Chapter IV

It was in that period that the American Civil Liberties Union was started; I joined at once, and attended weekly luncheons of its directors when I was in New York. Whether we had supported the war or opposed it, we all supported our right to say what we thought and our willingness to let the other fellow do the same. Among those I knew best were Roger Baldwin, who became a civil-liberties hero and devoted his life to the cause; Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of _The Nation_, who remained a pacifist even in the face of Kaiser Wilhelm; and B. W. Huebsch, then a publisher on his own, and later editorial head of Viking Press; he was my guide and mentor through the eleven Lanny Budd volumes, about which I shall tell.

Also, there was W. J. Ghent, author of _Our Benevolent Feudalism_. He and I got into an argument over the war in the columns of _The Nation_. The argument got too hot for Villard, and he wouldn’t publish my reply; so I paid for a page advertisement in _The Nation_ and had my say. I remember Ghent’s published comment: “Sinclair has taken the argument into the advertising columns, where I am unable to follow.” After that, I was summoned to a luncheon with Villard and Huebsch and very gently asked to call off the war--that is, the Ghent War.

Not long afterward came the founding of the Southern California branch of the ACLU, a drama in which I had the leading role. It began when I tried to read the Constitution of the United States at a meeting on private property that had been organized on behalf of workers who were on strike at San Pedro Harbor. I was arrested after the third sentence. When I got out of jail, I wrote a letter to Louis D. Oaks, chief of police in Los Angeles. It was printed as a leaflet and widely circulated in Los Angeles. It was also printed in _The Nation_ of June 6, 1923, along with an editorial note. I’m going to reprint that page from _The Nation_, partly because it tells the story, but mainly because it conveys so vividly the atmosphere of that period and the repression and brutality that went on then--which a new generation might find hard to credit.

In refusing to bow to the police of Los Angeles, who in the harbor
strike have been the servile tools of the Merchants’ and
Manufacturers’ Association, Upton Sinclair is strictly and legally
a defender of the law against those who would violate it. And it is
doubly to his praise that in this case he, a civilian, happens to
be defending the law against the men who are sworn and paid to
uphold it and have all the power of constituted authority on their
side. The facts are undisputed: the police arrested Mr. Sinclair
and his associates on _private property_, where they had assembled
with the written consent of the owner. The law gives a police
officer the right to enter private property only in two cases: if
he has a warrant of arrest, or if a felony is actually being
committed. Neither of these excuses existed in Los Angeles. The
persons interfered with would have been legally justified in
dealing with the police as violently as with a thief or kidnapper.
We print below Mr. Sinclair’s letter to the chief of police of Los
Angeles because it is a recital of facts which our readers should
know and a nobly patriotic protest which should have their support.

_Pasadena, California, May 17, 1923_

LOUIS D. OAKS,

Chief of Police, Los Angeles

Having escaped from your clutches yesterday afternoon, owing to the
fact that one of your men betrayed your plot to my wife, I am now
in position to answer your formal statement to the public, that I
am “more dangerous than 4,000 I.W.W.” I thank you for this
compliment, for to be dangerous to lawbreakers in office such as
yourself is the highest duty that a citizen of this community can
perform.

In the presence of seven witnesses I obtained from Mayor Cryer on
Tuesday afternoon the promise that the police would respect my
constitutional rights at San Pedro, and that I would not be
molested unless I incited to violence. But when I came to you, I
learned that you had taken over the mayor’s office at the Harbor.
Now, from your signed statement to the press, I learn that you have
taken over the district attorney’s office also; for you tell the
public: “I will prosecute Sinclair with all the vigor at my
command, and upon his conviction I will demand a jail sentence with
hard labor.” And you then sent your men to swear to a complaint
charging me with “discussing, arguing, orating, and debating
certain thoughts and theories, which thoughts and theories were
contemptuous of the constitution of the State of California,
calculated to cause hatred and contempt of the government of the
United States of America, and which thoughts and theories were
detrimental and in opposition to the orderly conduct of affairs of
business, affecting the rights of private property and personal
liberty, and which thoughts and theories were calculated to cause
any citizen then and there present and hearing the same to quarrel
and fight and use force and violence.” And this although I told you
at least a dozen times in your office that my only purpose was to
stand on private property with the written permission of the owner,
and there to read the Constitution of the United States; and you
perfectly well know that I did this, and only this, and that three
sentences from the Bill of Rights of the Constitution was every
word that I was permitted to utter--the words being those which
guarantee “freedom of speech and of the press, and the right of the
people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for
the redress of grievances.”

