootstraps theory and foster in

their students a sense of collectivity while teaching them to think critically about

important social issues.31 Though few adherents of social reconstructionism were

actually Marxists, many “wished to free the schools from subservience to the ideology of

capitalism, as David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot posit.32

30 Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (Boston: Routledge, 1986). 31 David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot, Public School in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 19. 32 Tyack et al, Public School in Hard Times, 25-26. 17

Tyack’s comparative study of school funding during two periods of economic crisis includes an examination of New Deal programs that offered job-specific adult education opportunities for participants. He contends these classes, “designed for the poor and staffed largely by people on relief,” were grounded in the concept that “all kinds of people can teach and that learning can take place in all kinds of settings.”33 As one of the leading employers and educators of young men in the Depression, the Civilian

Conservation Corps served as both a model for alternatives to traditional education and as a cautionary tale against federal control and Marxist infiltration of the nation’s school

system.34

In addition to classroom instruction, New Deal agencies, along with Communists,

labor unions, social groups, and religious organizations, offered free or inexpensive

educational lectures and open forums on a variety of subjects. Most topics pertained to

issues important to individual sponsors and were biased by design, but Robert Kunzman

and David Tyack argue that mainstream open forum advocates wanted to teach citizens

33 Tyack et al, Public School in Hard Times, 93. 34 Arlene L. Barry, “Censorship during the Depression: The Banning o f ‘You and Machines,’” OAH Magazine o f History 16, no. 1, The Great Depression (Fall 2001): 56-61; Calvin W. Gower, “The Civilian Conservation Corps and American Education: Threat to Control?” History o f Education Quarterly 7, no 1 (Spring 1967): 58-70; James Wilson, “Community, Civility, and Citizenship: Theatre and Indoctrination in the Civilian Conservation Corps,” Theatre History Studies 23 (June 2003): 77-94. 18

critical thinking skills in discussions about “disputed economic and political issues” where a “diversity of opinions” was presented.35

Some scholars of American Communism, such as former member Aileen

Kraditor, acknowledged the Party’s commitment to education while simultaneously denouncing it as mere indoctrination. Of her time in the Party during the Cold War,

Kraditor said, “[Class] attendance was as much a duty as any assignment.”36 Moreover, the Party encouraged members to read Party literature that fostered hatred of outsiders by linking non-Communists with American imperialism.37 Paul Mishler nuances Kraditor’s indoctrination thesis and analyzes CP education efforts as a “window” into the cultural lives of Communist children and adults. For Mishler, education and socialization schemes represented Communist attempts to instill in their children the importance of developing a “Marxist analysis of politics and economics” that permeated all aspects of their lives.38

The body of this chapter begins with a short analysis of Communist pedagogy and the CPUSA’s interpretation of that philosophy in comparison with ongoing contemporary pedagogic debates. I then turn to the Party’s complicated relationship with intellectuals and intellectualism and use biographical sketches of several District 13 operatives as

35 Robert Kunzman and David Tyack, “Educational Forums of the 1930s: An Experiment in Adult Civic Education,” American Journal of Education 111 (May 2005): 320, 36 Kraditor, Jimmy Higgins, 106. 37 Kraditor, Jimmy Higgins, 54. 38 Mishler, Raising Reds, 2. 19

examples of that complexity. Finally, I examine the San Francisco Workers School and operatives’ participation in the district’s educational programs. Though several men figure prominently in this story, I focus mainly on the contributions of female operatives.

Like Mishler, I am less interested in the ways that radical adult education served as an indoctrination tool, and I instead use it as a lens through which to examine District 13’s political and gender culture. That culture, however myopic, radically shaped functionaries’ perception of themselves as radicals by providing them with an education and the cultural space in which to use it.

Communist Pedagogy and the Workers School

Fundamental to Communist pedagogical philosophy was constructivism, the notion that only by doing can a student properly learn. In their 1920 polemic, The ABC

of Communism, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky wrote that children

learned “more easily, more willingly, and more thoroughly” when engaged with their

hands and that all citizens benefitted from an acquaintance “with the elements...of all

crafts.”39 Though Bukharin and Preobrazhensky referred to Soviet children, they and the

Comintern believed this to be imperative for adult education as well, as this hands-on

approach most likely benefitted workers accustomed to learning their crafts on the job.

This philosophical stance became a guiding principle when the CPUSA began opening

workers schools in the mid-1920s. A 1930 education conference sponsored by the New

39 Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism. 20

York Trade Union Unity League Workers School called American Federation of Labor

(AFL) schools enemies of working class education and resolved to counteract the

“undiluted bourgeois propaganda” emanating from them by “raising...the political, social, and cultural consciousness of the workers with...the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.”40 Though this theoretical grounding did not necessarily translate into

Soviet-style constructivist pedagogy, literature from the New York and San Francisco

Workers Schools stressed the Party’s belief in the “inseparability of revolutionary theory from revolutionary practice.” To that end, they proclaimed the schools to be not academic institutions but organizations that participated “in all the struggles of the working class.”41

In essence, the San Francisco workers schools offered an alternative to the bourgeois education supplied by the state. Though initially somewhat limited in scope, the curriculum soon expanded to include courses in United States labor history, constitutional law and the Bill of Rights, and the history of the Soviet Union, among others. The choice to offer classes in the social sciences stemmed from the observation that contemporary US history curricula in the public schools did little more than celebrate

US imperialism and the achievements of upper class white men. Columbia professor

40 “Proceedings of Working Class Education Conference called by Trade Union Unity League Workers School,” 19 April 1930, SAD MS, box 2, folder 20. 41 “San Francisco Workers School Course Catalog: Spring 1934,” SAD MS, box 2, folder 29; “The Workers School: Training for the Class Struggle, Announcement for Courses, Seventh Year, 1929-1930,” SAD MS, box 2, folder 19. 21

Harold O. Rugg and a few other academics made similar arguments in politicized debates with conservative women’s groups, notably the Daughters of the American Revolution

(DAR), over the future of US history instruction. While Rugg and other social reconstructionists believed that schools should instill in students the need for social change and social justice, the DAR argued that “education meant developing, through careful recitation of patriotic deeds, and promoting, through reading and writing about

America’s manifest destiny, an unswerving loyalty to the United States.”42 Much like

Rugg and his academic allies, the working class intellectuals of the CPUSA believed that memorization of carefully vetted historic events fostered an atmosphere of blind patriotism—an interesting paradox given the true Bolshevik’s propensity to exercise blind devotion to the CP regardless of shifts in the Party line.

Communism and Intellectuals

Though ostensibly an undertaking of, by, and for the working class, at its heart

Communism has always been a movement propelled by intellectuals. Like the excerpt from Red Messenger above, many radical artists, poets, and other writers employed the

42 Christine K. Erickson, “’We want no teachers who say there are two sides to every question’: Conservative Women and Education in the 1930s,” History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 500. 22

rhetoric of the radical intellectual as synonymous with the labor militant. A 1935 Young

Figure 1— "The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword,” The Young Worker 15 January 1935. Used with permission.

Worker political cartoon announcing the formation of the Young Workers Press

Association, for example, depicted a worker using a fountain pen to pierce the engorged

backside of capitalism, represented by a well-dressed corpulent white man (See figure

l).43 This visual depiction of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “the pen is mightier than the

sword” made plain the Communist faith in the power of radical working-class intellect

and in the righteousness of their message.

43 The Young Worker, 15 January 1935. AH images are courtesy of The Young Worker and Western Worker. They have been reproduced with permission from the Communist Party, United States of America. 23

The CPUSA urged members to think critically about the economic and social status quo, and in doing so, attracted intellectuals and artists from a variety of disciplines.

In California, writers Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winters and future New Deal artist Grace

Clements occasionally contributed to the Western Worker, used their celebrity to gamer support for migrant farm workers and radical political prisoners, and offered up their home to comrades needing a quiet place to rest and recover.44 Steffens declined, however, to join the Party, telling Sam Darcy, “The proletariat...must lead, control, and carry through this process. Liberals...have and always will rest and compromise before the hard, long job is finished. We liberals must never have power, not ever.”45 This sentiment, that left-liberal intellectuals should not be trusted with power reflected

Bukharin’s contention that intellectuals would always revert to their bourgeois natures, whether they came from the ruling classes or had risen from the proletariat because of their scholastic aptitude.46

The Party and its membership consistently rejected “petty bourgeois”

intellectualism and frequently discussed expulsion of those elements within some

sections. East Bay Section Secretariat member Vane Dart complained to the national

44 Caroline Decker Gladstein, interview by Dorothy Sue Cobble, 1976, digital audio file #8, California Historical Society, “The Twentieth Century Trade Union Woman: Vehicle for Social Change,” Wayne State University, https://archive.org/details/chi 000011 (hereafter cited as Decker, DAF #8); Grace Clements, “Storming the Judicial Lynchers,” Western Worker, 1 June 1932; Ella Winter, “International Events and Western Workers: Ella Winter Answers Questions on Soviet Union,” Western Worker, 12 June 1933. 45 Lincoln Steffens to Sam Darcy, 28 April 1934, SAD MS, box 1, folder 36A. 46 Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, The ABC o f Communism. 24

office that the Oakland bookstore had been “impossible to organize along working class lines,” most likely because the “celebrity” Anita Whitney fashioned it into a “hangout for bourgeois elements.” Dart noted that the bookstore’s policy against smoking created a decidedly “unproletarian” atmosphere that had been corrected somewhat by refusing to allow “petty bourgeois professors and speakers” to attend meetings.47 In 1929, the

District Organizer reported that too many “fruit peddlers, small business men, and delivery drivers” contributed to factionalism because their job responsibilities rendered them incapable of fully participating in Party activities. He suggested they expel these

“semi-proletarians” to make way for “more working class elements, even though they may be somewhat backward politically.”48 Clearly, district leadership found that certain kinds of non-Party intellectual pursuits—academia, shop keeping, truck driving— rendered radicals ripe for bourgeois corruption.

Samuel Darcy, at various times Young Workers League (YWL, a precursor to the

Young Communist League) delegate to the Comintern in Moscow, Associate Director of the New York Workers School, and the District Organizer for California, may be upheld as a successful example of the Party’s pedagogical philosophy in action. Bom in 1904 in

Orinion, Ukraine, Darcy immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1908 or

1909. He dropped out of school at age fourteen and worked at various jobs while

47 “District Organizer Report to the 1929 District Convention,” 27 January 1929, RGASPI: 515-1-136- 1791. 48 “District Organizer Report to the 1929 District Convention,” 26 January 1929, RGASPI: 515-1-136- 1791. 25

completing his education at night. Darcy made his living as a carpenter before being hired as YWL representative first in California and later at the Comintern headquarters in

Moscow. The passion he developed for Marxist education during his youth permeates die innumerable speeches, articles, and manuscripts he penned during and after his tenure with the Party. A true working class intellectual, Darcy could presumably lecture on the

state of American labor while standing on a platform that he had constructed with his own hands.49 When the Party transferred him to District 13 in 1930, Darcy initiated plans to begin publishing a West Coast version of The Daily Worker and ramped up efforts to

reestablish a workers school in San Francisco.50 In explaining the growth in CP

membership in the 1930s, he cited the increased availability of workers schools, Party

literature, and open forums as instrumental in counteracting the negative effects of

“severe police repression...[and] government persecution.”51

Perhaps no District 13 couple complicates the Party’s stance on bourgeois

intellectualism better than Violet and Paul Orr.52 Both grew up in devout Christian

homes with parents who subscribed to many of the doctrines of the social gospel

movement.53 For example, Violet considered her parents “racially progressive,” noting

49 Samuel Adams Darcy, “Untitled biographical sketch,” SAD MS, box 3, folder 8; “The Communist International— 1927-1928,” SAD MS, box 3, folder 17. 50 Sam Darcy to Central Committee, CPUSA, 16 January 1931, RGASPI: 515-1-173-2282. 51 Samuel Adams Darcy, “The Storm Must Be Ridden,” SAD MS, box 3, folder 15b. 52 “Soviet Youth!” The Young Worker, April 1930. 53 Violet Orr, interview by Lucy Kendall, 1976, digital audio file #2, California Historical Society, Women in California Collection, https://archive.org/details/chi 00009 (hereafter cited as Orr, DAF #2). 26

that her mother rented rooms to Japanese and Filipino men during her youth.54 Quickly realizing that they were compatible, Paul asked Violet to visit him when he began attending Stanford University in the fall of 1921, but she decided to enroll as well.55

They began dating seriously in their junior year, embarking on a lifelong partnership that took them on an intellectual and physical journey from Palo Alto to New York and the

Soviet Union before they returned to the Bay Area Communist world.

