by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This is the ninth post on this blog featuring an issue of The Open Forum, a weekly newspaper issued by The Southern California Branch of The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which emerged from the ashes of the National Civil Liberties Bureau in 1920 during the reactionary “Red Scare” era, when, following America’s crucial role in ending the First World War, the rise of Communism (such as in Russia) and other left-wing movements led conservatives to crackdown on those on the opposite end of the political spectrum.
The ACLU was unabashedly radical in its political expression in its early days and evolved into more of a civil libertarian organization with a particular focus on effecting change through the court system to protect civil liberties, even of neo-Nazis while publicly stating that it was non-partisan. It has been said that the ACLU has been part of four-fifths of the most contested cases before the United States Supreme Court.
The situation changed in 2018 when the organization decided to take a direct role in that year’s midterm elections by spending some $25 million to fight for liberal political causes and against Republican candidates. For those on the right, this move generated responses that made it seem like it was the Roaring Twenties again, while the ACLU has argued that it needed to become more politicized given the dangers it saw from the right, especially in the midst of the Trump Administration.
Yet, though a statement in each issue of The Open Forum asserted that “this paper . . . is carried on . . . to give a concrete illustration of the value of free discussion” and also that “it offers a means of expression to unpopular minorities,” there is no doubt that much of what permeated its pages was proffered by those who tended to propagate far left political perspectives. This is seen, for example, in the front page feature article “Education or Destruction” by an author only identified as “G.H.S.”
The writer began with a question about what was to be done to galvanize popular support for changing social and economic conditions “in consonance with progressive human needs” and added that “this question arises wherever radicals meet.” Education wasn’t just developed through books or in the classroom but also through events, from which “men and women get an inkling of social values through economic processes.” The matter than was about “the agencies now making for the enlightenment of the working classes” through a certain form of education in which laborers were to gain “an insight into the several processes by which they are relieved of the products of their toil.”
Not surprisingly, then, “G.H.S.” identified some of these entities:
A few Labor, Socialist and Communist papers and magazines whose combined circulation is less than one hundred thousand; a few open forum here and thee in the larger industrial centers, attended for the most part by old men and women survivors of bygone radical days, with Chicago and New York being possible exceptions, where young Jewish students have taken hold; the Socialist, Community and Socialist-Labor parties whose total vote last election did not reach four hundred thousand; more or less independent movements like the I.W.W. [International Workers of the World], the I.L.D. [International Labor Defense], and the [American] Civil Liberties Union, and one Labor college, with few students and less funds.
There may be papers and pamphlets, those infrequent forums or meetings of the radical organizations, or an individual conversion attempted—deemed “always a doubtful proceeding.” The writer was clearly doleful about the prospects for how “many radicals expect to consciously educate the forty million workers of this country, one by one, until a majority are lined up for industrial democracy.”
An anecdote was given involving the perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs who was approached by an enthusiastic “fellow traveler” who though getting a million workers activated was the key to changing conditions, but Debs purportedly replied “for thirty years I’ve been trying to get ten men in line, and I have not succeeded yet.
“G.H.S.” opined that “if radicals expect to change society and usher in a more perfect order through methods purely and exclusively educational, they probably will be educating from now until the last trumpet sounds.” As for getting enough party members to win control of the government in elections, “historic processes must be reversed and miracles must be wrought,” while the idea of organizing at industrial plants and the like and then building a new society was such that “they have another think [sic] coming.”
The reality, the writer concluded, was that “history reveals that progress is made through evolution and revolution” which, with examples like the American and French revolutions (though nothing was said about the horrendous excesses of the latter), “bring social improvement.” It was not a matter of organization, votes, education or prayer that brought fundamental change, he went on; instead, the dominant classes “are knocked down and dragged out when the classes beneath reach that point of exasperation where forbearance ceases to be a virtue, and a general uprising occurs.”
After adding that these revolts were either “spontaneous, unformulated and unorganized” or were the results of war, “G.H.S.” ended his essay by declaiming,
Education is a grand and necessary thing and must be given right of way. Evolution and revolution are what might be called life’s experiences and processes [events?]; from them comes the education that will fit the workers and enable them to take the social, political and economic institutions of society and hold them for the common good.
One can only imagine what “G.H.S.” thought when, just seven months later, the stock market crashed in New York City and the early stages of the Great Depression was ushered in. A reader in Los Angeles, meanwhile, may well have pondered the situation in the “open shop”, that is, largely non-union environment, in the city’s business world and where Republican politics, as in most of the rest of the country, ruled the roost through the entirety of the Roaring Twenties.
