Two weeks after the convention, eleven key figures in the Communist Labor Party of California were arrested and charged with criminal syndicalism. Effective on April 30 of 1919, California’s criminal syndicalism statute had been presented to the legislature as an emergency measure for the “immediate preservation of the public peace and safety,” and had passed by unanimous vote of the senate and with only nine dissenting votes in the assembly. The act defined “criminal syndicalism” as “any doctrine or precept advocating . . . the commission of crime, sabotage . . . or unlawful acts of force and violence . . . as a means of accomplishing a change in industrial ownership or control, or effecting any political change;” and it provided that any person who “organizes or assists in organizing, or is or knowingly becomes a member of, any organization, society, group or assemblage of persons organized or assembled to advocate, teach or aid and abet criminal syndicalism” is guilty of a felony punishable up to fourteen years in prison.[34] Its chief target was the International Workers of the World. The IWW had not only been instrumental in orchestrating labor strikes and slow-downs to improve conditions for industrial laborers and migratory farm workers, but it was suspected of more nefarious and surreptitious deeds in California: destroying hop kilns, burning wheat and hop fields, placing phosphor bombs in haystacks and barns, among other activities. With the criminal syndicalism law, California state authorities now had a forceful weapon against the IWW, and strike back it did: almost immediately, James McHugo, the IWW secretary in Oakland, and dozens of IWW adherents were indicted under the act. But the IWW was not to be the only target of prosecution for criminal syndicalism, as Charles Ruthenberg and Anita Whitney came to understand only too well. [35]
Ruthenberg was arrested on two separate occasions and under two separate state laws before the turn of the year. Shortly after Ohio’s state legislature enacted its syndicalism statute, he was arrested in July of 1919 at the Cleveland Socialist headquarters and charged “with circulating copies of the Messenger . . . which advocates the Soviet form of government.” With that indictment still pending, Ruthenberg was arrested again on December 1 – this time in Chicago, following a telegram from New York authorities that he had been indicted under New York’s 1902 Criminal Anarchy Law for publishing the Left Wing Manifesto, adopted at the June conference, that advocated the forceful eradication of established government. Whereas the Ohio charges were quietly dismissed, the New York prosecution was set for trial in October of 1920.[36]