While at Stanford, the Orrs studied Russian history, learned about the November

Revolution while participating in the pacifist discussion group Fellowship of

Reconciliation, and met Harry F. Ward, a visiting professor and Methodist minister from

Union Theological Seminary in New York. A strong proponent of the social gospel,

Ward also co-founded and served as the first national chairman of the American Civil

Liberties Union (ACLU) as well as the united front group the American League against

War and Fascism.56 Violet recalled taking a class with Ward on the History of the Old and New Testaments, but the social gospel, pacifism, and the infant Soviet Union dominated many of their philosophical discussions.57

54 Orr, DAF #3. 55 Orr, DAF #3. 56 Judy Kutulas, The American Civil Liberties Union & the Making o f Modern Liberalism, 1930-1960 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 28; David Nelson Duke, In the Trenches With Jesus and Marx: Harry F. Ward and the Struggle for Social Justice (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 109 and 167. 57 Orr, DAF #3. 27

After graduation and marriage, Paul received a fellowship to work for the Young

Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in New York, and the couple took the opportunity to enroll in Teachers College, Columbia University. Though Violet did not mention him in her oral history, while at Columbia she and Paul must have encountered Rugg, at the time a proponent of child-centered education, but who later became one of George

Counts’ most ardent supporters. Regardless, someone in the department urged them to visit the Soviet Union upon receiving their master’s degrees in education. They decided to follow that advice after their trip to Amsterdam as delegates to the 1928 World Youth

Peace Conference.

Once they arrived in Moscow, the couple’s life paralleled that of Harry F. Ward and his wife, who also visited the Soviet Union to see socialism in action. Both couples lived for a time with the journalist Anna Louise Strong (daughter of a social-gospel

Christian minister and herself a former member of the Seattle board of education) and toured other Soviet cities, as did more than one hundred thousand foreigners who visited the republic during the interwar period.58 While Ward came to disdain Soviet-style socialism because of its anti-Christian stance, Violet—like Strong—had no difficulty

58 Orr, DAF #4; Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (London: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1. 28

reconciling her faith with her political beliefs, remarking that outside of the Soviet Union, many devout people also joined the Communist Party.59

For two years, the Orrs taught English to students at Moscow State University, joining the Soviet teachers’ union in their second year. They engaged in spirited discussions with their pupils about the class system in the United States and marched in

Moscow’s glorious May Day parade. Additional research would be needed to verify if one or more of these students belonged to the cultural diplomacy organization All-Union

Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul'turnoi Sviazi s zagranitse, or VOKS), the group tasked with ensuring that foreigners left the country with positive memories of their visit.60 Convinced that in Marxism lay the answer to social and economic inequalities and injustices, the couple decided to return to the US to be near family and to help revolutionize US society. According to Paul, they had an interest in the use of literature to educate the public on working-class conditions and the appeal of socialism.61 As educators, both became ensconced in the revolutionary education system and radical press soon after joining the Party in 1931. Somehow their bourgeois upbringing, Christian faith, and mainstream, though progressive, education never resulted in their expulsion from District 13 or the Party.

59 Orr, DAF #6. David C. Duke, “Anna Louise Strong and the Search for a Good Cause,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 66, no. 3 (July 1973): 125. 60 David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 5. 61 Orr, DAF #18. This file is a short interview with Violet’s husband Paul Orr. 29

The San Francisco Workers School and Radical Education

The workers school curriculum may be divided into three categories: Marxism in theory and practice, agitation and propaganda, and radical perspectives on the social sciences. Functionaries usually taught classes that dovetailed with their paid positions.

In addition to her job as organizational secretary, Louise Todd taught Principles of

Working Class Organization and the Fundamentals of Communism.62 While she did not consider herself a “political leader or a Marxist theorist,” her “greatest strength” lay in her abilities as an organizer and in the “planning of day-to-day, down-to-earth

activities.”63 Western Worker editor Emmett Kirby, whose political cartoons grace the

pages of this thesis, lectured on revolutionary journalism, and the International Labor

Defense (ILD) team of Leo Gallagher, George Anderson, and Elaine Black taught

workers’ self-defense in the judicial system.64 According to Black, an effective defense

strategy for striking workers included a fundamental knowledge of United States law. “I

certainly, at that time, could quote chapter and verse of the Constitution and Bill of

62 “Active Communists to Teach Workers School Courses,” Western Worker, 20 November 1933. 63 Louise Todd Lambert, interview by Lucille Kendall, 1976, 5th interview, Is* tape, transcript, p. 12, Women in California Collection, California Historical Society (hereafter cited as Todd, transcript, 5th interview, 1st tape, 12). 64 “Active Communists to Teach Workers School Courses,” Western Worker, 20 November 1933. “Workers School, Ruthenberg House, 121 Haight,” Western Worker, 26 February 1934. 30

Rights,” she later recalled, adding, “Often, when I went to demonstrations, I had copies of them in my purse.”65

Other operatives shared their knowledge and experience of trade union organizing. Walter “Rudy” Lambert, the head of the district’s Trade Union Unity League

(TUUL), lectured on strategies and tactics for industrial workers, while his counterpart from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), Caroline

Decker, taught a similar class to trade unionists in California’s agricultural sector. Like

Todd, Decker felt under-qualified to lecture on Marxist theory and preferred to talk on

“bread and butter” issues such as wages and working conditions. She co-founded a workers training center at the Kincaid Ranch in Santa Clara County and imparted her considerable knowledge of labor agitation to farm workers selected to attend.66 Finally,

United Textile Workers (UTW) organizer Sonia Kaross led informal discussion groups with the “mostly uneducated” Filipinas and Portuguese women working in Oakland’s textile industry.67

One would expect to find classes explaining the tenets of Marxism and approaches to trade union organizing in a school for the working class. Less obvious is the necessity for courses that duplicate ones taught in public high schools. As Christine

65 Elaine Black Yoneda, interview by Lucille Kendall, 1976-1977, transcript, p. 36, California Historical Society, Women in California Collection (hereafter cited as Black, transcript, 36). 66 Decker, DAF #10. 67 Sonia Baltrun Kaross, interview by Lucille Kendall, 1977, digital audio file #5, California Historical Society, Women in California Collection, https://archive.org/details/chi 00003 (hereafter cited as Kaross, DAF #5). 31

Erickson argues, “Schools...have always offered more than an academic curriculum; they have instilled the dominant values of the larger culture and shaped students’ sense of what America means and where their places are in it.”68 As members of a minority political culture that did not adhere to the same value structure as the rest of US society, the CPUSA offered workers alternative visions of American and world history. For the most part, the radical curricula at Ruthenberg House simply placed workers in the historical record, as did Ida Rothstein and other American Labor History teachers who showed workers that they, and not elite white men, were responsible for the creation and maintenance of the country’s great cities, businesses, and institutions. Likewise, the history of the Soviet Union taught by Violet Orr gave workers a sense that their contributions held greater value in socialist nations 69

With the exception of the Orrs, most of the teachers at the workers school appear to have had little more than high school educations. During the 1920s and 30s, college

enrollment for women fluctuated between 7.6 and 12.2 percent of all women between the

ages of eighteen and twenty-one.70 Some, like Elaine Black and Sonia Kaross, dropped

out of high school and married at a young age.71 Louise Todd’s working-class parents could not afford to pay for college, so she trained to be a secretary at the High School of

68 Erickson, “Conservative Women,” 487. 69 “Active Communists to Teach Workers School Courses,” Western Worker, 20 November 1933; “Workers School, Ruthenberg House, 121 Haight,” Western Worker, 26 February 1934. 70 Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s, (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 57. 71 Kaross, DAF #3; Black, transcript, 13. 32

Commerce in San Francisco.72 Caroline Decker, who grew up in a middle-class family surrounded by radical intellectuals, decided against college because she did not think it relevant when “doctors and lawyers were in the breadlines.”73 All of these operatives received most of their training either on the job or at Party-sponsored educational events.

The Party’s commitment to education penetrated all aspects of organizing, so much so that the 1932 District 13 Convention cited it as fundamental to increasing class consciousness and to strengthening the Party’s membership.

While fighting to strengthen our class by fighting for food, against wage cuts, against evictions, etc., we must also strengthen our organizations with new recruits and better understanding o f the need for the overthrow of the capitalist system and all its parasitic institutions as a final emancipation of the masses from exploitation.74

Efforts to strengthen their organization also included an Americanization campaign aimed at foreign-born members. Editors urged them to apply for citizenship before the

1932 election, and workers schools offered English and civics classes to assist members in attaining this goal. They contended that “every militant worker and poor farmer” must

72 Todd, transcript, 1st interview, 1st tape, 1-15. 73 Decker, DAF #4. 74 “Draft Resolution District 13 Convention July 1932,” Western Worker, 1 August 1932 (Emphasis mine). 33

register to vote if the Party hoped to become a legitimate contender in local, state, and national elections.75

Perhaps no other evidence demonstrates their commitment to education more than

the swiftness with which District 13 reopened the workers school following the July 1934

anti-communist raids that damaged many of their buildings, including the Mission Street

Western Worker offices, the Party’s headquarters at 37 Grove Street, and the Workers

Cultural Center at 121 Haight Street.76 They began in late September in a small space on

Minna Street in the South of Market district, but the building could not accommodate the

more than four hundred students expected to enroll.77 Mid-session a larger, more

appropriate space became available a few blocks away from Ruthenberg House, and the

school moved to 463 Hayes Street, this time taking the workers library as well. They

accomplished this even though school secretary, Emma Cutler, was at the time

incarcerated in an Imperial Valley jail for her involvement in CAWIU strikes. Moreover,

the fall session contained several interesting new courses. “Quack” Economic Plans, for

example, promised a vigorous critique of the New Deal, Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in

California (EPIC), and economic schemes that the Party considered fallacious. Problems

of the Oppressed Nationalities in California assessed the state’s racial diversity and

75 “Register Now for Fall Vote: California Voters Registration Now On; Non-Citizen Militants Urged to Get Papers,” Western Worker, 1 February 1932. 76 “Unionists Smash Radical Hangouts In Purging Move,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 July 1934. 77 “Worker School Opens With Six Classes Sept. 24,” Western Worker, 24 September 1934; “Registration for S.F. School Open,” Western Worker, 19 March 1934. The expectation that more than 400 students would register once the school reopened was based on enrollment from the spring session. 34

addressed the issues affecting the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and African American populations. Finally, in a move that exhibited the changing demographic make up of the

Party itself, the school began offering Russian in addition to English language classes.78

Of paramount importance to retain young members was the need to make entertainment educational and education entertaining. The Young Communist League

(YCL) pamphlet, “A.B.C. of Agit-Prop Work,” suggested fundraising ideas for a carnival, including a game called “Whose Constitution,” in which sections of the US and

Soviet Constitutions would be read aloud and participants had to guess the origin of the passages. In fact, the YCL considered itself an “educational organization” whose primary function outside of agitation was to “educate the youth in our ranks to become full Communists, to become part of the vanguard.” To that end, the YCL required new members to attend classes on the fundamentals of Communism and to join study circles upon completion. They also had to acquaint themselves with all Party literature.

