Well-known from the 1950s on for her science fiction, in her younger decades deFord was a left-wing activist, first joining the Socialist Party in 1919 and then around the C.P. going on to write for such magazines as the Masses, Liberator, and New Masses. Here she is with a wonderful essay on the politics and social psychology of California, with its prisons full of rebellious workers, as settled by speculators, prospectors, and Midwestern Babbitts.

‘Native Sins of the Golden West’ by Miriam Allen deFord from Workers Monthly. Vol. 4 No. 9. July, 1925.

WHEN Sinclair Lewis chronicled the intimate life of Mr. George F. Babbitt, he omitted an important detail of his family history. Early in their career all Mr. Babbitt’s brothers migrated from Zenith, Minnesota, to South and North Zenith, California. Were it not for the devastating effects of birth control among the lordly Nordics, I should say that there were about two million of them. They were joined by the large and prospering tribe of Kennicotts, from Gopher Prairie. And arrived in this land of golden opportunity, they settled down to the real estate business and proceeded to make laws after the manner of their kind.

In South Zenith, colloquially known as Bulltown, where I was once a resident, I was approached on the day before a pre-Volstead election by a female Babbitt, and implored to “save the name of the precinct” by voting dry. I saved the name of the precinct, but not its aridity. I give the episode from my private memoirs as an instance of the emotional character of law-making in the Golden State. The emotion is carried over into law-enforcement. South Zenith is famous for the number of its Sweet Mammas who express their distaste for their fellows or their general ennui by murdering their husbands and other domestic nuisances. It is the only way to become really famous in South Zenith if the movies turn you down.

But the pure essence of California justice can be comprehended only by its dealings with the pestiferous working class. The sunshine of the state makes most people colorblind—they mistake the lightest pink for a deep and dangerous red, and have even been known to confuse a mild yellow with that alarming scarlet hue. California kiddies listen in at the radio for their Bedtime Red Raid stories; and seldom are they disappointed.

South Zenith is remarkable as the only California city which ever jailed a man for remarking that it had a fine climate. The story has been told by Upton Sinclair, whom the South Zenithites have not yet been able to land, and need not be repeated here. Naturally, a city so sensitive would hardly permit the public reading of a Constitution written by effete Easterners before California had even redeemed the Union by entering it. In fact, the gentler things of life are strictly forbidden all non-Babbitts. It is on record that when the Marine Transport Workers’ Hall at the twenty-mile-distant port of South Zenith was raided by zealous Knights of the Knightie, the first thing the gallant fellows did was to throw the piano out of the window. It belonged to the Prison Comfort Club; and if there is one thing a good Californian hates it’s a comfortable prison.

The prisons are not comfortable. In San Quentin they’re building bunks under the stairs and in the halls, and with a fine democratic fervor putting two men in one-man cells, and three in two-man apartments. When this is called to the attention of a California Babbitt, he never suggests that some of the prison population may belong elsewhere. He says, “I tell you, what this state needs is a few more prisons.”

Prisons are growing too tame and effeminate in California, anyway. Even the Sacramento County Jail, which was able during the war to kill off half a dozen men and drive one insane, recently succeeded in killing only one out of sixteen Wobblies held there for trial. The method is to force them to sleep on the concrete floors until they get pneumonia. If the Babbitts were really efficient they could manage to give them damp blankets and thus save the expense of quite a few criminal syndicalism trials.

The same end is gained, however, by the Joint Trial Act. In this system you simply hold all your criminal syndicalism prisoners in jail without trial until you have collected enough of them to justify the expense of a big case. Then you try them together, irrespective of when, where or why they were caught. It doesn’t make much difference anyway, for the only thing you have to prove is that they hold a card in the I.W.W., and they always acknowledge that as if they were proud of it. Then the rest is all routine, and you can shoot them off to San Quentin for one to fourteen years—or to Folsom, if you’ve ever got the goods on them before. In fact, if you’re smart enough, you can indict them on two exactly similar counts and slip them to jail for from two to twenty-eight years.

