D.  The Phoenix Rises

      Eugene Debs predicted in 1925 that “Anita Whitney will not go to prison.”^[131]  By 1927, after the Supreme Court’s affirmance of her conviction, that prediction seemed fanciful.  But a few days before the Court granted a rehearing in Whitney v. California, something unusual happened.  It was something that caught the attention of Anita Whitney’s lead appellate counsel, Walter Pollak.  One of Pollak’s former clients, Benjamin Gitlow, who six months earlier had lost his First Amendment case in the Supreme Court, was pardoned by the Governor of New York.^[132] 

      Shortly thereafter, in June 1927, California Governor Clement Calhoun Young pardoned Whitney,^[133] an act of clemency that surprised many.  Few governors, let alone a Republican one like Young, ever pardoned a “Red” at a time when Communists were so disliked.  So, why was Anita Whitney pardoned?  The answer was every bit as curious as almost everything else in her case.  

      The pardon application and much of the campaign were spearheaded by Whitney’s former California appellate lawyer, John Francis Neylan.  The Hearst lawyer who looked out for the interests of management,^[134] Neylan was a man of power.  From his plush suite at the Palace Hotel, he developed legal arguments to save the liberty of a client whose political creed was antithetical to his professional existence. 

     He also recruited others to his cause.  The list of those who endorsed a pardon for Whitney was a Who’s Who of captains of commerce.  Politicians also stepped forward to advance the pardon campaign.  “Were I Governor, I would pardon her at once,” declared U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson (R-CA).  University professors, social workers, economists, and civic and religious leaders followed suit.  And even Walter J. Peterson, who had been in charge of the detail that arrested Whitney, said that her arrest was a mistake:

I investigated Anita Whitney’s record in 1919 . . . .  I found that she had always done an enormous amount of good in the community.  .  .  .  She was one of those idealists who want to make the world better for everyone.  I ordered Fenton Thompson not to arrest her.  But he was so zealous he went over my head to Commissioner J.F. Morse and the arrest was made.  No constructive good can be done by making a martyr of Anita Whitney.  She should never have been held to answer in the first place.^[135]