Eighty-five years ago, author Upton Sinclair led a free speech fight in San Pedro. Today, it’s remembered as the birth of the Southern California ACLU

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY

It was out of the darkness that Upton Sinclair trudged up San Pedro’s Liberty Hill, a tiring climb past an assembly of cheering dockworkers and a squad of anxious police. Trailed by five sympathizing friends, a couple of cops and a lone reporter from the Los Angeles Record, Sinclair paused at the peak, where he mounted a bench and pulled out a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution, its cover colored by the American flag.

“Friends,” he began in the dimmest candlelight, “I did not come here to incite violence. I came up here to uphold the right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.”

Sinclair then thumbed through to a dog-eared page and read from the opening lines of the First Amendment.

But Sinclair, whose name still held muckraker fame thanks to his book, The Jungle, barely got beyond the right to freedom of speech before an officer interrupted him.

“You’re under arrest,” the policeman said.

Sinclair’s friends tried following with words of their own, but police squashed each successive attempt at a speech with an arrest. Officers eventually took all but one of his cohorts into custody. But as the police packed Sinclair and his friends into a squad car 85 years ago, the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union was born.

* * *

When Upton Sinclair moved to Pasadena in 1915, he promised his wife that he’d stay out of the public eye. For over a decade, he had been an active socialist, crusading for workers’ rights and even running for public offices. But out west, he was to keep to a quiet life of writing. That was California’s draw, after all, as back then the state was still a thing of myth, its golden air supposedly able to cure any ailment—even Sinclair’s kneejerk urges toward public agitation.

For nearly 10 years, he remained in his self-imposed seclusion. The writer penned pamphlets and polemics for his favorite causes, but never actually inserted himself into any events. Instead, he found himself looped into upper-class social circles, attending parties and galas of like-minded progressives. Sinclair even sequestered himself from time to time in a beach house on Long Beach’s Alamitos Peninsula, a seaside shack supposedly visited by Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin in its later days.

But Sinclair wavered on his apolitical promise when lawyers and workers began writing to him about the raids and mass arrests spreading through San Pedro.

It started in 1922 when news leaked down the coast that Portland was beginning a push to purge all members of the Industrial Workers of the World from the city, with word being that the expelled workers were looking to soak up a warmer California climate instead. Fearful of what was perceived to be a socialist invasion, the Los Angeles Police Department began its own pre-emptive purge, sweeping through San Pedro in search of any red card-carrying members of the IWW, generally considered the most dangerous union due to its eagerness to organize all workers (even the unskilled) into “One Big Union.”

Police relied mostly on the state’s criminal syndicalism law to round up its union prisoners, a World War I relic that allowed for the arrest of anyone seeking any sort of “violent change.” IWW members (so-called Wobblies) responded with street protests and calls to their national brethren. But officers only expanded their efforts, creating a special division of the harbor police (known as the Wobbly Squad) to wipe out the port’s red menace. Even more troublesome for the IWW was that the syndicalism law was locally reinterpreted to allow arrests on just the suspicion of “violent change”—a linguistic shift that not only created one of the most severe syndicalism laws in the country, but one that practically allowed police to manufacture evidence.

So by April of 1923, the IWW did the only thing it could and launched a full-scale strike, demanding the release of all labor-related prisoners, a minimum wage of $100 per month for seamen and $1 per hour for longshoremen, all overtime at double rates and the abolition of so-called “Fink Halls,” where the port’s anti-union merchants could carefully control the hiring process to weed out any Wobblies.

All this rested heavily on Sinclair, but it was the stories of police hunting down union members and of louse-ridden jails that finally freed him from that non-intervention bond he once promised his wife. No longer could he listen to news of the LAPD, under the supervision of Police Chief Louis Oaks (and with unrequested but not unappreciated help from the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan), thinning out Wobbly numbers on a daily basis, trolling through protests and speeches to arrest anyone with even the most tenuous ties to the IWW. The situation was so dire and the jails so crowded that the LA City Council approved the construction of a temporary stockade in Griffith Park to hold all the excess prisoners. To Sinclair, the government wasn’t just conducting an organized war on organized labor—it was snuffing out the very notion of free speech.

* * *

On May 15, 1923, the Los Angeles Record ran an announcement in advance of Upton Sinclair’s nighttime stop in San Pedro, proclaiming that Sinclair and his wealthy friends were coming down to take up the free speech fight for the striking workers.

“We are taking up the challenge of the chief when he announces that he is going to arrest all idle men and hold them in jail,” Sinclair told the paper. “We are embarking on a campaign for the protection of civil rights.”