When even this celerity grows boresome, Judge Busick of Sacramento, who has thought up all sorts of funny little tricks to enliven the course of California justice, has devised a plan by which they come in and practically ask to be convicted. The method is this. You catch one or more of the creatures and put him on trial. As his defense witnesses come to the stand, you ask them if they are members of the I.W.W. If they say no, they are disqualified as witnesses. If they say yes, they are arrested for criminal syndicalism as soon as they leave the court-room.

And the Appellate Court, which seems to confirm or reverse decisions according to what the judge happened to have for breakfast that morning, has decided that Judge Busick’s little joke is all right. They haven’t made up their minds yet about another pleasantry of his, the granting of a permanent injunction making it a civil offense to carry on the activities of the I.W.W. They even sent a man to jail in South Zenith for violating this injunction issued by a judge in another city hundreds of miles away.

Why anyone should pay good money to go to a vaudeville show when he can attend a criminal syndicalism trial in Busick’s court is an unsolved mystery. On one famous occasion, the defense asked for a change of venue on the ground that His Honor was prejudiced. Judge Busick heard the plea, conferred with Judge Busick, decided that Judge Busick was not prejudiced, and proceeded to try the case.

At that, he has not the exquisite wit of the South Zenith judge who released a lot of Wobbly prisoners on probation and gave them a set of rules which they must obey. Among other things they were forbidden to read the works of Upton Sinclair, to enter any restaurant calling itself a cafe, and to belong to any union unaffiliated with the A. F. of L.

The lately-retired chief of police of South Zenith, a highly advanced psychological cop who was lent them by the university city which he had adorned, recently gave all his men a few army intelligence tests. The average mental age of South Zenith’s finest was discovered to be ten years. One worthy specimen rated so low that they didn’t know just how to place him, so they gave him a two-year rating by way of compliment.

In North Zenith and vicinity they say it with frame-ups. It takes a California court to refuse a re-trial in a case where every important witness has been convicted of perjury, and where the defense has a clear photograph of one of the convicted men a mile away from the place where the crime was committed, two minutes before its commitment. Yet Mooney is still in San Quentin, and probably lucky that he hasn’t been hanged, and Billings is still in Folsom. Ford and Suhr are still in Folsom, too, with parole recently denied Ford; their heinous offense being that somebody got shot in a strike which they had happened to organize. The California penalty for this tactical error is life imprisonment.

When there is any danger that prisoners may escape the desired penalty, the North Zenith coppers are on record as having remembered that their forefathers were vigilantes. A few years ago there was a mix-up over some cuties who called with their gentlemen friends at a gangster’s hang-out and discovered to their inexpressible amazement that the place was not a ladies’ club. In the ensuing excitement some of the accused escaped to a near-by town. There they engaged in a little fracas with the police who came to arrest them, with casualties on the side of law and order. The next day three of the prisoners were found hanging from a tree, effectively disposed of without sheriff or chaplain. No one ever found out who the lynchers were, but strange stories went around about a string of autos seen to approach the town from the direction of North Zenith, and a number of North Zenith police officers were absent at roll call that morning.

It must not be thought that justice and criminal procedure in North Zenith are always so bloodthirsty as this. Circumstances alter cases. A well-to-do North Zenithite not long ago drove his car down the wrong side of a street and killed a young girl and injured her sister. There were witnesses unkind enough to intimate that the gentleman gave indications of just having visited his bootlegger. The jury, however, acquitted him on the ground that he had not been feeling well and had been seized with unconsciousness while at the wheel. Another wealthy man from a nearby town ran down a schoolmarm and amputated her leg. After one year in prison he was released on parole, by a board which has been very chary on paroles in general. On the other hand, a poor fellow with a family to support who accidentally killed a rich banker was given among other penalties the obligation of paying a substantial sum out of his wages every month to the banker’s family for several years to come. As part of his income depended upon his use of an automobile, and he was forbidden ever to drive again, the learned judge’s decision made things easy all around.

