Right Out of California by Kathryn S. Olmsted

Author:Kathryn S. Olmsted [Olmsted, Kathryn S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620971390
Publisher: The New Press

White Terror

Unhinged by the general strike, mobs formed in Seattle, Portland, Oakland, Richmond, Alameda, Stockton, and San Jose, among other cities. They ransacked Communist Party buildings, smashed furniture, burned books, and beat alleged subversives. Hayward vigilantes built a public scaffold with a noose as a warning to Reds. In Berkeley, a posse of three hundred surged through the city, hurling bricks through the windows of homes of suspected Communists. The bricks had a warning wrapped around them: “This citizens’ committee is aware that you are affiliated with Communists, Bolsheviks, or other government-destroying groups. Leave here immediately or face drastic measures.”52

Although the vigilante attacks appeared to be spontaneous outbreaks of mass hysteria, they were often encouraged and protected by the employers’ groups, as well as by local, state, and national officials. The Associated Farmers funded and organized some of the mobs, and county sheriffs and highway patrol officers stood by while vigilantes assaulted, kidnapped, and terrorized their victims. At the height of the violence in San Francisco, the National Guard set up a machine gun nest to protect the crowds who were looting the meeting places of radicals. The newspapers were mostly amused by the vigilante justice: “REDS TURN BLACK AND BLUE,” read one photo caption in the San Francisco Chronicle.53

One hundred and twenty-five miles down the coast, the Monterey peninsula “began to take on the color and tone of Hitler’s Germany,” according to Langston Hughes. When the members of Carmel’s John Reed Club called an emergency meeting to protest the vigilante attacks up north, they heard rumors that the town’s “patriotic citizens” would not allow the meeting to take place.

That night, Hughes arrived at the local meeting hall to discover the street blocked with cars, police headlights illuminating the doorway, and the chief of police standing outside. Inside the hall, anticommunist activists, organized by a new chapter of the American Legion, sat grimly among the radicals and took notes on who attended and what was said. Hughes was acutely aware that he was the only black person in the crowd.

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