Los Angeles 1954–1957

“California, here I come....” —Buddy DeSylva and Joseph Meyer, co-author, Al Jolson

The long drive from Chicago went without major hitches and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing parts of the country I’d never seen before as I made connections to the fabled Route 66 of song and barrelled on due west through Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, Arizona, and on to Cal-I-for-ni-ay. The scenery was spectacular. I felt like a 1950s Tom Joad although my prospects were slightly better then those of the characters of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.”

My first tasks in LA were: 1. To find place to live. 2. Get a job. 3. Make contact with the Socialist Party. I didn’t want to plop my bindle in the center of downtown, as I had just dropped off a hitch-hiker who had been riding with me from Texas in the middle of Skid Row So I picked up the LA Times and saw a classified ad for a single men’s rooming house with cooking privileges a couple miles west in a residential area. So that’s where I camped out until I found employment and then look for a studio apartment of my own. Finding a job wasn’t all that easy in the mild recession that marked early 1954. I tried for both blue and white collar possibilities that I saw in newspaper classified ads with no results, even a nibble. Finally, about three weeks after I had hit Tinseltown, I visited a private employment agency and through it nailed a job as a proofreader at the Times-Mirror Press, an affiliate of the city’s main morning newspaper, the Los Angeles Times which also operated an afternoon daily, the Los Angeles Mirror.

PHONE BOOK PROOFREADING

TMP was a commercial printing company with a primary mission of printing telephone directories for Los Angeles and for a wide range of cities throughout Southern California and beyond. TMP had its own composing room with a proof room with about fifty or more employees. Our job was to read galley proofs of both new white and yellow page listings plus display ads which were a major money-making feature of the Yellow Pages. The department was pretty equally divided into male and female readers. Except for Ellen Thun who was of Korean descent it was then an almost lily-white operation except for a few Latinos. There were no blacks in the proof room nor in the skilled crafts of the mechanical trades, not to speak of people in the editorial or commercial advertising departments of the newspapers. Reading of new listings of names, addresses and numbers was boring, especially in the alphabetized white pages, but the pay and benefits were quite good for those times, so our proofreaders were well-educated with a good number like myself holding college degrees.

The Times enterprises were notoriously anti-union and Los Angeles was an “open shop town,” much of it due to the bombing of the Times building in 1910 when the publisher was Harrison Gray Otis (1857–1917) who hated organized labor with a passion and was out to destroy it. Check Google’s excellent histories of that period. In 1954 a California politician named William G. Bonnelli wrote an expose of the Times dynasty which included Otis’s son-in-law Harry Chandler (1864–1944). It was titled “Billion Dollar Blackjack,” which I read at the time and recommend. Harry’s son Norman Chandler (1899–1973) was the publisher in 1954 and was no less anti-union. But there was one catch. Hearst published the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner downtown which was unionized. So whenever the Herald-Ex contracts included increased wages for its people, Chandler would match them dollar-for-dollar for the Times conglomerate lest its own higher priced wage slaves would develop pro-union sentiments. And it worked. Most Times employees knew the ploy and didn’t pay union dues. So we were basically free riders on the backs of organized labor further down LA’s Broadway.

I made friends with all the other readers whose politics ranged from liberal to conservative, with a strongly partisan Republican top management in the Times dynasty. Howard Voeltz, our proof room foreman, even did precinct work for the GOP during election times in some eastern suburb. My closest TMP friends for many years were Cyril Zimmerman, then still an SWP Trotskyist former merchant seaman, and Ellen Thun, a Democratic liberal, who later married and lived well into their 90s.

ECHO PARK BECOMES HOME

Now that I was gainfully employed came the hunt for more permanent lodging. It was quite easy. I looked up old Whitman House friend Bob Camp and his wife Dolores, who rented a one bedroom apartment on Echo Park Boulevard, about a half-mile north of Sunset Boulevard, not all that far from Downtown. So I ended up acquiring a small studio on the hillside overlooking Echo Park Lake on Echo Park Boulevard a block or two south of Sunset, with plenty of free street parking further up the hill from my apartment house complex. I soon discovered Echo Park Co-op located near where the Camps lived. It was a full service small grocery managed by a solid co-op man Clyde Johnson, so I immediately bought a few shares, only one being a voting share in elections and membership meetings. As the store depended on volunteer help I contributed my labor for inventory some Saturdays over the next few years. Other active members included SP members Bill and May Briggs who lived in the area at the time, another SP member who came from Milwaukee and knew Mayor Frank Zeidler, and Dora Keyser, a long time Los Angeles anarcho-pacifist. The larger Pioneer Market dominated the corner of Sunset and Echo Park Boulevards, that was handy for quick grocery stops, although I remained mostly loyal to the Co-op. Incidentally, Echo Park Co-op was once managed by Reino Hannula, son of a Finnish Socialist family in Gardner, Mass., who quit to get a college education at 37 at UCLA and eventually became a professor of computer science in San Luis Obispo. In his retirement years Reino published a quarterly English language magazine called Finn Heritage on which I served as associate editor during its existing years. As a young man he had been a Yipsel and pacifist and a WWII conscientious objector.

SOCIALIST PARTY, LOCAL LOS ANGELES

Since I was eager to transfer into Local Los Angeles, I stopped by to see Bill and May Briggs at their hilltop house. They were a sweet, generous couple, then with their son Bobby about ten years old, and we immediately established a close comradeship and friendship that lasted for the remainder of their lives. Bill had been an SP member since his New York days and was a leading activist as a shoe salesman in the Oakland General Strike of 1947. Both were of a Jewish background and for a short time Mae had been a young Oehlerite Trotskyist along with Chicago union leader Sid Lens during the 1930s. I was also eager to meet Vern Davidson and his wife Margaret who I had met at the 1952 SP Convention in Cleveland. Their marriage had ended since then because Vern was gay, although they remained good friends until Vern passed away. Margaret took back her maiden name Phair and later preferred to be called Maggie which I’ll use from now in these Memoirs.