Another short front page article concerned the convening of the “American Negro Labor Conference,” to be held from the 10th to the 15th under the auspices of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black workers’ union led by the remarkable A. Philip Randolph, who founded the organization in 1925. It is hardly a shock that the mainstream newspapers in the Angel City provided no coverage of the gathering, while the African-American-owned California Eagle did provide some information about the conclave, which was actually held over three days, through the 12th.
The first day’s meeting was held at the Second Baptist Church, where Randolph, a noted orator, gave a keynote speech on “Problems and Future of the Negro Worker in American Industry,” which was deemed “a masterful effort” as “the huge crowd [was] held spelbound [sic] by the brilliant and forceful eloquence” of the union leader over the course of his hour-long address. On Monday, the gathering met at the Vernon public library where, during the day, there were two presentations, including one on “Negro Press and Negro Labor,” by Charlotta Bass of the Eagle, and another on “Labor and the Press,” by Lew Head, a journalist formerly of the Pasadena Star-News and contributing editor to The Open Forum.
On Monday night, the proceeding went to Jefferson High School, which a great many Black students attended during the period and where two ministers, Congregationalist H.B. Hawes and W.D. Carter of the Pasadena Baptist Church, spoke on “Religion and Labor” and “Negro Church and Negro Worker,” respectively. The third and final day was back at the Vernon Library with four talks given: “Education” by Dr. D. Scudder; “Industrial Education” from Floyd D. Covington; “Organized Labor and Negro Worker” by John S. Horn; and Randolph’s closing presentation on “Industrial Democracy and Negro Work.”
Notably, there was a reference to Randolph in the more liberal Los Angeles Record when he addressed the City Club, with the paper summarizing his talk as concerning the fact that “Black Americans are entitled to fair play and an opportunity to earn a decent living,” an argument that “was given a sympathetic hearing and was followed by many questions.” One of these concerned whether there was a superior race, to which the union leader replied there was no such thing, though there were superior individuals within any race. The head of a union that represented some 70% of all porters and which was recently chartered by the American Federation of Labor told the assembled,
With their labor and their spiritual strength, [African-Americans] have helped to build the nation. They are entitled to be rated and judged according to their personal worth and value.
Speaking of The Record, a short commentary in the “News and Views” section by insurance agent Primm D. Noel, lauded the paper, which was part of the Scripps-McRae-Howard chain. Noel opined that “if this country is to be saved from plutocracy,” it would be due largely to such papers and chains as these. Even though he decried the position of the Record on issues like Prohibition and the “war” in Owens Valley between some of its ranchers and the Los Angeles Aqueduct’s operators within the Angel City, Noel noted “it can always be found on the site of the common people.”
As an example, he continued, the paper “has already opened its guns against the crooked and powerful interests” that he claimed were conspiring to take control of Los Angeles government in upcoming election. Noel praised the Record for naming names among the wealthy and powerful and concluded that “no voter can afford to be without this fearless, almost radical paper, so as to know the facts and be able to vote right [or would that be left?]”
Noel also devoted space in his column to population control, with birth control advocacy considered a very radical matter in those days; the new governor of New York who “is much like his predecessor cousin, though he poses as a Democrat” and who, while not a Socialist, had at least “decided social ideas”—this being future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (distant cousin of previous President Theodore), who was considered quite radical by the conservatives during his long tenure in the White House; and the inconsistency about positions by the Hearst newspaper syndicate, which ran the local Examiner, concerning the issues of drugs versus alcohol.
In his “Making Paupers?” piece, Noel wrote that “one of the evils arising from our modern, humane, Christian civilization is the thwarting of natural law, which endeavors to eliminate the weak and unfit.” He went to suggest that nature had no thought for those who were deemed “unfit” and that it “ruthlessly crushes them in attempting to preserve and improve the race or species.” While he offered that the county’s Outdoor Relief Department “is doing wonderful work in assisting the unfortunate poor, and the sickly and subnormal,” he added that the financial impositions on taxpayers was “approaching the breaking point.”
He cited a preeminent issue being “that the Mexicans constitute a large part of the load, away out of proportion to their percentage of the population.” Noel looked to pin a large share of the blame for this influx of migrants from our southern neighbor on certain groups, while deciding that utilizing Black dialect was a good way to make a point:
the Chamber of Commerce, the railroads, the large horticultural and agricultural interests, and other big exploiters of cheap labor are assisting in a constant influx each year of thousands of these undesirables.
