Charlotte Anita Whitney

Charlotte Anita Whitney (July 7, 1867 – February 4, 1955) was an American women's rights activist, political activist, suffragist, and early Communist Labor Party of America and Communist Party USA organizer in California.

She is best remembered as the defendant in a landmark 1927 California criminal syndicalism trial, Whitney v. California, which featured a landmark U.S. Supreme Court concurring opinion by Justice Louis Brandeis that only a "clear and present danger" would be sufficient for the legislative restriction of the right of free speech. This standard would ultimately be employed against the Communists again during the Second Red Scare of the 1950s.

Early life Anita Whitney was born in San Francisco, California, on July 7, 1867, the daughter of a pre-eminent family whose members included the American Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field and the multi-millionaire speculator and magnate Cyrus W. Field. Her father was a lawyer.

Whitney attended both private and public school growing up in Oakland, California, across the Bay from San Francisco. She continued in that capacity until 1908.

1920 criminal syndicalism trial

When World War I broke out in Europe, Whitney, who was a pacifist, became a member of the anti-war Socialist Party of America, joining the party meetings of the Oakland branch. When the more radical members of the Socialist Party bolted the 1919 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party in Chicago and elected to create an American Communist party, Whitney, who considered the Socialist Party too moderate, threw herself into the Communists' cause and drummed up support for the new Communist Labor Party throughout California.

Following a speech at the Hotel Oakland to the Oakland Civic Club on behalf of the CLP, Whitney was arrested on November 28, 1919, and was charged with "criminal syndicalism" in violation of the California Criminal Syndicalism Act. A pre-trial hearing was held in the case on January 6, 1920, less than a week after the U.S. Department of Justice's mass crackdown on alien radicals known as the "Palmer Raids", and the case went to trial in Oakland on January 27, in the Alameda County Superior Court.

Whitney was charged with five counts of having violated the state's Criminal Syndicalism law by her membership in the Communist Labor Party. Since Whitney freely admitted her status as a charter member of the CLP, the burden of the prosecution was in attempting to demonstrate the association of the organization with the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist International, based in Moscow, organizations held to be illegal under California law. Once having established the criminal nature of the CLP, prosecutors argued that they would then establish the guilt of the defendant.

Whitney's defense attorney, Thomas H. O'Connor, was unable to obtain a continuance in the case on the grounds that his daughter had fallen ill with influenza in the ongoing 1918 flu pandemic. O'Connor was himself stricken on the second day of the trial and was unable to continue the trial after the third. He would die of the illness a little over a week later, as did a woman on the original jury. Citing reasons of expense, Judge James G. Quinn swore in an alternate juror and demanded for Whitney's assistant counsel, J.E. Pemberton, to proceed with the case. The defense called only single witness, Whitney herself. It also recalled one individual who had been forced to the stand by the prosecution, San Francisco communist leader Max Bedacht. The prosecution, on the other hand, argued at length that the Communist Labor Party was nothing more than "a political adjunct of the IWW" and called upon the jury "to uphold the sacred tenets of Americanism and to place, with its verdict, the seal of disapproval on the activities of the Communist Labor Party and its blood brother, the IWW." The first appeal was filed on February 28 in the District Court of Appeal in the First Appellate District, San Francisco, citing 16 grounds for appeal and points of error. On June 5, 1922, a petition for a rehearing of the evidence in the case was made before the California Supreme Court. The petition was denied, with two justices dissenting. On October 19, the appeal was summarily dismissed, on technical grounds. The appeals process was still not at an end, however. In December 1925, Whitney's legal team succeeded in overcoming the jurisdictional technicalities that had sabotaged its previous effort, and it won a petition for a rehearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was argued again on March 15, 1926.

Some 14 months later, on May 16, 1927, Whitney's conviction was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in Whitney v. California. The ruling featured a landmark concurring opinion by Justice Louis Brandeis that only a "clear and present danger" would be sufficient for the legislative restriction of the right of free speech. His opinion would be employed again in cases revoking restrictions against Communists after a subsequent wave of imprisonments during the 1950s.

Post-trial activity

Still dogged by criminal charges from her 1919 arrest, Whitney ran for California State Controller in 1924, waging a relentless political campaign that garnered over 100,000 votes.

In 1934, she helped establish the San Francisco Workers' School (later the California Labor School). In 1935, she was again convicted by the California court system, related to election fraud, since eight circulators had made false attestations during a pre-election petition campaign, but the state watchdogs saw fit to add additional charges of "lecturing without a permit" and "distributing radical literature". Her stature among radicals only enhanced by the conviction, Whitney was named the state chairperson of the Communist Party in California in 1936. California's communists nominated Whitney for the U.S. Senate twice. Her 1940 campaign for senator won over 97,000 votes.

Although trailed by a protracted record of political harassment and accusations by the California Tenney Committee, compounded by the anticommunism promoted locally by actor and future Governor Ronald Reagan in Los Angeles and across the nation by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, her popularity among the country's radical leftists never completely disappeared.

Death Anita Whitney died on February 4, 1955, aged 87, in San Francisco.