In general, it is a dangerous thing in California—as elsewhere, I heard it rumored—to run afoul of the law without a well-lined pocket to help things out. The warden of San Quentin has a private picture gallery containing the portraits of all the late lamented who have been bumped off the official gallows. Over it is a legend which runs: “You Will Find No Rich Men Here.” As intimated, this is not a unique feature of California legal procedure. The present governor of the state is, however, one to whom all Babbitts may point with pride: he issued a formal invitation, on one occasion, to the women of California to go out and work for an extension of capital punishment to other crimes than murder; and expressed the pious wish that one poor devil might have been hanged twice. The object of his tender attentions was an Afghan who was one of a lively party resulting in a corpse. His fellow-countrymen, who had acquired some veneer of American civilization, persuaded him to plead guilty white they fled the state. The trial was all over and the confiding Afghan back in his cell before an interpreter informed him he had been sentenced to hang. He went to the gallows as scheduled.

Only on one occasion did the governor reverse his iron decision never to reprieve a condemned murderer; that was the Good Friday when they were going to celebrate the crucifixion by hanging three men on a gallows built for two. That time even the Babbitts howled; and the jamboree was divided into two sections and put off for a later date. One of those three was an old sailor out of a job who was caught stealing a bottle of milk from a doorstep. The policeman—one of the South Zenith ten-year-olds—beat him up; and the old sailor, having been too long at sea to understand this routine tactic, shot him dead. It is an unbreakable rule in California that anyone who kills a policeman under any circumstances will be hanged—from a tree, if necessary, as previously noted. They informed the old sailor of his reprieve just seven minutes before his hanging; and now in the near future he is to go through that happy experience again.

Ah, yes, as George F. of the Babbitt tribe remarked, “The way to get a thing done is to do it.” At San Quentin there is an institution known as the jute-mill. New prisoners are supposed to work in it for a year or so, and the unreasonable fellows object to the lint in the air, to the exhausting labor, to the fact that the place is a fire-trap—in fact, if you begin coddling prisoners there is no telling what they will complain about next. The unwritten law is that criminal syndicalists and other undesirable citizens get a double or triple dose of the jute-mill; the obstinate creatures—doubtless on orders from Moscow—are perpetually objecting, and then going on strike because one or two of them are thrown in the hole in consequence. Nothing remains then but to throw them in solitary on bread and water until they are ready to give in and come back to work; and such is their mistaken pertinacity that it usually takes several weeks to starve them into submission. Out of pure spite, two of those fellows contracted tuberculosis just because the dungeons were a bit damp; one is going blind; and another, because he pretended he was too weak after a strike to work in the rock quarry, and they made him work there anyhow, destroyed the official monopoly in hangings by strangling himself to death in his cell.

But it would be very unfair to California to assume that all her criminal syndicalism candidates are of the uncouth type of this impulsive fellow. One of the very first of these desperate criminals to be apprehended was Anita Whitney. This dangerous woman had spent her whole life in such vicious practices as club work and social reform. Six years ago she went so far in her depravity as to attend a Communist meeting where an enterprising dick had thrown a maroon piano scarf over a glass case containing among other lodge emblems a Star Spangled Banner. This constituted desecrating the American flag by superinducing a red flag upon it; and was one of the main counts in the criminal syndicalism prosecution which followed. The other defendants, after two and in some cases three trials, were finally dismissed because the tax-payers balked at any more expense for the sake of righteousness; but Miss Whitney had already been convicted. Her case has been carried from court to court, and is now before the nine wise old men in Washington, where her great-uncle was once justice. At last accounts they are still postponing decision in the hope that there will be another earthquake soon and Miss Whitney will be swallowed up in it.