That opportunity came quite soon as the LA Yipsel which included Maggie and Vern had organized a public SP meeting at the Party’s headquarters at 1904 Arlington Avenue at Washington Boulevard on the West Side. Featured at the meeting was a talk by Matilda Robbins, a recently retired LA social worker who was best known as Matilda Rabiniowitz (1887–1963), as a spectacular IWW organizer in the East from 1912–1915. She led a successful IWW strike at a Little Falls, NY textile plant of mostly women workers and had also organized auto workers in Detroit, which laid a groundwork for UAW successes in the 1930s. I soon became fast friends with Matilda until her death in 1963 in Berkeley, CA. (Lot more on Matilda Rabinowitz in Google worth pursuing.) She had been executive secretary of Local LA from 1944–’47. Recent research indicates that Matilda had been an LA contact person for the Libertarian Socialist League in the early 1950s.

Charles (Charlie) Curtiss (1908–1993), another mainstay of the Local, was a printer by trade at the Herald-Ex and an ITU member. He had been a long time member of the Cannon Trotskyist movement who had been a confidante of Leon Trotsky in Mexico before his murder. Charlie spoke fluent Spanish and acted as Trotsky’s go-between to his Mexican comrades as one of the conditions of his Mexican asylum was not to associate with them directly. Charlie had quit the SWP and joined the SP in 1951 because of a change in his Marxist perspective. He no longer supported the bolshevik idea of a vanguard party, since he had come to accept Marx’s own analysis of the necessity of a mass worker’s party to lead the transition from capitalism to socialism, as he explained to me. In other words, he believed that “the liberation of the working class was the task of the workers themselves.” His wife, the former Lillian Elstein had been a YPSL and became a Trotskyist after meeting Charlie and remained one for the rest of her life after her husband had decided to rejoin the SP. So Charlie would bring his mother-in-law Fanny Elstein, a long-time immigrant Jewish SP member, regularly to Local LA’s membership meetings, which was rather nice of him. (Lots about Charles Curtiss in Google but I’ve found no photos.)

I don’t remember if David McReynolds, a leading young socialist/pacifist and a gay man, who later ran as the SP’s candidate for President in 1980 and 2000, was at the Robbins meeting but I’ve seen plenty of him in the many years that have passed since then. I do recall that Vern brought his good friend Stu Perkoff, an anarchist poet, who lived in the radical beach front Bohemia of Ocean Park/Venice where most of our LA Yipsels also lived at the time. Local LA’s membership hovered around a hundred or more comrades during my six years in the area. There was a large component of hundreds of Eastern European Jews around the needle trades embodied in their ethnic left labor circles who were employed in the area’s large scale garment industry. Prominent was Sam Oshry, a Party member who worked as an insurance agent full time for the historic social democratic Workmen’s Circle.

SOCIALIST NEWSLETTER

I worked a lot with Charlie Curtiss during my spare time from work at the Arlington Street headquarters which consisted of an office and a meeting hall. Some of this was during morning hours at times when I worked the evening shift at TMP. We established a monthly newspaper for the Party which it hadn’t had for a time called the Socialist Newsletter. It was issued as a mimeographed publication at first with the assistance of Party membership secretary Ernestine Kettler, a woman my mother’s age, who cut the stencils from the typed articles Charlie and I and others wrote. We engaged Matilda Robbins as a regular columnist she called “The Barb.” She was a sharp talented writer who enjoyed wielding her caustic pen against corrupt pompous labor union bureaucrats and pretentious liberal politicians as well as corporate bosses. All these years Matilda also wrote columns for the IWW’s Industrial Worker though no longer a member and for the British Independent Labor Party’s newspaper, a revolutionary remnant that James Keir Hardie founded that existed alongside the reformist British Labor Party which had stemmed from it. Pacifist and left socialist Fenner Brockway (1888–1988). was a long time ILP national secretary before joining the much larger Labor Party as a veteran MP for many years, particularly involved with the Black African freedom movements fighting for that great continent’s independence from European colonialism.

Comrade Curtiss, being a union printer and knowing my own typographical background, and I soon converted the Socialist Newsletter to letterpress. Charlie knew a small commercial print shop in downtown LA owned by two brothers from an SP family background that provided us the Allied Printing Trades Union label. Charlie during his spare time would go to that shop and reset our typewritten manuscripts into type on the plant’s Linotype machine. I would assist in doing some of the page makeup by hand during my off hours. Having the free use of these facilities enabled us to use engraved cuts from photographs to make our newsletter look professional and more attractive. This enabled me to keep my printing skills up to code which helped prepare my way to join LA Typographical Union 174 in 1957 through Charlie’s intercession.

Along the way we were joined on the Newsletter staff from a new recruit Frank Bristol, a WWII Naval officer, who had worked as a journalist for the Hearst Press in Mexico as a staff reporter who was fluent in Spanish. He was there in 1938 when President Laszlo Cardenas nationalized the US-operated oil industry with an unrealized threat by FDR to invade for its recovery for the empire. He rode on Cardenas’s Presidential train in that period and was under suspicion by the Mexican officials as a Yankee spy in his reportorial duties. But as Frank explained to me during a drinking bout together later that he loved Cardenas and what he was doing, although he himself was “only a mere Hearstling,” sobbing through his tears. At this stage of his life Frank was working mostly factory jobs in LA and he became a valuable asset to our Newsletter as a writer and co-editor. His girl friend was a Finnish-American Aune Heikkila from Michigan who lived in Venice and also joined the SP and maintained our mailing labels for posting our Newsletter. It is somewhat intriguing to me that the two Finnish-American women who joined the SP in those years came from a conservative Finnish church background, unlike me who came from socialist labor origins. The other Finnish woman comrade in Local LA was school teacher Ingrid Markul, married to another comrade, machinist John Markul, who had been a socialist revolutionary in his native Yugoslavia.