Because “all YCL work must be permeated with educational activity,” the pamphlet’s author cautioned, “an agit-prop (and for that matter, a unit as a whole) without literature is like a man without his right hand. Our pamphlets, books, and periodicals must play a leading role in the political education of our membership and of the broad masses of

78 “Worker School Opens With Six Classes Sept. 24;” “Worker School in S.F. Moves; Classes Open,” Western Worker, 18 October 1934. 35

young proletarians.”79 Between classes, reading, agitation, and meetings in addition to outside schooling and wage work, no wonder YCL officials worried about retention and attempted to make at least some of these requirements entertaining.80

For radicals who could not afford the $1 tuition for each course at the school, the

Party and several front groups provided free or inexpensive educational opportunities through a series of guest lectures and open forums. These types of “adult civic education” began in the early nineteenth century with the lyceum movement and continued after the US Civil War with the Chautauqua movement and the Cooper Union

Forum sponsored by Columbia University.81 As Kunzman and Tyack contend, groups with wildly divergent political and religious beliefs sponsored similar events during the

1930s as a means of disseminating their opinions about contemporary social and political issues.82 The Communists were no different in this regard. CP-sponsored lectures

“[covered] the news that [was] either neglected or misrepresented by the capitalist press.”83 Speakers like Ada Wright, the mother of two young African American males falsely accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama, gave attendees an evaluation of Southern race relations and the national judicial system not found in the mainstream press.84

79 “A.B.C. of Agit-Prop Work,” Communist Party of the United States of America Manuscript Collection, box 42, folder 35, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (hereafter cited as CPUSA MS). 80 Kraditor, Jimmy Higgins, 107. 81 Kunzman and Tyack, “Educational Forums,” 324. 82 Kunzman and Tyack, “Educational Forums,” 324. 83 “Workers’ School Will Broadcast Review of News,” Western Worker, 20 December 1934. 84 “Mass Meeting,” Western Worker, 14 May 1934. 36

Mainly organized by front groups such as the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU) or the

International Workers Order (IWO) and listed in Western Worker advertisements or in the recurring events column, “Where To Go,” these lectures provided intellectual and social spaces where the underemployed and unemployed could learn about issues relevant to them as workers and radicals.

Lecture topics varied according to the intended audience or to specific issues in the news. With so many starving and living on the streets, worker health must have been a matter of concern for all but the wealthiest citizens. The San Francisco Mission Section played host to IWO physician Maurice Korshet’s “lecture series on workers’ health problems,” while Dr. Vera Goldman explained the “Aspects of Public Health in Soviet

Russia” for the San Francisco Richmond Branch of the International Coordination of

Revolutionary Parties (ICOR).85 Korshet later joined N. Schafer from the IWO national office at a “social insurance mass meeting” where they spoke on “workers health and the

IWO.86 Though a timely event, given the ongoing social security debate in state and national legislatures, this talk may have been merely an IWO sales pitch for their own insurance offerings.87

In the first half of the 1930s, the CPUSA attempted to establish unions in the same sectors as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a practice commonly known as

85 “Where To Go,” Western Worker, 16 April 1934; “Where To Go,” Western Worker, 8 January 1934. 86 “Social Insurance Mass Meeting,” Western Worker, 9 December 1934. 87 “International Workers’ Order Offers You Security,” Western Worker, 12 October 1936. 37

dual unionism. To that end, many Western Worker articles and Party-sponsored lectures explained the benefits of “revolutionary industrial unionism” over AFL “reformism.”88

Because the AFL showed little interest in organizing farm workers or people of color, most of the Party’s organizing successes came in areas dominated by these workers.

Decker spoke frequently about agricultural organizing before and after her arrest on criminal syndicalism charges.89 She found working with the “Spanish speaking population” in California “most satisfying” and a boost to her ego, especially when she learned during her post-arrest tour that many farm workers named their daughters

Caroline in her honor.90

By far, most talks dealt with some aspect of Soviet socialism, usually in comparison with conditions in the United States. For example, ACLU chairman Harry F.

Ward told attendees “What We Can Learn from the Soviet Union,” while Ben F. Wilson lectured on “Education in Soviet Russia.”91 The listing described Wilson simply as a

“traveler,” an important distinction for many speakers hired by the FSU and IWO to give firsthand accounts of Soviet life. Paul and Violet Orr gave a series of talks about their experiences working and living in Moscow, becoming full-time employees of the

88 “Louis Hyman: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism v. AF of L Reformism,” Western Worker, 23 April 1934. 89 “Where To Go: Caroline Decker speaks on ‘The Coming Struggles in Agricultural Fields,” Western Worker, 23 April 1934. 90 Decker, DAF #10. 91 “Where To Go,” Western Worker, 18 January 1934; “Where To Go,” Western Worker, 1 January 1934. 38

Oakland and San Francisco FSU sections shortly after they returned to the US.92 After touring the Soviet Union with an African American film crew that included the writer

Langston Hughes, Sonia Kaross lectured for six months on racial and gender equality in the socialist republic.93

The Party and front groups usually enlisted women to speak about global gender issues, but the women of District 13 differed in their opinions about the relevance of feminism and the woman question to the revolutionary struggle.94 Todd admitted to being

“particularly interested in the woman question” and “usually” gave a speech somewhere on International Women’s Day.95 So did Orr, who thought that the Soviet Union understood better than the CPUSA “the importance of equal rights for women.”96 When asked about women’s emancipation as it related to the 1930s, Decker responded,

Too many people were starving; too many people were out of work. There were too many gut-level needs, so that the role of the female, my god, was just not all that damn important. She was starving with everybody else. I think she was a more equal partner then because she was subjected equally to all the miseries. Misery was equal, so the role of women was not on the agenda at that time. Historically it didn’t mean

92 Orr, DAF #4. 93 Kaross, DAF #2. 94 “Commemoration of the Canton Commune,” Western Worker, 6 December 1934; “Where To Go: Louise Todd on ‘Lenin On the Jewish Question,’” Western Worker, 4 June 1934; “Violet Orr to Speak at 5 Mass Meetings,” Western Worker, 4 March 1935. 95 Todd, transcript, 2nd interview, 2nd tape, 5. 96 Orr, DAF #6. 39

anything. Not in the working classes...now in the middle classes, that’s something else again.97

Ever the pragmatist, Decker contextualized the woman question using her memories of working class struggles in the agricultural fields of California. Her real world application of concepts espoused by historic Marxist theorists like Clara Zetkin and

Rosa Luxemburg, as well as Decker’s Soviet contemporary Alexandra Kollontai, revealed an understanding of the intimate connection between women’s oppression and class conflict. Like Zetkin and Kollontai, Decker believed it vital that women be brought into the class struggle before they could hope to attain economic equality.98 She also understood, as did Zetkin and Luxemburg, that middle-class feminists could only be trusted to advocate for reforms that secured their place within the white, bourgeois power

structure.99 Yet Decker, like the other female operatives in this study, could freely express her belief in the primacy of the class struggle even as she benefitted from the

Party’s relatively more progressive gender system.

97 Decker, DAF #8. 98 Clara Zetkin, “Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Women Will Socialism Be Victorious,” in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, ed. Philip Foner (International Publishers, 1984), http://www.marxists.Org/archive/zetkin/l 896/10/women.htm; “Clara Zetkin,” Western Worker, 3 July 1933; Alexandra Kollontai, “The Social Basis of the Women’s Question,” in Alexandra Kollontai: Selected Articles and Speeches (Progress Publishers, 1984), https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm. 99 Clara Zetkin, “Social-Democracy and Woman Suffrage (Paper presented to the Conference of Women belonging to the Social-Democratic Party at the Annual Congress of the German Social-Democracy, Mannheim, Germany, 1906), http://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1906/xx/womansuffrage.htm. 40

Conclusion

Operatives who took part in the school as educators and students reflect the complexities of the Party’s stance on bourgeois intellectualism, as they came from a variety of educational, social, and economic backgrounds. The majority, however, received their Marxist educations on the job and in settings not unlike the ones in which they soon found themselves teaching. The Party educated these women and men and then

provided the spaces in which they could share their newfound knowledge with supportive

audiences. Though most likely a requirement of their status as functionaries, their

participation as students and teachers nonetheless demonstrated the professional and

intellectual possibilities for the working class in California’s radical adult education

movement. 41

Chapter 3—The Body Politic

Comrade Daniels, when he left for LA, was physically not in best shape (he weighs from 105-107 lbs.) and after a few hard weeks of work, he has broken down. This lead (sic) him to the following action: On Friday February the 27th a letter was received from comrade M. Daniels addressed to the District Committee asking for a leave of absence for 3 months. At the same time the comrades from LA informed us that comrade Daniels has disappeared for a whole day. We have since received a letter from Comrade Daniels, regretting his action. However what are the causes of his action? It is his ill health, and to my opinion Comrade Daniels thought that by taking this action he will force the District Committee to send him some help—Morris Rapport.100

Comrade Mike Daniels, depicted in this letter from district undersecretary Morris

Rapport as a frail and possibly undernourished operative, bares little resemblance to iconographic images of masculine radical workers found in Communist literature. If this were an isolated instance of one paid functionary unable to handle the rigors of

Communist organizing, it would merit little notice by scholars, but sourcesfrom

Comintern files suggest that Daniels shared more with his fellow radicals than did the muscle-bound workers drawn by Western Worker and Young Worker cartoonists or to the bloodied and broken bodies of union organizers in photographs published by those same newspapers. Similarly, cartoon depictions of radical women as mothers and wives reveals more about the complexities of Communist feminine gender construction than it does about the lives of actual female operatives.

100 Morris Rapport to the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the USA, 3 March 1931, RGASPI: 515-1- 173-2282. 42

Communists did not invent iconic muscular masculinity as a rhetorical device nor were they singular in their use of maternity as a defining characteristic for women. Like members of the mainstream labor press, radical journalists used manhood and the inherent strength in muscular working class bodies to remind members that the CP collective body could accomplish more than individuals could. Rather than hide bodies broken in confrontations with anti-Communist forces, the radical press instead prominently displayed those bodies as demonstrative of their commitment to working class struggles. Likewise, radical women, though most often associated with hegemonic symbols of femininity, learned from political cartoons that it was acceptable to be confrontational—i.e. to display masculine traits when in pursuit of militant goals.

Though somewhat inaccurate, female operatives received rhetorical assurances that militancy would not preclude them from functioning as wives and mothers. District 13 operatives, though hardly representative of normative Depression-era manhood and womanhood, created and maintained gender identities unique to their culture, a culture in which the collective identity mattered more than that of individuals.

As has been demonstrated in other scholarly works on gender in the first half of the twentieth century, the body became, in essence, a propaganda tool by which political organizations, social movements, and religious groups conveyed specific, though sometimes conflicting, gendered and racial messages in support of their individual agendas. Early twentieth century city boosters in Pittsburgh, for example, commissioned 43

public works of art that gendered the industrial city male and linked the region to working class masculinity long after global economic systems drew the city’s businesses offshore.101 New Deal art administrators similarly used public sculptures and murals to establish and reaffirm acceptable gender roles and expression in Active accounts of

American expansionism in attempts to bolster the country’s flagging national identity.102

Likewise, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration employed members of the burgeoning advertising sector to sell to young, unemployed men the idea that in unskilled manual labor they could renew their “diminished manhood.”103 As the European and

Asian conflicts threatened to reach the United States, these same advertising executives used gendered imagery to encourage those young men to reassert their masculinity by enlisting in the military and to persuade their young female counterparts to temporarily adopt certain types of masculine behavior for the duration of the impending global conflict.104 The combined forces of capital and government, one could argue, succeeded in these endeavors by reinforcing collective narratives of patriotism and gender.

