1.1. Tape Number: I, Side One (July 27, 1972)

Gardner

Mr. Monroe, to begin with, let's talk about your backgrounds, where you were born, and your family.

Monroe

I was born October 4, 1909, in a very small village in Northern California. The name of that village is Loyalton, and that in recent years, has been one of my private jokes: that having been born in Loyalton I should have established for all time my loyalty; and yet it was on that particular question that my life took an interesting turn.Loyalton is situated in what is called Sierra Valley. Sierra Valley is an ancient lake bed just east of the Sierra Nevada scarp in Northern California, about thirty miles north of Lake Tahoe. Geographically and geologically, it's an interesting point in California. It is very near the northern end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, geologically. This valley is the headwater of the Feather River.One of the major passes through the Sierras, which became the route of the Western Pacific [Railroad], crosses the Sierra Valley at its northern edge past "Beckwith," as we used to call it, or Beckwourth, which I learned much later was a village settled by one of the early Negro settlers in California after the Civil War. Beckwourth, the little town, is still there, Beckwourth Peak, where I killed my first deer as a young man--all of this is for me interesting country, an interesting place to have started my life. It's in that part of California which is right on the edge of Nevada just over the Sierras, partly Sierra country, partly Nevada country. There Loyalton rests at the present day.At the time of my birth, it was a fairly thriving sawmill town and agricultural center, very small agricultural center, to be sure; but in the valley itself cattle raising, wheat raising, grain raising, and dairy farming were part of the industry there. But the major industry was lumber, lumbering from timber cut on the adjacent mountains and at a later time hauled from more distant places to the mills there. Sawmill work, of course, was the work of my parents, and sawmill work was the way of life of the people in Loyalton.My family were not property people; they were workers, kind of diminished family by that time.(I'm a third generation Californian, which is a matter of some note. That isn't going to be so important in the future because there are lots of third generation Californians now; but for a man sixty-three years old, that is a matter of some interest. My grandmother was born in California and my mother in California.)I am the only issue of what, by the time of my birth, I think, had got to be a pretty bad marriage. My mother was the daughter of a pretty bad marriage. Her mother, who is now dead, worked as a cook in a mining camp and cooked for miners in Sierra City. Sierra City is on the western side of the Sierras, not far from Downieville, Grass Valley, Nevada City, in the old Mother Lode country.My mother was born to my grandmother as a result of an English trader coming through in, I guess, the 1870s or thereabouts--I think my mother was born in the 1880s--an Englishman from England by way of, I believe, Canada, who happened--God knows how--to have found his way to this tiny little mining town, courted my grandmother, whose primary identification, as far as I am concerned, was that she was an Irishwoman.

Gardner

What was her name? If you could, give as many of the names as possible.

Monroe

Yes. It's interesting--I don't remember her name. I never knew her. [telephone interruption] I never knew her; she died before I was born. My mother's name is Nell Gertrude, and it was Wilkinson, as a maiden name, and then later Monroe. My mother is still alive, incidentally, and will be eighty-five this September.

Gardner

In Loyalton?

Monroe

No, no. She now lives in Grass Valley and has for a number of years.The young Englishman who fathered my mother, and is my grandfather, moved along, moved north, and left my pregnant grandmother with a daughter. In that sense, my mother was the product of a very unfortunate marriage. She was an only child, and by the time that I was born, as I said earlier, her marriage with my father had, I think, gone pretty sour.My father was one of two children of my grandparents. I don't know enough about the origins of the grandparents and great-grandparents. I suspect that on both, particularly on my father's side, he represented people who came to California, came to the West, following the Civil War, in that phase of the westward movement. They were not Gold Rush people; they came in the period after that. And they came, I think, following cattle out. I have the impression that my grandfather and my great-grandfather were in cattle ranching of some sort and moved west and finally ended up in California, my grandfather owning for a short period of time the only hotel in Big Pine, California. I've passed through that community a number of times and have wondered where that hotel is, which he owned there probably around the turn of the century.My father and his brother, my uncle, were the only children of that marriage. My grandfather, my father's father, died several years before I was born, so by the time I came along the family was disintegrating in one way or another, either as a result of broken marriages or the death of elder members of the family.My father was uneducated. I think both my parents probably had no more than a fourth- or fifth-grade education. My father was, as I think of him in that period, boyish, exuberant, irresponsible, a kind of ne'er-do-well who picked up very quickly the capacity to do certain kinds of semiskilled work. He had been a brakeman on the railroad and a conductor, and worked in the sawmill, and had done farm work and one thing or another. He was fairly bright, I think, as a person, but never quite took his responsibility either as a husband or a father too seriously. That was a good thing.My mother, on the other hand--I guess by reason of her special childhood experience and what I suppose was the bitterness of her mother--grew up to be a kind of dour and solemn person, very strong, very demanding, and intolerant of the kind of irresponsible attitude toward life that my father manifested.When I was about three years old, I think as a result of my mother's insistence, they got together some small amount of money, moved from Loyalton to a still smaller crossroads community, and bought or took over the management of a general store at what is now called Chilcoot. I don't know the origin of the word, but that's the point at which one of the longest tunnels on the Western Pacific goes through a whole mountain out into Nevada and off toward Reno. My father's management left something to be desired, and I think probably they just barely made a living there, and finally decided to sell out and leave that area.The impression I have of my parents in that period is that they were sometimes together, but mostly they were apart, and when they were apart I was left with the woman who was really the dominant influence, I think, in my younger years--my grandmother, my father's mother.

Gardner

What was her name?

Monroe

Grandma, I knew her as; Aunt Hat, as she was known to not only members of the family but to friends. Her name was Harriet, and by the time I came along it was Harriet Phelps. It had been Harriet Monroe; before that, Harriet Doan. She was a Doan girl.She was, for me, a remarkable woman, a remarkable person, and she was a kind of home for me--not the place, not where she was; but in her person, she was a home. I could always count on her. And, as I say, from the fact that my parents were so frequently separated and quarrelling and then coming back together, she was the kind of constant maternal experience and personal experience in those early years.The Loyalton experience included, before I left there first at about three or four years of age, my grandmother's sister, who was one of the Doan girls also, and who had married, very fortunately, one of the Lewis boys. The Lewis boys were early settlers of Loyalton, and even before Loyalton was organized as a community [they] had operated a mill about ten miles up the canyon, up Loyalton Creek Canyon, known as the Lewis mill, naturally. It was their mill. There were three brothers--Richard, Horace, and Sturgeon. They had the finest homes in Loyalton, and they were, in a sense, the aristocracy of Loyalton. They were partly lumber people but partly agricultural people, because they owned 400 or 500 acres of prime land in the valley.My grandmother's sister, Aunt Eva, married Richard Lewis and became a part of that family, bearing, with great misfortune--and I've always thought that this would be the meat for an interesting novel--two children, one of whom developed cataracts at an early age and was virtually blind, the other contracting meningitis at an early age and was totally crippled. The tragic figure was their father, Richard Lewis, who was a handsome man with great stature and dignity, who was the mayor of Loyalton, who yearned, I think, so much for healthy, strong children. I don't know whether he blamed his wife or how it was, or whether the strain was running low in the family, but he bore two weak children, two invalid children; and by the time I was ten, he succumbed to a heart attack, when he was, I think, just barely fifty or thereabouts, a relatively young man. He left that family without very much money, because--he was a bad manager--by that time the family fortune had been considerably depleted, his older brothers had died and their families had dispersed, and poor Aunt Eva was left with two invalid children, a fairly comfortable home, and an estate that didn't see her very far into the future. But that's down the line.When I was three or four, and after the experience at Chilcoot, my father and mother, who were then back together again, decided to move to Grass Valley, where some of my mother's cousins and relatives lived. There we lived for a year, rather comfortably and fairly happily. My father didn't work, but that was because he had sold the store and had a little money; and with money in the bank, who needs to work? He indulged himself during that period in the study of hypnotism. He was fascinated by that, and I can remember some amusing instances in which he would try to hypnotize my mother and me, and we would humor him and then, of course, laugh at him because he failed to hypnotize us. He spent some of his time, I think, at the village saloons. He liked to drink, but drank, I guess, not to excess. I don't remember his being an alcoholic or a drunk, but he did drink and enjoyed it, much to my mother's consternation, I think not in moral terms but because it was uncomfortable for her; and sometimes he didn't handle his liquor very well.Because I was an only child and because in these small towns I was kept somehow away from other children, I hadn't really any contact with kids until the year in Grass Valley, and then I played with three or four of my cousins, second or third or fourth cousins, and I remember that year pleasantly.Then we moved to Standard, California, because my grandmother and my step-grandfather were there. I hadn't mentioned him before. My grandmother's first husband, my grandfather, had died earlier. She later then, not much later, married her second husband. His name was George Phelps, and he was a saw filer. In the hierarchy of the sawmill, I guess the mill superintendent is at the top of the heap; next to him is the saw filer, because this is the man who makes the saw sharp enough to cut the logs; and then, the millwright; and then, the millhands. Saw filers were among the best paid of sawmill workers, and so, moving from Grass Valley to Standard, when we joined my grandmother and step-grandfather, they were comfortably settled in what was one of the better houses in that mill town. I've gone back to these houses since, and they don't look quite as nice as they did then, but they were well situated. And my father with the homing instinct of going back to his mother, who was always available to him, brought me and my mother along; and we lived together, a family of five or six, for a year or so, until I think my mother couldn't stand it any longer, and then we got our own little mill town house and lived there.I started to school there at about age five. This is an interesting fact, too. As early as I can remember--and, of course, that's because I was the only child in this whole household--I was regarded with special expectation. I've thought about this later. I guess I was brighter than the ordinary youngster, but maybe this is because I was expected to be brighter, or maybe that was a factor in the whole thing. But when I turned five, it was simply expected--although the other youngsters were six or seven when they started--that I would start to school. And I did, and I was smaller and younger and more babyish than any of the other kids, but I stuck it out. I didn't like it very much. It took me away from home and family, but I made it and finally settled into school, and I guess did very well, because I finished six years of school in about four years. School came easy for me, and I have no real impressions of those early school years.

Gardner

Do you recall the school at all, the size?

Monroe

Yes. Standard itself probably was a town of 250 people, just enough to man the mill, the yard, the factory and the company store. It was a company town, literally.

Gardner

Each of these towns was.

Monroe

Were company towns, yes. There was one school at the edge of the town, and kids came not only from the town itself but from the farms around. Standard is very near Sonora; it's about five, six miles from Sonora, which was one of the notable Mother Lode centers.The impression I have of those early years of elementary school was that they were easy, that I wasn't big enough to play baseball very well, that almost any of the kids there could lick me, that I had about me a kind of sissyish reputation. I was looked, well, looked kind of askance at, because I was different or I felt different, and I was given a kind of different status. I suppose my parents and my grandparents--and every community is stratified--counted themselves in the upper layer of the community. My grandfather made more money than most of the millworkers; we lived in a better house; I was dressed better and I was catered to; and I was regarded; therefore, naturally, as the kind of butt of the other kids. I don't remember ever having a fight there, however, except in one or two instances in which I didn't come off very well. Again, I was smaller and younger and not quite up to the level either of physical combat or of dealing with the kinds of social problems that I was confronted with.[I have] certain distinct memories about some of the youngsters that I knew there, but nother very terribly significant happened in that period of time. I remember my father taking off again, and some concern on my mother's part, and then being alone with her for a year or year and a half, during which time she found it necessary to go to work, first as a housekeeper and chambermaid for the two rooming houses that the company had erected for single workers, and then as a waitress in the local kind of community restaurant.I was left home alone and foraged for myself very well. It was a country town, in a sense; there was no problem at all finding things to do. I remember being Tarzan of the Apes in the foothill behind the house and swinging in the trees. I read avidly Zane Grey then. It was about the only set of books that the local library had so I was alternately every hero from the Zane Grey series. There was always something to do, so it didn't bother me much that either my father was away or that my mother was busy working.Then, when I finished sixth grade, I moved permanently with my grandparents. I think I had become by that time a kind of an encumbrance to my mother. It was clear that my father wasn't going to do much for me or about me, and I think probably the normal processes of her life required that she rid herself of this child who was an encumbrance. And my grandparents were eager to have me. So that summer, I went to stay with them for the summer; and as it turned out, I stayed on permanently with them and moved to Merced Falls. This was another mill town on the Merced River, west of Yosemite and out of the valley. There I did the seventh grade, and then we moved again the following year back up into the mountains up near the Sierra Valley, near Portola, which is a division point in the Western Pacific, and again, another mill town--because my grandfather was beginning to age in the sense that he was past fifty and was losing some of his physical strength and therefore competence to do what was really very heavy work and very taxing work. So he floated from job to job, and we floated with him. There, another indication of the family's determination that, by God, I was going to get ahead academically whether I wanted to or not, or whether it was good for me or not: I finished the seventh grade, but that meant that I had spent five years in school.

Gardner

Then you were only about ten at the time.

Monroe

I was eleven when I moved up on the Feather River up to Delleker. I went to school there, and they had a crazy kind of schedule because the winters are severe there, and it's almost impossible during the regular school term for children to get to school; so they went to school during the summer and spring, and the normal vacation was the wintertime.Well, I arrived in such time, and I've forgotten the exact dates, but I was there about four or five months when the county exams, as they were known, were given. Getting out of elementary school meant that you had to pass the final exams. I was in no way ready to take these, but, by God, I was to take them. I took them and had a miserable time with them and didn't pass them, which was a great crushing blow to my grandmother.She immediately thought that there was some kind of dirty work about this, and decided that, in fact, I was quite ready to enter high school. The local high school was three miles up the Western Pacific track in Portola, and she walked up there with me and talked to the high school teacher--there was only one high school class in this little railroad town--and convinced the teacher that I was ready for high school even though I hadn't passed those very bad county exams which I had been cheated about.So I enrolled in high school at the tender age of eleven and had a miserable two or three months. By that time it was winter again, and I walked the tracks from where I lived three and a half miles to the high school, and I remember nearly freezing my ears on one occasion and being very miserable and uncomfortable about the whole process.There I first learned about life, as a matter of fact. A railroad town is, I guess you would say, a kind of tough town. Railroad workers are pretty worldly, and their off-spring tend to be comparably similarly worldly. I walked into this classroom at age eleven, and I think probably the average age of the other people was sixteen, and some of the older boys and girls must have been eighteen or nineteen.First, I couldn't make very much sense out of what I was being taught because with algebra, coming in as I did in kind of the middle of their year, it was hard for me to catch on. Bookkeeping, I was being taught, and that was a little too demanding for me. The rest of it, some of it I could catch on.

Gardner

What sort of English were they teaching, and what sort of reading did you have?