The pauperizing effect of regular doles is well illustrated by a Negro recipient who phoned into [Outdoor Relief?] headquarters when her regular supply of groceries was a little delayed, with this complaint: “I’s been tradin’ with the county for twelve years, and would like better service.”
These opinions just go to show, once again, that racism can certainly be found among those on the left side of the political realm.
The “From Varied Viewpoints” page has a letter to editor Clinton J. Taft, who resigned from the pulpit of a Congregational church in Los Angeles in 1923 to become the regional ACLU branch director, a position he held for twenty years, from a 75-year old, Channing Severance, who defined himself as “a confirmed pessimist who sees no hope for the mass of mankind to escape the conditions which produce general complaint all over the world” and, after detailing why he became that way, he declined to subscribe to The Open Forum. As it was, Severance was not long for this world, as the retired carpenter, who wrote that he was “a financial failure,” died about a year-and-a-half later and was able to escape the “bondage to monopolies and the money power which can never be broken.”
Also of note is a short piece from the Socialist Labor Party, which quoted James Madison as suggesting that “the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few,” though he added that, in such a case, “we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.” This seems like sage advice for our time, but, in The Open Forum, 94 years ago, readers were urged to pick up a copy, for just 15 cents, of “James Madison and Karl Marx,” courtesy of the National Executive Committee of the party and available at the party’s Los Angeles office in the Douglas Building (still standing today) at Spring and 3rd streets. Meanwhile, there was an invitation to attend an entertainment by the “Bulgarian Branch” of the part at the Y.W.C.A. International Institute in Boyle Heights, the campus of which is a City of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.
On the back page are lists of upcoming events and meetings including those of the Los Angeles Open Forum, held on Sunday evenings at the Walker Auditorium Building on Grand Avenue south of 7th Street, and where upcoming talks were to be on “Permanent Prosperity” by a Proletarian Party national executive committee member, Harold M. Soul, and “Poverty, Politics Pessimism and Propaganda” the UCLA senior Chester Williams, who spent most of 1928 in Europe and was to share his views on conditions there. Other organizations listing vents included the I.W.W.; I.L.D.; the Socialist Party; the International Brotherhood Welfare Association; the Free Workers’ Forum at the Libertarian Center in Boyle Heights (which had more than its share of left-leaning residents); and the Universal Book Shop, which was on Spring near 2nd and which offered a circulating library.
Finally, there is an interesting short essay by Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian pastor who was a founder to the ACLU’s predecessor, the National Civil Liberties Bureau, and a perennial candidate for office under the Socialist Party banner, including for mayor of New York City in 1929. Thomas, who went on to mount a half-dozen campaigns for president between 1928 and 1948, wrote about the recently inaugurated (on 4 March) President Herbert Hoover. Distinguished from “the great Calvin” Coolidge, who was generally known for his short work days and unquestioning support of big business, Hoover, the writer avowed, “was not Wall Street’s first choice” as chief executive.
Thomas added that the new president and his former boss—Hoover was Secretary of Commerce under both Coolidge and Warren Harding (for whom, incidentally, Thomas worked as a paper boy when Harding ran a small-town newspaper in Ohio)—had a relationship such that “there is little love” between them. While he was scored for leaving “the slipping and senile Uncle Andy [Andrew] Mellon” as Secretary of the Treasury, Hoover, in the Socialist Party standard-bearer’s eyes, had the advantage that “no man ever had better training” in economics than him, even if “few men made a worse campaign” than the president’s 1928 effort.
Thomas concluded that Hoover “would have to act as Coolidge did not,” not just with respect to the American economy, but with foreign affairs, which, of course, presidents have much more power than with domestic matters. In any case, it is notable that the Socialist added,
Neither is there any reason to believe this stock market prosperity, this wild orgy of profits and poverty can continue. The next four years will have to see conscious choices. What sort will Hoover make? How much strength has he? . . . [With respect to the election,] the fault is the American people’s. If they like to elect a man to the highest office without knowing his program on any vital subject, why should he worry?
The reason for concern was made crystal clear in late October as what Thomas said about the stock market bore out. The responses of Hoover, Mellon and other officials and the bank crisis of 1932 led to a resounding defeat to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the one-term president’s training could not prepare him for the maelstrom ahead.
We’ll look to offer more posts on the remaining issues of The Open Forum from the Museum’s collection and learn more about the small, but vocal, left fringe of Los Angeles and national politics, so be on the look out for those.