In order to accomplish this, city boosters, corporations, and government officials found it necessary to downplay or outright hide certain realities that would have shattered

101 Edward Slavishak, Bodies o f Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008). 102 Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1991). 103 Christina S. Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). 104 Jarvis, Male Body at War, passim; Donna B. Knaff, Beyond Rosie the Riveter: Women o f World War II in American Popular Graphic Art (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012). 44

these narratives. Both Edward Slavishak and Christina Jarvis peel back the veneer of physically imposing manhood established by boosters and political operatives to reveal the broken and injured bodies of early twentieth century steel workers and World War II soldiers carefully hidden from public view.105 Elizabeth Faue shows that while

Minneapolis trade unionists adopted some aspects of the national narrative of masculinity, they rejected its patriotic overtones and instead equated manly behavior with labor militancy.106 Finally, Thomas Fahy and Richard Street demonstrate how

Depression-era photojoumalists and novelists used broken bodies as both indicative of

strength in the face of adversity and as “metaphors for eroded optimism and opportunity.”107

The political cartoonists and photographers who contributed to The Young Worker

and Western Worker employed similar strategies, depicting working class men and women as either “strong or weak” depending upon the message they wished to convey. 10S

Most often the Party’s newspapers used allegorical images of radical masculinity and

femininity to foster passion and commitment to socialism among an audience receptive to the notion of the CP and its affiliated mass organizations as muscular, militant working

105 Jarvis, Male Body at War, chapter 5; Slavishak, Bodies of Work, chapter 6. 106 Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering & Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 71. 107 Thomas Fahy, “Worn, Damaged Bodies in Literature and Photography of the Great Depression,” The Journal of American Culture 26, no. 1 (March 2003): 3; Richard Steven Street, “Lange’s Antecedents: The Emergence of Social Documentary Photography of California’s Farmworkers,” Pacific Historical Review 75, no. 3 (August 2006): 400. Street argues that the new documentary style of photography “centered on people” and “stressed the interrelationship of content, form, text, audience, and publication in the service of larger social matters.” 108 Fahy, “Worn, Damaged Bodies,” 10. 45

class men and women, but they also employed the rhetoric of victimization, particularly when lambasting New Deal programs during the Third Period. Moreover, published photographs of broken radicals’ bodies, though ostensibly suggestive of physical weakness, also showcased radicals’ strength despite overwhelming opposition. As with hegemonic gender discourses, Communists defined the parameters of radical masculinity and femininity in comparisons with the “Other,” the forces of capitalism and imperialism that linked manhood and womanhood with consumerism, parenthood, and hierarchical social structures. In what ways did Communist collectivist ideologies affect visual representations of radical gender? How did these radical gender narratives compare to the lived experiences of District 13 operatives? Though a comprehensive examination of these questions is beyond the scope of this chapter, it does highlight the ways that

Communist gender construction diverged from dominant narratives and places them within the context of what historian James Gilbert called “crosscurrents to the mainstream.”109

The bulk of primary evidence used in this chapter comes from digitized copies of early 1930s issues of the Communist newspapers The Young Worker and the Western

Worker found at the Labor Archives and Research Center located on the campus of San

Francisco State University. From the pages of these newspapers, I gathered fifty gendered and/or racialized photographs and political cartoons for analysis. It became

109 James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago and London: The University o f Chicago Press, 2005), 218. 46

evident rather quickly that the vast majority of images represented radical white masculinity, while the remainder dealt with issues pertaining to men of color, racial and gender solidarity, and radical white womanhood. The ensuing analysis roughly follows this organizational structure with the exception of racial and gender solidarity, which will be inserted into the other three sections when appropriate.110

It has been firmly established that the Communist International and the national leadership of CPUSA did not tolerate dissent once policies had been debated and voted on in select committees.111 This essay does not challenge assertions that individual

Communists lacked personal or professional autonomy. Instead, this study examines gendered iconography published in radical literature during the 1930s and compares it to the lived experiences of District 13’s most active cadres to ferret out the similarities and

incongruities in the stories that Communists told each other about themselves. It is this dichotomy, this gaping hole between Active narratives of strength and lived experience

and the concomitant policies that valued collectivity over individualism that makes up the

framework upon which to examine radical bodies and gender formation in the Great

Depression.

110 The Young Worker and Western Worker, Riazanov Library Project, Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University. I am deeply indebted to the members of the Riazanov Library Project for their time and effort to preserve these important Communist Party documents. 111 Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia; Glazer, Social Basis; Klehr, Heyday; Kraditor, Jimmy Higgins. 47

Radical Manhood

Manhood and masculinity, like all gender constructions, depend on relationships with other men and with society for validation. Men look for social markers related to manly behavior in cultural settings, but more often they rely on other men to confirm that their deportment falls within acceptable parameters of normality.112 Communist male gender construction, for example, relied on comparisons that cast workers as more secure in their masculinity than capitalist men. In her study of the Minneapolis labor movement,

Elizabeth Faue found that Left-leaning political cartoons showed “brawny” workers

“[possessing] the saintly qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice,” while capital’s engorged

“body suggested waste, impotence, and emasculation.” This juxtaposition of corpulence and muscular masculinity appears to have been a common theme in labor-Left culture during this period, as Communist cartoonists turned to this symbolism frequently.

The laziness of the parasitic class and the excesses of capitalism, for example, were made plain by obese bodies wrapped in clothing unsuitable for labor. In various depictions, jowly, beady-eyed capitalists lynched young African American men, denied cannery

women living wages, and stared defiantly toward the viewer, denouncing Communist

“materialism.”114 Many times the bosses appeared incapable of supporting their massive

112 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 6. 113 Faue, Community o f Suffering, 74 and 82. 114 “Fight Lynch Terror,” The Young Worker, 9 June 1930; “To Win—Organize and Fight!” Western Worker, 3 July 1933; “What I Can’t Stand in the Communists Is Their Materialism,” Western Worker, 15 August 1932. 48

frames and either sat or leaned upon a cane lest they stumble under the enormous weight of their own greed. Moreover, they cowered in the presence of righteous radical masculinity (See figures 1, 4, and 10). As one would imagine, Communist exaltation of the common man did not resort to the same messianic symbolism that Faue found in her study and instead emphasized collective human endeavor as the driving force behind social change.113

They were, however, presented as masters of their environment in larger than life perspectives. The workers of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), Friends of the

Soviet Union (FSU), or the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union

(CAWIU)—men and women of varying national origins—loomed large over the

landscape they intended to conquer or the masses that they led to enlightenment (See

figure 2).116 Much like New Deal commissioned art works showing robust workers as

lords and masters of both the untamed frontier and industrial landscapes, these workers

rolled up their sleeves, forearms rippling as they marched heroically forward to confront

imperialists and the boss class.117 Operatives may not have enjoyed professional and

physical mobility, but these images, by depicting actual forward movement, gave radicals

the impression that they were leading an economic, political, and social revolution.

115 Faue, Community o f Suffering, 82. 116 “Hail National Youth Day,” The Young Worker, 30 May 1933; “A Trade Union Unity League On Every Job!” Western Worker, 7 August 1933. 117 “Strike! — Demonstrate! —Fight the Boss Class!” The Young Worker, 1 May 1930; The Young Worker, 25 May 1932; “All Hail National Youth Day,” The Young Worker, 30 May 1933. For more on New Deal gender iconography, please see Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture. 49

1

Figure 2— ’’All Hail National Youth Day,” The Young Worker, 30 May 1933. Used with permission.

Moreover, this forward momentum coupled with the symbolism of rolled sleeves suggested that Communist operatives did not shy away from physical exertion, marking them as antithetical to the parasitic elite who fed off of the labor of others. At times, the acronym of a mass organi2ation appeared on the clothing or body of the worker, indicating that this manly body represented not an individual radical, but the collective 50

strength, whether real or imagined, of the TUUL, CAWIU, or FSU (See figure 3).118

The Agricultural Workers Answer!

Figure 3— "The Agricultural Workers Answer!" Western Worker, 28 August 1933. Used with permission.

The CP considered the struggle for economic justice in the factories and fields of

California to be class warfare, and the Western Worker often published evidence of

118 Western Worker, 15 March 1932; “A Trade Union Unity League On Every Job!” Western Worker, 7 August 1933; “The Agricultural Workers Answer!” Western Worker, 28 August 1933. 51

clashes with anti-Communist and anti-union forces in depictions of broken Communist bodies. In one such photograph, CAWIU organizers Mike Marvos and Pat Calihan looked almost giddy despite obvious injuries to their heads and faces. According to the caption, deputy sheriffs broke Calihan’s jaw using the butts of their rifles, and Marvos received the same treatment in his attempt to rescue Calihan. Though probably in considerable pain, both men appeared happy to have survived their foray on the frontlines of the war against capitalist exploitation of the working class (See figure 4).119 This, and similar shots of bloodied and bandaged workers demonstrated radical men’s willingness to sacrifice their bodies for the sake of the labor movement while simultaneously

showing the viciousness of the other side.

Figure 4— “Strike Leaders Beaten, Jailed,” Western Worker, 3 July 1933. Used with permission.

119 “Strike Leaders Beaten, Jailed,” Western Worker, 3 July 1933; Western Worker, 28 August 1933. 52

So too did the photograph of four members of a Los Angeles Unemployed

Council (UC) who joined ninety-six others in a protest over relief distribution at the local welfare offices. By staging demonstrations against governmental agencies that controlled their economic fates, the UC offered alternative sites for gender construction to men who had lost the primary means by which they created and maintained their masculinity.120

At this particular protest, one hundred men clashed with members of William F. “Red”

Hynes’s red squad, and Robert Myers, John Hester, Fred Daniels, and William Coper

were subsequently beaten and arrested. Taken after their release, this three quarter image

shows Myers, Hester, and Coper swathed in bandages, each sporting facial lacerations

and puffy jawlines. The framing is key in that it allows the viewer to see that Daniels,

Hester, and Coper also had bloodied and swollen hands, an indication that these three at

least gave as good as they got. Only Daniels avoided the gaze of the camera, which

could have been an attempt to avoid recognition or a sign that he was in considerable pain. Combined, the four faces show determination, humility, discomfort, and calm (See

figure 5).121

120 Faue, Community o f Suffering, 82. 12 1 “jhgy Asked For Food—And Got This!” Western Worker, 30 January 1933. 53

They Asked For Food—And Got This!

Figure 5— ’’They Asked for Food—And Got This!” Western Worker, 30 January 1933. Used with permission.

Images of bloodied unemployed and union organizers contrasted sharply with bespectacled radical intellectuals like writer Lincoln Steffens and the “Red Messenger” from the previous chapter, yet sometimes they were one and the same. To show the ruthlessness of the Los Angeles police department and its government-sanctioned red squad, the editors repeatedly reproduced a portrait of International Labor Defense (ILD) attorney Leo Gallagher, whose round glasses seemed to have survived the beating that he 54

and other LA liberals suffered during a protest

over a raid on the local John Reed Club.122

Though Gallagher never joined the

Communist Party, in many ways he embodied

the spirit of radical masculinity—intelligent,

committed to the legal defense of the working

class, and unafraid to challenge the inhumane

policies of the Los Angeles police department

(See figure 6).