Monroe

Well, I don't remember. There didn't seem to be a lot of reading. Grammar, yes, and I could fathom that. I don't remember the books or anything. I remember trying to learn algebra and bookkeeping, and my balances never came out right, and I had a miserable time. So I was pretty unhappy there.On one occasion I was wandering around at lunchtime all by myself. I had eaten my lunch, which I had brought in a paper bag, wandered into an anteroom, and disturbed two young people there. The girl had her dress up and the young man was behind her, and they were making strange motions, each with the other. And I stood and watched them for what may have been a minute. They seemed not disturbed at all by my presence and went right on with their business. Then it occurred to me that it was privacy that they liked, so I beat a quick retreat. [laughter] I hadn't the slightest idea. The only thing I had seen comparable to it was a rooster on top of a hen in the barnyard, and I knew that that had something to do with sex, and I put two and two together and finally got a startled four, that they must have been doing something sexual there.I checked this with my grandmother when I got home. She was a little startled and shocked by my report, but assured me that it was all right, that they were probably just playing with each other.Needless to say, the premature high school experience didn't work, and by that time the end of the work year had come around and then we moved back to Loyalton, where I went back into elementary eighth grade, had another month or two at it, and then took the Sierra County exams and passed third in the county, it is alleged. My grandmother was satisfied with that score. I should have been first, but all things being equal, it was all right for me to be third.So I was back in Loyalton again, and this was one of the first times coming back. I've been back again and again and again, and I intend once more to see Loyalton one day.Then we moved, and again my grandfather, out of a job, took the only job available. We made the big leap from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Santa Cruz and down to redwood milling and timbering. I started my first year in high school at Santa Cruz and spent that year, summer being a whole new experience for me--I'd never seen the ocean before--swimming there at what was then a famous summer resort.We found a very comfortable house there. My grandfather had a job for the year, and I started high school. In the early part of the year, I kept being attached not only to the surf and swimming, but to the Santa Cruz plunge, which was a huge indoor swimming tank, plunge. After school, I used to get on my bicycle, ride down to the plunge and practice diving for an hour or so, and then get on my bike and ride home. After about a week or ten days of that, I came down with pneumonia and was in bed for about six weeks. That's the most serious illness I've ever had in my life.That year went well. I mastered algebra and had a very interesting English teacher and a miserably ancient arts teacher; and, still only twelve years old, [I was] not quite able to deal with manual training, as they called it then, which consisted of making a hatrack or a breadboard, or if you wanted to get really ambitious you undertook making a chest of drawers which never fitted together. But it was good fun, and I found friends; and my first year in high school was kind of a pleasant experience.I decided that I was going to be a champion miler and went out for track. Again, I was twelve years old, and although I was a good hiker and fairly strong for my age, competing against kids who were seventeen and eighteen left me a little wanting; but I finally got enough steam up to run a whole mile, and then got tired and decided I wasn't interested in being a miler.Then my grandmother, in that calculating way she had, devised our move to San Jose, which had about it the qualities of a kind of return to an old life of hers. She had previously lived in San Jose a number of years before with her first husband, and I think happily so.That was a sensible move, because there was a college in San Jose. I had just finished the first year in high school, and I wasn't ready for college yet and she didn't try to push me in; but she made certain that, in that fashion, if I did finish high school, and if she could persuade me to go on to college, there would be a college handy. And, as a matter of fact, that's the way it worked out.Two intervening experiences I would like to slice into this, if I can go back in time, that I'd forgotten about. In the period where we were just leaving Merced Falls and returning to the mountains, my grandfather and grandmother and I spent what turned out to be two months in San Francisco. I was taken there because by that time most of my second molars, rear molars, had rotted to the gums. Dentistry was not a part of my early experience, nor dental care, and so as my teeth came in, my second teeth, they rotted as they came. So I needed to have some teeth removed and some fillings and whatnot, so we went to San Francisco. Almost as soon as we arrived there, my grandfather came down with pneumonia and was confined to a hotel room for the whole time of our visit there. My grandmother had to nurse him and take care of him there, so I was on the streets of San Francisco at that age.I'd never been in even a big village before, so the whole thing was a fascinating experience for me. I would start out in the morning with a little money in my pocket, take in a morning movie, then find a lunch somewhere, and wander the streets in the afternoon. I walked all over downtown San Francisco and knew it like the back of my hand as a child of ten. That experience I remember, and as I go back to San Francisco now I will remember places that I saw at that time that are still there.Through the whole period of that earlier part of my life--and the San Francisco experience was one example of it--I think my grandmother had no apprehension at all turning a ten-year-old out on the streets. I had done things by that time by myself which demonstrated my capacity to deal with problems, find my way there and back; and that sense of independence and the ability to do what I wanted to do, to take responsibility for myself with what I felt was complete trust at the home base is, I think, a very interesting and very important element in my life. I can't say this for my mother, who, although she didn't have time to attend to me, never left without instructing me precisely as to what I should do, disciplining me and sometimes pretty harshly treating me if I disobeyed her. But with my grandmother I was on my own, and I can't ever remember being spoken to harshly by her, punished by her. It was simply unnecessary, or at least she thought so and I thought so, and everything went very, very well.The summer after I finished my first year in high school, and after I'd had my bout with pneumonia, my father was still living with my grandmother. He kept coming home like a pigeon every so often. He would venture forth, make another failure of what he was trying to do, come back home where could eat for a while, then venture out again, come back. I enjoyed him when he was home, and we were kind of like brothers, certainly more like brothers than like father and son.

Gardner

What kind of ventures did he get into?

Monroe

Oh, car selling, mining. The summer I'm about to speak of, he was up in the Sierra foothills again, on the north fork of the Feather River, in with two or three very impressive people who were going to open up an old mine shaft there, in which, legend had it, there was just millions of dollars to be found. My father had no money to invest, the other people didn't either as it turned out, but they went there and kind of fooled around, made a limp effort to buy old equipment and try to pump the water out of the mine so that they could get at this readily available gold that was there just waiting for them.My father took me up with him, and there I spent the summer. By that time, I had acquired both a double-barreled .16-gauge shotgun and a .22 Remington repeater rifle, and I had a fishing rod; and that's all the equipment I needed for the summer. My father paid no attention to me except to see that I got some food, and I provided my own food on occasion. I would set out in the morning with a gun, and hunt and fish, swim, and all by myself, wander these foothills.A very interesting area. It's not terribly far south of Mount Lassen in what is clearly volcanic area, again, north of the Sierras in the beginnings of the Cascades, rugged, and snake-infested, and game-infested. I killed four or five rattlesnakes there. I just wandered around, amusing myself, taking care of myself, being completely independent, and having a ball.Again, it's that independence and very early ability or capacity to take care of myself, but with the expectation that I would and that I didn't need to be instructed, that I knew what to do; and apparently I did it well enough to convince everybody concerned that I could do it, so I was on my own. I was my own man, both in the physical sense and the intellectual sense, although there was very little intellectual stimulation. As you might suppose, I think my grandmother probably never attended school. As I said earlier, my mother and my father may have had a fourth-grade education, but nothing more than that. We had no books. We had limited music, no paintings, none of the things that are now regarded as absolute necessities for a person to develop to be an educated, intelligent, sophisticated, and cultured member of the American society.

Gardner

And yet your grandmother had fine scholastic plans for you.

Monroe

Oh, she did indeed, and she was determined that that was going to develop for me, again, out of the early expectation that she had, and out of her deliberate manipulation and maneuvering quite without my knowledge at the time, but that's what it was all about--and carrying everybody else in the family along with that so that I would be there and it would be available.In San Jose, then, we settled, and my grandfather, during my sophomore year in high school, had a job, and I think he had a job during my junior year. We lived modestly but comfortably, had enough to eat. I had clothes to wear to school--not as many as high school youngsters think they have to have now, but enough to cover me--and a bicycle that I rode to school. So the sophomore year and the junior year went by.In those two years, as a result of personal contacts I had with other boys at high school, I developed an interest in scouting, became a Boy Scout and joined a Boy Scout troop. Let's see, I was then thirteen, and was fourteen, really, when I settled seriously into scouting in, I guess, my junior year. I was plugging along with the Boy Scout tests. I passed the tenderfoot test, and then the second class test, and then after a while the first class test.Then a special incentive was presented to me. The national scout director was going to be in Oakland, I think three months from then, and would present Eagle Scout badges himself personally to any scout who was eligible. Well, by that time I think I may have had two merit badges, and you had to have twenty-one in order to be an Eagle Scout, so I settled down to a routine of passing one merit badge a week and did it methodically. I had special dispensation, because nobody thought I would do it, so I said, "If I can pass them by that time, can I go?" And the local scout director said, "Yes, oh, yes." So I settled down and passed them and had the twenty-one merit badges and went to Oakland, had my Eagle Scout badge presented.

1.2. Tape Number: I, Side Two (July 27, 1972)

Monroe

Eagle Scout activities kept me busy extracurricularly in that period, and I plugged along in high school doing not, I would say, brilliantly, but adequately. I probably had a B average for the three years at San Jose. [I was] still younger than my colleagues; finally when I graduated, I was sixteen and most of my classmates were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.In my senior year, or before I graduated, I came on one of the startling and kind of stark facts of American life: that is, American life for the uneducated, semi-skilled, aging worker in this society. My stepgrandfather had provided for us--for his wife, for me, most of the time for my father--a pretty comfortable living, relatively. Nothing lavish, no luxuries, just enough for a good life, providing that he could get jobs.In the course of my senior year in high school, he was unable to get employment, solely and simply because he was too old; and he was then, I think, not quite fifty-five. Younger men were getting the jobs, and he was out of work. He had managed, I think, to save a little money, not very much, but just enough to invest in what he thought was going to be a thriving and productive business. He rented, took over the management of, a gasoline station at the edge of San Jose. It was a pretty run-down establishment by that time, and he was the sole operator. I helped him from time to time, but not enough to relieve him of a very early morning to very late at night job; and it just barely paid his living and expenses.From that point on, his life and my grandmother's life went down economically. They couldn't make a go of the gas station. They decided to try their hand at chicken ranching, which was also pretty much of a flop, and they eked out a living one way or another, both of them working in canneries during the summer or doing whatever work they would find to do, and just making, just barely living, as a matter of fact.I lived with them. If they had been different kinds of people they would have insisted, I suppose, that I drop out of school, get a job to support them. After all, I had a high school education, which was a good deal more than either of them had had, or any other member of the family; but going to school, continuing in school, was simply a "given" in my situation, and as long as I could work and take care of myself--and I did work in gas stations and canneries and odd jobs, schoolhouse janitor and all kinds of things--that's all they expected of me, not to be their support but to take care of my own needs. They gave me a bed to sleep in, and there was food on the table; and I paid for my own clothes, my own expenses, sometimes asking them for money when I ran short, not often having money left over to give them. But through the college years--and, of course, this began in the fall of 1926 and lasted until I graduated in the summer of 1931--through that whole period, the 1929 crash, and the onset of the Great Depression they lived pretty meagerly and pretty miserably; and I did not help them substantially, and in a sense I was not able to help them. They didn't demand it of me, so I kept in the academic groove and went forward there.I started to college at literally sixteen years of age and turned seventeen shortly thereafter; and as I have said a number of times previously, I was a year or two, not only chronologically but in terms of maturity, ahead of myself and different from my ordinary classmates. I had had virtually no experience with girls up to that time, up to the time that I entered college. My high school experience had been pretty much homosexual, you might say. I think except for taking a cousin to a movie on one occasion, I'd had almost no experience with girls. The older boys were dating, and dating was very much a part of the 1924-25-26 swing of things, but I was out of that both in boy scouting and in the sense that I was terribly afraid to make approaches to girls.I started college, and with the help of one or two of the friends that I made there, began to make up for that whole deficiency. It needs to be remembered that this was the period of Prohibition, and that this was--'27-28--the age of the flapper, the first age of the emancipation of women, if you will, the precursor of women's lib. The Roaring Twenties were at the full roar by the time I hit college, and my academic diligence and conscientiousness went out the window; and I proceeded to make up, as I say, for all lost time, in terms of association of girls, whom I finally got up courage enough to take out, to discover; in the sense that bootleg wine and whiskey and gin and all manner of, now, what I would regard as undrinkable things were a necessity; and I plunged into the social swing with a vengeance.It took me, therefore, five and a half years to finish a four-year college course, but I came out about on schedule, so that I made up for the early advance by stretching, out and enjoying very considerably--not so much, in the first three or four years of my college experience--the intellectual challenge of it. That didn't concern me at all. I was growing up socially and, I guess, in some ways emotionally; and, as I say, making up for the dearth of social experiences, and, in a sense, the enjoyment of life in the earlier period. My early life had been a very simple one; now I came into the complexities of modern sophisticated society. And I lapped it up, joined a fraternity, was a popular boy on campus.

Gardner

What fraternity?

Monroe

A local fraternity. Delta Theta Omega, it was called. There were no fraternities then on the state college campuses, so we invented one, and that started a trend. Some very, very interesting people that I knew then were in the fraternity. Many of them have had interesting and productive careers. They were bright, creative, and very fun group of guys and gals in and around the fraternity.I just barely stayed in school, and I remember being on probation and off probation, and at one point I thought they were going to kick me out but they didn't. I think had friends on the faculty and I managed to stay in school during that time. [I was] elected vice-president of the student body; I was editor of the yearbook; and toward the end of my college experience I got tremendously interested in dramatics and did a number of plays. Just a very energetic, very active kind of guy, despite the fact--and my major burden in that period, really, I think it related somewhat to my poverty, because we were miserably poor then and lived in kind of unclean quarters--I had probably the worst case of acne, not the kind of deep-scarring kind, but just a faceful and shouldersful of pimples that no matter what I did I couldn't get rid of. I had the wrong diet, of course, and they didn't have the miracle medicines that they now have, and that was a great burden to me. But despite that, and in spite of the festering face that I had from time to time, I made it with the other kids, and was liked, and made friends then that I carried for a long, long time, most of whom now have dropped out of my life, particularly since my life later took such a different and drastic turn.In that period, I remember very well campaigning, although I couldn't yet vote, for Herbert Hoover when he was first elected, and thinking that Calvin Coolidge was a pretty dignified and kind of nice guy. Hoover, who was a Stanford man--and we were right there in the shadow of Stanford--was our kind of president. And my grandparents were Republicans; my parents were Republicans. Politics was not a subject discussed except sometimes profanely: "Blankety-blank guy." But this was FDR later, "that blankety-blank guy in the White House."There was nothing stimulating in that earlier period, and as far as the college experience is concerned, the outside world was way out there somewhere. Our world was confined to going to class, when we went to class, and usually if you could think of any better reason for being someplace else you went there, sometimes just to lie on the lawn and sleep.

Gardner

How big was San Jose State at the time?

Monroe

San Jose State had about 1,400 students when I started there.

Gardner

And what did you major in? English?

Monroe

Well, I finally came out with a major in education. When I started there, it was San Jose State Teachers' College. It had been the first normal school in California, San Jose Normal School, then Teachers' College, and then State College. The transition was made while I was still there; I was there long enough for them to make a number of changes. But education, and then teacher training, was the strength there. So I majored in education then, with a major in speech and a major in science, and I think I had maybe credits enough for one other major in something.Through it all, as I say, my world then was made up of going to class occasionally, just barely staying in until the final phase, planning for the next weekend and which bootlegger were we going to be able to get a supply of liquor from, dating for the next weekend, and looking forward to the football bonfire event and certain dances that came along, and just literally having a ball, oblivious to the world out there, even in '29 when the bottom fell out of the whole economic barrel. It didn't affect us immediately. My grandfather had already suffered his reverses by that time and had accommodated himself to a new kind of living, which I had accommodated myself to.Then I got along toward the end of that, and after being there four years and not making much headway except piling up a number of credits, but my grade points weren't high enough, I found myself in my final year having to settle down and finally get out of that place. I recall about the middle of that year, as I approached the third quarter of the year, I was told that I couldn't graduate the final quarter unless I took a load of, I think, twenty-three units. I was permitted to make one B. The rest had to be A's, or I'd have to come back and go around again. So I settled down to very hard work, and I worked like blazes and made the grade points, and finally graduated and got out.

