Charlotte Anita Whitney, 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.
Background
Charlotte Anita Whitney was born on July 7, 1867 in San Francisco, Calif. , the daughter of George and Mary Lewis Swearingen Whitney. She described the values she learned in childhood as a combination of "Christian ethics plus democratic ideals. " Her father, an attorney, once served as state senator from Alameda County. Her maternal uncle, Stephen J. Field, was a United States Supreme Court Justice. According to her own account, it was on a trip with him to Washington, D. C. , at the age of seven that Anita Whitney first glimpsed poverty, a striking contrast to the comfort and affluence of the world she knew.
Education
Whitney was educated at both private and public schools in California, including San Jose Normal School. She graduated in 1889 from Wellesley College, with a B. S.
Career
Like many young women of her time, she lacked a vocation. Whitney dated her radicalization from 1893, when she visited the College Settlement House on Rivington Street in New York City. Again she saw squalor, but this time she set to work--first in New York, then in the slums of Oakland, Calif. In 1901 she became secretary of the Council of Associated Charities of Alameda County, a position she held until 1906. In 1911 Whitney began to engage in political activity, becoming an ardent worker for woman suffrage. As president of the California College Equal Suffrage League, and second vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (then headed by Anna Howard Shaw and Jane Addams), she led the fight to make California the "sixth free state. " She next worked in the suffrage campaigns in Oregon, Nevada, and Connecticut (in the last state with Katharine Houghton Hepburn). When the California College Equal Suffrage League was reorganized into the California Civic League, to educate women for public responsibility, she was again named president. Whitney was involved in the free-speech fight of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies) and the Wheatland hop riot in 1913. She fought for the release of jailed Wobblies and aided the families of workers hurt in confrontations. In 1914 she joined the Socialist party. The Russian Revolution of 1917 led Whitney to renounce her earlier charity work and to support the cause of "socialists who did things. " In 1919, when the California Socialist party split from the national party to form the more radical Communist Labor party (soon renamed the Communist party), she was among its founders. It was as a Communist that Whitney became the focus of a criminal syndicalism case. In 1919, when "red raids" began in California under antisyndicalism laws, she spoke in defense of those arrested. On November 28, 1919, after a speech at the Oakland Center of the California Civic League, in which she had said, "I am a loyal American citizen, and I want an American flag on the platform upon which I am about to stand, " she was arrested on five counts of criminal syndicalism. She was convicted on one count and sentenced to one to fourteen years. Although she remained in prison for only eleven days because of her health, appeals of her case lasted until 1927. Governor C. C. Young pardoned her on June 20, 1927. In 1924 Whitney ran for state treasurer on the Communist party ticket and received more than 100, 000 votes, the only significant support for a Communist candidate in the election. She remained an activist until her death. Whitney was chosen national chairman of the Communist party in 1936, was a member of the Communist Party Campaign Committee in 1940, and was the Communist candidate for United States senator from California in 1950. Nevertheless, as late as 1929 the New York Times referred to her as a "social worker. "