by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Today was one of those great days that began with sharing history in Los Angeles about a quartet of well-known art collectors (Henry Huntington, J. Paul Getty, Norton Simon and Eli Broad) and ended with a presentation on an area of Carbon Canyon in Chino Hills that, for thirty years, included a Jewish camp run by what was formerly known as The Workmen’s Circle, now The Worker’s Circle (TWC), a left-leaning fraternal organization concerned with progressive values and social justice.
The latter is the focus of this post with some background on the TWC in its early years of operation in Los Angeles. With a massive surge in immigration broadly in America during the late 19th and 20th centuries and, specifically, a significant population of Jews, including from Eastern Europe, the formation of Der Arbeter Ring, as it is known in Yiddish, the aims of the association were fueled by a burgeoning American industrial economy in which too many workers labored for low pay under dangerous conditions and lived in environments that were substandard and degrading.
The tensions of the emerging labor movement in conflict with employers included frequent strikes and a strong reactionary element in which, all too often, public and private police and National Guard troops were called out to quash the efforts of workers and labor organizers to seek better wages and working conditions. Moreover, some labor “agitators” identified with left-wing political movements, including Socialism, that led to such groups as the International Workers of the World and others being targeted by authorities as un-American and subversive.
In Los Angeles, the so-called “open shop,” meaning anti-union conditions in most businesses, was a powerful force that limited, though did not prevent, unions from gaining a major foothold through much of the early 20th century. The first local chapter of the TWC incorporated in September 1913, just a few years after the bombing by radical labor figures of the Times building and after Socialist Job Harriman nearly won the mayor’s office, came at a particularly important time in local politics and labor.
From early on, the local TWC combined a marked activism with socializing and community building. So, while members went on outings to such popular resort areas as Redondo Beach, Monrovia Canyon, Ganesha Park in Fullerton and Glen Oaks Park in Glendale, it pursued a variety of programs and initiatives for its many causes. For example, at the end of 1916, the Central Committee of the TWC sponsored a pair of talks on “Judaism and Socialism” and “Literature and Its Creators” by Morris Winchevsky, described in a notice as “the noted Jewish scholar, lecturer and Socialist leader” and “a Jewish idealist.”
A little over a week later, a couple of local branches took part in a Jewish Congress Conference at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue that included nearly thirty organizations, including unions, fraternal orders, Zionist associations, charitable efforts for Jews in other countries, the formation of a tuberculosis sanitarium that evolved into the City of Hope in Duarte, and others.
With the onset of World War I, dynamics changed, especially as the patriotism and conservatism that arose from America’s entry into the conflict meant a significant outgrowth of tension with left-leaning groups like the TWC. The Red Scare, in which leftist organizations were targeted by the American government, followed the war and involved, as one instance, the 2 January 1920 arrest in Fresno of Lewis Lieberman, who told officers that he was a Communist, an adherent of the International Workers of the World (the “Wobblies,” who were viewed as among the most entrenched of “agitators”) and a member of the TWC. His arrest was specifically for his I.W.W. associations, but the other two were of about the same level of concern for authorities.
One response to the Red Scare was the establishment of the American Civil Liberties Union, which sought to preserve First Amendment rights of free speech for leftist individuals and groups. The regional chapter of the ACLU published a newsletter called The Open Forum, issues of which have been highlighted several times on this blog. A key figure in the local group was Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel The Jungle was widely read for its expose of the meatpacking industry including the dehumanizing effect on workers of their treatment by company owners. Sinclair was long a resident of Los Angeles and a June 1924 talk included music from the TWC children’s chorus.
In 1925, a school board election became a heated issue as incumbent Frederick R. Feitshans was challenged by Clara Schechter, an attorney who a native of Russia, recently naturalized an American and a relatively new resident of Los Angeles. Coverage of her candidacy in the local press was nearly uniformly hostile with the Mid-Week News-Herald of 26 May stating that she was a Socialist and a member of the ACLU and TWC with the addition that they were “organizations which, as is well known, are opposed to true Americanism.”
It felt it important to state that Schechter had only been naturalized two-and-a-half-years prior and that she was born in Russia, while also attacking statements purported made in literature for her campaign that decried militaristic sentiment in schools. Moreover, the paper claimed that “her policies and ideas are directly contrary to those that have made the American school system what it is” and that it was necessary to defeat her candidacy “for the forwarding of true Americanism; for the protection of the patriotism and the high ideals of the public school,” though none of this elucidated and was, apparently, considered self-evident.
When Schechter secured enough votes in the primary to move to a run-off against Feitshans, the Highland Park News-Herald of the 29th, lamented that it was “due to the negligence of the all-American voter” that “this woman made a very strong showing,” not considering whether it was possible that her messaging resonated with a large proportion of the population. Her platform was adjudged to be “a lot of rot” and “the sort of stuff a certain class [agitators] feeds upon,” making her “dangerous.” As for Socialism and the ACLU and TWC, it was understood, the paper stated, that “those who are familiar with the disturbing element in this country know what these organizations stand for.”