Gardner

Was there any teacher that you had at San Jose State, any professor, who inspired you in any way?

Monroe

Yes. There were two or three, I think. One was the drama coach, whom I liked very much and who was, I think, responsible for stimulating my first reaching out for an intellectual and cultural life.

Gardner

Do you recall his name?

Monroe

Yes, his name is Hugh Gillis. I don't know whether he's still alive, as a matter of fact. He may be. He's been very ill over the years, and I am sure he's retired by now. He was a young guy there and very popular, very attractive, and he helped a great deal.One science teacher, whose name I don't remember, stimulated me a little bit. Then there was a blustering economics professor that I was attracted to, a Bill Poytress. I took econ with him my freshman year and flunked it, but I liked the guy, and, in the course of my college experience there, had other contacts with him.Most of the other people, I was kind of indifferent to. I wasn't attractive enough to them because I didn't commit myself in any conscientious way to their work. One philosophy teacher, Elmo Robinson, I think, liked me, and I liked him.I found myself in the summer of 1931 graduated, at long last, with the Depression setting in very heavily, with a teaching credential which would equip me to teach elementary or junior high school, and, literally, not a job available. I had in previous summers, as I said earlier, returned to Loyalton, just as a kind of romantic fling, and had worked in the factory there. It was a temporary thing and it was hard work, but it was kind of fun to be there and I could fish on the weekends. Otherwise in the summers, I worked in the canneries in San Jose, and that was hard work, but, again, for a short period.But now I was ready to go into the world and make my fortune, and the world was closed. There was nowhere to go. I had done well enough in the overall span of my work there to qualify for graduate work at Stanford. I hadn't any money, but a friend of mine, who had graduated earlier, had taken a job teaching at Menlo School and Junior College. He had been there one year; he was a year ahead of me. He wangled a job at Menlo School and Junior College for me as a dormitory supervisor, which would pay me my board and room, and I scrounged the tuition from my Aunt Eva, and that was enough. I'd get board and room and, I think, twenty dollars a month, a little spending money, at Menlo School.So I enrolled in Stanford and began a year's graduate work, again, in education. I saw that whole year through, did reasonably well. It was pretty dull stuff, but this was my way of equipping myself with a graduate degree which maybe could help me get a job then. I went four quarters and, besides the units needed for the master's degree, had a kind of legup on some graduate work beyond that. I had only to write a thesis to complete the thing.Then Menlo School and Junior College had no job for me the following fall, and there was still no other teaching job available, so it was then that I pulled up roots in the summer, went back to Loyalton again, and settled into what looked like a fairly long haul at mill work. That's the period of hard physical labor which I remember.We worked a ten-hour day, six days a week, from seven in the morning until six at night, an hour off for lunch. [It was] heavy and grueling work, physical work, doing a number of things, but lifting, a good deal of lifting, and part of the time working in a warehouse throwing bundles of lath and siding up on stacks for thirty cents an hour; so that at the end of the week I had worked sixty hours and had earned eighteen dollars, and that was just barely enough to pay my expenses there. I wasn't getting ahead, but that's the only thing I could do.I worked through the summer into the fall and until Christmastime, day after day. I assume that you've done some heavy physical work in your time; you remember how it is that you go home and go to bed being so tired that you just barely get through dinner to go to bed? Bones would be aching. You'd go right to sleep, and you'd wake up the next morning and the same bones would be aching exactly the way they were the night before; and you'd pull yourself out of bed, and your bones continue to ache until you kind of get warmed up and work again. Then another ten hours of that monotonous, heavy, burdensome work.I looked around me there in that period, and some of the youngsters that I had gone to school with in Loyalton when I finished were still living there, and instead of going on to college, had finished either the local high school or had dropped out of school and were millworkers. And that's all they had been doing since I left them until I went back. They already looked ten years older than I did-- they were the same [age], a little bit older but not that much-- hunched and kind of bent over from the effects of hard, continuous work. If I wasn't confirmed before in my conviction that I just had to get the hell out of that kind of thing, that I couldn't spend much of my life doing that, the experience really wrapped it up for me. But again, there was nothing to do to, until the following January, and then lo and behold, an opening occurred at Menlo School, and I was called back down and took my first teaching job there.

Gardner

Teaching what?

Monroe

Teaching high school English. At first, a limited number of classes. I think for the rest of that year, I taught two classes of English, had dormitory duty and whatnot. That finally worked itself into a full-time teaching assignment. Again, this was Depression time, 1933-1934.In what I think was 1935, I had my fairly typical teaching assignment. I taught four classes of English-- freshman, sophomore, maybe two junior sections--a class in journalism, and supervised the school newspaper (matter of fact, put it together; it was a high school paper), had a class in speech, coached all the school plays, had dormitory duty every other night (that meant being in the dormitory and available to kids all night every other night and every other weekend), and on the alternate weekends I was the bus driver that took kids out on the field trips, picnics, and to the beach. My total salary for that year, 1934, I think, was board and room and forty dollars a month. I started there board and room and twenty dollars a month and all I had to do was supervise the dormitory every third night, I think. [laughter] That was a measure of how hard the Depression years fell on a small private school, and I was damn glad to have a job because it was, again, still the only job available to me.

Gardner

Where is this school?

Monroe

In Menlo Park, which is just north of Stanford. Menlo School was a kind of private preparatory school for wealthy boys who intended to go to Stanford. Originally it had been a school, and by the time I was there it was also a junior college, and youngsters that hadn't quite made the grade through high school could go to Menlo Junior College and were pretty well assured of getting into Stanford upper division at the end of that two-year experience.These were very pleasant years for me, though. I worked like blazes, but it was fun. I enjoyed the kids, I enjoyed teaching, even though it was very confining, and again, financially, I couldn't get ahead. It was not a matter of not being frugal and saving; there was just not enough to go around.I could and I did, on the side, take from time to time further graduate work at Stanford. In the summer of '36, I still had a thesis to write to finish up for my master's degree, but I kept procrastinating and putting that off--highly uncharacteristic of me.I was enjoying teaching and kind of minding my own business and plugging along, pretty comfortable at this private boarding school. I lived on the campus, didn't have to have a car, and life was fairly simple and a little bit comfortable.Then the summer of 1936, I visited some friends in San Jose, and in the course of that met an old friend of mine from college days who had been one of the most popular and prettiest girls on the campus, one of the campus queens. I, out of shyness and with my pimply face, daren't even to think about taking her out or having any kind of dealing with her. We spoke to each other as we passed in the halls and that was it, and I kind of admired her from afar. She had graduated from San Jose State and had been teaching for three, four, five years, by that time, I guess.When I saw her that summer, she still looked very attractive to me, and apparently I looked more attractive to her than I had previously. So we began an affair, and it was all very pleasant and very intense. I had had previous strong attachments to other young women, nothing very permanent or very regular or very long, but I'd had some interesting girlfriends and had had a kind of interesting boy-girl relationship with a number of young women. But this developed very intensely and very quickly, and by that New Year's Day, of 1936, on December 31, Helen [Ward] and I were married. We had to sneak off to Monterey to do it, because she was under contract not to get married.

Gardner

Where was she teaching?

Monroe

She was teaching then in Napa, California, in elementary school, and she knew that if her principal found out that she was married, she'd get fired, and she didn't want that to happen. We didn't want any kind of fancy wedding anyway, so we sneaked off to Monterey, got a license. Let's see, did we have to wait three days then? Yes, yes, I went down in advance, got the license, and we went down together and we were married, and that was the beginning of my married life.We had no money, either of us. We had no furniture. Nothing to begin life with. As a matter of fact, the brief honeymoon we had was in my dormitory room back at the campus at Menlo School during the Christmas period. I think she stayed with me that night, December 31, and the next day and night, and then she had to return to Napa to pick up her teaching again and I had to go on with my duties. So it was a very brief honeymoon.I knew that our financial condition would not change very rapidly unless I got either more money at Menlo or a new job, so I talked it over with the man in charge of the high school, and they just didn't have any more money to give me. I foraged around, and jobs were somewhat more plentiful then, and I had a little experience; so I got a job at Hayward High School, across the [San Francisco] Bay from Menlo, and started there in February of '37 teaching English and speech and drama, and moved out of what was a very small, isolated private school situation into a fairly large typical public high school.It was a kind of big professional step, but I did very well, almost immediately made myself popular with the kids, and enjoyed teaching them. They liked me. Everything was going along fine, until it came time to renew my contract for the next year.I had been lured there with the definite promise by the superintendent of schools that if I started at what I think was something like $1,250 or mayber $1,400--what we would regard now as a ridiculous salary--that it would be increased $150 the next year, something in that order. Lo and behold, when the letter of employment was received, it was of the same salary that I made when I went there. That made me indignant, and I got all worked up and feisty about that.In the meantime, I had an indication from a friend of mine that there was a job that I might be able to take at Marysville High School and Yuba Junior College, and so when the superintendent at Hayward wouldn't come up with the additional money, I told him to go to hell, left the school, and took the job at Marysville. He was very unhappy, I think, but I was unhappy with him, too.We moved to Marysville then. By that time, Helen had given up her job in Napa. While I was teaching at Hayward, we had an apartment there, and she would come down on the weekends and then go back to Napa to teach; but at the end of that school year she resigned, and then we moved to Marysville together. That began a kind of constant moving around, much too much for her.She was born in Colusa, California. Her maiden name was Helen Ward. Her father was the town barber and had been for many years, but managed to combine barbering and gambling to get himself a little money. The riverboats used to come up as far as Colusa, and when they did, he had certain gambling cronies that he played with. I guess he was a pretty good poker player, because he didn't make very much money barbering, but he supplemented it through card playing. They had a very comfortable old house there. She had started to school there, graduated from high school, had been away only the brief years of her college experience in San Jose and then gone back; so she was really a small town girl, with a sense of deep roots in a community and a deep attachment to it.This proved, I think, later, to be one of her problems, because as soon as she got hitched up with me, I started pulling her from place to place, from thing to thing, in what I always justified was an advancement for us, because we started up the economic ladder, too.The year at Marysville was satisfactory. She was near her home--Marysville is about twenty-five miles from Colusa in the Sacramento Valley--and she was in familiar territory again. She felt fairly happy there.She hadn't completed her AB degree. She had taken the three-year course at San Jose State, which equipped her with a teaching credential but not the degree. I guess I began to ride her a bit in this regard. As I remember it, it was a twofold thing on my part, or at least my concerns, I think, were twofold. She often talked about not liking to be idle at home, and wanting to work and wanting to do things, but without a degree she couldn't get the kind of job she wanted. She had aspirations, she thought, to something more than that, higher than teaching elementary school. I urged her, and she finally agreed, to return to San Jose in the latter part of that year, go back to college, stay with my grandparents in San Jose, and complete her AB, which she did by the end of that coming summer. Which meant that part of our first married year was one of separation. We lived together for a while, and then she went to San Jose and I stayed in Marysville. I was a very Spartan- and very Protestant-type guy in those days, in the sense of having settled down after kind of wastreling my way through college, and after dawdling around in my early professional life and not taking anything too seriously. Once I got married, then I committed myself to the hard struggle. I suppose the psychiatrist would say that I was compensating for my father's irresponsibility, and that I was trying to recover my mother's respect or something. At any rate, I took the whole matter seriously and worked very hard, and it was teach during the year and graduate school in the summer.At the end of that year I had an offer to go back to Menlo School and Junior College, and I decided to take it so that I could continue work for the doctorate. Among the things that finally occurred during the year at Marysville was that I got busy and finished my master's thesis. While Helen was away in San Jose, I sat and with two fingers--I don't type except with two fingers--typed my own master's thesis: (a) because I didn't have money enough to hire a typist; and (b) because that was the way I could be sure that it was right.

Gardner

What was it on?

Monroe

It was in speech. It was a survey of courses of study in the teaching of speech in high school. Nothing very monumental, just adequate.We finished that year. I went then, at the end of the year, back to San Jose, summer school that summer, and then we moved to Menlo Park the following fall and found a place to live. Helen got a job teaching in San Francisco in a private school; I taught at Menlo School and Junior College with graduate work on the side. That was the year 1938, the fall of '38.By that time, some changes had been effected at Menlo. There had developed a close working relationship experimentally between Menlo School, the high school years, and the education faculty of Stanford, the School of Education. In that brief period that I had been away at Hayward and Marysville, the whole School of Education faculty had been completely turned over. A new dean, Grayson [N.] Kefauver, had come into the school from Teachers' College, Columbia, bringing with him J. Paul Leonard and Paul [L.] Hanna and Harold [C.] Hand, and a whole crew of advanced, progressive educators of the Dewey philosophy, including a man named Holland [D.] Roberts, who was the specialist in the teaching of English in the faculty there. Those specialists, the math specialist and the science specialist and the English specialist, had a working relationship with Menlo School, so that Menlo School was a kind of practice school for them. Jim [Isaac James] Quillen, who later became dean of the School of Education at Stanford, and who is now dead, was a part of that group.Going back to Menlo meant that I had an opportunity then, as a previous member of the English faculty and as a kind of respected teacher, to work with these new people and to gear in my graduate work with their work at Menlo. It was a very happy combination.Through that year, I taught the usual number of classes. Somewhat relieved--I didn't have dormitory duty, didn't have to live on the campus, didn't have to drive the bus on weekends--but four classes of English and one of speech and the drama and the newspaper and that whole program. But I enjoyed it. I had a hell of a lot of energy then, and it was early morning to late at night, reading for graduate courses at the university, and making contact with these new people, and getting my professional sights raised and my horizons unfolded, etc., etc. It was an exciting year.In the course of that year, I developed a relationship with Holland Roberts, which persisted for a number of years, and which I'm looking forward to renewing when I return. He was fired from Stanford years later for political activities, but he's one of the people that influenced my life most.

Gardner

Where is he now?

Monroe

He's living in Palo Alto; he's retired. He's written some books and has some income from that. He's a Russophile. He has the American Russian Institute in San Francisco. Radical politics and on the left of things, but through him and through the others, as I say, I got my first large world view--for me, at least, almost a dazzling world view--that so many things were going on in the world that I hadn't known about; but they were there and I began to see the relationship between those events and what was happening to me.This was a time in which educators were addressing themselves seriously to the question, "Can the schools build a new social order?" It seems ridiculous now, and it had been ridiculous before and terribly presumptuous, but these were people that took themselves seriously in that sense. They were, as I look back on it, a little grim about it, and a little authoritarian in their approaches, and terribly shortsighted insofar as their estimate of the capacity for such a possibility is concerned.This, I think, was one of the periods of most rapid intellectual and social growth on my part. By that time, Roberts had kind of steered me into a special interest in the teaching of reading (remedial reading, reading difficulties), the whole problem of literacy, not just in schools but as a societal thing; and I began to read the field, and I took some courses with him. Then, that summer, he invited me to join him as kind of codirector of what we called first the Stanford Reading Center. This was a program designed for high school youngsters, junior and senior high school youngsters, for about a six-week period. We admitted something like forty of them, putting them together in a one-to-one relationship with experienced teachers coming back for summer work in how to deal with reading problems. I was kind of the master teacher in this situation. I worked my tail off from morning to night, but learned a very great deal, and developed a stronger working relationship with not only Roberts but other members of the School of Education faculty, and began to develop their respect for me and a kind of place for myself there.I repeated this in the summer of 1939 and 1940, and then in the summer of '41, I think I gave that over to somebody else because I was then in the final stages of either just preparing for my graduate exams or just finishing up my course work. But for three summers, I undertook this work with Roberts; and, as I say, learned a very great deal. It was a very rich experience for me. It had the double value of paying me a little salary, because I was on the staff nominally, and I got credit for the work, so I was piling up credits and getting money for it and establishing working relationships.

