Charlotte Anita Whitney facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Charlotte Anita Whitney
|
|
|---|---|
Charlotte Anita Whitney in the 1910s
|
|
| Born | July 7, 1867 San Francisco, California, U.S.
|
| Died | February 4, 1955 (aged 87) San Francisco, California, U.S.
|
| Resting place | Mountain View Cemetery (Oakland, California) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Wellesley College |
Charlotte Anita Whitney (July 7, 1867 – February 4, 1955), best known as "Anita Whitney", 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 1920 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. When her education in Oakland was complete, she attended a normal school in San Jose, California before leaving for the East Coast to attend Wellesley College from which she graduated in 1889.
Following graduation, Whitney worked for a time as teacher.
In 1893, Whitney visited a slum in New York City. Profoundly affected, she soon developed an interest in social work. In 1901, she took over as the new executive secretary of the United Charities of Oakland, California. She continued in that capacity until 1908.
The same impulse that drove her to seek betterment in the lives of the poor and downtrodden apparently also led her to campaign actively for women's suffrage. Two decades before women across the nation were entitled to vote, under the Nineteenth Amendment, Whitney took part in a series of early voting rights campaigns, from California to Connecticut.
By 1911, Whitney's interest in the women's rights movement led her to become the California organizer of the National College Equal Suffrage League until 1913. She would later serve as Vice President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
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.
On June 20, 1927, California Governor C. C. Young granted Whitney an unconditional pardon, believing that putting her into a cell was "unthinkable". Young added that the law under which she was convicted was constitutional but that "abnormal conditions attending the trial" greatly influenced the jury and that "under ordinary circumstances" the case never would have been prosecuted.
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 national chairwoman of the Communist Party in 1936.
California's communists nominated Whitney for the US Senate twice.
Her popularity among the country's radical leftists never completely disappeared. 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 1950 campaign for senator won close to 99,000 votes.
Death
Anita Whitney died on February 4, 1955, aged 87, in San Francisco.
