A. The Younger Years
On July 7, 1867, Charlotte Anita Whitney was born in San Francisco into an influential and refined family. She could count five Mayflower pilgrims on her father’s side; on her mother’s side, the Dutch Van Swearingen family, who settled in 1640 in Maryland, could claim two American Revolutionary officers, one a colonel in the Virginia militia who produced a line of genteel slave owners. Anita’s father, who suffered health conditions, escaped the climate of New England by migrating to California in the 1860s to begin a successful legal practice; there, he met his wife, and raised his children in an environment of comfort and culture. In the fall of 1885, George Whitney packed his daughter off to the East Coast to receive a first-rate education at Wellesley. She spent her holidays with her aunt and uncle-in-marriage, the conservative Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field.[17]
Three years before Whitney entered college, Charles Ruthenberg was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in a small wooden-framed house with a white picket fence. His birth on July 9, 1882, added a ninth child to the immigrant family that had left Germany only four months earlier. “Worker August Ruthenberg,” as his father’s name was recorded on his marriage license, was a longshoreman who raised his family in one of Cleveland’s poorer districts. A socialist who believed in organized labor, August never seriously engaged in radical politics but exposed his son to Sunday afternoon discussions with his blue-collar friends on the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Schelling. Though Charles had wanted to go to high school and college, his father’s premature death of typhoid on August 23, 1898, forced him to earn money for the family. He became a carpenter’s assistant, working ten hours a day for $9.00 per week.[18]
In 1892-1893, while Ruthenberg learned his fourth- and fifth-grade lessons, Whitney engaged in social work at the College Settlement on New York’s lower east side, where she was first exposed to real poverty. Anita had found “at last . . . something vital to be done.”[19] Returning to California in 1901, she began a lengthy stint in charitable work. She served as secretary for the Associated Charities of Alameda County from 1903 to 1910, and spearheaded a successful campaign to oust race-track. As the first probation officer of Alameda County, she established efficient methods that set the standards for her successors. She helped orchestrate the 1911 victory for women’s suffrage in California. As president of the California Civic League, she strove for laws securing minimum wages for women and children, the pasteurization of milk, the abatement of red-light prostitution districts, and the right of women to serve on juries.[20]