Evidence of police and vigilante

brutality served the dual purposes of casting

Figure 6—“Gallagher and Others Beaten by ‘Red i j nnwerlpsc Rv Squad,’” Western Worker, 27 February 1933. Used 13(11031 m en 38 00111 manly ana powerless. By with permission. promoting what Elizabeth Faue called a

“romantic and heroic perception of violence” in photographs and articles about labor militancy, the CP placed a masculine stamp on their union activities and supplied proof

for their readers that the radical labor movement was indeed engaged in a war against a

122 “Gallagher and Others Beaten by ‘Red Squad,’” Western Worker, 27 February 1933. Founded in October 1929 by the editors of and contributors to the radical literary magazine The New Masses, members of the John Reed Club dedicated themselves to the creation of art with “explicit social and political content.” For more, see Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, “‘New Masses’ and John Reed Club Artists, 1926- 1936: Evolution of Ideology, Subject Matter, and Style,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 12 (Spring, 1989): 56-75 and Eric Homberger, “Proletarian Literature and the John Reed Clubs, 1929- 1935,” Journal o f American Studies 13, no. 2 (August, 1979): 221-244. 55

formidable enemy.123 Though each bloody lip and broken jaw signaled defeat, in actuality the battered faces of these men demonstrated the cowardice and inhumanity of capitalist forces, and in some respects emasculated the victors while boosting the masculinity of the vanquished.

Race and Radical Masculinity

Men of color, so often subjected to emasculation and racialization in the mainstream press, could look to Communist newspapers for more positive, manly depictions. At the time, the Communist Party demonstrated a commitment to racial solidarity by applying limited financial resources and significant time in the defense of nine African American young men wrongfully accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama and by providing legal services for foreign nationals threatened with deportation. The

Party also sought to eliminate “white chauvinism” within its ranks and expelled members

found guilty by local control commissions. One could argue that these efforts were little more than thinly veiled recruitment drives, but the fact remains that at this time the Party was one of the few white organizations willing to challenge entrenched and legislatively

sanctioned racism. By simply depicting men of color as manly and not as infantilized, racialized, or feminized caricatures, Communist artists not only acknowledged their masculinity, they also defined it in relation to the “Other” by positioning them next to manly white radicals.

123 Faue, Community of Suffering, 73. 56

Boss Tricks Cannot Break Workers Ranks

Figure 7—“Boss Tricks Cannot Break Workers Ranks,” Western Worker, 23 October 1933. Used with permission. Cartoonists occasionally depicted African American manhood, like that of white radical masculinity, in relation to the emasculated obese bodies of capitalists, but more often in relation to other workers. Group settings gave artists the opportunity to emphasize the importance of cross-racial coalition building in the CAWIU, UC, and ILD, and to that end they portrayed male workers of color as masculine equals to their white comrades.124 It must be noted, however, that more often than not, artists situated white male CP operatives and strike leaders at the front of these group images or centered

124 “Boss Tricks Cannot Break Workers Ranks,” Western Worker, 23 October 1933; “Join the Parade;” “Answer Rolph’s Insults;” “Spread the Strike! Build the Union!” Western Worker, 24 May 1933. 57

within the frame unless the cartoon’s message specifically dealt with grower efforts to use racial discord to undermine striker resolve (See figure 7).125 This had the perhaps unintended effect of implying that radical white men of the UC and CAWIU would lead people of color out of poverty. This is less evident in drawings regarding the ILD fight to free the Scottsboro Boys or to end lynching, as artists deployed John Henry imagery of oversized, muscular African American men wielding sledgehammers or pickaxes (See

figure 8).126

During the 1933 strike wave in California’s agricultural sector, the Party’s

platform of racial solidarity was put to the test as growers played on workers’ prejudices,

especially those held by recent arrivals from the Southeast and Midwest who dreaded the

prospect of affiliating with African Americans for any reason. According to Sam Darcy,

CAWIU operatives “let developments take their course” and allowed African American,

white, Mexican, and Filipino workers to form separate units within the union. Each

group picked strike captains from among their ranks who in turn worked with CAWIU

organizers to coordinate their efforts. Only when engaged in militant strike activity,

Darcy noted, did farm workers “overcome this [racial mistrust]” and “subordinate

everything to the needs of battle.”127 This instance represents a departure from normal

125 “Boss Tricks Cannot Break Workers Ranks” shows three muscular workers representing the three races involved in the cotton harvest. 126 “Smash the Barriers!” The Young Worker, 7 July 1930; Young Worker, “Hack It Down!” 9 May 1930. 127 Samuel Adams Darcy, “The Storm Must Be Ridden” (unpublished manuscript, circa 1945), SAD MS, box 3, folder 20. 58

Communist collective identity strategies and may be indicative of Darcy’s tendency to adjust policies when circumstances warranted.

Figure 8—“Smash the Barriers!” The Young Worker, 7 July 1930. Used with permission. The Radical Male as Victim

Only rarely did CP cartoonists use the iconography of victimization and emasculation on male bodies during this period, but when they did it occurred most often in conjunction with denunciations of New Deal programs, lynching, and imperialism.

128 For more on District 13 and Sam Darcy’s philosophy, see Robert W. Cherny, “The Communist Party in California, 1935-1940: From the Political Margins to the Mainstream and Back.” American Communist History 4, no. 1 (2010): 3-33 and “Prelude to the Popular Front: The Communist Party in California,” American Communist History 1, no. 1 (2002): 5-42. 59

Much like the unorganized workers infantilized in Minneapolis labor literature, non-

Communist men were sometimes cast as “weak, immature,” and ineffective without the assistance of their more masculine Communist brethren.129 In this instance, corpulence, capitalist excess, and imperialism combine into the massive frame of a US military official overseeing the medical examination of two homeless youth in preparation for their enlistment as cannon fodder (See figure 9).130

"THEY'RE STAKVfcD, GENERAL. BUT THEY CAN STILE STOI* A BULLET”

Figure 9—“They’re Starved, General, But They Can Still Stop a Bullet,” Western Worker, 22 May 1933. Used with permission.

129 Faue, Community of Suffering, 75. 130 “jhgy’rg starved, General, But They Can Still Stop a Bullet,” Western Worker, 22 May 1933. 60

Though the Party would be loath to admit it, this representation of emaciated young men more closely resembled the bodies of Communist functionaries in District 13,

as the all-encompassing nature of their commitment to working class struggles only

exacerbated the effects that malnourishment and government-sanctioned harassment had

on radical bodies. In a letter to Max Bedacht written in the second year of his tenure as

District 13 Organizer, Sam Darcy noted with little fanfare that his involvement in the

effort to free political prisoner Tom Mooney, organize local and state hunger marches,

publish the Western Worker, and get the Communist Party included in upcoming

elections had resulted in an exhaustion-fueled illness.131 He later described his activities

during the 1934 longshoremen’s strike as a “taxing life physically and often harrowing on

the nerves.132

Darcy’s frenetic schedule can be partially explained by the Party’s desire to be all

things to all workers, but the limited number of paid functionaries meant that at certain

times, there was no one else to do the job. While Darcy traveled to the national office in

1931, Morris Rapport wrote to him about the lack of sufficient manpower for an

approaching unemployed conference, noting, “the only one available is Hogardy who is

sick and will have to go to the hospital. [Elmer] Hanoff and I are trying to prevail on him

to wait until after the conference.” He also reported that Cooper in the Los Angeles

131 Sam Darcy to Max Bedacht, 27 November 1932, SAD MS, box 1, folder 16. 132 Samuel Adams Darcy, “The Storm Must Be Ridden” (unpublished manuscript, circa 1945), SAD MS, box 3, folder 21. 61

office “took sick,” and because the rest of the LA personnel had been imprisoned, he

anticipated that he would be traveling south to take over that section for a while.133 If

many operatives like Hogardy put off trips to the hospital for the sake of the movement, it

is not surprising that some of them felt old before their time.134

Several months later, the national office denied Secretariat member Charles

Bakst’s request for a month’s leave, telling Morris Rapport that he had been correct to

allow Bakst two weeks off instead. “If Comrade Bakst is really sick this should give him

an opportunity to go some place where he can regain his health. However, this does not

mean that such a leading comrade can simply walk off any time he so desires.”

Though he did not follow Mike Daniel’s lead and disappear without permission, Bakst’s

attempts to circumvent the District hierarchy only resulted in reprimands from his

superiors in the national office.

Radical Womanhood

Much like the racial component of CAWIU political cartoons, when not

commenting on specific female concerns, cartoonists typically placed women behind

white men or employed the gendered rhetorical strategies of marriage and motherhood;

133 Morris Rapport to Sam Darcy, undated, SAD MS, box 1, folder 33. 134 Sam Darcy to Max Bedacht, 27 November 1932, SAD MS, box 1, folder 16. Darcy was commenting on the death of a comrade named Louis who he had speculated would live “forever if anyone would.” When he wrote that he “didn’t realize [he] was getting so old,” Darcy had just celebrated his 28th birthday. 135 Organization Department Central Committee to Morris Rapport, 7 July 1931, RGASPI: 515-1-176- 2319. 62

using what historian Barbara Melosh termed the “comradely ideal.”136 Although cartoonists depicted them as equal participants in strikes and demonstrations, many

women appeared as appendages to their male comrades, as the bearers of the next

generation of radicals, or some combination of both. Artists most often used this tactic

when drawing agricultural workers, perhaps to counter mainstream narratives of male

radical uprisings (See figure 10).137 This differs markedly from Minneapolis imagery

from the same period, where Faue cited a glaring absence of “representations of the

worker (and especially the union worker) as female.”138 Moreover, explicit in CP

matemalist rhetoric was the

notion that maternity and

militancy could coexist in the

female body.

When majority female

unions became the focus,

however, CP imagery changed to

one of muscular femininity, as in Figure 10—“Spread the Strike! Build the Union!” Western Worker, 24 May 1933. Used with permission. the July 3, 1933 cartoon of a

136 “Spread the Strike;” “Join the Parade;” “Answer Rolph’s Insults;” Melosh, Engendering Culture, chapter 2. 137 “Spread the Strike.” 138 Faue, Community of Suffering, 76. 63

lean, stem-faced woman cannery worker.139 In this positive example of a woman displaying typically masculine behavior, a solitary CAWIU worker demands that cannery operators, state labor officials, and politicians adhere to the federal women’s minimum wage laws (See figure 11). Whereas Faue might have seen in her solitude an indication of labor’s reluctance to gender the labor movement and class warfare as female, I argue that the CP often portrayed their male members as underdogs in a similar fashion, as lone warriors in a battle with the forces of capitalism.140 Yet these men and women never represented individual desires, efforts, or accomplishments. Though this cannery woman was not tattooed with the acronym or symbol of the union, she, like her male counterpart in figure 4, stood for the collective strength of the CAWIU. Moreover, much like the gendered rhetoric of World War II propaganda encouraging women to contribute to the war effort through enlistment or wage work in the defense industry, this image showed radical union women when masculine behavior was not only acceptable, but necessary in the fight for economic and political justice.141

139 \ y j n —Organize and Fight!” 140 Faue, Community o f Suffering, 89. For an example of a solitary male worker, please refer back to figure 1 . 141 KnafF, Beyond Rosie, 10 and 16. Knaff called this process a “circular dynamic,” in which cartoons and comics demonstrated acceptable ways that women could assume masculine traits while still maintaining those characteristics that marked them as female. 64

To Win—Organize and Fight!

Figure 11— To Win—Organize and Fight!” Western Worker, 3 July 1933. Used with permission.