1.3. Tape Number: II, Side One (August 1, 1972)

Gardner

Mr. Monroe, when we left off, we were talking about Holland Roberts and the influence of Stanford in the years 1938 to 1941; and I was wondering about the influence of Holland Roberts upon you, your thinking, and your teaching methods.

Monroe

Well, let me incorporate, in answer to that question, the following kind of summary review of the previous recordings. By October 4, 1941, my thirty-second birthday, I had come out of a rural and, I think it can be said, humble childhood marked by two elements: (1) high expectation of me as the only child in that family; and (2) a strong sense of independence and self-sufficiency. I had come into an adolescence that was fairly unsettled, with a great sense of inferiority and apprehension about dealing with other people, both people my own age and adults, but an adolescence marked by some degree of success in certain things--I'm referring now to my scouting experience, the success I had in that, and my relatively successful academic program in the high school. Into college, into the Roaring Twenties; and I survived the Roaring Twenties, bootleg whiskey and bathtub gin notwithstanding. Then, marriage in the thirties, into the thirties and the Depression years of the thirties, where I learned some pretty harsh economic lessons about the nature of American life: the experience of my grandfather and my own experience, confronting the world prepared to work and to teach, to find the world totally unreceptive to my qualities and credentials; the experience of returning to my origin and laboring in a sawmill and box factory at hard labor with very little remuneration. Then my marriage, return to teaching, and finally getting myself on the track, taking my marriage very seriously and the responsibilities thereof seriously, and gearing into the hard work of upgrading myself, bootstrap-wise, or climbing up the ladder--whichever figure one chooses--to make a place for myself in professional life.As I say, at the time of October 4, 1941, I had made some advance in that regard. I'd had an unusually rich experience at Stanford University in the School of Education; I'd had contact with able and enlightened professors, something that I hadn't really had before; and I began to develop in that period a larger view of the world and began to learn something of what was going on in the rest of the world. Previous to that, I had had little concern about either politics or world affairs or national affairs; I'd lived a really kind of provincial and parochial life. Now, the world began to open up and new ideas flooded in, including a strong sense of social consciousness and a sense of my obligation, not only to myself and to my family, but of my obligation to other people and to the nation and the world as a whole.It was a rapidly growing period for me, and the people who influenced me most, then, I think were not only the general faculty at Stanford--Paul Leonard and Harold Hand and Jim Quillen and Paul Hanna--but most particularly Holland Roberts, who was my advisor there and whose view of life, I think, was even at that time a radical one, radical in the sense that he was strongly dedicated to a better world for all people.He came out of a populist kind of environment in downstate Illinois, had had a taste of big city life in Chicago, and had come to Stanford, invited there because he was one of the foremost authorities in the teaching of English in the country at that time. [He was] a remarkably strong, intelligent, and dedicated individual, and I learned a great deal from him. I had at that time an almost fatherly reverence for him; and over the years we've been close, and I still regard him as one of the most important people in my life.October 4, 1941, saw me about a month away from the birth of my first child. My daughter, my oldest child, Marilyn, was born on November 7, 1941. That happens to be the date of the anniversary of the Russian revolution, and that was a kind of signal event. At that time, a child whose surname is Monroe might be expected to be called Ann or Caroline or Josephine or something like that. We selected carefully the name Marilyn for her, because we thought it was a good combination of Mary, which I thought was a nice name, and Lynn, which my wife thought was a very good name for a girl child. We put them together and it turned out to be Marilyn, Marilyn Monroe, if you will, whose name appeared about three years later on theater marquees, much to our surprise, and much to the consternation of this child as she grew into junior and senior high school and had to bear that particular designation. I think it may have had a strong influence in her life; and if I had to do it over again, I would call her Ann or Josephine or some other name not quite so attention-calling.She was born uneventfully. About a month later, December 11, 1941, we had decided that we should move to larger quarters to accommodate our new offspring, and in the course of hauling furniture out of our little abode in Menlo Park, we heard the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor; and our whole world, in a sense, was turned around. By that time, I had finished my course work for the doctorate, had only to complete my examinations, which I completed the following spring, and by that following summer had begun to develop the view that the war in which we were now heavily involved was a tremendously important event, not only to the nation and the world, but to me. I began combining the growing development of my sense of world responsibility and what came, even at that early time, to be known as the "war against fascism," I began to feel a stronger and stronger urge to take part in that war.I did not at that time; instead, the summer of 1942, I taught summer school at University of California at Berkeley, had two courses in the teaching of reading there, made contact with members of the University of California faculty, and the following fall had hopes of appointment at the university, either on the School of Education faculty or in some special assignment.Nothing developed, and, instead, I accepted a position with the Santa Barbara County Schools as secondary coordinator for the county schools. Helen, my wife, and our infant offspring and I moved to Santa Barbara, where we found comfortable living and settled down for that year, only to be called at the end of the first month by the University of California to accept a position in the School of Education and with the Extension Division, offering a program for university students who had difficulty reading efficiently and studying effectively.I took it on because I wanted a foothold in the university community, left the Santa Barbara County job reluctantly, took a lower rate of pay, moved on to Los Angeles, and took up my duties in this new capacity. This involved my teaching two days a week at UCLA, boarding--this was wartime, so flying was impossible--a Southern Pacific train known as The Owl, which was a night train to Berkeley, and then teaching Thursday and Friday on the Berkeley campus. I made something like thirty-eight round trips of that fashion during that year. Besides being a very exhausting experience, it was a kind of an unsatisfactory experience. The program was tentative; and wartime conditions made the commuting--which was extraordinary commuting to say the least--and the whole complex an insecure and uncertain and kind of dissatisfying experience.Consequently, the following summer, I returned to Berkeley, and we gave up our apartment in Westwood to return to Berkeley for the summer. I taught, again, in the summer school at Berkeley, and then applied for a commission in the United States Naval Reserve. I was eager to participate in the war. I wasn't really terribly enthusiastic about war and fighting and getting myself killed, even for the honor of my country, and I couldn't see waiting to be drafted into the service, so I did apply for a commission in the naval reserve. In late August or September, that commission came through. I was appointed with orders to report the first of November in Tucson, Arizona.I had not yet completed my doctoral dissertation, although all of my other requirements were completed; and so at the close of summer school in Berkeley in, probably, early August, I hauled my family back to Palo Alto, moved in with the Robertses to stay for that limited period, and settled down to a fourteen-hour-a-day grind to pound out and to complete my dissertation, so that at least that would be finished when I left the academic community.It was a narrow squeak. The day on which I needed to take the train to report for duty in Tucson, I first went to the bindery at the university to deposit the typed copies of my dissertation, duly signed and ready to be bound, and then drove to San Jose to catch the train to go to Tucson. I've been thankful for that fortunate timing since that time, because if I hadn't completed the dissertation, it might have delayed or affected--fortunately, for all I know--my academic and professional career after the war was over.At any rate, I left my wife and infant child in San Jose, took the train for Tucson, and spent two months there, in the course of which I received orders, not to report for dangerous duty on the high seas, not to report to the jungles of New Guinea, but to report to the quiet and very safe confines of the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington, D.C. When I arrived, I was seated at a desk and told that I should make achievement tests for naval training schools in two categories of training in which, quite appropriately, I'd had no experience whatever. It's the navy's way, the army's way--it's the military way. I was to make tests for gunnery mates and fire controlmen, and I learned shortly thereafter that fire control didn't mean the work of a fireman but was the work of the people who aimed the guns on board ship. I studied the navy manuals, and I learned a little bit about guns, and I proceeded to, in the course of the next two and a half years, to make what I think were acceptable tests. I don't know whether they're still in use or not, but modifications of them may still be in use.I fought out the war against fascism safely ensconced behind a desk in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, never set foot upon a ship, and although I wore the navy uniform proudly I could hardly consider myself a navy man. I brought my wife, Helen, and our child to Washington, D.C. We found an apartment in one of the complexes there that were rapidly springing up to accommodate the burgeoning military establishment. Because gasoline was rationed, and because we were limited in travel, we saw rather little of the East Coast and had two not unhappy but uncomfortable years there in Washington, D.C.I advanced in due time from lieutenant j.g. to lieutenant; and at the conclusion of the war, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the quick resolution of the war both in Europe and in the Pacific, I was offered a lieutenant commander's commission or promotion if I would agree to stay beyond, I think, May of 1945 for another six months. I agreed to do that, accepted the promotion.Then, almost immediately, there was a descending stagnation which settled on the people there. The war was over and we were all chafing to get out and get back into professional life--most of the people around me were school people of various universities and colleges across the country. We were eager to get back into the postwar scramble up the professional ladder.In what I suppose was late August or early September of that year, I put out feelers for positions and was offered a position at Penn State--what was then Penn State College, now the State University of Pennsylvania at State College--to replace there a person who had made quite a name for himself in the teaching of reading, Professor [Emmett A.] Betts at Penn State.I was able to wangle my release. The naval authorities were reluctant to let me go but recognized that I wouldn't be of much value to them if I were chafing to get out, so they released me early, and I went to Penn State and took up at the beginning of the summer session there.(This must have been at an earlier time than August. I've forgotten the exact dates; maybe it was a springtime thing. It was '46, so I had accepted the extension of my naval service the previous fall, and I was, I guess, two months short of the full term that I had agreed to serve. So it was spring of '46 in which I made application, got the job at Penn State.)I went there in late June, taught the summer session there, and then the following year was an assistant professor of education. We found comfortable housing, and Helen liked the town, and we were enjoying our relations there with other faculty people in the community; and it looked as though we would settle in at that point and stay indefinitely.I taught the full year, and then summer of '47 rolled around, and I had a full program then, being responsible for directing, both in the summer of '46 and in the summer of '47, a special conference, sponsored by the School of Education, for elementary and high school teachers in problems of reading development. These were both successful conferences, and I was rapidly establishing for myself a professional reputation and not only acceptance but some approval among educators in the state of Pennsylvania, and even out of state, in Ohio and in other communities in other states.About halfway through the summer of '47, I received a wire from Professor Paul Leonard, with whom I'd had courses at Stanford in the earlier years, who had accepted the presidency at San Francisco State College, and who was attempting--very creatively, I thought--to develop an experimental program at the four-year college level, a special program for lower-division students, and a diversified and experimental program for upper-division students, as well as the building of a graduate program.San Francisco State had been originally San Francisco Normal School. It was a quiet little place until Leonard moved there. Almost immediately, he was given attention in the national press, and clearly in the educational press, as an innovator at the college level.The wire from Leonard invited me to accept a position at San Francisco State, a position as the chairman of the Language Arts Division, full professorship, rapid elevation from assistant professorship, and a salary somewhat above what I was making at Penn State--and the chance to move back to California. I thought very hard, debated with my wife, and discussed the problem with the chairman of my department there, who immediately offered me advancement to associate professorship and a considerably more satisfying salary. It was a very difficult decision to make. Helen and I would sit at night and list, on both sides of a column, the advantages and disadvantages. I guess the overwhelming advantage was that we could return to California thereby, and that had a way of overweighting all the other factors.So, I resigned at Penn State, accepted the appointment at San Francisco State, and we hauled ourselves across the country.

Gardner

What year was that?

Monroe

That was in the summer of 1947.Helen and I, with one child, had wanted a second child, but none came along. We took no precautions, and we were eager to have a second child. It wasn't until we returned to California--and it is my personal view that it was the night we crossed the border into California and stayed at a motel in Truckee--that Helen conceived the birth of our second child. We were back home, both of us; it was a comfortable feeling. She was a native Californian; I, as I said before, was a third-generation Californian; and to be home again was a matter of comfort, a sense of assurance, and a sense of homecoming. When we arrived at San Francisco, I took up my duties at the college, found myself with a division of some twenty, twenty-five faculty people, an administrative responsibility that I hadn't borne before, and, in the years '47-48-49, found myself heavily engaged in the very creative process of designing new educational programs, integrating content of various subject fields, getting away from the old departmental bastions, lines, and divisions-- the compartmentalization of learning into something that approached, at least in terms of theory and concept, the development of integrated learning experience.The people at the college accepted me warmly. I made close friends there, became an element of some influence in the faculty and on the campus, talked in an interesting way to interested students. At the same time, I began to broaden my educational acceptance and respect in the state as a whole. I was sought by institutes to address teachers, sought as a consultant in the language arts field by several county school programs. I turned my hand at making not only my salary at the college but additional income from consulting and from summer teaching and special programs of one sort or another. Things were going along swimmingly.The last capstone of that was an invitation to come to UCLA in the summer of 1950 for a special workshop program for junior college teachers, a six-week program sponsored by the School of Education, in which I was one of five people selected as a leader of that workshop. In that particular experience, I think I was unusually successful, maybe stood out above some of other consultants, in a way that, I think, attracted me to the attention of the School of Education people at UCLA, and I should not have been surprised a year or two later if I had been invited to join the UCLA faculty.In a sense, I was at a plateau professionally which I had reached after hard work and the diversion of World War II, but probably also by dint of the ability I showed in my professional field. I had developed some ability to speak effectively to professional groups, and I think I can say that at the end of that summer of 1950 I was at a point where my professional career might have advanced pretty rapidly, and within five years I might have found myself either in a university position of some prestige and importance or attracted into college or university administration. I returned from that summer to San Francisco and shortly thereafter my professional career took a very dramatic turn.

Gardner

You've built up so dramatically I hate to interrupt, but I'd like to know something about the methodology of your teaching that was obviously part of this rise that you had in your profession, the influence of Dewey, and something about your dissertation.