I’M ELECTED CHAIR OF LA SP

It didn’t take long for our Local party to elect me the SP Chair for Los Angeles County. Of course this doubled my work load, being both Party Chair and Newsletter co-editor and workhorse. But I was young and had lots of energy so besides my TMP job, my political responsibilities took up most of my waking hours. This didn’t deter me from occasionally getting blasted at the neighborhood bars around Echo Park and the seedy Mexican gin mills on Temple Street near Figueroa, the Old Carioca and New Carioca owned by partners Joe Comeau and Joe Rodriguez. This also provided me some sorry semblance of a love life with Latin ladies of the evening who hung around the Old Carioca at the corner of Temple and Fig. Sometimes I’d join our other young comrades around the beach towns of Ocean Park and Venice for house parties which were fun and where the beer and wine flowed freely. Sunday mornings we’d lay on the beach, weather permitting, to recover from the Saturday night bacchanalia. Dave McReynold’s termite-ridden beach cottage was a favorite on the party scene. Other younger Party members in the Beach community included brothers Jerry and Johnny Blatt, Rex and Barbara Backus, Marsha Berman and Roberta Schulman, all UCLA alumni. Johnny Blatt married Roberta (Bobbi) Rosner who moved from New York to live in this socialist beehive of a community.

DEBS CENTENNIAL

The year 1955 marked the hundredth birthday of our movement’s monumental early hero, the SP’s Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926) who was our five-time Presidential candidate and an important labor leader and pioneer of industrial unionism. So we engaged the Local in holding a major centennial celebration of his anniversary year. We reserved a good-sized auditorium just south of downtown, solicited speakers for the program and did a professional publicity campaign, with recognition by the Los Angeles city government. We did get some decent commercial media coverage and did a job for a good turnout from the labor and progressive movements. The noted Socialist author Upton Sinclair was still alive and living in Buckeye, Arizona. I wrote to him inviting him to be a feature speaker at our happening. He courteously demurred as a caregiver for his ailing wife which precluded travel. I also sent press releases in Finnish to the Finnish-American press, focussing on the social democratic Raivaaja and IWW’s Industrialisti. I omitted sending any to the CP-oriented Työmies-Eteenpäin because of my bitterness toward the Communist Party. Actually, my Finnish press releases brought several old Finnish Socialists, plus an older IWW couple to the event. One day I received a letter while working at SP headquarters from an elderly Southerner who had been a fellow inmate of Debs at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary where Debs served his time for his courageous resistance to WWI. He spoke highly of our comrade as beloved by all the other prisoners as a wonderful, warm and generous human being. Many of us have read that the day Debs walked out of the prison after his pardon by President Harding, an enormous roar of support and love welled from within the penitentiary walls as he was leaving.

Matilda Robbins was the natural mistress of ceremonies at the Centennial with a packed house. Perfect for the task. I don’t recall all the speakers but I imagine our California State Chairperson Bill Briggs had to be one of them. David McReynolds eloquently represented our SP youth on the platform. Another younger comrade, Glenn Buell, represented the labor movement as an organizer for the Printing Specialties Division of the Printing Pressmen’s Union. (Glenn, a native California son whose pioneer grandfather had founded the town of Buellton, and his Japanese-American wife Sayuri, a talented ethnic dancer, became good friends during my LA years.) Our Centennial was a total success.

SAVING SPANISH SEAMEN FROM FRANCO

One day Gordon Smith, an SPer and activist in the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, relayed the word from his father, an ACLU active, that a Spanish Navy training vessel on maneuver in Los Angeles had three of its seamen jump ship and flee to Mexico. They had been pursued and caught by US Navy Shore Patrolmen, brought back from Tijuana, and were being held at the Naval station in San Ysidro. Since crossing the border to nail them was an illegal act, the ACLU was hot on the young men’s case. We put out an emergency edition of our Socialist Newsletter in support of the young sailors knowing that if fascist Spain ever got their hands on them it could mean their deaths or at least long term imprisonment. We did our best to publicize support to release the seamen to return to seek asylum in Mexico. We had a sizeable community of Spanish Anarchists living in Los Angeles who had fled Spain when Franco had won the Civil War. This community brought food, clothing and money to the young men locked up in San Ysidro. Finally the Free the Sailors campaign paid off. Republican Mexico, no friend of Franco Spain, expressed no opposition for giving them asylum and residency rights. And the Navy’s illegal seizure of them in foreign territory was successfully defeated. So the young men went to Mexico in freedom and the training vessel returned to Spain without them. I’m proud of the efforts of our Local SP in this successful campaign.

BENEFIT CONCERT FOR SPANISH REFUGEE AID

This campaign gave us contact with the Spanish Anarchists in the Los Angeles Basin. So together with them and the IWW, our Local decided to hold a benefit for Spanish Refugee Aid, an international agency dedicated to assist radical refugees from the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista (POUM), or Partit Obrer d'Unificació Marxista in Catalán, a non-Stalinist revolutionary group and the anarchist Confederacion Nacional Trabadores (CNT) and Federacion Anarquista Iberia (FAI). Thousands from all of these were living in squalid refugee camps in the south of France. Director of Spanish Refugee Aid at the time was Sonia Orwell, widow of English Socialist writer George Orwell who had fought in the ranks of POUM in Catalonia during the revolution and civil war. We figured the USSR was providing assistance to CP refugees from Spain so our efforts were to assist emigres of the non-Stalinist left. We organized a concert at a nice venue in Los Angeles featuring classical music, including the teenage daughter of an exiled anarchist family who was a fine pianist. We cleared about $300 at the door which we decided would go to POUM and Anarchist refugees since the Socialist International was providing assistance to Socialist Party and other social democratic exiles. Our benefit was a success for a time in which leftist causes were not all that popular.