The most militant portrayal of Communist women I found did not come from the radical press, but from the pages of the Los Angeles Times. This is not surprising, given the conservative stance of the newspaper’s editorial staff, nonetheless the provocatively titled “Ladies Who See ‘Red’” offers a more realistic view of California’s female operatives than even the Western Worker. Ethel Dell was one of six Young Communist 65

Figure 12— Excerpt from Karl D. Pancake, “The Ladies Who See Red,” Los Angeles Times, 26 March 1933. Used with permission.

League members arrested for staging a demonstration in support of political prisoner

Tom Mooney at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics (See figure 12). According to reporter

Karl D. Pancake, Miss Dell, Ida Rothstein, Elaine Black, Lillian Goodman, Mary Collins, and other women “[furnished] the motive power, the very life blood of the Red movement in Southern California.” Moreover, they “joyfully and fanatically accepted battle” and provided “blows...just as lusty and ...battle cries more vigorous than those of 66

the other sex.” The leader of the LA red squad, William Hynes, described Miss Dell as possessing “a right-hand swing that [had] louted many a man on the jaw.”142 Pure hyperbole perhaps, but evidence suggests that both Pancake and Hynes spoke the truth, as the women in my study endured the same police and vigilante harassment as their male colleagues, served multiple stints in city, county, and state correctional facilities, and occasionally walked away baring physical evidence of their encounters with anti­

communist forces.

Maternity and Radical Female Bodies

Contrary to die matemalistic imagery found in the radical press, few of these

women were actually mothers. Elaine Black, Sonia Kaross, and Peggy Dennis attempted

to juggle motherhood with Party work, but with limited success. Black left her daughter

in the care of her parents for three years, a decision that negatively affected their

relationship later.143 Dennis found once she became a mother, her husband and

coworkers refused to let her join in potentially dangerous Party activities.144 Finally,

Darcy and several East Bay operatives complained to the national office that Sonia

Kaross failed to perform her duties because her tubercular daughter required too much of

her attention.145 The Party’s paradoxical relationship with gender equality and maternity

142 Karl D. Pancake, “The Ladies Who See Red,” Los Angeles Times, 26 March 1933. 143 Black, transcript, 26 and 67-69. 144 Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography o f an American Communist: a personal view of a political life (Westport: L. Hill, 1977), 41-42. 145 K. Ilmoni to R. Baker, 30 August 1931, RGASPI: 515-1-176-2319. 67

will be addressed more thoroughly in the next chapter, but these examples provide some perspective and may help explain why other female operatives felt compelled to forego motherhood during the period in which they were most active in the Party.146

I found no sources that these women officially requested leaves of absence, though several mentioned taking time off to recover from exhaustion in their oral histories. Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter welcomed Caroline Decker into their Carmel home on occasion and even arranged for her to stay in a luxurious sanitarium when she became ill.147 Louise Todd suffered from chronic anemia and needed special iron

supplements provided by the doctor at Tehachapi Women’s Prison who happened to be a

former classmate of Frances Foster, the wife of ILD attorney George Anderson.148

Finally, Violet Orr, who professed a “tendency to get over-enthused...and after that...to

get tired,” credited husband Paul with helping her to approach campaigns in a more

balanced emotional state.149 None of these women suggested that their gender affected

their ability to do their jobs, though I suspect that it played a part in the manner in which

the district dealt with their periodic need for rest. The Comintern files for District 13 are

awash with requests for sick leave from male operatives, yet none exist in available

records for their female counterparts. Given the nature of CP hierarchy and the

146 Decker, DAF #8; Orr, DAF #14; Todd, transcript, 4th interview, 3rd tape, 9; Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38. Caroline Decker, Violet Orr, Dorothy Healey, and Louise Todd chose not to have children during the early 1930s because of their commitment to Party activism. 147 Decker, DAF #8. 148 Todd, transcript, 3rd interview, 1st tape, 15. 149 Orr, DAF #14. 68

Communist penchant for extensive recordkeeping, the lack of a paper trail suggests that

women simply notified the district office and immediately obtained permission to take time off. District and national officials viewed male operatives’ appeals with greater

scrutiny and occasionally required verification from medical professionals before giving

their approval.150 It would seem that though Party policy dictated equal assessment of

male and female functionaries, unhealthy gendered bodies prompted gendered reactions

from individual (and largely male) Communist leaders.

Conclusion

The Communist press used multiple gendered rhetorical strategies in Active and

realistic depictions of radical manhood and womanhood to show readers how they should

think of themselves as revolutionaries, as citizens, and as working class leaders. The

thoughtful intellectual, the muscular militant, and the impoverished victim of capitalism

came to represent different aspects of radical masculinity, while the devoted mother and

wife remained, as in hegemonic gender discourse, the common symbols of radical

femininity. Though they sometimes gave accurate portrayals of radical lives on the

ground, often the iconography of radical masculinity and femininity represented the ideal

more so than reality. These idealized gender constructions were based on and imbued

150 Charles Bakst to the Central Executive Committee, 27 June 1931, RGASPI: 515-1-173-2282. Bakst reported that, though Darcy requested confirmation from a doctor, he could not do so because it would undermine his cover as an unemployed worker. 69

with the notion that collective and not individual identities would ensure success in radical endeavors. 70

Chapter 4—Radical Hearts

The mere fact that a marriage certificate has been issued to a man and woman means nothing. The Russian soviets have common sense enough to see that happiness does not depend on a marriage certificate and that the raising of children should be a part of the duty of the state. The state would furnish experts to feed and train children and we would have a much better race—Ida Rothstein.151

As has been demonstrated in the previous chapters, to be a professional revolutionary entailed total commitment of the mind and body. The totality of operatives’ immersion in Party activities came with immersion in Party doctrine, whatever that philosophy happened to be in the moment. This not only affected their professional lives, but their personal relationships as well. Although the Party could not very well control emotional attachments that formed between male and female members, they could organize fundraising events, anniversary celebrations, and other gatherings that encouraged heterosexual socializing within a contained group of likeminded radicals.

As Caroline Decker put it, “Our personal lives were integrated with our political lives.

Our political lives came first.”152 Certainly, this was the intention of Lenin, Stalin, and the Comintern—to encourage members to privilege the movement over individual

151 Pancake, “The Ladies Who See Red.” 132 Decker, DAF #10. 71

desires—and by many accounts, the party succeeded among the most dedicated operatives.

As expected, California Communists looked to Soviet Russia for guidelines regarding their personal relationships. They married for fellowship as much as for love and looked for partners who shared their belief in a socialist future. What could they hope to gain by participating in a social and legal institution that most Marxist theorists believed to be both a symptom and result of capitalism’s decay? District 13 members, at least, expressed a variety of reasons for choosing to marry, but the shared commitment to socialism figured prominently, as did their desire for partnerships of equals. In many respects, this juxtaposition of societal and individual concerns reflects what Alice

Kessler-Harris called the “reciprocal tension between class and gender” present in

American society.153 This dynamic played out in radical personal relationships, as friends and intimates negotiated the boundaries of acceptable gender roles in both radical circles and in mainstream culture. They had frank discussions about reproduction that privileged women’s desires to remain active in the Party and used contraceptive devices and abortion when necessary to maintain the agreed upon family size. Radical men supported their wives’ ambitions by doing their share of housework and by assisting in childcare. When they proved unsupportive or even acrimonious to the notion that men should help out around the house, radical women in District 13 simply left them. As this

153 Alice Kessler-Harris, “Treating the Male as ‘Other’: Redefining the Parameters of Labor History,” in Laboring Gender History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007): 146. 72

litany suggests, radical marriages resembled the companionate ideal in many ways, but they differed substantially in that Communist women continued to work after marriage and childbirth whether or not their husbands supported this decision. Communists also practiced collectivism in their private lives and made decisions based on their perceptions about whether or not those choices would be beneficial or detrimental to the class struggle. For these reasons, radical marriage represented an evolutionary leap in the development of more equitable heterosexual relationships.

Since Susan Ware encouraged her peers in 1982 to mine the abundance of unexamined source material on women in the Depression-era United States, historians have heeded her call, producing works on youth and leisure culture, women’s education, women radicals, and the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in heterosexual relationships.154 Some analyze the connection between leisure culture, eugenics, and the age of expertise to show how governmental and non-governmental bodies defined and advocated for “proper” heterosexuality.155 Others place sexuality and reproduction within the context of US capitalism and use imperial medical practices to shed light on contemporary beliefs about race, class, and gender.156 Still others examine how race,

154 Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s, ed. Barbara Haber (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982). 155 Susan Currell, March o f Spare Time: The Problem and Promise o f Leisure in the Great Depression (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 156 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); 73

class, and educational status complicated interwar marriages between northeastern

African Americans and migrants from the Jim Crow South.157

Scholars of radicalism and labor in the 1920s and 30s link Gilded Age and

Progressive Era utopian, anarchist, and free love ideologies with those promoted by socialists and Communists in the interwar period. For middle class “sex radicals,” the fight to legalize birth control had less to do with reducing the chances of pregnancy and more from a desire to separate sex from reproduction.158 Others argue that the controversy surrounding companionate marriage and public and private advocacy of birth control and premarital sex has been instrumental “in shaping modem ideals of moral, heterosexual matrimony.”159 Most agree that the quest for reproductive rights made strange bedfellows of nativist eugenicists and political radicals.

Landon Storrs agrees that many New Deal leftists learned to question the legitimacy of “sex hierarchies” from family members or left-leaning college professors who adhered to or sympathized with socialist gender ideologies. While her subjects recognized the need for gender equality in personal relationships and marital practices, they also understood the role that gender hierarchies served in upholding the capitalist

Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 157 Anastasia Curwood, Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 158 Christina Simmons, “Women’s Power in Sex Radical Challenges to Marriage in the Early-Twentieth Century United States,” Feminist Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 168-198. 159 Rebecca L. Davis, “’Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry’: The Companionate Marriage Controversy,” The Journal of American History (March 2008): 1137-1163. 74

economic structure. By undermining traditional courtship and marital practices in their everyday lives, New Deal leftists, she posits, “[challenged] all kinds of orthodoxy, not just [the capitalist] economic system.”160

Much of the social history of Communism can be found in the memoirs written by members or former members of the Party. As expected, these vary in tone depending on the authors’ relationship with the CP at the time of publication. Those who remained in the Party in the mass exodus that followed Khrushchev’s speech defend their choice as in service of the greater good.161 Some reflect on their radical lives with measured fondness, admitting that while youthful enthusiasm, idealism, and naivety may have influenced their lack of perspective regarding Party doctrine and tactics, their contributions to social and racial justice in trade unionism and New Deal policies made immersing themselves totally into the movement well worth the price.162

By far the most negative reflections emanate from former “true believers” like

Aileen Kraditor who came away from her experience among the Party faithful resentful of the hold that Communism had on her and with the feeling that she had emerged from the clutches of a religious cult. Kraditor equates the Party with an alternate universe, one that exists parallel to the mainstream in which a member could “isolate himself from reality without ever leaving [his] hometown.” Such gullibility enables him to “[deposit]

160 Storrs, Second Red Scare, 36. 161 Healey and Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers-, Dennis, Autobiography. 162 Samuel Adams Darcy, "The Storm Must Be Ridden,” SAD MS, box 3. 75

his whole personality in and [give] his loyalty to one ideology, one role, one institution.”163 As mentioned, I am less concerned with upholding or refuting Kraditor’s contentions than in examining the ways that such entanglement affected gender formation and radical intimacies. How did total subservience to Party doctrine play out in the private sphere? Did Communist anti-individualism foster the creation of unique personal relationships or merely variations on the hegemonic theme? Finally, were Communists in District 13 capable of maintaining collectivist thinking in all aspects of their lives?