Monroe

The dissertation was entitled "Problems in the Teaching of Reading in Secondary School." It was not a highly scholarly work; I'm not terribly proud of it. I'm glad about it only because I finished it in time and it was acceptable as a dissertation.What it started out to be and what it might have been, had I not been diverted from it, is a textbook for teachers of reading and English and the other subject fields, teachers in high school who need to deal with the problems of reading on the part of young people that, for their unique individual reasons, or for general educational scholastic and sociological reasons, do not learn to read well enough when they enter high school to do effective secondary school work. It's a common problem. In a sense, it's a national problem of limited literacy on the part of young people who, in this society, are not only required to be educated but fit the national slogan that we are educating all the children of all the people.The principles involved in the type of program of reading development which I came to subscribe and to conduct variously and to advise other teachers simply built, I think, largely on Dewey's general educational philosophy. First, reading is only a part of the whole development of personality, and one's ability to read is interrelated with his whole personality, physical development, visual development--the interrelation of that particular function with the totality, with the whole child as we used to say, or the totality of personality and adjustment. Therefore, if reading is a maladjusted element in the individual, one looks for the related maladjustments in the rest of the personality, and in that sense, removes any physical or visual or social-emotional elements which may be contributing or reinforcing the reading disability.Second, motivation to read and a sense of confidence that one can read are important factors in the development of one's reading. To ask a youngster to read material which is of no relevance, no concern, no interest to him is not a good way to open up the process of reading. If one can find what the child's interests are and find reading related to those interests, or if one can find problems that the child wants to solve which can be solved only by reading, then there is a natural and relevant motivation for reading which will impel him then, because he needs to do it or wants to do it, to attempt the process of reading.To paraphrase Dewey's principal educational aphorism, "People learn to read by reading." The development of skill in reading rests upon a quantitative base of reading and at the later stage, then, the more qualitative processes of critical and selective reading.What I found, and, of course, what others have found--there's nothing remarkable about this now--is that a demonstration of interest on the part of the teacher in the individual child, a concern for him or her as a person, and a relating of reading to that expression of concern is maybe the teaching secret; that the use of phonics, or mechanical means, or special methods, or techniques of this, or the linguistic approaches--these are secondary and of relatively superficial importance. The basic element is a relationship between a teacher and a child in which reading becomes a pleasant and comfortable addition to that relationship.This is a very simplistic and general formulation of the plan, but it works--I saw it work again and again--and it was the position that I took and the kind of general philosophy and program that I espoused and expounded.

Gardner

Now we can get back to the dramatic moment. You just finished UCLA summer school, where I imagine you had been involved in what we were just talking about, and then returned to San Francisco State.

Monroe

Yes. This was 1950, and by that time, of course, the aftermath of World War II, the political consequences of World War II, and the remarkable phenomenon that seems to follow every war in which the victor is vanquished by the vanquished and adopts the views and attitudes and programs of the conquered nations; in this particular case, of course, the remarkable reversal of our national attitude towards the Soviet Union, the onset of hysteria and fear with regard to the Soviet Union--these general elements had begun to appear. I was not unaware of them, and I was concerned about them; and, as I say, I had by that time developed a sense of world consciousness and social consciousness.The most immediate impact in this regard, I suppose, was the year of 1949 at the University of California, where some people that I knew and other members of the San Francisco State faculty were in close touch with people at Berkeley. The imposition on that faculty of the so-called Regents' Oath was an unsettling thing for us, and, of course, a particulary traumatic experience for the Berkeley faculty as well as the University of California faculty on other campuses. We followed that; we had supported in various ways (in some limited way financially, but in various moral ways by resolutions of our faculty) the Berkeley faculty against the Regents' Oath; but the final climax came in the spring of 1950, and the ultimatum "Sign or get out" had been issued. This was a painful part of our knowledge and experience also. But it hadn't occurred to me that something comparable to this would occur on the state college campus.

Gardner

Did you know any of the nonsigners at Berkeley, personally, at that time?

Monroe

I knew two or three of them; not well, but some-what. Of course, reports of their activities reached us. But I had no close personal acquaintance in that group. I was unaware of the other legislative developments which I've learned about since: that by that time, the city and county employees in Los Angeles had been required in 1948 to meet the test of such an oath; that Senator Jack Tenney was capitalizing on this particular political gimmick and was putting everyone, including the regents of the University of California, to the test, having introduced in the 1949 session a number of loyalty oath bills aimed, in some cases, particularly at the UC faculty, and aimed also, I think, at public employees generally. That was something that I didn't know about at the time.I returned to the campus in September of 1950, and we were just getting ready for the 1950-51 term when the report came that a measure had been introduced in a special session of the California legislature called by Governor Warren to deal with civil defense problems, following, I should interject, the outbreak of the Korean conflict that summer. When I was still at UCLA during the summer session, the Korean thing broke out in early July, and that was disturbing to me, unsettling. Again, I didn't see the relationship between that fact and what was going to happen but which certainly did happen with a special call to the legislature to enact "civil defense legislation"--which, looking back on it now, seems a kind of ridiculous program to be concerned about then. Far-off Korea, our involvement there in the internal affairs of a very small nation--it is hard to understand why this should have been a civil defense problem for the people of California or the United States, but the political winds were blowing hard then. Joe McCarthy was just beginning to take his place in the national scene; and with political hacks and shysters like Jack Tenney whipping up the winds here in California, and the right-wing Republicans pressing for xenophobic and patriotic gestures, it isn't difficult to understand why the politician, Earl Warren, should accede to this, call a special session, and call upon Harold Levering, one of the far right-wing Republicans, to introduce a measure which called for a loyalty oath for public employees. This, I suppose, was for politician Warren a way of immobilizing the right-wing forces that were pressing him and a way of retaining his leadership in the party.The special session of the legislature convened on October 3, if I remember correctly. The Levering Act was introduced that day and was passed, I think, the same day, without public hearings or any opportunity for opposition. It went into effect immediately, because of the emergency, and we found ourselves at the college confronted with either signing or not signing before November 4. Signing meant retaining one's job; not signing meant losing one's job. It was as simple as that.

Gardner

What did the oath say specifically? It might be useful to go through the different oaths. There is an oath that existed in the state of California for years.

Monroe

Yes, and I had taken that oath when I started. As a matter of fact, I had taken it before that; and when I joined the faculty in 1947, I took this oath without any hesitation at all. That oath, the one in effect in 1947, was a simple declaration of support for the Constitution of the United States, the state of California, and to carry out one's duties to the best of his ability. Philosophically, I think one can wonder whether or not that makes one's support of the Constitution any stronger, makes one any more loyal, changes one at all, makes him work harder; but it was a formality which was couched in positive terms, and since I did support the Constitution and had no reservations about the comparable provisions in the California constitution, I could take that oath easily. I didn't need an oath like that to commit me to do as good a job as I could do.The Levering Oath, though, incorporated that paragraph and then extended it as follows. [tape recorder stopped] The second paragraph of the oath went on to require the public employee to swear that he did not advocate the overthrow of the government by force or violence or other unlawful means; that for the past five years he had not been a member of any organization that advocated the overthrow of the government by force or violence or other unlawful means except as follows, and then there was provision in the oath for any exceptions; and then finally, that as long as he was employed as a professor or whatever his station was, he would not advocate the overthrow of the government by force or violence or other unlawful means or join any organization that so advocated. Some people facetiously filled in Boy Scouts of America and YMCA in the exceptions.The Levering Oath was cleverly set in a larger measure which had the effect of reclassifying all public employees as civil defense workers subject to whatever orders their superiors might give them. It was a quasi-military kind of conscription bill, which was one of its interesting dimensions. Then, not as teachers, not as garbage collectors, or whatever they might be, but as civil defense workers, they were required to take this oath.The additional provision in the act was that no compensation shall be paid to any person who hasn't taken the oath. There were some teachers who continued teaching the remainder of that year without pay; and, under the provision that they couldn't be paid, they were permitted by their administrators to continue teaching even though they didn't take the oath. They couldn't keep that up very long, because they needed to be paid, and finally had to resign their position.The main thrust of it, of course, was a threat to academic freedom and to the First Amendment rights of all the people involved; and we began at the college, as soon as the oath was enacted, a month-long process of discussion--the most active kind of discussion that I can ever remember engaging in with other people. The faculty as a whole organized, and because I was particularly outspoken in this regard, I was appointed chairman of a faculty committee of about eight or ten or twelve to study the oath and its consequences, and to make recommendations to the faculty with regard to what the position of the faculty would be. At the same time, some of us who were more concerned than others began to discuss this matter in smaller groups and more privately. The other process that occurred was a kind of sifting and screening of the faculty. Some faculty members rushed to the room in which the oath was available for signing, I think in order to get themselves on record first.

1.4. Tape Number: II, Side Two (August 1, 1972)

Monroe

For the great majority of the faculty, I think, this was a tremendously trying experience, and many of the people that I was close to, had a great deal of respect for, and loved as colleagues and friends agonized over the matter of whether they would sign or wouldn't sign, and one by one finally acceded to this requirement. I think I may have been personally a kind of deterrent to their ready signing, but this is to undersell them. They were good people, and they knew that this was an evil thing, or thought it was, and the fact that I was holding out, and continued to hold out, made it difficult for them easily and quickly to get the thing over with.But one by one they decided to sign, did sign, set the matter aside, in many cases telling me, when they had, that they thought this was the course of wisdom, that they didn't agree with the oath and that it was a bad thing, but the way to deal with phenomena of this kind was to stay on the inside and to fight it there, and that's what they had decided to do.In that period--and it's one of the most intense periods of my life, I guess--I was conducting a struggle on three levels. The first was in relation to my colleagues on the faculty and those people whom I respected most, some of whom had already declared that they would not sign, and that put some pressure on me not to sign.The second was at the family level with my wife, and now with respect to our two children, what we were going to do about this--both having very strong feelings against the oath, both having some understanding of what this represented politically, what it represented in a broad social sense, and both being kind of stubborn and independent people with regard to being pushed around by government or by superiors. We were both strongly inclined not to sign, but recognized that the consequences of this could be pretty serious and severe; and by that time we had, in the course of the former upgrading that I was talking about, finally found a very good house to live in down the peninsula. Helen, my wife, who had had a very secure and very comfortable home as a child and young woman, wasn't about to settle for any kind of housing, and we had a labored time for the first couple of years in San Francisco until finally she settled on this particular house. We had bought it, and we'd moved in, and we looked forward to a comfortable and secure living condition there. That condition for her was in the balance, and at that level we night after night talked and discussed and debated and weighed the matter of signing.Then of course, finally, was the personal level, whether or not I personally could stand up to the test of not signing, what this would mean to me, and what I would do thereafter.The day of judgment approached, and I finally made up my mind that I wouldn't sign; and, ultimately, I was one of eight at the college who refused to sign the oath. By the first of November, there had been both a series of faculty meetings and finally one total faculty meeting at which the special committee that I chaired reported the reasons for opposing the oath. The faculty adopted a resolution calling on the legislature to rescind the oath. By that time, everybody but the eight or so had signed, so it was a kind of empty gesture by the faculty; but concurrently with that, off the campus, a few of us had begun to organize with other groups of public employees in the community and had held, at the American Friends Service Committee meeting house in San Francisco, one or two meetings to begin to build an organization that would take effective action in relation to the oath. When November 4 rolled around I had not signed, and the seven others had not signed. We received on that day a letter dismissing us for cause, and we were invited, in effect, to leave the campus.

Gardner

Do you recall who the others were and what eventually happened to them?

Monroe

Yes, I do. One was Herbert Bisno, who was an assistant professor of sociology, who a year later went to the University of Oregon and has been on the Oregon faculty ever since. He's had a distinguished professional career there. He was fortunate enough to be the only one of the nonsigners at San Francisco State to find, fairly soon, a teaching position and to pick up his teaching career.Another was John Beecher, a descendant of the Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe family of long Southern lineage, and a feisty, very creative, interesting guy, an assistant professor of sociology also. Beecher is now sixty-eight, approaching seventy, and has had a somewhat distinguished career as a poet, lecturer, and a printer of books since that time. I think he's not had a permanent teaching post since then.Leonard Pockman was a professor of physics, very interesting, intense kind of guy. He has since died of Parkinson's disease, a very slow and tragic fashion.Another was a young art instructor, Frank [A.] Rowe, who is now chairman of the art department at Chaney College, I think it's called, a community college in Oakland. Frank had a rough time for a while, worked as a department store decorator and whatnot, but finally got himself back into teaching and has a good position now.Another was a young instructor on my faculty, an instructor in journalism. Her name is Phyllis Mezey. She has been in and out of teaching but only on a tentative, parttime basis, and she's done photography and journalistic work otherwise.One was an office worker, a secretary in one of the departments, Lucy Hancock, who came to be secretary of the organization that was founded later and office manager for that short-lived organization.The final and last one is a fellow named Jack Patten, who was on my faculty, whom I helped steer his way through graduate work at Stanford, and who later turned up as an informer for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, naming various people--never me, to my knowledge. He had the grounds for doing it, but.... At any rate, I've lost track of him, understandably, and I don't know what his fate has been.Those were the eight and they're dispersed now and spread variously.

Gardner

What were the arguments given on both sides: the arguments in favor of signing, and the arguments opposed?

Monroe

Well, the arguments generally of the faculty people who signed, I think, in no instance found support for the oath. They didn't think it was a good thing; they thought it was unnecessary. They thought it was a mere formality, and one might as well sign. As I say, the most compelling argument they made was [that] in light of their families' needs and their professional interests, they felt that they had to sign, but that that was the way to do it, that one signed and then stayed on the inside of the institution and fought repression against the institution.It was my observation at the time that that was an empty argument and my experience thereafter that their fight went out of them very fast. They fought very little; and not, I would guess, until the recent events at San Francisco State has that faculty come back into any kind of fighting stance. Their recent fight there, I must confess, I don't understand entirely, but it took a long while for that faculty to rebuild its sense of morale and spirit and any sense of fight against the pressures against the college.So I knew that was a hollow argument, and on the other side, we argued variously that this was an indignity, that first it was a violation of our professional status to classify us as civil defense workers and subject us therefore to whatever authority might be put over us, and that we weren't hired to pass buckets of water as a brigade of civil defense workers--we were professors and teachers; that literally, on its face, any requirement which prohibits a person, at pain of losing his job or compensation therefore, from advocating any idea is on its face a violation of his First Amendment rights and a violation of his rights as a teacher to advocate, as a teacher, whatever he will; [that it was] a violation of the freedom of association, the First Amendment, because one could not join that organization so categorized; [that] the oath was vague and of a repressive character; and then I think many of us felt that this was a kind of forerunner of what we later came to call McCarthyism, and that in a sense we were taking up an out-post position because we wanted to resist that influence and that national hysteria of the country.

Gardner

Did you have much support, or any support, from the student body or the community?