McCARTHYISM WANES, SMITH ACT OVERTURNED

The worst of the witch-hunt against suspected Reds subsided somewhat during 1950s when Joe McCarthy (1908–1957} even suggested the Army Security and the President as communist sympathizers and was taken apart by the wit and elegant probing by Army Attorney Joseph Welch at Army-McCarthy investigative hearings in 1954 which dispatched the malevolent Senator from Wisconsin to political oblivion and eased the fears that had permeated the Left for several years. When grossly insulted by McCarthy, Welch’s famous televised retort was “Have you no sense of decency?”: Another significant victory for civil liberties was the US Supreme Court’s overturning of the Smith Act and the freeing of CP prisoners and the dropping of pending cases of others. The original guilty verdicts against the Party leaders was partially based on the mention of revolutionary violence in early 19th Century Marxist tracts since the courts couldn’t prove that the current CP was advocating the overthrow of the US government by force and violence. This ancient theoretical argument wasn’t seen relevant in the here and now of the 1950s. The worst of state repression thus lost its edge and a freer political environment began to emerge.

At the same time our own comrade Vern Davidson ended up going to the Federal penitentiary for his conscientious objection against being drafted in the Korean War that had ended in 1953. Just because as an atheist he did not base his humanitarian plea on belief in a supreme being. David McReynolds, still then a Christian believer but on principle standing up for Vern’s position, fell through the military’s cracks and ended up moving to New York where he became editor of the anti-war magazine Liberation. Soon after he went to work on the staff of the War Resisters League where he was employed for over forty years before his retirement. To this day, David is involved in anti-war work, socialist politics and writing. Vern told me an amusing story just before he disappeared for a couple of years into an Arizona pen. His father, an old railroad man, was approached by a fellow worker: “Was that your boy the papers say is refusing to be drafted.” Vern’s Dad apprehensively conceded this. “Good, it’s about time somebody told the guv’ment to go to hell!”

EISENHOWER NO ANGEL

Although President Eisenhower was wise enough not to involve the United States in a large land war in Asia during his two terms in office as Communist Ho Chi Minh and his Indo-Chinese peasant army were taking the measure of the French colonialist army’s desperate attempt to maintain its foothold in Asia following WWII, he served America’s empire in other ways.

CIA OVERTHROW OF DEMOCRACY
IN GUATEMALA, IRAN

In 1953 Eisenhower and the CIA, with his staffers, anti-communist ideologue staffers John Foster and Allen Dulles, orchestrated a coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala for his popular land reforms that helped the country’s peasantry The military coup installed the rightist dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas which who along with similar successors ruled the country again for the benefit of Yankee capital from the North. The same year the CIA and British intelligence overthrew the democratically chosen secular government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh who in 1951 had nationalized the oil industry run by British capital to benefit the country’s own people instead of the profit greed of the UK’s oil barons. The plotters installed the royal dynasty of Mohammad Rega Shah Pahlevi who gloried in palatial opulence with the backup of his secret police force Savak, whose brutality was no less than that of the Gestapo and KGB. And foreign oil capital was back raking in the bucks from the black gold of Iran. In 1979 the Shah and his regime were overthrown and an Anti-Western theocracy replaced it. Iran’s underground secular left was an early part of that revolution but was consumed and sidelined by the powers of the Mullahs.

GARY POWERS AND U-2 INCIDENT

On May 1, 1960 the Russians shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory in a dramatic Cold War incident. The Eisenhower Administration denied it as a spy plane, but the pilot Francis Gary Powers was captured alive and the plane itself was brought down nearly intact with all its surveillance paraphanalia. In addition, Powers made a complete confession to the Soviets and apologized for his actions. Our government’s lie was a huge embarrassment to it. Adlai Stevenson was our UN Ambassador and repeated the lie before the real facts were established. It’s no secret that both Cold War opponents spied on one another but this publicity ruined our credibility in making public statements about its actions. I can recall when Nikita Khrushchev once jovially told Richard Nixon: “While your spies are reading our secret documents in Washington, our spies are reading your secret documents in Moscow. Haw, Haw!” Powers received a ten-year prison sentence but was freed in a 1962 prisoner exchange with KGB Colonel Rudolf Abel, real name Vilyam Fisher, who US Intelligence had arrested in New York earlier as a Soviet spy and was serving a stiffer sentence than Powers. Main difference between the two men was that the clueless Powers had blabbed all over the place while the cool, seasoned pro Abel had kept his mouth shut throughout.

BAD MARRIAGE; MAMMA AND IRMA MOVE TO L. A.

(I invited a disaster when I exchanged couples messages in the Los Angeles Mirror classified pages. At 29 I thought I should be getting married and become a pater familia. So I met this attractive Puerto Rican divorcee my own age with a ten-year-old son, and after a brief romance of a few week’s infatuation which I mistook as love, we flew to Las Vegas and hitched in a quick civil ceremony in one of its instant marriage mills. Big mistake. I was in for dealing with a manic depressive (a term which was new to me, now called bi-polar) for a year which totally drained me emotionally. We broke up with a divorce. The settlement cost me some formidable bucks but fortunately no alimony payments. Enough said as I began life anew.)