Before looking at District 13 marital and reproductive practices, it is necessary to provide some grounding in the rules that governed mainstream heterosexual relationships. Marriage as an institution suffered immensely during the economic crisis, as men and women responded to deprivation by altering traditional ways of living. The body of this chapter begins with an examination of a custom in transition, followed by a synopsis of Marxist theories on sexuality and marriage. The last two sections analyze lived experiences of District 13 operatives in relation to both the hegemonic and radical visions of heterosexual marriage and childbearing.

This chapter owes much to the work of Anastasia Curwood, whose New Negro subjects battled “both public and private pressures” in their attempts to create a different marriage paradigm for middle class African Americans.164 It also builds on the work of

163 Kraditor, Jimmy Higgins, 45. 164 Curwood, Stormy Weather, 3. 76

Landon Storrs in that it complicates the link between the companionate ideal and leftist marital practices by placing them within the context of the Marxist critique of capitalism.

California Communists tried to redefine heterosexual relationships and matrimony

according to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, and they did so in defiance of traditional practices and legal standards and amid persistent accusations of wanton sexuality. To be

sure, the pressure to conform to Soviet principles outweighed that which emanated from

mainstream society. Though on the surface radical relationships in California appear to be simply variations of conventional or companionate marriages, a deeper reading shows that District 13 marital and reproductive practices reflected Communist theories that

privileged the needs of the community over individual desires.

The Depression and Companionate Marriage

Much has been written about radicals and companionate marriage, a term created

by sociologists in the 1920s to “describe a transformation in the social and economic

functions of marriage” made possible by the changing legal and political status of

women.165 White working class anarchists, free love advocates, and socialists were in the

vanguard of this movement, and as Christina Simmons argues, they “envisioned

egalitarian sexual relationships that were less centered on reproduction, more expressive,

and more satisfying than Victorian codes allowed.”166 By separating sex from

165 Davis, “’Not Marriage at All,” 1138. 166 Simmons, “Women’s Power,” 169. 77

reproduction and by emphasizing genuine affection and partnership, marital advisors, sociologists, and other companionate advocates argued for a transformation in the reproductive function of heterosexual marriage. In doing so, these experts also made sexual satisfaction within the confines of heterosexual marriage central to women’s happiness.167

The Depression complicated the relationship between emotional wellbeing, economics, marital status, and birth rates and made the companionate ideal an unattainable goal for most young couples. Marriage and divorce rates decreased significantly during the early 1930s as young couples put off weddings they could ill afford and unhappily married ones remained so.168 This last is significant as an analysis of marital relations during the period concluded that couples’ financial disputes multiplied significantly, men’s increasing petulance resulted in “weakened marital relations,” and the Depression only exacerbated any preexisting tension within the home.169 Among married couples the birth rate also fell during this period, as many used birth control and abortion to limit the number of children they produced.170

Some believed that women’s new economic and political standing made the companionate ideal irrelevant to their emotional fulfillment. When Ida Rothstein

167 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding o f Modern Feminism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 156-157. 168 Ware, Holding Their Own, 6-7. 169 Jeffery K. Liker and Glen H. Elder, Jr., “Economic Hardship and Marital Relations in the 1930s,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 3 (June 1983): 355-356. 170 Ware, Holding Their Own, 7. 78

suggested to Los Angeles Times reporter Karl Pancake that a marriage certificate did not necessarily guarantee happiness, she may have been regurgitating Marxist rhetoric, but her contention nonetheless resonated with some mainstream pundits. In “Men’s Notions

About Women,” San Francisco Chronicle syndicated columnist Dorothy Dix debunked several commonly held beliefs about females, including their ultimate desire to find the right man.

Among mature women who are still young there are thousands upon thousands for whom matrimony has no attraction whatever and who would look upon marriage as a sacrifice instead of its being the goal of their ambitions. They don’t want a man cluttering up their lives nor their houses. They want to be independent and free to handle their own money and come and go as they please, as no wife can. 171

In some respects, this assertion may have been Dix’s attempt to explain the downward trend in marriage rates during the Depression, but she effectively summarized the conundrum that self-sufficient, single women faced in the 1930s. Only by finding marital partners who supported and shared their private and public ambitions could women hope to maintain some measure of economic and personal autonomy. This was the new companionate ideal—one in which economics played a more significant role than in the previous decade.

171 Dorothy Dix, “Men’s Notions About Women,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4 August 1933. 79

Marxism and Marriage

In the decade following the 1917 November Revolution, the Russian government took measures to remove some of the inequities in tsarist laws governing intimate relationships. They made it easier and cheaper for all Russians to obtain marriage licenses or divorce certificates, and formally recognized common law marriages. They also legalized contraceptives and, for a time, abortions.172 These regulatory modifications originated from the Marxist conviction that the religious and social institution of marriage required substantial alteration in order for it to remain relevant in the workers’ republic.

Alexandra Kollontai, a Marxist theorist and Bolshevik official, believed that the traditional family structure had been eroding for decades, particularly when both parents and one or more children were forced to participate in the wage economy. In her analysis, the industrial revolution had systematically transformed the family from a reproductive support network to the “primary economic unit of society”-which she and other Bolshevik writers considered superfluous in the new socialist state. Kollontai applauded the Russian government’s new divorce policies that allowed women to free themselves from abusive relationships and cautioned those women afraid of change to

“seek and find support in the collective and in society, and not from the individual

172 Davis, “Not Marriage at All,” 1146. 80

man.”173 Marxists also believed that women who chose to marry should be free to live full and productive lives outside of the home. In order for women to be able to do revolutionary work, Vladimir Lenin advised, they must be liberated from the unpaid labor of housework and childrearing that essentially made them “domestic slaves.”174 “So few men,” he later wrote, “even among the proletariat - realize how much effort and trouble they could save women.. .if they were to lend a hand in ‘women’s work.’” In essence,

Marxists analyzed marriage, like any other social relationship, as a hierarchical labor system in which one participant unfairly benefitted from the labor of the other.

District 13 Marriage Practices

The companionate ideal as espoused by 1920s social pundits maintained that marriage should be a partnership, but, at its heart, that partnership was one of emotional attachment and not necessarily one that changed the intellectual or economic inequity associated with the male breadwinner model. Communists, on the other hand, believed that marriage should not only be an emotional partnership, but also one in which a couple shared core political and social beliefs. Reflecting on this in an interview conducted decades later, Violet Orr said that she and Paul “married for fellowship,” but also because they “shared the same perspective of what could be useful for the vast majority of the

173 Alexandra Kollontai, “Communism and the Family,” in Selected Writing o f Alexandra Kollontai (Allison & Busby, 1977), https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm. 174 Vladimir I. Lenin, “Capitalism and Female Labour,” Pravda, 5 May 1913, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/apr/27.htm. 175 Clara Zetkin, “Lenin on the Women’s Question,” in My Memorandum Book, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkinl.htm. 81

people of [this] country.”176 Upon meeting her husband when he applied for conscientious objector status during World War I, Sonia Kaross said, “He was very friendly, sympathetic to my work, and sympathetic to the women’s organization, and I felt that [with] a man like that.. .we would be able to work together.”177 For both women, the ability to empathize with others and an altruistic spirit were perhaps their future husbands’ most appealing characteristics.

Empathy for others included their overworked wives. Sharing the “second shift” of household labor not only freed women to work longer hours for the Party, it also afforded them the chance to advance in their chosen fields, as the women of District 13 could attest. Violet Orr credited husband Paul’s willingness to “[lift] the load as far as the household work was concerned” with making it possible for her to “take part in the larger life of the world.”178 When trade union or CP activity kept Sonia Kaross away from home, her husband cooked for himself and did his share of the housework, as did

Rudy Lambert for Louise Todd.179 Relief from the “daily sacrifice to a thousand unimportant trivialities” gains special significance when one takes into account that even with labor-saving devices like vacuum cleaners and washing machines (which few CP operatives could afford), household chores might still take more than sixty hours per

176 Orr, DAF #3 and #14. 177 Kaross, DAF #3. 178 Orr, DAF #14. 179 Kaross, DAF #2; Todd, transcript, 5th interview, 1st tape, 11. 82

week.180 Sonia, Elaine, Louise, and Violet understood their husbands to be exceptional men in a time when others would have balked at the mere suggestion that wives could be wage earners, much less that husbands should do their share of “women’s work.”

Yet, to the consternation of several female operatives in this study, some male

Communists clung to orthodox gender constraints based on the male breadwinner model that restricted women’s employment after marriage. When forced to decide, many of these women chose professional ambitions over their marital obligations, and few relationships survived. Todd felt a “responsibility” to do something about the economic crisis and allowed her “personal life [to become] subordinate to the greater needs of the radical movement.”181 Her first argument with her first husband Fred Doyer came about when she expressed her desire to resume working after their honeymoon. Though he eventually acquiesced, their marriage continued to be “fraught with tremendous pressures because of [her] participation in the movement, which became all-encompassing,” and they separated in 1934. While Black returned to work after giving birth to her first child, her employment as an International Labor Defense operative brought new challenges for her young family. Unlike her previous jobs, the ILD required her to be ready at a moment’s notice to bail out political detainees, but when her first husband, Ed

Black, got home, “he wanted dinner ready and the table set—whether [she] was working

180 Clara Zetkin, “Lenin on the Women’s Question,” in My Memorandum Book, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkinl.htm; Ware, Holding Their Own, 5. 181 Todd, transcript, 4th interview, 3rd tape, 6. 182 Todd, transcript, 4th interview, 3rd tape, 6; 2nd interview, 1st tape, 4; 3rd interview, Is* tape, 12. 83

or not.” Still, Elaine claims they separated in 1932 because of his drinking and infidelity and not because of any conflict over the demands of her job.

At certain times and for a variety of reasons, some operatives chose cohabitation over marriage. Todd did not divorce Fred Doyer until 1938 although she had been involved with Rudy Lambert for at least four years. She later admitted that she and

Lambert married simply to appear more respectable to mainstream Californians.184 Karl

Yoneda and Elaine Black spent the first half of the 1930s illegally cohabitating not because they held contempt for the institution of marriage, but because California’s anti­ miscegenation laws prevented them from doing so.185 Only when Elaine became embroiled in a legal dispute due to her activities during the 1934 San Francisco longshoremen’s strike did she and Karl consent to allow Anita Whitney to pay for a wedding trip to Seattle, Washington.186

Two-operative families like those just described meant that the Party essentially became the third member of the marriage, as questions that affected operatives’ economic, professional, and private lives were funneled through formal and informal

Party channels. Decisions made by district and national leaders, though certainly

183 Black, transcript, 137-139. 184 Todd, transcript, 5th interview, Is* tape, 10. 185 Valerie Matsumoto, “Japanese American Women and the Creation of Urban Nisei Culture in the 1930s,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, eds. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): 298. California’s anti-miscegenation law expanded to include Asians in 1880. The 1948 California Supreme Court case Perez v. Sharp overturned the law. 186 Black, transcript, 50-53. 84

gendered, affected not only female members, but also entire families. For example, as warrants accumulated for the arrest of labor activist Eugene Dennis (then known as Frank

Waldron) in the early 1930s, he went into hiding while Peggy continued doing Party work for months before learning of the Party’s decision to relocate the family to

Moscow.187 One imagines that Peggy and Gene suffered equally when the Soviet government refused to allow their son to return to the United States with them when their tenure in Moscow ended.188 Though unquestionably an extreme case, this represents just one of the consequences couples faced when adhering to Party directives.

