Student Activism in the 1930s
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SLID Essays (Summer, 1935)

Autobiography of William K. Hollister


Antioch College

1. Up until about two years ago I lead on exceedingly normal life. In fact, my entire environment, home and friends, small town schooling, etc. were so typically bourgeois that I feel competent to be classed as an authority on the middle class mind. Our family moved around quite a bit in western Penna. and Ohio, my father being a superintendent on railroad construction and similar jobs. He was always well liked by the men, and for this reason and others never become involved in any labor trouble. The nearest we came to a clash with the proletariat was during the bituminous coal strikes of 1921, at which time my father was superintendent of a small scab "stripping" mine west of Pittsburgh. His men were well paid and happy, but unorganized. There was considerable turmoil for a month or so while the U.M.W's tried mass picketing to bring them out. At the time they blew up all the other independent mines in the district, but left ours alone. Owing to the dirty deal that Lewis gave the miners at this time when their strike failed to get the cooperation of many small mines like ours and to win their demands from the National Mining Company and a few other big corporation, I did not gain a very favorable impression of labor unions. Also, being one of a few American families in a largely foreign district, our isolation from the working class during the ten years we lived there was almost complete.

2. My interests during high school and early college were almost exclusively technical, centering on radio and aeronautics. There was no high school paper or youth organization of any kind except a straggling troop of boy scouts, of which I was a member for two years.

3. At Antioch I came for the first time under liberal influences. The college itself is non-partisan to a suicidal degree and it took me from 1928 to 1934 to become a socialist, during which time I bobbed around in four fields of concentration, ranging from Engineering to English. However, as a result of much contact with the Morgan (Arthur E.) family, two of whose sons are S.P. members, and several of their group, the Red propaganda could no longer be denied. That is to say, the elder Morgan's are Cooperativists rather than revolutionists, but the younger group went much further left. I joined the S.P. and Y.P.S.L. last summer and the S.L.I.D. last fall, working with both groups all year. This spring a group of us in Ohio formed a state Yipsel Federation, of which I am Educational Director. During this last year my interest in the socialist and labor movements has taken a sharp curve upward. Our activity in Yellow Springs included fall election campaigning for the S.P. and against our fellow townsman Simeon Fess; participating in a cement workers strike, picketing, carrying coffee, etc.; producing two plays for labor union groups in nearby town; arranging forums; staging several peace demonstrations, reports of which the L.I.D. already has; and attempting to organize radical groups in three towns as well as on our own campus.

4. My job experiences while at Antioch, although not making me actively labor- conscious at the time--I was never in a union shop--did give me several valuable years getting acquainted with real laboring people. They included one year factory assembly work at the Kitchen-Aide Mfg. Co., Troy, Ohio, makers of an overpriced home food mixer; one year as radio repairman with Atwater Kent, Phila; a year of office work in the job-getting dept. at Antioch; ten weeks selling frozen fish on South State Street, Chicago; two summers on farms; and two years managing the Antioch Student Cooperative restaurant, a real Consumers' Cooperative.

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