Mamma and Irma came to join me in Los Angeles in the second half of the 1950s decade. Mamma had to retire from her housekeeping job at the Dragotti’s as she turned 62 from her crippling arthritis. Fortunately, Federal legislation had recently included domestic workers under the Social Security Act which would provide her a modest income for the remainder of her life. The first winter of her retirement she had been bedridden most of the time because of the severe arthritis pains. Her young Finnish roomer had to bring her filled kerosene container up from the basement to the second floor apartment to heat the place because she could no longer do so. Irma wrote to me from Boston that she was thinking of applying for a civil service job as medical secretary at the Fort Devens army base in Ayer and move back to live with Mamma in Fitchburg for an easier commute to work although she enjoyed being a Bostonian. I suggested a better idea. Why not move to Los Angeles as the warm California climate might prove more healthful to her arthritis? Moving back to the dullsville of Fitchburg wasn’t all that inviting after experiencing the cultural advantages of Boston for several years.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

Harry’s IWW uncle Antti Saikkonen in a lumber camp

So that’s what happened. Irma took driving lessons, got her license, and bought a car for the long trek across the continent. My mother took it hard inasmuch as she had only lived in Massachusetts since her voyage from Finland in 1915 and would miss the Finnish community she knew so well and the many good family friends we’d made within the past 30 years. With the move, most of them she’d never see again. (Mamma had been to California shortly before as I had bought her a round trip plane ticket to visit here, the only airplane ride of her life. During the two-week trip I took her on a Greyhound bus trip up the West Coast all the way to Oregon. We took a side trip to Astoria where she met her aged Finnish cousin Otto Toivanen for the first time since she was about 13 in Finland as her brother Antti Saikkonen accompanied the Toivanen brothers, Matti and Otto, when they migrated to the United States in about 1908. Otto’s wife Helmi had died since I had first visited them in 1949.

I had rented a one-bedroom apartment in LA’s Boyle Heights for us to live from a socialist comrade Abe Plotkin and his wife Millie who owned an apartment house on the East Side. My TMP job had moved from the Times building at First and Broadway downtown to Soto Street near Olympic in Boyle Heights so now I had an easier commute to work which I could even walk. I now worked the swing shift as I was taking day classes at Los Angeles State College on the East Side toward earning a secondary school teacher’s credentials. The college was situated off the east-bound San Bernardino Freeway, which I could easily reach by bus or car.

Mamma and Irma moved in upon their arrival and shared the back bedroom while I slept on the living room couch. Irma found a medical secretary’s job almost immediately at Children’s Hospital in Hollywood. But the commute from Boyle Heights to Hollywood was almost impossible and a few weeks later they rented an apartment near West Hollywood. I myself moved to City Terrace a short distance away east, renting a room with kitchen privileges with a middle-aged bachelor named Willie Reimann who operated a small rooming house in his old family home. There was a bus stop across the street for easy access to both my job and the LA State campus. I lived there until my departure to San Francisco in 1960. The change proved beneficial to Mamma as the warm climate reduced her arthritis pains considerably so she was able to walk again without a cane for a few years. On warm, sunny weekends Irma would drive her to the wonderful Southern California beaches which expedited her healing process.

I JOIN INTERNATIONAL TYPOGRAPHICAL UNION

In November 1957 I realized a dream of many years. I became a member of Local 174, Los Angeles Typographical Union through the good efforts of SP Comrade Charles Curtiss, a longtime member. He introduced me to Joe Aubuchon, the local president, who had me take a proofreading test which I passed with flying colors. I was accepted as a full-fledged member “under conditions of amnesty” whereby I had to make an effort to organize for the union at the unorganized Times-Mirror Press. The union had made no serious attempt to organize Times printers in years. I was on my own so the best I could do was to compile a list of potential union sympathizers if ever the ITU was to make a serious organizing drive. My only concrete accomplishment was to sign up two good proofreader friends to become dues-paying union members so they didn’t feel they were “free riders” in a non-union shop. The only promise I gave to Joe Aubuchon was that I wouldn’t take a travelling card to a stronger union local right after being sworn to membership. So I stayed three more years at TMP before picking up that traveller.

DEBATE WITH COMMUNIST PARTY

One of my most memorable events during my Los Angeles years was the challenge our Los Angeles SP gave to the Southern California Communist Party on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution for a debate on the issue. I’ve previously discussed in these Memoirs about the CP losing a good part of its membership around the world in shock over the crimes of Stalin in the Soviet Union made in the secret four-hour speech by President Nikita Khrushchev earlier that year. Now the shocks were intensified by the uprising of the Hungarian people (particularly its working class) for democratic rights which the Soviet dictator crushed by overwhelming armed force causing even more of a fallout among CP ranks. I was surprised the CP accepted our challenge in these times of extreme crisis in its ranks. A number of our SP’s National Committee opposed such a debate with the argument this very fact would give undeserved respectability to a discredited political adversary. We dismissed the latter criticism as we felt such a debate provided an exciting opportunity to advance the ideas of democratic socialism to an expected large audience and to criticize the now failed official politics of the USSR and its member parties around the world.

The debate took place to a packed good-sized meeting hall just South of downtown LA. Representing our Socialist Party Local was Charlie Curtiss, a well-informed lecturer who has a young man had been briefly a CP member but had gone along with the apostasy of James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern who founded American Trotskyism. Charlie was not a charismatic personality but had an excellent grounding in the various Marxist currents and expressed our politics well and whose heart was with the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. It was a difficult assignment for Dorothy Healey (1914–2006) Southern California CP Chair and a member of its National Committee, as she had the unenviable task of defending the USSR’s ruthless crushing of the Hungarians’ brave quest for freedom. A woman of considerable vivacity and a Red Diaper baby, Healey had been a competent organizer of Black and Hispanic factory workers and agricultural field hands during the late 1920s and early 1930s, although the farm workers’ strikes she led failed under intolerable conditions against California’s formidable agribusiness. Comrade Curtiss treated her with respect personally but made an effective case on the history of world Stalinism. Healey did the best she could but wasn’t too convincing. We talked a bit with her in the hallway after the debate, and nearly in tears she admitted that her party had a lot of problems in this juncture of history but said she was determined to reform it from within. In preparing for this report I looked her up in Wikipedia and found her old political world was falling apart as she had read the four-hour Khrushchev speech at the 20th Congress, and was convinced totally that he was right. But having invested all of her adult life in the Party she was determined to see that it wouldn’t be an abject vassal of the USSR and she was dedicated to democratize the US party internally. That she did try and alongside Peoples World writer Al Richmond (1914–1987), and Bettina Aptheker, Healey was the only other National Committee member to condemn the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. But it wasn’t until 1973 that she resigned to join a newly-established radical democratic organization, the New American Movement, which later merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee led by Michael Harrington. DSOC soon became the currently existing Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of which Mike and Dorothy Healey were the first national co-chairs. Southern California also lost many CP members during this 1950s period. The only ones I met personally were People’s World writer Harper Poulson and Vicky Landish, a dedicated party activist. I met them at a meeting set up by Gordon Smith while they were deciding where to go now that their “True Believer” religion had failed them. I know they didn’t join the SP and I lost track of them shortly thereafter.

