Red Lady

In San Francisco's Superior Court last week Charlotte Anita Whitney, 68-year-old daughter of a onetime State Senator and niece of a U. S. Supreme Court Justice appointed by Abraham Lincoln, was convicted of "false swearing" to signatures on Communist petitions for a place on the ballot, faced a possible sentence of six years in prison.

Up to last year Californians had never troubled to enforce their election law which requires circulators of petitions to swear that they have personally witnessed the affixing of each signature. But in November 1934 jittery citizens were still seeing Red after their Communist-fomented agricultural strikes and the San Francisco General Strike. Investigating Communist Party petitions, vigilant patriots charged that eight circulators had made false attestations, got out warrants for their arrest. Last February one of them, a young woman named Louise Todd, was convicted of perjury, sentenced to one to 14 years in Tehachapi Women's Prison. Embarrassed authorities overlooked six small-fry Reds, but they could not ignore famed Charlotte Anita Whitney. Last fortnight she was brought to trial.

Handsome, gentle-born Anita Whitney started life as a social worker, says she was turned to radicalism by the futility of charity as a method of ending misery. Because she was a charter member of California's Communist Labor Party, she was convicted in 1920 under the State's notorious Criminal Syndicalism Act, sentenced to one to 14 years in San Quentin Prison. For seven years fiery young Lawyer John Francis Neylan, now William Randolph Hearst's most trusted adviser, fought for a retrial, finally took her case on appeal up to the U. S. Supreme Court. The appeal was rejected in a decision which established the constitutionality of the Criminal Syndicalism Act. In 1927, after a storm of appeals from famed sympathizers, Governor Clement Calhoun Young gave Anita Whitney a pardon. To the chagrin of many a sympathizer, most of whom were mild liberals, Anita Whitney promptly marched back to the Communist battle line as an orthodox Stalinite. In the election which led to her arrest, she polled over 100,000 votes as her Party's candidate for State Comptroller. Considered their No. 1 asset by California Communists, she is gentle, generous, indisputably sincere. Red-haters call her a fanatic who has used her birth & breeding to betray her class. Of 25 candidates examined for Communist Whitney's jury only two admitted to prejudice against Communism. The rest, including five subscribers to William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, had "never formed or expressed an opinion" on the subject.

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