Student Activism in the 1930s
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ASU Memoirs

American Student Union Memoirs


50th and 25 National Reunion--ASU and SDS--1986

Kay Cline Burton

1. From 1930-34 students in Southern California formed a spirited part of the upsurge that would transform the state's politics and loosen the near-fascist stranglehold of Big Agriculture. It was a time when armed vigilantes roamed freely through the Imperial Valley and other ranching areas to maintain that open shop "White Spot" of the nation.

2. Our UCLA chapter of SLID, of which I was a leader, joined with other chapters in '34 to form an Intercollegiate Student Council. The Council, in turn, joined with young people from Congregational and Methodist and other churches to organize the Southern California Congress of Youth. Chester Williams, who later joined the New Deal Administration, was chairman and I was elected secretary.

3. The Congress became an effective catalyst for progressive social change.

4. We were part of the EPIC campaign headed by Upton Sinclair, whom we almost elected governor in November '34. There is strong evidence that he was indeed elected in a bitterly contested campaign but lost out in a questionable ballot count. Our goals were: End Poverty in California, pensions for the elderly (in tune with the Townsend and Ham 'n' Eggs movements), ending anti-union vigilantism in the agricultural valleys, and the right of all labor to organize. From the EPIC campaign a new Democratic Party emerged and California became part of the New Deal.

5. In January '34 the noted ACLU attorney, A.L. Wirin, on his way to a meeting in the Imperial Valley, was kidnapped, beaten and dumped in the desert. Delegations began going down to protest. With several clergymen, the Congress of Youth led a delegation to the embattled area. We knew it was risky, but we had no difficulty getting up three carloads. We met the same reception as previous groups. Armed thugs surrounded us, piled us back into our cars and "escorted" us out in three different directions. The car I was in sped out to the accompaniment of shots over and around our flivver. But the story was now national news and the growers were compelled to mute their murderous denial of elementary rights. For the ACLU, it was a battle to restore the Constitutional protections so viciously stomped on by the growers. I was one of two student representatives on the Board of the Southern California ACLU. Upton Sinclair was its most prominent member. The other student rep was Al Hamilton.

6. The Longshore strike of '34 shook the entire West Coast and helped reawaken labor throughout the country. Members of the football squad at UCLA were mobilized as flying wedges to break the picket lines. We left-leaning students violated campus rules against leaflet distribution and exposed the uses to which the athletes were being put. We were reprimanded by UCLA Chancellor Ernest Moore but the flying wedges disintegrated shortly after. There were other strikes supported by our members and we grew accustomed to carrying signs on picket lines, some of our people getting arrested. The infamous Red Squad of the L.A. Police got to know us. They, too, were part of our education during those turbulent years.

7. In November of '34 I left for the East with Monroe Sweetland, his wife and one of the Haskell brothers. On the way, we stopped over at Evanston, 111., to attend a student peace conference at Northwestern University. In New York, I worked briefly on the staff of Student Outlook, edited by Joe Lash. Later, I left to become an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and then for the CIO Textile Workers Organizing Committee. In the 1960s, in L.A., I was back as an organizer, for an AFL-CIO sponsored special organizing project, retiring in 1973 only to become an activist in the senior movement.

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