Monroe

We had some support from the student body and some support from the community. Some of the student leaders called a meeting on the campus which I addressed, at which, I remember now, I promised that I would return to the campus. I will remind the people there of that promise when I go back, not in the sense that [Douglas] MacArthur promised to return, but it has somewhat the same nostalgia about it and prophecy.In the community, the San Francisco press took, I think, a fairly friendly view toward those people who refused to sign. That press had been at least evenhanded with regard to the Regents' Oath and that controversy, and, except for some small community papers and some small groups in the community, there was no outright condemnation of us as traitors or disloyal or whatnot.On the other hand, the social work groups, and public employees' union, and the teachers' organizations, and the American Association of University Professors chapters, and the Friends (the Quakers) and the ACLU people all generally supported us. And it was out of that complex that we built, as we did rather quickly and had viable as an organization by mid-December, what we came to call the Federation for Repeal of the Levering Act.That was a group which, I guess by reason of my rank as a full professor and my status on the campus as a campus leader and, I think, a person respected on the campus, I came rather naturally to lead, preside over the meetings, and then came to be elected chairman--whatever that title meant--of this new organization. In December and January, December of '50 and January of '51, we put together very rapidly what got to be a federation of some thirty or forty community groupings, with a very distinguished list of individual sponsors headed by Alexander Meiklejohn, who was then still alive, and some national figures.I must say, though, that we invited Albert Einstein to be a sponsor of the federation, and, although I don't have it here at hand, I have a letter addressed to me from him, typed by him in his own fashion with typographical errors, declining to become a sponsor. He said at the time that we were fighting a symptom and that the real problem, the basic fundamental problem, was the militarist and expansionist attitude of the United States; and until that could be defeated, our efforts would be for naught, and he didn't want to be associated with it.It's an interesting letter, and in one dimension I thought he was right. Of course this was something on the surface of what was growing up after World War II. The so-called containment policy of our State Department had about it also an expansionist representation. Our involvement in Korea was not remarkably different from our involvement in Vietnam at the present time, both of which fitted the pattern of a government bent upon setting itself up as a world police force as we now see the role, which was just beginning to emerge then, and which Einstein saw very clearly and which he wanted to resist. I was not angered by his letter nor disappointed, but I was interested in his response; and, as I say, I still have the letter, and it's one of my valued mementos of that whole experience.We put together a going concern and, in the course of things, fought our way through the organizational problems-- what kind of an organization it was going to be, and how representation would be developed, and how a representative executive committee could be formed that would represent the whole grouping of people.Then, in some respect, each of us settled down to deal with our own personal family and financial problems in one dimension. My salary stopped; my consultancy stopped. Having received my last check I guess on the first of November-- there was no money coming in thereafter--finally it was agreed that I should be paid $400 a month as chairman of the organization and to invest full time. Two or three other members of the staff, our office manager and a couple of the other nonsigners--Bisno and, I think, Phiz Mezey--received some compensation, until it became clear later on that we couldn't finance so large a staff. Then the staff settled down to two--I and Lucy Hancock, who managed the office--and I was the full-time employee.We set about, then, first a legislative effort to repeal the Levering Act and to broaden that purpose to resist, in the 1951 session of the legislature, any other repressive measures that might be introduced.I very soon had my first introduction to the legislative process. This was in February, I think, of 1951, February or March. In that session, which convened in January of '51, two measures were introduced as constitutional amendments. One was a measure which would deny tax exemption to any veteran, or any institution, including churches, which did not subscribe to a special oath contained in that measure. The other was a constitutional amendment which provided for writing into the constitution of the state of California, permanently, the text of the Levering Oath. The Levering Oath, part of the Levering Act, had been enacted as a simple legislative matter; this measure would write, would substitute, for the oath of office in the constitution, the new oath.Those were our chief targets, and we learned that these two measures were coming before the Assembly Committee on Constitutional Amendments, so we proposed to appear before that committee and testify against them.We arrived in Sacramento--I arrived with a carload of people--and we had spread the word, so the hearing room was full of people who were opposed to the measure, our friends. The committee at that time was chaired by an elderly assemblyman from Pasadena whose name I forget. He was handicapped and walked with a cane, and he must have been in his late seventies. He was an ancient individual. I remember his taking his place at the committee chair. Assemblyman Levering was there to argue on behalf of these measures; and another assemblyman, who had a reputation for being at least three-fourths, if not nine-tenths, intoxicated at every session of the committee, was there; and two or three other committeemen.The chairman of the committee convened the meeting, and then this inebriated assemblyman took up the dominant position. The first one, ACA-1, was called, and I arose to address the committee. I approached the committee table, introduced myself, started to speak, and the drunken assemblyman challenged me and asked if I had registered as a lobbyist, to which I had to reply that I hadn't.I didn't know about this particular requirement. As a matter of fact, it was observed mostly then in the breach. There was such a requirement, but it was a kind of laughed-at element in the assembly. If the committee was friendly to a particular witness, they let him testify; if they were hostile to him, they would kick him out.So I started, and I was stopped, and when I said I hadn't registered I was informed that I couldn't testify. Well, I proceeded to appeal this and found myself expelled from the committee room. Three or four people who followed me were also expelled, and we all had our first introduction to the legislative process. A public hearing is really not a public hearing if the legislators don't want it to be.Thereafter, I did register, and one other member of our group registered, and we did appear before committees in various ways. I learned something about the legislative process and the legislature which, I suppose, because I'd had no experience of that kind before, began my rather completely cynical view of the legislative process. The people's representatives behave very strangely in Sacramento, as I suppose they do in all state capitals. I guess, in a way, the people sent there are representative of the broad segment of the voters; but taken as a group, they can hardly be categorized as wise, and, in the sense of representing the best interests of people, representative of those interests.I don't think the current legislature is very much different from the one that I confronted first in 1951. There have been some reforms and some improvements, and there are some more able people there, but it's a rough and tumble place and anyone who takes on the kind of task that we took on at that time expecting any degree of success can be sure of it that he's going to be disappointed.In the course of that session we, of course, failed, totally, to keep these two constitutional amendments from passing, and failed totally to keep half a dozen other repressive measures from coming through, some of which were authored by Jack Tenney, others by Harold Levering. Through that period, the federation was active, meeting regularly, and we were raising funds. The first year of our operation we raised something approaching $25,000, which was quite an achievement for this fly-by-night group.

Gardner

Did you have members and participants from the other schools, say, civil organizations like San Francisco city employees who had refused to sign, or San Jose State faculty who had refused to sign? Were they participating as well?

Monroe

Yes. I don't remember the exact groups that did, but we had two or three chapters of the American Association of University Professors, a number of public employees' unions, the teachers' union, the more left-leaning unions and organizations, professional groups, and those groups-- either religious groups or community groups--that had had a long commitment to resisting the kind of thing represented by the oath. We didn't have any chambers of commerce, and we didn't have any American Legion posts, but the kind of typical grouping that you would expect to come out on this. I think it could be said that we were fairly successful in steering a careful, deliberate course, neither left radically nor right, kind of down the middle of the particular purpose for which we were set up, and stayed with that purpose pretty markedly.In the course of this year's experience, I had one very disquieting and uncomfortable incident. Of course, by this time, organized labor had split into its left-independent elements and the conservative AFL-CIO unions. I think AFL-CIO hadn't merged then, but the three or four--the ILWU and the electrical workers and I guess the public workers-- had been expelled from the CIO unions charged with being dominated by Communists.The public employees' group--and this was the only organized group of public employees--naturally came in support of the federation and joined as one of the sponsoring organizations. I thought nothing of this, and I welcomed their support, until we held in Fresno--we were making an effort to broaden the scope of our campaign--a conference representing people from Los Angeles and Southern California and people from Northern California.On the occasion of that meeting, a labor representative, I think kind of self-appointed, a man named John Despol, who had been involved in labor matters here in Los Angeles and Democratic politics from time to time, appeared at this conference. He came on and took the floor--I was presiding-- took the floor in the sense of demanding that the federation, in order to purify itself, publicly expel the public workers' union, this independent, ousted union. Despol was a CIO representative, and he spoke in that way. He said "You'll have no support from the CIO until you get rid of this Communist-dominated union."I was unprepared for this but reacted, and then there were comments from the floor, and finally I had to point out to Despol that, first, this was not really a meeting of the federation so we couldn't expel anybody there; and that even if it were, it would be my inclination not to expel anyone from the federation for that reason, that we welcomed everybody that wanted to support our purpose, that we had only one purpose, and that we were not about to be used by any group against another group.

Gardner

Especially to expel a group for advocacy when that was what you were fighting.

Monroe

Precisely, yes. That didn't please Despol, and he threatened us on that occasion. I didn't quite understand the threat until toward the end of the legislative session. Despol was also a legislative representative of the CIO and kind of played the field. He was in Sacramento and he was back and forth. He's gone down in my record book as one of the more despicable individuals in my acquaintance.In Sacramento, in order to get his revenge and to punish me and the federation appropriately, he contacted Jack Tenney. Of course, Jack Tenney is notorious; I don't know whether people remember him here or not. He was state senator at that time, a notorious, rabid right-wing guy. He had first been elected to the assembly with the support of the Communist party in Los Angeles. He was the composer of "Mexicali Rose," a musician, and had done a flip-flop and turned way over on the fascist side. Finally, his last claim to fame was running as the vice-presidential candidate with MacArthur on Gerald L.K. Smith's Christian Nationalist party ticket in 1952.Despol suggested to Tenney that Tenney raise a question about our credentials as lobbyists. Now we had applied for credentials; they had not been issued. We had reported regularly as we were required to and kept on appearing before the committees and nothing happened.Tenney had been the chairman of the California Joint Senate-Assembly Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, a post from which he was ousted in 1948 because he named half of the community leaders in Los Angeles as being Communists. That was a little too strong for some people, so he was removed from that post. Hugh Burns, then, a senator from Fresno, was substituted for Tenney. Tenney put Burns up to the task of challenging our credentials, and so we had a hearing before this committee to determine whether or not we were of good moral character and therefore qualified to receive cards or certificates that we were properly lobbyists.We went through that ordeal. Both Herb Bisno and I were questioned at some length. Finally, we were asked the $64 question, which we both refused to answer, and stated the grounds that this was like asking us to take a loyalty oath; and then were denied by the committee, but by that time the session was over. I cite this instance, because I want to put in the historic record the work of this character John Despol, who is still around drawing a salary as a pie card in the labor movement somewhere, and who has, in my judgment, done nothing but damage to the labor movement and the good people of California. That bit of vindictiveness.The session was over and two constitutional amendments had passed. This is 1951, and these measures would go on the ballot in 1952. The federation kept active the rest of the year. The legislature was out of session, but we held fund-raising meetings and educational meetings, and I travelled up and down the state to Eureka and Redding and Sacramento and Los Angeles and San Diego, and got about as much as I could, meeting with as many people as possible.We recognized then that we would have to begin to mount a political campaign to try to defeat those measures on the November, 1952, ballot. They were then the counterparts of Proposition 14 [1964], Proposition 24 [1962], and I guess whatever the capital punishment and obscenity and school assignment and foreign labor measures will be this year. They turned out to be Propositions 5 and 6, so numbered, and, as I say, the federation worked to build a network of interested people and to increase our resources as much as we could to deal with these.I was still, then, earning $400 a month as chairman of the federation. My traveling expenses were paid when I made trips in my car. I remember driving from San Diego to San Francisco one night and arriving there early the next morning. It was a kind of grueling experience, but I had a lot of energy in those days and a great deal of commitment to this, and not very much concern really about my economic well-being, a kind of confidence that somehow we would come out of this in some way; expecting that when the campaign against the measures was over, if we failed, then that we would have to give up the fight and that I would have to find some kind of teaching assignment somewhere, but that that could be done. In the meantime I had this job to do, and I was trying to do it as well as I could.

Gardner

How was your personal life affected at that point?

Monroe

Well, I was away from home a good deal, and Helen, my wife, carried on as well as she could. We had two children then. One was in school, and the son who was born in 1948 was then three years old. So she had her hands full with the kids, and she was a doughty and courageous gal, but worried, I think. She had expected that at long last (we had moved all over the state, clear across country, and then to Penn State and then back home again), there would be a condition of permanence and security. She was living in a house that she liked. Of course, not signing the oath changed all of that, but she stuck to her guns nobly.We got through that year and into the spring and then began to undertake seriously the political work to beat Propositions 5 and 6, recognizing that the main concentration of our organization was in Northern California and discovering, of course, that the majority of people live in Southern California, and that any statewide proposition needs concentration in the south. We called various meetings, and I came to Los Angeles several times on trips and spent a good deal of time here, meeting people, and as many small groups and large groups as I could reach--among other groups, the board and a group of friends of the American Civil Liberties Union here. This was in the spring of '52. I've forgotten the exact months, but I was probably here in January and again in March and then again in April, doing what I could at long distance to organize a group here. We finally got established a Southern California branch of the federation with local leadership, and they were beginning to conduct their campaign here.

Gardner

Who were some of the local leaders?

Monroe

Dick [Richard W.] Petherbridge, who is now an attorney in Santa Ana in Orange County, and his wife, who was not his wife then but who was a social worker who had refused to sign the Levering Oath--these were two active people. Dick and Harriet Glickman, Al and Dorothy Bricker, Esther Masatir, Hannah Bloom, later to become Hannah Shields-- these were people who were at the center of the group here, but there was a growing group of interested people.The problem here was that the oath furor had passed through this community three years earlier, and whatever fight there was against the oath had been made by the city and county workers in 1948. They had already lost their court cases, and the fight was pretty well gone out of that group.I need to interject, talking about court cases, the fact that as early as December of 1950, a group of nonsigners, led by Leonard Pockman (a group which happened not to contain my name, by very interesting coincidence, or that might have disqualified me, under res judicata, from participating in the recent matter) representing tenured faculty people, Herb Bisno representing nontenured faculty people, and then two other cases representing, I think, city college and public employees' groups filed a pattern of cases challenging the constitutionality of the Levering Oath. That was done for us through the ACLU in San Francisco. The attorney who handled that is Wayne Collins, who was general counsel then for that group.That case was filed directly in the state supreme court on a writ of mandamus. That court remanded the case, our case, to the First District Court of Appeals that was then headed by now-Justice [Raymond E.] Peters. It was argued in due time, and the briefs were filed, and we were waiting for the decision to come around. That had been filed in late 1950 and argued sometime in 1951. The decision was pending, and we received report that almost concurrently with a court of appeals decision against the Regents' Oath, the First District Court was about to bring down a decision overturning the Levering Oath; but before that decision could be announced, the state supreme court took our case (the Regents' Oath case) out of Sacramento and took other oath cases back in its own jurisdiction. That was sometime in 1951. New briefs were filed and so forth.The court sat on the case through the remainder of 1951 and the beginning of 1952, did not announce its decision until early October, 1952, just before the election on Propositions 5 and 6. In that decision they did two things: they struck down the Regents' Oath, but on the ground that the legislature had preempted the field, and therefore the regents had no jurisdiction to enforce that kind of oath; and they upheld, in what I think fairly can be said was preposterous rationale, the Levering Oath in a decision written by Chief Justice [Phil Sheridan] Gibson.He ordinarily was a pretty good guy, but it seemed to me apparent, and I think I can assert this for the historic record, that he and the court were under political pressure from the governor, and the Democratic leadership under pressure from the Republican party, not to create a political furor by overturning that oath and appearing to support, well, Communist doctrine and overthrow and so on and so forth.I can't help thinking that Gibson must have been ashamed of that decision, but he rendered it, and it was joined by six other members of the court. The only dissenting opinion was filed by a wonderful justice, Jesse Carter--now dead. In a magnificent dissent, he set forth what actually became the basic rationale for the overturning of the oath later.As the campaign against Propositions 5 and 6 went on, before they reached the ballot, and as a result of my visits here, and as a result of the fact that the executive director of ACLU of Southern California, who at that time was a man in his early seventies, Reverend A.A. Heist, a retired Methodist minister, strong and independent-minded and at odds with, if not a majority, at least a leading minority on the ACLU board here, had announced his resignation--the combination of these things opened the possibility to my being invited to apply for the job, which I did in May of that year, and before the end of that month I was informed that I had been hired, effective July 1, 1952. I reported for work on that day, leaving my family still in Northern California to dispose of the house there, which we then had to sell, and to arrange for the movement of our furniture here. I was a dedicated, committed campaign man and had to give that priority over taking better care of my family. I started to work here on the first of July, 1952, which is now just twenty years and one month ago.At that time, I was still heavily concerned, and had an agreement with the board that I could devote my major attention to these two propositions which were coming up for election in November. I did what I could, still working with the people in Northern California. We did what we could all do. On election day the two propositions carried, both 5 and 6, by margins of two to one.At the time, it seemed to us that that was a kind of heartening sign, and I'm sure that our campaign had something to do with the size of the opposition vote. I've forgotten the number, but we ran up a respectable vote against the oath, and maybe that helped to slow things down and put a braking action of some kind in the course of what then was getting to be talked about as McCarthyism. As the national scene shifted to the behavior, the remarkable gyrations and maneuverings of Senator Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin, the whole nation then became enmeshed in that period of the American experience.

