Communist Strikers in San Jose in the 1930's

SCARRED BY A SHELL

In his 1996 book, "Endangered Dreams" the renowned Californian historian Kevin Starr described the critical point of the labor rally in St. James Park on July 31, 1931, this way: "Finally, an unarmed young woman jumped to the platform and urged the crowd to march on City Hall to demand the release of all arrested strikers," he wrote. "The woman then leapt from the speakers' stand and took her place at the head of a quickly forming column. ... A tear gas bomb hit the young woman in the face, and she fell to the ground unconscious." According to an oral history left by Dorothy Ray Healey, that young woman was a San Francisco-based Communist organizer, Mini Carson (nee Karasick), who later ran for Congress as a Communist. The tear gas bomb hit Carson on the cheek, and Healey traveled on the running board of a car that took Carson to a hospital. Healey says Carson retained the scar for the rest of her life.

HELP FROM THE RICH

The Communists got help from unexpected quarters. In her oral history, Healey remembered a "very rich" woman who lived across the street from St. James Park. Healey recalled that the woman would regularly contribute $3 to $5 a week -- between $45 and $70 today -- to the cause. Sadly, the benefactor's name has been lost to history.

TO MOSCOW WITH LOVE

The files of the American Communists were exceptionally well-preserved in the Comintern archives in Moscow, which were opened to the public in the mid-1990s. San Francisco State history professor Robert Cherny, who has studied the movement, says there was a reason for that. During World War II, the Soviet Union assigned the job of organizing the files to Wolfgang Leonhard, a young German Communist who had studied in Moscow. Leonhard took the job seriously, with the result that correspondence originally sent to New York and then forwarded to Moscow survived in good condition.

MUCKRAKER'S LEGACY

The muckraker Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), who in later years lived in Carmel, was sympathetic with the Communists' goals but never was a party member. That became an issue in 1934, when the leader of Communist District 13 (California and Arizona), Sam Adams Darcy, wanted Steffens to run as the Communist candidate for U.S. Senate. Steffens refused to join the party. And Darcy was reproved by the national leadership. "Darcy was on the outs with the national leadership," Cherny said. "They'd bring him back in line."

HER BEST SPEECH

Caroline Decker Gladstein and Patrick Chambers, two of the Communist leaders in San Jose during 1932 and 1933, had vastly different talents. Gladstein -- then known as Comrade Decker -- was a superb organizer, an eloquent speaker who could stir a crowd. Chambers was more content to sit around a campfire and listen to farmworkers voice their complaints. Later, when Gladstein had her first child after splitting from the party, she received a telegram from Chambers. "Best speech you ever gave," it said.

TRUE TO THE FAITH

Almost all of the Communists who were active in San Jose during the 1930s drifted away from the party, particularly after the famous speech by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 denounced Stalin's sins. But one organizer, Elizabeth Nicholas, who was famous for her home visits to workers in San Jose's Goosetown neighborhood in the 1930s, clung to the faith. In the 1970s, historian Glenna Matthews tracked down Nicholas, who was living then in a modest and well-tended home in Mountain View, with pleasant roses.

"I didn't want to say, 'Are you now?' " Matthews remembers. "But the first thing she said to me was, 'I joined the party in the early '20s, and I have been a member continuously since.' " Nicholas died in 1993 at age 88.