But before trekking Liberty Hill later that night, he tried to clear his plans with top city officials. He met first with Los Angeles Mayor George E. Cryer, who, after an hour of haggling, agreed to protect Sinclair’s constitutional rights, barring he and his friends didn’t “incite disorder.” Chief Oaks, however, wasn’t as willing.

Oaks reportedly interrogated Sinclair, a founding member of the national branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, about his ulterior intentions.

“What’s the American Civil Liberties Union? What’s it got to do with Los Angeles?” Oaks asked. “Did it tell you to come here?”

Sinclair responded by reading from the First Amendment. Oaks balked and told him to “cut out that Constitution stuff.” When Sinclair asked if he would have permission to hold a rally on Liberty Hill, Chief Oaks grew even more dismissive.

“Go ahead!” Oaks barked back. “You will be arrested and will go to jail, and let me tell you—you will stay there. There will be no bail.”

So that night when Sinclair stood atop Liberty Hill—crowds of workers below him, his pocket-sized copy of the Constitution illuminated by candlelight—the police followed through on Oaks’ promise, arresting him and his friends and stuffing them into a nearby squad car.

The agitators were shipped first to the San Pedro police station and booked on charges of criminal syndicalism. But when Chief Oaks arrived, the group was loaded into another car and sent bouncing through hayfields and orange groves, eventually ending up at a jail in Wilmington.

Oaks held Sinclair and his conspirators there overnight and planned to sneak them into court the next day. There, he would have the judge immediately appoint defense lawyers, commit Sinclair and his associates to jail without bail, and shuttle them out of sight of the press. But sabotage ran deep in the LAPD, as one of Oaks’ own subordinates phoned Sinclair’s wife in time for her to inform his lawyer of the plan.

With only two pieces of evidence tying him to Oaks’ trumped-up charges (Exhibit A: Sinclair’s copy of the Constitution, and Exhibit B: a worn-down candle), Sinclair was allowed out on bail, a fact that Oaks fought against, telling the press that Sinclair was “more dangerous than 4,000 Wobblies” and that he was guilty of crimes that were “contemptuous of the Constitution of the State of California.”

Once Sinclair was freed, he shot straight into his fight for free speech, accusing Oaks of trying to kidnap him and crush the strikers’ constitutional rights. ACLU allies followed by renting an auditorium in Los Angeles and bringing Sinclair in to speak regularly—the crowds usually spilled out of the building. When Sinclair held a second rally on Liberty Hill days later, some 5,000 people attended.

Soon, national and foreign criticism began stacking up against Los Angeles, with newspapers condemning California as a “retrograde state” and the city for using so-called “public kidnapping” as a tool of “stupid oppression.” City officials were all but shamed into conceding to Sinclair. The criticism was so sharp that the managing editor of the Los Angeles Examiner was called upon to strike a quick and quiet deal with Sinclair, the terms of which included dropping all charges against him and his friends, and ensuring that a Southern California chapter of the ACLU would be established and forcing the removal of Chief Oaks.

Within weeks, Oaks was dismissed. And within a few years, Mayor Cryer’s ties to the Crawford crime syndicate were revealed, a politically powerful gang that ran prostitution and gambling outfits during the 1920s.

* * *

At the time of the Southern California branch’s establishment in 1923, the national chapter of the ACLU was itself only three years old, an infant institution that would grow into one of the most powerful defenders of civil liberties in the country. And much of the local chapter’s success is owed to Sinclair, who suspended his writing to speak at rallies, edit pamphlets and organize meetings until he was certain that the organization could stand on its own.

But Sinclair’s victory didn’t quite spell out the same success for the striking members of the IWW. Even after the release of all but a handful of labor-related prisoners, the IWW still drew the ire of local merchants. Members of the KKK reportedly abducted Wobblies, drove them to the outskirts of the county and left them tarred and feathered. There was also an incident in which police and civilians raided an IWW rally, beating sympathizers with baseball bats and clubs, and even reportedly dousing seven children in hot coffee and one in a second bath of scalding grease. By 1924, just a year after the incidents on Liberty Hill, the IWW’s national membership dipped dramatically. And by 1925, the San Pedro strike had been broken, with merchants happily announcing that the port had been “cleaned up.”

Still, Sinclair’s plan worked with the most roundabout efficiency—he was fully aware that his involvement and arrest would at the very least be a crucial link in the fight for free speech. That much was clear even from his jail cell in Wilmington, where he lay flat on the floor, stiff in his refusal to risk infection from the louse-covered cots.

“There’s another reason why I have gone to jail,” he told reporters. “And that is that it is the only way I can get anything said in the United States.”

Tags: aclu, iww, labor, liberty hill, PORT OF LOS ANGELES, San Pedro, unionism, upton sinclair