1.5. Tape Number: III, Side One (August 3, 1972)

Gardner

When we left off last time, Propositions 5 and 6 had just been voted through by the California electorate. We can talk now about the aftermath of that, and the effects of the voting.

Monroe

In postelection November, 1952, I found myself at the end of the loyalty oath campaign, in a sense. We had lost on the ballot; the Levering Oath was written permanently into the California Constitution; and, both with a sense of defeat and with a sense of having done as much as we could do, the anti-oath people were content with their limited achievement and turned their attention to other things.There was some talk in the federation of continuing the organization, but actually the steam went out of that boiler pretty rapidly, and the federation was formally and officially disbanded in December, or early January, 1953.So I found myself the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California--it was called the Southern California branch at that time, affiliated with the national ACLU--and I addressed myself there-upon to the work of my new position and, in a sense, my new career. I had taken the job with the ACLU as a kind of interim thing for, as I told myself, two or three years, until I could get back into teaching. It was at least a job, and, although the salary was not magnificent, it was almost a living wage.My family was then preparing to move from Millbrae, California, to Los Angeles, and I began to take up my work with new associates, the members of the Board of the American Civil Liberties Union here, notably Robert Morris, Helen [M.] Beardsley, Jerome McNair, and other members of the board; and, of course, began at that time what has come to be a long association with Al Wirin--Abraham Lincoln Wirin, as he was named.I hadn't known very much about ACLU before it came to my attention in the Levering Oath fight and before I took up my work with ACLU here. Shortly, I was to learn something of the history of the Southern California branch, its origins, and something of the history of the national organization.Nationally, ACLU was formed in 1920 by a group of friends and associates around Roger Baldwin. Baldwin, the descendant of a well-to-do, upper-middle class, liberal, St. Louis, Missouri, family, finally found his way into the radical movement on the East Coast during World War I. He became, after a short career in social work and in social organizations, a conscientious objector in World War I, was convicted and spent the better part of a year in jail for refusing to be conscripted in the army at that time.Following his release from prison in what I think was 1918-1919, he formed, and joined with others in forming, a committee against militarism--I've forgotten the exact title of the committee. That in turn became, in 1920, an organization devoted exclusively to the defense of civil liberties under the Bill of Rights.Baldwin and people like Norman Thomas and Clarence Darrow and Felix Frankfurter were the early organizers of that group and concerned themselves with instances in which the Bill of Rights was seriously violated throughout the country. The most notable early violations of the Bill of Rights affected those people after World War I who were looked on as aliens, foreign agents, and, under the deportation statutes and regulations of the Department of Justice, were either rounded up and imprisoned or, in many cases, loaded on boats and shipped back to the Europe from which they came.We need to remember, of course, that the Russian revolution had shaken the whole world, and most particularly the capitalist world, and the revolution, in chauvinist American terms, was attributed to those foreign agitators who, on our shore, might ferment a comparable revolution here. So it was a period of high hysteria and great anxiety on the part of the American people, flowing partly from the prejudices of World War I itself and then later, of course, the anti-foreign attitudes that developed in the American society.The ACLU nationally fought deportations and the Palmer raids and the other serious instances of gross violation of the constitutional rights of people here; and, although it was a very small and very elite kind of group, it probably began to have some impact at that time. Throughout its history, and throughout Roger Baldwin's tenure as executive director, the ACLU continued to be an elitist and a small national group of members across the country who knew Roger Baldwin, knew about the work of ACLU, and whose major relationship to it was a financial one of supporting the activities of Baldwin's office in New York. Such notable instances as the [John T.] Scopes trial in the twenties (the Scopes trial was an ACLU case, one of the first notable cases), the [Nicola] Sacco-[Bartolomeo] Vanzetti case in Boston--these were instances in which Baldwin expressed his own personal influence and concern, bringing Clarence Darrow into the Scopes case and being active in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston.But the ACLU was pretty much a one-man operation. A national board centered in New York and centered around Baldwin, the personal figure. Its activities settled down largely to being those things that Roger Baldwin was concerned with. He would hear of something occurring in some part of the country and would board a bus. Despite his personal wealth, and he's still quite a well-to-do man and was at that time, he practiced a very parsimonious budgetary policy with regard to the union; and as late as 1954 or '55, when he came to Los Angeles first, and when I first met him, instead of flying by regular airline, he took a nonscheduled flight out because it was cheaper that way. For the most part, he rode buses rather than trains, and, I guess, buses rather than planes when they came to be the primary mode of cross-country transportation.As I say, the ACLU until almost 1950 was confined to what Baldwin himself thought was important, and the union was kept small, elite, just large enough to finance the operations that Baldwin was interested in. He made an important contribution in the concept of ACLU and in organizing around that concept, but, from my view, never realized the potential strength and significance of the organization, and never built, across the country, the strong, active, and effective organization that might have been developed through the thirties and forties and might better have prepared us to deal effectively with McCarthyism when it struck in the fifties.Locally, the ACLU Southern California branch was formed in 1923, very shortly after Baldwin had organized the national group. Here, the same kinds of aftermath of World War I were being expressed, taking the form principally here of the organization of the activities of the IWWs, those early anarchist working-class people who were attempting at that time to organize the various work categories here and, in particular, the waterfront workers in San Pedro and Los Angeles harbor. There was an active IWW group, and, although I don't know the history in detail, the general impression I have is that there was an effort at that time to form if not an IWW labor-dominated group, at least to form early unions of waterfront workers.In 1923, this activity was increasing, much to the concern not only of the waterfront proprietors and businessmen and industrialists, but to the concern of the city fathers at that time. Somewhere along that period, an ordinance was enacted by the city council of Los Angeles prohibiting public meetings and public speaking at the favorite meeting ground of the Wobblies--as they were known--in San Pedro, a place known as Liberty Hill. That ordinance having been enacted, there was a good deal of concern on the part of liberal-minded community leaders that that was an infringement of the First Amendment rights of the people concerned; and individuals like Upton Sinclair, who was already active in California affairs and California politics and a reputed writer--already had a number of books to his credit--Upton Sinclair, with Hugh Hardyman; one associate; and a man named Prynce Hopkins, another; and three of four other associates, decided that the enacted ordinance and the activities of the L.A. police with regard to the Wobbly meetings and organizing efforts were unconstitutional or intolerable, and decided to test the constitutionality of the new ordinance.They did this by going to Liberty Hill on, I think, a Sunday afternoon, taking with them a copy of the Declaration of Independence. When they arrived there, Upton Sinclair mounted to the podium--I guess there were several hundred, even several thousand people there--and he proposed to defy the ban, or prohibition, upon public address at the particular place. At the podium, when he got the crowd's attention, he began to read the Declaration of Independence. The police were there and forewarned, and he had finished only the first two or three lines of the declaration, when a policeman stepped forward and placed him under arrest. He thereupon handed the document to one of his associates, and that person picked up the reading and continued--he was arrested. Before the process was completed, some five or six of these doughty individuals had been arrested and were hauled off to jail.They were held in various jails overnight and probably through the next day, finally found and bailed out; and then the test began. An action was brought against the ordinance, and, of course, it was found ultimately to be unconstitutional.Out of that action and out of that concern, what was then called a mass meeting was called in Los Angeles, attended by I don't know how many people but a very sizable crowd of people; and on that occasion there began the organization of what came, then, very shortly thereafter--by the early part of 1924--to be designated a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. So the ACLU in Southern California is now almost fifty years old and almost as old as the national organization itself.

Gardner

Did Sinclair know Baldwin?

Monroe

Sinclair knew Baldwin.

Gardner

That's how they got together?

Monroe

Yes. They were both part of the national intellectual elite of the society at that time, and I think it was his acquaintance with Baldwin, his knowledge of the national organization that prompted Sinclair here, and his friends, to follow that pattern and to set up an organization to deal with just the defense of the guaranteed protections of the Constitution.The first director of the ACLU here was a man named [Jacobus] Ten Broek, then a young man, later to become an important California scholar and member of the University of California faculty at Berkeley. His tenure was very short.He was succeeded by a man named [Rev.] Clinton [J.] Taft. A good many of the people who were involved at that early stage were from the ministry and came to this activity out of a broad, both religious and humanistic, concern for people's welfare and people's rights. It was natural, I suppose, therefore, that the second director, actually the director who held longest tenure of the affiliate here, should be a former minister. He had been a Congregational minister. He was not a large man, slight in build and of about medium height, but in a sense, with a tough spirit and a feisty personality, and, I guess in his way, again, pretty much single-handedly fought many of the battles that had to be fought in the twenties and thirties in Los Angeles.There is an account in our records of his having been forcibly removed by two policemen from a city council meeting in which he was protesting the activities of the leader of the police Red Squad, as it was known. Red [W.F.] Hynes was a captain in charge of this particular intelligence branch of the police, and Hynes had a long, notorious record of breaking up political meetings and public meetings of a various sort that he didn't approve of. On one occasion, Taft was protesting this at the city council and was literally picked up and carried out by two policemen by reason of his objection to their activities.Again, Taft's vision, or Taft's concept, of what the ACLU should be or could be was, from my view, a narrow and limited one. In the course of his nearly thirty years in the directorship here, the organization depended on the support of a very few individuals and one or two angels, like Kate Crane Gartz, who was known as the angel of ACLU, a very wealthy woman who lived in Altadena, heiress of the Crane plumbing manufacturing company, and who, if the coffers got too empty, would toss in a few thousand dollars and keep the organization going for another period of time.Taft was not what I would call a top-rate promoter, and over the long period of his years, membership remained small, the leadership very narrow and kind of elitist, and the impact of the organization, I'm sure, limited because of the small dimension of Taft's views.In that period, much was going on in California. The organizing efforts of labor unions proceeded. The very earliest efforts to organize agricultural workers were undertaken. Al Wirin tells, of course, a hair-raising story of his attempt in Imperial County to intercede on behalf of agricultural workers there, and of his being kidnapped, literally, by representatives of the Associated Farmers at that time, and, I guess, American Legionnaires, hauled out into the desert, his car destroyed, left in the desert to wander back into town and get out of that dangerous area.It was a kind of rough and tough time, and civil libertarians were a beleaguered and certainly courageous group, but never got beyond being a small embattled segment of the population. The years of the thirties, the Depression years here, were stringent, as they were over the country; and, of course, in that period, the organizing efforts of the still young American Communist party were interlaced with all the other events of the time. The Communist party, by the end of the 1930s, was, in Los Angeles and in California, a significant political element. Unions of the CIO variety were, I think, quite clearly dominated by known members of the Communist party. That was a factor which became significant following World War II, when the beheading of and the purges of these communist functionaries became the mode of that particular day.I mustn't leave out the very important work, symbolically at least, and, in a sense, actually, of ACLU in California with respect to the internment of the Japanese at the outbreak of World War II. I was not in Los Angeles at that time, and I don't know the events that occurred in 1938 and '40 and '41. I'm sure the impact of nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy, the Spanish Civil War, and all those historic events was as pronounced here as it was in other parts of the country. The rising tensions among sympathizers for the fascist regimes and the vociferous and outspoken antifascist groups was as intense here as it was elsewhere.I suppose none of us was prepared for Pearl Harbor, the outbreak and the active intervention of the United States in the war, and for the almost immediate order by [Lieutenant] General [John B.] De Witt, augmented and supported by the then attorney general of the state, Earl Warren, calling for the removal of people of Japanese ancestry, irrespective of whether they were native-born or whether they had come here from Japan, shortly after Pearl Harbor. The ACLU, almost singly, recognized the egregious violation of these people's rights represented by that order, protested publicly, and, of course, immediately went to court to try to get that order struck down or ameliorated.Al Wirin, by that time, was general counsel for several of the CIO unions here and for the state federation of CIO unions, the California CIO Council. These unions, almost immediately, came out in support of the war effort. Not very long before then, they had been saying, "The Yanks are not coming," and had been opposing any intervention in the European conflict--until, of course, Hitler's attack upon the Soviet Union, which caused a total reversal of that particular field. And, of course, with America's entrance into the war, by reason of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war against Germany and Italy, the unions supported the war effort.When Wirin, as counsel for ACLU, took up a public position opposed to the Japanese internment, he caused the wrath of the union leadership at that time, and very shortly thereafter was given the alternative either to drop out of the ACLU action against internment or give up his retainer with the various unions. Al made a not easy but certainly clear choice and lost his union accounts, stayed with the ACLU and continued his personal legal battle against the internment order. His efforts failed, because the courts upheld the order in its various forms; and it was not until many years later that Al and the Japanese were vindicated and some restitution made to those people whose property was seized and whose lives were disrupted at that particular time.At the close of the war, then, Clinton Taft retired. He was replaced by A.A. Heist, a retired Methodist minister-- again, out of that humanistic religious community. Heist, like Taft, had a rather limited view of what ACLU could do or should do. Heist was not what I would call an effective organizer. He took over and continued very much the kind of thing that Taft had been doing--speaking out occasionally on important social issues that concerned ACLU; occasionally taking on in personal fashion some city official or city agency; writing letters, sometimes with peppery language. But for the most part, he concerned himself with conducting the ACLU pretty much as he might have conducted a church or a congregation--counseling people who needed his counsel; writing, pretty much in sermon fashion, the issues of Open Forum that appeared at that time; and occasionally taking or supporting legal action that the ACLU undertook, legal action of a limited sort because the resources were so very limited.When I took over here in 1952, I found an organization that was, by that time, nearly thirty years old, with a membership of under 1,000 in Southern California, and a total annual income at that time of something under $20,000 a year, just enough to pay the director's salary, hire one secretary, and provide a nominal retainer to counsel for whatever work needed to be done by a lawyer. The activities of the organization were scattered and inconsequential; and I think, all in all, it can be said that ACLU here--but this was true nationally--nowhere had reached a level of effectiveness, either in accord with the importance of the organization and the significance of its mission, or in accord with what needed to be done, what had to be undertaken by this very unique, both national and local, grouping of concerned people.

Gardner

What sort of parallel growth, or lack of growth did the national organization have during this period? What cases came up before it in the thirties and forties, and what sort of membership did it have?

