The Muckraker and the Spirit of Protest at Liberty Hill Live On

By the time Upton Sinclair moved West, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, he had established an international reputation as a social activist and muckraker. His novel “The Jungle” (1906), exposing the inhuman conditions in the meat-packing industry of Chicago, had virtually invented investigative journalism.

On May 15, 1923, angered by the Los Angeles Police Department’s brutal treatment of the striking members of the Industrial Workers of the World, Sinclair appeared at a protest rally in San Pedro. It was held with the owner’s permission on private property bearing the prophetic name “Liberty Hill.” He began his speech by reading the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Barely able to finish the first three lines, Sinclair was arrested on orders of Chief Louis D. Oaks, who called the author “more dangerous than 4,000 IWW.” Sinclair later would thank Oaks for his “compliment,” for “to be dangerous to lawbreakers in office such as yourself is the highest duty that a citizen of this community can perform.”

Sinclair’s friends tried to take up where he left off and continued to read from the Bill of Rights. They too were arrested. For reading the 1st Amendment, all were charged with “discussing, arguing, orating and debating certain thoughts and theories, which thoughts and theories were contemptuous of the Constitution of the State of California.”

The police held Sinclair and the others incommunicado all that night and the next day. The authorities tried to rush them into court, hoping to have them held without bail, but someone had tipped off Sinclair’s wife, who arranged for his lawyers to secure his release.

Sinclair immediately seized the opportunity to turn his unlawful arrest into a political trial. “I charge, and intend to prove in court,” Sinclair wrote to Oaks, “that you are carrying out the conspiracy of the Merchant’s and Manufacturer’s Association to smash the harbor strike by brutal defiance of law.” He accused the officials of denying the strikers’ “every civil right,” leaving them with no recourse but “to go back as slaves, and the Constitution of the United States [would] cease to exist so far as concerns workingmen.”

But Sinclair would have none of that. “All I can say, sir, is that I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and that meantime I am not frightened by your menaces.” Sinclair warned the authorities: “I have a conscience and religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering and may be lost through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country. I have received a telegram from the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, asking me if I will speak at a mass meeting of protest in Los Angeles, and I answered that I will do so.”

Sinclair and his supporters hired a hall and held crowded meetings every afternoon and evening. Out of those gatherings, the Southern California branch of the ACLU was formed. A Congregational minister, the Rev. Clinton J. Taft, resigned his pulpit to serve as its first director, a position he held for the next 20 years.

Protests over Sinclair’s arrest came from all over the world. The Nation reprinted his brave letter to Oaks and called Sinclair “a defender of the law against those who would violate it.” The magazine urged its readers to support this “nobly patriotic protest.”

In the end, all charges against Sinclair and his colleagues were quietly dropped. In his autobiography, Sinclair would gleefully report that Oaks was soon expelled from the force, but not for his unconstitutional behavior. He was found “in his car at night with a woman and a jug of whiskey.”

For 75 years, the ACLU of Southern California has struggled to remain true to Sinclair’s courageous spirit: to protect freedom of speech, press and assembly; to protest lawless government repression; to come to the defense of the powerless. And above all, to preserve and uphold the Bill of Rights.