But you told me that “this Constitution stuff” does not go at the
Harbor. You have established martial law, and you told me that if I
tried to read the Constitution, even on private property, I would
be thrown into jail, and there would be no bail for me--and this
even though I read you the provision of the State constitution
guaranteeing me the right to bail. When you arrested me and my
friends, you spirited us away and held us “incommunicado,” denying
us what is our clear legal right, to communicate with our lawyers.
All night Tuesday, and all day Wednesday up to four o’clock, you
and your agents at the various jails and station-houses repeated
lies to my wife and my attorneys and kept me hidden from them. When
the clamor of the newspaper men forced you to let them interview
me, you forced them to pledge not to reveal where I was. You had
Sergeant Currie drive us up to Los Angeles, with strict injunctions
not to get there before four o’clock--he did not tell me, but I
heard another man give the order to him, and I watched his
maneuvers to carry it out. It was your scheme to rush us into court
at the last moment before closing, have lawyers appointed for us,
and have us committed without bail, and then spirit us away and
hide us again. To that end you had me buried in a cell in the city
jail, and to my demands for counsel the jailers made no reply. Only
the fact that someone you trusted tipped my wife off prevented the
carrying out of this criminal conspiracy. My lawyers rushed to the
jail, and forced the granting of bail, just on the stroke of five
o’clock, the last moment.

I charge, and I intend to prove in court, that you are carrying out
the conspiracy of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association to
smash the harbor strike by brutal defiance of law. I was in the
office of I. H. Rice, president of this Association, and heard him
getting his orders from Hammond of the Hammond Lumber Company, and
heard his promise to Hammond that the job would be done without
delay. It is you who are doing the job for Rice, and the cruelties
you are perpetrating would shock this community if they were known,
and they will be punished if there is a God in Heaven to protect
the poor and friendless. You did all you could to keep me from
contact with the strikers in jail; nevertheless I learned of one
horror that was perpetrated only yesterday--fifty men crowded into
one small space, and because they committed some slight breach of
regulations, singing their songs, they were shut in this hole for
two hours without a breath of air, and almost suffocated. Also I
saw the food that these men are getting twice a day, and you would
not feed it to your dog. And now the city council has voted for
money to build a “bull-pen” for strikers, and day by day the public
is told that the strike is broken, and the men, denied every civil
right, have no place to meet to discuss their policies, and no one
to protect them or to protest for them. That is what you
want--those are the orders you have got from the Merchants’ and
Manufacturers’ Association; the men are to go back as slaves, and
the Constitution of the United States is to cease to exist so far
as concerns workingmen.

All I can say, sir, is that I intend to do what little one man can
do to awaken the public conscience, and that meantime I am not
frightened by your menaces. I am not a giant physically; I shrink
from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of
refinement; also, I freely admit that when I see a line of a
hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to
keep anyone from coming onto private property to hear my feeble
voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a
conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties
were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our
cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country. I have received a
telegram from the American Civil Liberties Union in New York,
asking me if I will speak at a mass meeting of protest in Los
Angeles, and I have answered that I will do so. That meeting will
be called at once, and you may come there and hear what the
citizens of this community think of your efforts to introduce the
legal proceedings of Czarist Russia into our free Republic.

UPTON SINCLAIR

The ending of this episode: We hired a good-sized hall in Los Angeles by the week and held crowded meetings every afternoon and evening. The Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union was formed, and a Congregational minister, Reverend Clinton J. Taft, resigned from his pulpit and served as director for the next twenty years or so. At the end of a couple of weeks the editor of the Los Angeles _Examiner_ called me on the telephone and said, “Sinclair, how long is this thing going on?” I answered, “Until we have civil liberties in Los Angeles.” “What, specifically, do you mean by that?” he asked, and I said, “For one thing, Chief Oaks must be kicked off the force; and we must have the assurance that there will never again be mass arrests of strikers.” The editor said, “You may count upon both these conditions being met.” I asked, “What guarantee have we?” He said, “I have talked it over with the half-dozen men who run this town, and I have their word. You may take mine.”

So we called off the meetings. A few days later we read in the newspapers that Chief Oaks had been expelled from the force, having been found parked in his car at night with a woman and a jug of whisky. So far as I can recall, there have been no mass arrests of strikers in the past twenty-nine years.