The sole liberal paper in town, the Record observed that attacks on Schechter by the likes of the Rev. Robert “Fighting Bob” Shuler, the bulldog pastor of the Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Times, actually served to work in her favor, at least according to statements from her campaign staff. Supporters rebuffed the insistence that she was in favor of “sovietizing” schools and introducing unionized teachers, while opponents claimed that the candidate “stood for the elimination of ‘race discrimination in the schools,” and decried “race segregation.”
Schechter responded that she was not aware of the contents of literature published to promote her and she also called the statement that she’d been naturalized just 2 1/2 years prior misleading. She noted that she was a teacher in Canada and New York, as well as California, and studied law in Canada before completing the law study course at the University of Southern California before being admitted to the bar in February 1920.
Her supporters added that “such progress as she has made is the result of her own initiative and energy, as she was a poor girl and has had to make her own” way in the world. The Record observed that Feitshans was a school desk manufacturer and insinuated that, though he recused himself from votes on the district order his products, was “a bad precedent that might result in dangerous complications.”
The Times of 31 May profiled Schechter and played up her purported political affinity and memberships in the ACLU and TWC, noting that the former was one in which “Upton Sinclair is prominent.” It asserted that she sought to manage schools by committees of teachers and high school students, a “soviet platform” pronounced by a board candidate from 1923 “with the backing of all the Reds and Radicals.” It acknowledged her denial of knowledge of the literature promoting her campaign and ended by stating “she is interested in welfare work and is indorsed by the Central Labor Council.”
When the results were announced, Feitshans cruised to an easy victory, winning about twice as many votes as Schechter, but the amount of attention and attacks directed at her were clearly unnerving to much of the political establishment and media allies in the City of Angels during a period in which conservatism generally dominated local, state and national elections.
Other interesting projects included TWC’s efforts to support “industrial music,” meaning orchestras and other ensembles comprised of musicians working for businesses. Nathan H. Alterman was cited in a 1925 Times article as having given up “in desperation his self-organized cloak-makes orchestra in the Bronx in New York City, but, then living in Los Angeles, “is now developing a workers’ music club in the organization known as the Workmen’s Circle.” Notably it was reported that the music bureau of the powerful Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, a vigorous promoter of the “open shop,” was supportive of Alterman’s goals.
In May 1926, TWC officials, including Harry Scherr, chair of its district committee, supported efforts of United Jewish Appeal in getting support from workers for raising funds to assist Jews in Eastern Europe who were starving, with some $200,000 sought locally for an effort that intended to raise $20 million nationally for that cause as well as “to help rebuild Palestine as the homeland of the Jew.”
In 1928, Jews in Pasadena held a dance at the Crown City’s Masonic Temple as part of the local chapter of the Jewish Consumptive Relief Association’s efforts at what became the City of hope and refreshments were served by the TWC’s ladies’ auxiliary. In September, the Walt Whitman branch of the organization hosted speaker David Ziskind to discuss the problems of American military intervention in Nicaragua.
The Record of 11 June 1929 reported that the TWC was invited to join in a banquet held by the Socialist Party at the Elite Banquet Hall, on Flower Street near 6th Street, in which the attendees were “to celebrate the victory of the British labor party and the polling of 70,000 votes for each of the Socialist candidates for the board of education in Los Angeles’ recent municipal election.” Sinclair was the keynote speaker for the festivities.
September 1929 brought together more than a dozen Jewish organizations, including the TWC, to take part in a national People’s Tool Campaign to assist “declassed Jews in Russia” during Stalin’s continuing reign of terror in the Soviet Union. A concert at the Trinity Auditorium was to be held the following month as it was reported that “hundred of thousands of Jews in
Russia are yearning to become producing workers and that training and tools” were required to assist them. In December, a TWC chapter joined a Libertarian organization to host “a protest meeting on the subject of Russia’s political prisoners” as part of an Open Forum, the term employed by the ACLU for its meetings and as the name of its publication, as noted
above.
In October 1930, as Sinclair sought, for the second time (his first effort was in 1926) to win election as California governor, a rally was held for him at the Trinity Auditorium, with the TWC choir among the entertainers. Sinclair left the Socialist Party for the Democratic Party in his 1934 gubernatorial campaign, in which he garnered some 880,000 votes, a dramatic showing compared to the 46,000 and 50,000 votes he received in the prior two attempts. Finally,
in December 1930, a Progressive Loan Association of the Workmen’s Circle, Inc. was established with four directors who were authorized to issue $25,000 in stock with 1000 shares having a par value of $25.
These tidbits of the early history of The Worker’s Circle in Los Angeles, covering not quite two decades of activity are a little-known, but very interesting aspect of Jewish organizational life, especially from a left-wing political perspective, at a time when the population of Jews in the City of Angels was rising dramatically, but when the era was one of strong conservatism that was at great odds with the tents of the TWC.
Notably, the camp in Carbon Canyon included youngsters having lessons in speaking Yiddish, instruction in Jewish musical traditions, but also political discussions with Socialism being the core, albeit with a strong anti-Communist bent. As Leonard Friedman, who attended the camp in the late 1930s, told his daughter, “Everyone argued politics. Everyone participated. Everyone ate latkes.” In other words, leisure mixed with political and social activism there and elsewhere within the TWC orbit, little reported as it was in the mainstream Los Angeles press during those early years.