JOHNSON-FORREST AND “CORRESPONDENCE”

Harry with his cousin Jane

Shortly after my move to Los Angeles my cousin Jane Arenz urged me to get in touch with her old Musteite-Trotskyist comrade Frances (Freddy) Paine (1912–1989) who with her wealthy architect husband Lyman Paine (1901–1978) had moved and bought a house in the Lincoln Heights District of LA. She wasn’t all that impressed with their latest foray into small Marxist sects, abandoning the SWP and Trotskyism. But they were old friends and thought I’d enjoy their company as potential personal friends. As I’ve cited earlier in these Memoirs I had met Freddy at my cousin’s place in Walden, NY in the spring of 1947. Lyman I’d never met before and they became really fine folks to know who I visited occasionally during my LA period. They had been founding members of the Johnson-Forrest Tendency of the SWP, which was now independent on its own. Johnson was the pseudonym of Trinidad Marxist thinker C.L.R. James (1901–1989) and Freddy Forest I’d also met at Windy Hill in 1947. Her real name was Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–1987) who had once worked in Mexico as Trotsky’s Russian language secretary. This group no longer agreed with Trotsky’s thesis of Russia being a “degenerated workers’ state” which J-F now called “state capitalist.” They had also abandoned the Leninist line on a “vanguard party.” As Freddy once told me: “All these years we’ve been telling the workers what to do, now we want the workers to tell us what to do.” No different from my long held politics of rank and file worker democracy and workers self-management which I’ve upheld to this day. This is something I felt comfortable upholding as a member of the Socialist Party as a libertarian socialist. J-F published a paper called Correspondence they issued frequently. They met often as an editorial committee to write their articles for the paper. They featured a Letters Section which supposedly consisted of letters from industrial workers all over the world. They’d be signed “Motor hooker from Detroit, “Waitress from Chicago, “Nurse from Portland, “Cab driver from Brooklyn.” Although they did have worker contacts around, I suspect many of these letters were written by members of the Correspondence collective themselves at their editorial meetings. By the time I moved to LA, James had written a study of the author Herman Melville, “Mariners, Renegades and Castaways — The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In” a Marxist interpretation of Herman Melville’s whaling novel, “Moby Dick,” which Freddy sold me. Not being that swift an ideologue, I never quite got the Marxist connection, except possibly that “the great white whale” represented capitalist evil.

Although they no longer were Trotskyist, the Correspondence collective was infected by the old sectarian disease of splititis. Forest split with Johnson, and each took their own diminished group of followers with them. Dunayevskaya now called herself a Marxist-Humanist and established her own interpretation of Hegel’s ideas on “theory and action” which I’ve never bothered to try to analyse which get pretty complicated. The 1844 manuscripts of a young Marx were basic to their thinking. They started a newspaper called News and Letters that still publishes to this time, featuring letters with “bylines” from all categories of the working class as did “Correspondence”. Their main centers of activity were around Detroit and Los Angeles with Raya’s closest comrade being a black auto worker from Detroit named Charles Denby whose journal “An Indignant Heart” is an N&L classic.

The Johnson group included the Paines, James Boggs, another Detroit black auto worker, his Chinese-American wife Grace Lee Boggs, a highly respected civil rights activist who died in October, 2015 at age 100. Another loyal James associate was rank and file labor activist Martin Glaberman (1918–2001) who wrote the classic pamphlet, “Punching Out,” an excellent handbook for labor militants. Unfortunately, James himself was deported to England, so had to work with his US comrades via long distance. Computers weren’t in popular use yet, so letters and phone calls were the basic means of communication.

Freddy Paine told me that the breakaway Dunayevskaya faction in Los Angeles had stolen into their common headquarters in the middle of the night and taken away the mimeograph, typewriters, stencils and paper stocks and the only thing that they left in the stripped office was its inventory of James’s “Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways.” Ironically, the Los Angeles breakaway N&L group led by Dunayevskaya’s sister Bessie Gogol, rented office space at 1904 Arlington Street, down the hall from our SP Los Angeles headquarters. The Correspondence group kept on publishing its paper for a few years and eventually faded away. Our relationship at the SP office with our new neighbors was distant and correct. Shortly after, two of their younger members Art and Abby Kunkin, who had two little daughters, started coming around to our SP affairs. Eventually, they became estranged from Bessie and her husband Louis Gogol, an MD, and others and joined our Local as a “two person split” and became active members for several years. Art eventually became the editor of our Socialist Newsletter for a time.