But the prize example of the high integrity and clear moral purpose of right-thinking California legal action is the case of Tom Connors. Connors was secretary of the California Branch of the I.W.W. Defense Committee. About two years ago a state legislator named Fellom—who certainly should have been lynched by now—dared to introduce a bill to repeal the criminal syndicalism act. All the anti-Babbitt associations—alas! even California is not free of them!—circularized the state in favor of the Fellom Bill, Connors among them. One of the twenty thousand circulars fell into the hands of a man who was on the venire of a jury to try a criminal syndicalism case. After two trials the twelve good men and true concerned decided that this constituted tampering with a jury, although Connors had never seen the complaining witness; and the sentence was set at five years. Only after six months in San Quentin was the judgment reversed. The judge was our old friend Busick.

Just about the same time, in a neighboring town, a prosperous contractor had a friend on trial for bootlegging. The contractor was accused and convicted of having introduced his bootlegging friend to members of the jury and of having intervened on the defendant’s behalf. He got five days.

Yes, sir, you’ve got to hand it to California. When the Wobblies boycotted the state and advertised it as “the beautiful and damned—land of orange-groves and jails,” a proud district attorney arose and chortled: “We are glad to have the world know that California has jails for radicals—such as they are.”

“Such as they are” is right. But the California exhibit which wins the gilt-lined custard pie is the trio of peripatetic professional witnesses whose testimony has sent over a hundred men to those jails up to date. The regular assortment, which recites its unsavory personal history and on the strength of it secures the conviction of complete strangers, consists of a confessed burglar and high-jacker, a stool-pigeon who during his radical career short-changed his trusting fellow workers of $455.50, and a sexual pervert who has deserted from the army, navy and marines on thirteen separate occasions. Once in a while a new witness helps these three out in their arduous but well-paid labors; but since one newcomer staged an unofficial booze raid and killed a man who asked for his warrant, and another was hardly established in the state before he was extradited to Washington where he was later convicted of a statutory offense—to use the chaste language of the newspapers—against a fourteen-year-old girl, the authorities feel that innovations are dangerous, and are sticking to the original trio.

These old reliables testify to their former crimes; announce that while holding cards in the I.W.W. they, on their own initiative, burned sundry hay-stacks and otherwise maltreated the surrounding scenery; pocket their checks and go to the next trial—and some lumberjack who joined the agitation for baths and clean bedding years after these gentry were kicked down the steps of the last Wobbly hall, is on their testimony sent up to the hoosegow for one to fourteen years.

If any other state can cite a method of disposing of annoying disturbers more efficient, original or colorful, it is asked to send its representatives to confer with the local authorities, to the end that California may maintain its proud supremacy among the commonwealths. Efficiency, originality and color are indeed the three main characteristics of California justice. Under the first head, the secretary of a radical organization in North Zenith was quietly kidnapped on the street one night nearly a year ago, and has never been heard of since; under the second, a lot of South Zenith children rehearsing a play and another lot engaged in studying the contraband Russian language were scooped up and sent to jail as dangerous radicals; and under the third—well, shall we select the coat of tar recently administered by the Ku Klux, with police assistance, to some objectionable soapboxers; or the bombing of the house of the colored gentleman who bought a home too near his white brethren; or the nice white steam-heat which was turned on the prisoners crowded in a little receiving-cell until they fainted and fell in helpless rows on the concrete floor; or the boiling coffee into which the wicked Wobbly children were thrown in San Pedro?

California has inaugurated a campaign to invite a host of red-blooded he-men and their ladies to settle in the Golden State. I hereby contribute my bit. I trust by its aid all good Babbitts will realize the opportunities and pleasures that await them in the land of honey, fruit and pretty fair wine. “California is calling.” The spirit of ’49 still lives—in fact, it has had a gland transplantation and hasn’t grown up a bit.

The Workers Monthly began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Party publication. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and the Communist Party began publishing The Communist as its theoretical magazine. Editors included Earl Browder and Max Bedacht as the magazine continued the Liberator’s use of graphics and art.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/wm/1925/v4n09-jul-1925.pdf