The Comintern transferred the Dennis family to keep Eugene out of jail, but this was only one variable that influenced resolutions to transfer operatives. As discussed in the previous chapter, at times transfers came when the leadership responded to the need for fresh bodies because of arrest, sickness, or heightened union and strike activity in different regions of the country. Other times reshuffling occurred when Darcy or the national office attempted to counter unit or section dysfunctionality by relocating problematic members. Soon after arriving in the Bay Area, Darcy embarked on a campaign to rid the district of any remaining followers of Jay Lovestone or Leon Trotsky,

187 Dennis, Autobiography, 56. 188 Dennis, Autobiography, 86. 85

but he also reorganized units and sections, moving certain operatives into less powerful positions or separating what he described as cliquish elements.189

District and national office responses to personal requests for transfers complicate the notion of Comintern control over functionary lives and give some perspective on when individualistic thinking was acceptable to Party leaders. As demonstrated regarding operatives’ appeals for leaves of absence, reactions to these requests varied according to prevailing conditions, but they seemed on the whole to be positive when addressing the needs of couples. Karl Yoneda soon followed Elaine Black after the ILD moved her from Los Angeles to the San Francisco office. To be sure, his ability to speak and write Japanese worked in his favor, as the Party’s Japanese language newspaper,

Rodo Shimbun, maintained offices in the city.190 Likewise, the Party honored Rudy

Lambert’s wish to assist in Louise Todd’s defense by moving him out of trade union work and into the Southern California ILD office when she began serving time for peijury at Tehachapi Women’s Prison in 1935.191 Peggy Dennis, on the other hand, resented the organization department’s failure to “[consider] assignments collectively”

189 Darcy to Central Committee, 16 January 1931, RGASPI: 515-1-173-2282; Sonia Baltrun Kaross, “Statement of the Oakland Section Buro to the District #13 and the CC of the Communist Party,” 22 January 1931, RGASPI: 515-1-189-2499. 190 Black, transcript, 23. 191 Todd, transcript, 3rd interview, Is* tape, 12. 86

for Gene and herself when they returned from Moscow. She moved with him to

Wisconsin and worked without pay until a position opened up for her.192

Maternity and Reproductive Practices

Elsa Dixler maintained, “American Communists were.. .trapped by their vision of women as mothers above all else,”193 but as was demonstrated in the examination of

Party gender rhetoric in the previous chapter, the Party simultaneously exalted motherhood and praised the contributions of childless women operatives. As Dorothy

Healey so succinctly put it, “Who could think of a revolutionary having a child? We couldn’t take time off; it was unthinkable.”194 Yet Party literature continuously depicted women in their traditional occupations as wives and mothers, especially in political cartoons that focused on New Deal programs and their impact on working class families

(See figure 13).195 Writers also bestowed the honorific “Mother” on lifelong radicals like

Ella Reeve Bloor and Mary Mooney and frequently omitted their given names in advertisements, articles, and photograph captions. Much like Abraham Lincoln’s

“decomposing body” that “many...preferred to imagine...as a member of the national family rather than as a father and husband in his own family circle,” the title “Mother”

192 Dennis, Autobiography, 88. 193 Elsa Jane Dixler, “The Woman Question: Women and the American Communist Party, 1929-1941” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1974), 181, ProQuest (AAT 751529). 194 Healey, Dorothy Healey Remembers, 38. 195 “The Upturn,” Western Worker, 29 May 1933. “The First Check,” Western Worker, 11 December 1933. The former centers on the higher costs of commodities under NRA standards. The latter depicts a father attempting to balance the family budget with the proceeds from his “forced labor paycheck” while his wife and children look on. 87

reduced these post-menopausal women to their former reproductive function even as it added weight to their symbolic status as mothers of the entire movement.196

TH E FIRST CHECK

Figure 13—“The First Check,” Western Worker, 11 December 1933. Used with permission.

196 “A Fighting Mother,” Western Worker, 15 March 1932; Pamphlet, “Free Earl Browder! Banquet and Program in honor of Mother Ella Reeve Bloor,” SAD MS, box 2, folder 29. On Abraham Lincoln and the “body politic,” see Gary Laderman, “The Body Politic and the Politics of Two Bodies: Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in Death,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 22 (Cambridge University Press, 1997): 123. 88

In Bloor’s case there was a certain irony in the title as she, like several other radical women operatives, left her own children in the care of her mother while she crisscrossed the country organizing and giving speeches.197

Individual circumstances as much as Party directives appear to have contributed to reproductive decisions for young District 13 couples. Todd, who chose not to have children because of her dedication to the revolutionary struggle and because of the economic crisis, claimed to have made this choice with both husbands.198 As a member of the California Executive Board of the CP, she recalled that women (including Healey in 1943) often asked for her opinion about combining motherhood with Party work, and she advised them to have children if their marriages were equitable.199 Decker, who did not have children while married to fellow CAWIU organizer Jack Wamick, said, “If I had had children, I would not have been doing what I was doing. It’s that simple.”200

Finally, the Orrs decided against adoption for financial reasons, but also because children would have impeded Violet’s chance “to be a part of the larger life of society.”201 For these women, professional and political objectives trumped any desire to procreate, at least during the time in which they were most active in the Party.

197 Ella Reeve Bloor, We Are Many, 83-84 and 103.Bloor frequently left one or more children with family members and friends in the Socialist Party, but she also sometimes took a child with her on her travels. 198 Todd, transcript, 4* interview, 3rd tape, 9-10. 199 Todd, transcript, 5th interview, 1st tape, 5. 200 Decker, DAF #9. 201 Orr, DAF #14. 89

Other Communist women chose the more challenging path of being working mothers. Vicki Ruiz has documented the problems that single mother and union organizer Louisa Moreno encountered in the absence of childcare centers and a family support network.202 As mentioned in the previous chapter, several District 13 operatives faced similar impediments as working mothers. Sonia Kaross opted to take her daughter with her to Section meetings when necessary, much to the annoyance of her fellow East

Bay cadres. In fact, in 1931, Oakland’s incoming organizational secretary objected to the child’s presence enough to file a complaint with the national office, telling R. Baker that, “The [Section Organizer] is very weak. She has a sick daughter who absorbs as much of her time as the party does.”204 Like Moreno, Black felt that she could not properly care for daughter Joyce while working for the ILD. For three years, Black’s mother served as guardian, and Elaine and Karl visited them in Southern California whenever they could. No evidence exists to suggest that Joyce suffered the same abuse that Moreno’s daughter Mytyl endured while living with her Party-affiliated “informal foster families,” yet she too resented Elaine’s abandonment and ran away several times to live with her biological father.205 After continuous prodding from her husband, Peggy

Dennis consented to have a child, with the stipulation that she could remain a professional revolutionary. Once she had Tim, to her increasing dismay, her husband,

202 Vicki L. Ruiz, “Una Mujer sin Fronteras: Louisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism.” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 1 (2004): 1-20. 203 Kaross, DAF #2. 204 K. Ilmoni to R. Baker, 30 August 1931, RGASPI515-1-179-2319. 205 Ruiz, “Una Mujer sin Fronteras,” 9. Black, transcript, 26 and 67-69. 90

mother, and Party superiors put constraints on her activities. “Not getting arrested meant staying out of street actions or public meetings. I taught classes, wrote leaflets, served on committees that planned actions for others who would get arrested. I felt guilty.”206

Though on the surface Party doctrine regarding maternity meant greater individual freedom for CP women, in actuality they limited women’s choices when those women attempted to combine revolutionary work with motherhood. Dennis referred to the motivational force behind internalized guilt, but equally provocative were the misinformed accusations of coworkers. In an allusion to complaints like those levied against Sonia Kaross, Todd noted that comrades often ridiculed new mothers for trying to get out of doing Party work. She saw mothers in the CP as reflections of working mothers everywhere—under-supported and often victims of chauvinism, but still dedicated to making better futures for their children. To that end, she enlisted in several united front campaigns for government-sponsored childcare centers and included this as part of her election platform when she ran for San Francisco supervisor.207

Because of the stigma associated with motherhood, CP women used birth control obtained from Sanger clinics if they could afford it or less reliable “feminine hygiene” products if they could not, and resigned themselves to illegal abortions when necessary.

This did not place them on the periphery of Depression-era reproductive practices, but at

206 Dennis, Autobiography, 41-42. 207 Todd, transcript, 5th interview, 1st tape, 1-5. 91

the center of a transitional period in the history of birth control and abortion in the United

States. By mid-decade condoms could be purchased in dime stores and mail order catalogs in some states, or obtained from door-to-door salespeople. In a time when other businesses failed at alarming rates, the contraceptive industry averaged $350 million per year in sales by 1935, which means that Communist women who purchased contraceptive devices unconsciously contributed to one of the decade’s most profitable capitalist endeavors.208

In the 1930s the abortion rate also increased among women “of every social strata,” who often cited the need to continue working as one reason for this decision.209

Rickie Solinger estimates that between twenty-five and forty percent of pregnancies ended in abortion during this period.210 Healey, who had the first of three abortions at the age of 16, said, “It was just taken for granted that we would have [them].”211 Black had an abortion at the beginning and, when a diaphragm proved ineffective, at the end of her first marriage.212 Dennis also had several abortions—one of them in Moscow while it was still legal, but she had to apply for permission from a Party bureaucrat before getting the procedure. *71 Like* their mainstream counterparts, Communist women in California

208 Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005), 126. 209 Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 135. 210 Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 118. 211 Healey, Dorothy Healey Remembers, 38. 212 Black, transcript, 134 and 142. 213 Dennis, Autobiography, 102. 92

used contraception and abortion to limit their fertility in efforts to retain their status as

workers and as professional revolutionaries.

Conclusion

Though depicted in the mainstream press as free lovers who abhorred the

constrictive nature of bourgeois marriage, many Communists willingly chose matrimony

over cohabitation. These partnerships of equals seem reminiscent of the companionate

ideal promoted by early twentieth century sociologists, but Communist marriages in fact

differed from them measurably. Middle class intellectual experimentations with new

marital structures and practices in the interwar period were wholly individualistic

endeavors that stemmed from desires to develop more meaningful intimate relationships.

Communists, on the other hand, sought to eliminate individualism in all aspects of their

personal and professional lives, including marriage and reproduction. This meant that the

state, or in this case, the Comintern and CPUSA, had some say in personal decisions and

that individual Communists considered the needs of the radical community at large when

making choices about marriage or family structure. Because class-consciousness took

precedence over personal considerations, the members of District 13 formed unique,

radical heterosexual partnerships that went beyond ordinary conceptualizations of the

companionate ideal. 93

Chapter 5—Conclusion

The early 1930s was a time of retrenchment and reconsolidation of power in

District 13. When Samuel Adams Darcy arrived to take control of the district in 1930, his first task was to expel those who refused to accept the changes in national leadership and to attempt as best he could to reorganize and expand a district with less than three hundred dues-paying members. Within a few short years, Darcy and a few loyal operatives transformed District 13 from a stagnant, backwater section of the American

Party into a hotbed of radical activism with a vibrant Communist subculture centered at

C.E. Ruthenberg House at 121 Haight Street in San Francisco. At this Workers Cultural

Center, new and old members alike could obtain a meal, play a game of basketball, borrow or purchase the latest pamphlet or newspaper, learn to develop film or speak a new language, and listen to an assortment of visiting dignitaries lecture on recent labor struggles or life in the Soviet Union. Within this insular world, Communist men and women played, worked, and studied together, absorbing Marxist gender, political, and social ideologies in an atmosphere conducive to radical heterosexual socialization. There the Party nurtured the hearts, minds, and bodies of these men and women, imbued them with a sense that only in the collective could they hope to transform American society, and created with them a uniquely Communist gendered political and social culture. 94

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