 SP-SDF MERGER

Another development nationally in the latter 1950s was the merger of the Socialist Party with the Social Democratic Federation which had broken away from the SP around the time of the Trotskyist invasion of the SP to grab its revolutionary youth and to try to wreck the parent organization in 1936. That was the time the Finnish Federation left the SP, tired of this new turmoil, and went on its own to form the Finnish-American League for Democracy in 1941. Our SP left wing put up no real opposition to this merger since it was a matter of socialist unity with former comrades. We were further encouraged that the more conservative wing of these social democrats opposed the merger, led by former Lovestonenite and ILGWU leader Charles Zimmerman who were close to conservative AFL union bureaucrats like George Meany within the Democratic Party. They reconstituted themselves as Democratic Socialist Federation (DSF), considering our SP as an impotent anachronism. So the merger with the SDF’s more amenable grouping went off without much resistance. Our unified organization was renamed the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation, which name lasted until 1973. The national committees of both organizations combined to become an enlarged NC until a national convention held new elections. Herman Singer of the SP continued as National Secretary of SP-SDF. Among new officers we inherited from the SDF was the colorful Gus Gerber of New York, a Pittsburgh, PA second generation Finn David Rinne, and a foreign journalist Leon Dennen about whom Herman Singer was high. Early on, Dennen was unmasked as a CIA spy and left the organization abruptly. Herman Singer continued on as NatSec, but somewhat embarrassed. Herman was no dynamo in his job and somewhat right wing although I had amicable relations with him as Local LA Chair. The only LA addition to our Local’s ranks from SDF was Hyman Schneid whose wife Fanny had been an SP member right along. Hymie was a colorful character in his own right with a great Jewish sense of humor.

Herman Singer, who doubled as editor of our national monthly magazine Socialist Call, said something in one of his articles which has had a profound effect on me about socialist politics. He wrote: “We may never see socialism but one is a socialist.” Seeing the minuscule size of our socialist “movement” in all its currents at the time and now in 2015, this makes perfect sense. The socialist society will probably never be realized as the malevolence and predation of omnivorous world capitalism, corporate or state, will likely make this planet impossible for human life in a relatively short time. German evolutionary social democrat Edward Bernstein once said: “The goal is nothing, the movement is everything.” This brought balm to the souls of incremental humanist pragmatists. But the concept of a basic goal to shoot for even if impossible makes the struggle worth the while to give our lives a social purpose. I consider myself an anarchist or libertarian socialist but try to live according the cooperative values of such a society even if such a heaven on earth is impossible to achieve.

INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST LEAGUE

We soon began to see overtures for organic unity from the Shachtmanite Independent Socialist League on both national and local levels. The ISL had hit a quagmire, It was stuck in a sectarian mode that was going nowhere by itself. so Max Shachtman and his followers in the ISL began to look at our Socialist Party as something to unify with. A left wing orientation led by Hal and Anne Draper were more sceptical as some of their comrades saw the SP as an opportunist social democratic swamp which would be the ruination of revolutionary socialist politics. The SP itself had a minority Third Camp current which supported an independent revolutionary politics, yet with a number of adherents who were at odds with the Leninist ideology of the ISL. Earlier in these Memoirs I cited Shachtman’s favorable look at the Socialist Democratic Federation’s labor union officialdom and now with the SP-SDF merger his sympathies grew toward such an amalgam. The ISL/Workers Party had been in alliance with the Reuther Caucus of the UAW, so joining in with the SP-SDF would increase the possibility of Shachtman’s influence with the AFL’s labor officialdom.

An active ISL branch also functioned in the Los Angeles area. It included Ted and Elly Yudkoff (Ted Enright was his party pseudonym), Dan and Sarah Schelley, Sam and Ruth Class — Ruth being Dan Schelley’s sister, labor activist Stan Weir, and youth members Jim Burnett and Arlon Tussing. We worked with them on various issues. Stanley (Red) Weir (1921–2001) was the most interesting to me. A merchant seaman during the war, his sense of rank and file militancy was influenced by former IWW seamen he had worked with aboard ship. He had also worked in the auto plant assembly lines and was a rebel in the ranks of the UAW during these years. He was then quite contemptuous at the SP’s outlook on trade union politics. At that time a down-the-line Leninist, Stan once told me: “Look, the SP has no “line.” You’ve gotta have a political line. That’s the first thing the workers want to know about you, what’s your line?” He tried to impress me that a “line” was necessary for revolutionary Marxists to make any headway within the working class. This was the opposite of much of my experience on the job with other workers. When I introduce my self as a socialist to fellow workers, often their suspicion is aroused that you’re trying to peddle them some sort of “correct line.” In reading his later writings and arguments on these issues over the years, Stan went through a metamorphosis within his own thinking. As Freddy Paine had intimated to me, workers had valuable insights to teach “professional revolutionaries,” who were spouting off-the-wall vanguardist preachings that had no meaning to the plain, ordinary working stiffs. In his later years, Stan sounded more like an anarcho-syndicalist or libertarian socialist than some party bureaucrat preaching top-down sermons. I was always impressed by Stan’s straightforward honesty and integrity as he evolved in his life and learned many valuable things from him and his experiences.

MORE SOCIALIST PARTY NOTES

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was easily re-elected in 1956 over his 1952 opponent Governor Adlai Stevenson for a second term. Socialist Party candidates again ran its 1952 slate of Darlington Hoopes and Samuel H. Friedman in a poorly financed low key campaign. They did get a little bit of TV and radio time. As I sat in a Boyle Heights bar one evening I heard Comrade Hoopes come on for a five-minute interval on its fidgety black and white small TV. I was the only one who listened to his message. The barkeep annoyedly asked, “Who the hell is this guy?” but mercifully let the Hoopes statement run its course instead of changing channels. Hoopes and Friedman got only 2,044 votes, a drop from 20,264 in 1952. I gave them a write-in vote in California which probably wasn’t even counted. They were even out-polled by the Socialist Labor Party candidate Eric Haas with 44,400, securing ballot status in more states than we did. Probably Mickey Mouse may have scored more write-ins. Was it worth a campaign? In hindsight, probably not As it was, it was 20 years before the SP sponsored another national campaign.

Vern Davidson was released after serving two years of his three-year Federal prison sentence for his draft resistance. He immediately entered law school at UCLA, a long-term ambition. After overcoming formidable legal difficulties, he managed to get admitted to the bar, and began a long career as a law professor, climaxing at Gonzaga University in Spokane from which he retired before his death in 2012.

COMMITTEE ON RACIAL EQUALITY (CORE)

Los Angeles had had an active chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality before my residence that was now defunct. CORE was a direct action, nonviolent civil rights organization founded by pacifists James Farmer and George Houser in 1942, based on the ideas of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). In the 1950s and 60s it became a major factor in the Black Freedom movement It played a significant part in the Freedom Rides of that decade in the South and joined with Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the massive March on Washington in 1963. It was time to reactivate CORE in Los Angeles. Organizers of the founding meeting included Wilson Riles Sr., then secretary of the pacifist FOR in Southern California; Sayuri Buell, Japanese-American member of the Socialist Party; Max Mont, secretary of the Jewish Labor Committee; Gordon Carey, son of a Protestant clergyman and recently released after a prison hitch for resisting military induction during the Korean War; Henry Hodges, a black SP member and recently honorably discharged as a commissioned Army officer during the Korean War; and me.

Our efforts weren’t as dramatic as those of civil rights activists in the South who faced death daily from the Ku Klux Klan, and lynch mobs. Young white CORE members from the North, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were among those who were murdered by racist killers in Mississippi.

Our activities were centered on picket lines at Woolworth stores in Southern Los Angeles, pressuring them to hire black sales personnel. I spent many a Saturday daytime at the Woolworth demonstrations. Our chapter grew and others of our number focussed on ending housing discrimination with some success on a case by case basis. Incidentally, Wilson Riles (1947–1999), who had been a school teacher and principal in Arizona before working at the FOR, was the first black candidate ever to be popularly elected to statewide office in California when he was chosen Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1972–’82 serving three terms in this non-partisan office.

VISITING SOCIALISTS

During the 1950s Local LA played host to various visiting socialists, both from the United States and abroad. Lewis Coser, who along with Irving Howe had founded DISSENT Magazine in 1953 and was a Brandeis University professor on a West Coast trip. Bobbi and Johnny Blatt treated Coser to a dinner at their Venice cottage which a number of us attended. Noted British left wing MP and veteran anti-war and black African freedom spokesperson Fenner Brockway (1888–1988) spoke to a packed meeting room at our Arlington Street headquarters. Through the assistance of our National Office we hosted a dinner meeting for the foreign secretary of the Japanese Socialist Party at the Blatts. Later several of us met with some leaders of the Japanese Social Democratic Party at a downtown hotel, also through the auspices of the N.O.

PACIFIST BAYARD RUSTIN ARREST ON SEX CHARGES

In 1953 FOR organizer Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) was on a West Coast speaking trip for the antiwar movement when he was arrested in Pasadena one evening when police found him engaging in a sex act with two other men in the back of a car. Homosexuality was considered criminal behavior during those years, so Rustin pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of “sexual perversion” and spent sixty days in jail. This shocked his host sponsors and Rustin secluded himself in fellow pacifist David McReynolds’ Venice beachfront cottage in Ocean Park for a time in a depressed state before returning to New York. Rustin made no secret of his homosexuality privately but his publicity-filled Pasadena arrest put him into wider public glare for the first time. This hurt him considerably in his anti-war and civil rights activities, so he had to function more in the background when he brilliantly organized some of the greatest public demonstrations of the civil rights movement in US history. But at this point in 1953 he was fired from his job with the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Fortunately, he was hired as executive secretary of the War Resisters League, where he served with distinction for a short time.

Local LA was a bit touchy about getting involved in supporting gay rights in that time period although we had several gay men in our membership who made no secret of their preferences although publicly discreet with homophobia epidemic in general society accompanied by police repression. To my knowledge we had no lesbian members at that point. There was rife homophobia in left sects during these times. I had earlier hinted in these Memoirs at some of my deeply closeted desires to same-sex activities. When at Michigan State in the late 1940s had my communist friend Gil W. made a strong physical pitch to seduce me I would probably have succumbed. I did visit gay and lesbian bars from time to time for a few beers but nothing ever happened. One night I got horribly drunk at a party and one of my friends drove me home. I invited him in and actually initiated the activity which ended up in some intense fellatio.

When I woke up alone with a hangover the thought of being “queer” scared the hell out of me. Will there ever be women in my life again? That night I went to the Old Carioca Bar on Temple Street and picked up a beautiful Mexican prostitute called “Spider” with whom I’d had sex before. We repaired to my place and the tryst with her was as pleasurable as ever. So my desire for women had not gone away. Which showed how naive this “man of the world” really was. It was years before the term “bisexuality” or “pansexuality” became familiar to me. But I have enjoyed my affairs with both sexes since then as well as with occasional transsexuals. It took me years before I could be “out” openly about my desires. The only other time I had gay sex in my Los Angeles tenure was with a young Mexican chap in the front seat of my car who was an occasional drinking buddy at a Boyle Heights bar. In the late 1950s I had a hot episode in a San Francisco North Beach hotel with a talented young Jamaican man who taught me some of the nuances of this lifestyle. Yet I enjoyed going to dances in Los Angeles ballrooms and meeting young women in a platonic way. My sex life with females was pretty much with prostitutes on both sides of the Mexican border. I was too shy to be a real make-out artist otherwise. Well, now that I’m out of the confessional booth in this chapter, I’ll wind it up and proceed to Installment 19 which will conclude my LA days and begin with the rest of my life in the SF Bay Area and in Finland.

End of Installment 18