Monroe

Again, by 1950, the national organization, after thirty years of its history, had attained a membership across the country of probably not more than 10,000 individuals, of which we had, appropriately, about one-tenth in Southern California. I'm sure the national budget was probably no more than $120,000, and the record was sparse and scarce and consisted for the most part of those friend-of-the-court appearances that Roger Baldwin was interested in, or that the New York group--and it was totally a New York-Manhattan Island grouping of individuals--thought were important.There had been some history by that time of Baldwin, Arthur Garfield Hays, for another, and Morris Ernst, for another--these people who were the handful of leaders of the organization--with respect to the [Rep. Martin] Dies Committee [on Un-American Activities] and the early witch hunting committees in Congress, activities out of Washington respecting the anxiety over national security. But, again, there as well as here, there was no recognition on the part of these people that they had a mission infinitely larger than they recognized and infinitely larger than they were prepared to fulfill.The board, when I took over here, was limited to fifteen or sixteen individuals, and with the record that I've just recited, the level of activity was low. I think the average age of that board was probably fifty-five or sixty. They were an older group and were quite content with what had been done, perhaps wanted a somewhat more active direction, but were unaccustomed to a high level of organizational activity. It became my task, as I saw it then, to begin building, in a sense architecturally, a larger membership, a larger financial support, and a larger reservoir of resources for the work that had to be done.It's that task into which I settled, mid-November of 1952, with my personal campaign closed, at least for the time. I found myself shifted from the narrow concern of a particular oath, a particular statute, and its particular effect upon me, into the broad field of civil liberties and civil rights, not quite well prepared, either, to take on the direction of an organization because I'd never done anything like that before. I'd had no previous training or experience in constitutional law, and I was a neophyte, a novice, with respect to political action and the political relationships between the work of ACLU and the community and the political body as a whole.I would not count myself a very well prepared, seasoned individual to take on this task, and I took it on finding myself in this much larger field. I took it on in a trial-and-error basis, using what judgment I could, calling on other people for help and advice, but determined, as I say, to begin a building process, always thinking, at least in that early stage, that I dould do this for a little while until I could return to teaching.Now, these twenty years later I recognize that I was hooked almost from the beginning, and it's an interesting fact that until the present time, I made no effort whatever to find a teaching job, partly, I suppose, because I thought it would be difficult to find one in that early period, and I'm sure it would have been, but partly because I got so immersed and involved in the task that I had assumed that I didn't have much time to think about looking for other kinds of work.About the first thing that came down the pike, apart from Propositions 5 and 6 and that concern, was the local Smith Act trial. In 1950, the United States Supreme Court, by a substantial margin, had ruled the Smith Act constitutional as applied to the national leadership of the Communist party. The famous Foley Square trial was concluded and the Smith Act upheld by Chief Justice [Frederick M.] Vinson, supported by other members of the court in what was pretty remarkable language. The only previous limit upon free speech/free association had been what was known as the "clear and present danger" rule: that is, that something had to be immediately imminent and clearly dangerous in order to be restrained, in order not to enjoy the protection of the First Amendment. As many of us thought at the time when the 1950 Supreme Court decision came down upholding the Smith Act, the "clear and present danger" rule had been changed to a kind of "vague and future danger" concept: that because the Communist party of the United States posed perhaps a future threat and not necessarily a clear one, it nonetheless should not be permitted to operate; and its leaders should be subjected to punishment by reason of their advocacy of certain ideas.Other Smith Act trials were occurring across the country, and, of course, several California leaders of the Communist party were indicted and were under trial here.The earliest question of an organizational character that came to my desk and to the board of ACLU was whether or not ACLU should participate as a friend of the court, not appeal but at the trial level, which was an innovation in ACLU thinking. There was strong argument on the part of board members that we should not do that, that we should wait until the trial was over and then intercede on the First Amendment questions on appeal. Al Wirin was very much interested in getting involved in an early stage; other members of our board were at that time, too, as I was myself. I think that was one of the first policy tests of where the affiliate was going. By a divided vote, the affiliate board here voted yes, to intercede and to authorize Al Wirin to participate in the trial, at the trial level, as our representative in a friend-of-the-court position against the prosecution.

Gardner

Parenthetically here, who were some of the members of the board at that time? Who were some of those who were on your side in these early discussions and arguments, and who were some of those opposed?

Monroe

It's kind of hard to remember. I do remember that there were three members of the board at that time who were troublesome in the sense that they were opponents of some of the ideas that I advanced. As a matter of fact, these are the three people, I happen to know, who voted against hiring me at that particular time.One was a man named Paul Jacobs, who was attached to the union movement--I think he was a representative of the oil workers at that time--and his mission was an active, aggressive, anticommunist mission. I had not, I guess, proven myself to be sufficiently anticommunist to Paul, as I had not to John Despol earlier, and so Paul opposed me for appointment and opposed our intervention in the Smith Act trial.Another was Edmund [W.] Cooke, who was a long-time active Democratic party official, supporter. He'd been active with the Democrats here for a number of years--later was appointed judge--and was of a more conservative turn of mind. I think he opposed my appointment because he was a little apprehensive about the employment of an activist. He preferred ACLU to follow along in its more conservative stance.The third was a local lawyer who has since become one of my very close friends, or he considers himself a close friend of mine, Clore Warne. He was then a very successful lawyer, a member of the Pacht firm, as a matter of fact, one of the senior members of that firm and a kind of field marshal of the firm, a very outspoken, sharp-tongued, quick-minded man who, I think, had been very close to the Wobblies in his younger years--a kind of anarchist, an interesting anticommunist, but on sectarian and factional grounds rather than on philosophic grounds. I've never quite been able to figure out where Clore stands philosophically on general political questions.At any rate, he was one of the people who opposed my appointment, voted against me, although he now claims some credit for having hired me. He's now in his late seventies, maybe close to eighty, and since has suffered tragically a devastating stroke which, in ironic fashion, affects more his speech than his general physical well-being. Of course, Clore had made his living and made his mark in the world with his tongue, and to have that immobilized was for him very tragic. I've felt a very deep sympathy for Clore on that account.These three, I'm sure, were those who opposed our intervention in the Smith Act trial, and there may have been another member or so of the board; but in the main, people like Bob Morris and Jerome McNair, who was chairman of the board, Helen Beardsley, Hugh Anderson, and the others I don't remember, supported that position. And into the Smith Act case we went.Of course, that instance, and later there were many others, was a clear demonstration of the public relations problem that ACLU constantly suffers. The affiliate here had had a long and consistent history of being straight and right down the middle on political questions. ACLU does not take a partisan position with regard to political parties; we don't support candidates. We are concerned solely with the constitutional issue involved, and I think the record of the affiliate here had been that, although there were rumors, when I came on the job here, that Clinton Taft in the late thirties had given evidence of strong right-wing sympathies, had been especially friendly with Gerald L.K. Smith and some of the local Nazi and fascist groups. I was never able to confirm that, but it was suggested to me that that was one of the reasons that he had been pushed out of the job when he left, that he had become too right-wing for the board at that time.Irrespective of that history, when we entered the Smith Act case here, the press and the public, generally, I think, were confirmed in their view that ACLU was really an agency of the Communist party and now was showing its true colors. Over the years, of course, the misconception on the part of the public is that ACLU somehow takes on the color of the issues it's concerned with or the people involved in those issues, so that moving into a Smith Act trial meant that we were sympathetic to Communists and wanted to save these particular communist leaders, and obscured the fact that our sole concern there was to save the First Amendment and the guaranteed rights under that amendment.Throughout the fifties, of course, when anticommunism was the religion of the society, every act that we took--and we had to take many on behalf of individual Communists or the rights of individual Communists--simply implanted that impression more strongly in the public mind. We got involved there ultimately, of course, in the case that came to be known as United States v. Yates that overturned the doctrine in the Dennis decision. It was 1956 or '57 before the Yates case got to the United States Supreme Court. That case was the first to reverse the Smith Act convictions, and our involvement in it may have been a significant factor in that reversal in the field. Thereafter, the Smith Act has become pretty much a dead letter and has not been invoked again, so far as I know, across the country as an instrument for suppressing radical political groupings.The next thing to come down the pike was the 1953 legislative session. Our legislature then met every other year: in odd years, the regular session; in even years, what was called the budget session. So in the '52 session, not very much freight had been hauled with respect to regular legislation. The remnants of the 1951 session, which had given us Propositions 5 and 6 and moved us more strongly toward a repressive period, were picked up in 1953.

1.6. Tape Number: III, Side Two (August 3, 1972)

Gardner

I'd like to go back to the Smith Act for a minute, Mr. Monroe, and go through some of the background. It was a very strong forward step for the affiliate to take, compared to what the national organization was doing, and I'm interested in some of the background of the Dennis case and then the Yates case.

Monroe

Yes, I think our action here of interceding at the trial level was, maybe, a more militant posture for ACLU than had been practiced by any other branch of the union or certainly by the national office. The national ACLU had interceded in the Dennis case, but at the appellate level, at the United States Supreme Court level, and had argued in defense of the First Amendment rights of the communist leaders; but this followed, as I understand it, a great deal of soul-searching and travail on the part of our national leaders, who even then were caught up in the wave of anticommunism that had swept the country by that time. Either out of fear, or out of a concern for public relations, or out of their own antipathy to communism or the Communist party or certain communist leaders and the activities of the Communist party leaders, they had hesitated to intervene at an earlier stage or more forcibly in the opposition to the Smith Act prosecutions.Here, on the other hand (and of course this was a couple of years later than the Dennis case), the indictments were issued, I think, in 1951, following the Dennis decision, and involved, I think, thirteen California leaders of the Communist party: that is, the official officers of the party, people like Phil Connelly, who had been executive secretary of the California CIO Council; Dorothy Healey, his wife at that time, since divorced; Oleta [O'Connor] Yates, who was a Northern California Communist party leader; Rose Kusnitz, Rose Chernin as she was known. The other names escape me at this time, but these four were prominent members of the group of defendants, and, of course, the case came to be known as U.S. v. Yates, in the name of the Northern California secretary.Here, I guess, we were either less fearful or more foolish, maybe somewhat doughtier in our principal attack upon the matter; and as I say, our board in the majority was prepared to intercede forcibly and effectively at the earliest stage of the prosecution.In early 1953, in the regular session of the legislature, the legislature took up again the process of refining its attack upon Communists, and communist sympathizers, and people on the left who might still be involved either in public employment or who just lived in California. Two acts particularly were aimed at teachers and at public employees: one was known as the Dilworth Act, named after Nelson Dilworth, who was a state senator and chairman of the Senate Investigating Committee on Education; and [the other was] the Luckel Act, which was named after an assemblyman [Frank Luckel] on the Republican right wing, aimed at all public employees other than teachers.The thrust of these two acts was to take the loyalty declaration one stage further beyond the loyalty oath and to impose upon school districts, school boards, public agencies, the mandatory obligation of dismissing forthwith any individual who, if called before a school board or a committee of the legislature or a committee of the Congress, refused to answer any question put to him with regard to his political activities or views, without a hearing and with no further ado.The first use of the Dilworth Act was against a teacher at Orange Coast College in Southern California, a Clinton St. John, who happened, from a personal view, to be the son-in-law of Holland Roberts, my old advisor at Stanford. Clinton was then teaching physics and chemistry at Orange Coast College. He had been in that position for three or more years, had earned what he thought was tenure, but was called--and Orange County was not exactly a hotbed of liberalism at that time--before the board of that college, and was questioned, and of course asked the $64 question, which he refused to answer. I've never quite known all the reasons, but he stated his reasons on principle grounds, that that was an invasion of his right under the First Amendment, that he had no obligation to reveal his political views or associations to a school board.I was there at that hearing on that occasion, representing the ACLU, and, incidentally, speaking on behalf of a good friend of mine, appealing to that board not to dismiss him, to decline to use the instrument of the Dilworth Act that had been placed in their hands. Of course, my appeal fell on deaf ears. I'm not sure that there was a single vote in favor of that position. St. John was fired, and his case became one of the first attacks upon the Dilworth Act undertaken by ACLU of Southern California.Not very long thereafter, the Luckel Act was imposed and enforced against Harry Steinmetz, who for a long period of tenure had been a professor at San Diego State College-- for many years, approaching thirty years, I think. He was then in his middle or late fifties, a very bright, very outspoken, very socially conscious professor of psychology, who had over the years attacked many public officials and figures and, therefore, had not endeared himself particularly to either the college hierarchy or the political leaders outside the college. With the Luckel Act in hand, the state Board of Education, that then had jurisdiction over the state colleges, summoned Harry to give him a Luckel Act grilling, and proceeded, with Al Wirin's representation at this hearing, to fire him.Then we had a second court test of the constitutionality of these two measures: in respect to Clinton St. John, the Dilworth Act; and in Harry Steinmetz's case, the Luckel Act. The ACLU of Southern California took both these acts to court and regrettably, in both cases, failed to persuade the court at that time that these were serious violations of First Amendment rights of teachers and public employees. Both the Dilworth and the Luckel acts were sustained by the courts; St. John and Steinmetz lost their jobs, to return later to teaching positions, both of them, but having their professional careers interrupted in a very serious way.

Gardner

How high did the appeals go?

Monroe

Both appeals went to the United States Supreme Court. That court declined to review the lower court cases, the California Supreme Court upholding both measures as constitutional. So we never got our day in the top court, and it was the California Supreme Court, the same court that upheld the Levering Act, which sustained these two measures.Of course, while this was all going on, the Hollywood blacklist was rampant, loyalty security hearings at the national and local level, the aircraft industry here and other industries involved in national defense contracts subject to purges of employees who failed to meet the national standards or who refused to reveal what may have been radical relationships and associations in their past. These were the years of the slow steady purge--out of employment, out of community organizations, out of public posts of one sort or another, out of political candidacies of anyone who either had in his own personal record membership in the Communist party or associated groups, or was a member of any family in which these relationships were characteristic, or who had friends, or who had ever attended a meeting, or who read the wrong literature, or for any reason at all. The most preposterous instances, some of them, the most notorious ones [were] reported in the national press; but at a lower level and outside public scrutiny, [there was] the slow inexorable grinding away and grinding out of any economic status of these "subversive, disloyal, security-threatening individuals."The Hollywood blacklist, I guess, is the best publicized of this whole business. That episode, starting as early as 1947, continued to run its course in the fifties, and time after time the concern of ACLU here was to deal on an individual basis with someone subjected to a loyalty security hearing, or a group of public school teachers who, under the Dilworth Act or through other measures that were adopted locally by school boards, were subjected to dismissal or to suspension by reason of these political factors.

Gardner

Who were some of the Hollywood blacklisted people and/or some of the teachers whom you represented or defended?

Monroe

Well, let me see if I can recall them. Of course, the Hollywood Ten was the best known group--Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson and the others. Their names don't come readily to mind, but they are pretty generally known,A group that never made quite the Hollywood Ten marquee were in levels of concern below that and were simply not called before committees but were fired by studios on the basis of "evidence," quote-unquote, submitted either by the FBI or by the staff of the House Committee on Un-American Activities or other witch-hunting bodies which, of course, sprang up like dragon's teeth both in California and in other states across the country and at the national level.Of the teachers, the public school teachers here included people like Florence Sloat, who was in a group of some fifteen or twenty teachers that represented the first Dilworth Act victims in Los Angeles. They were called in '54-55, following the court's sustaining of the Dilworth Act and following also the remarkable shifting of the L.A. Board of Education to the right. With the various elections, the board came to be a five-to-two composition of highly conservative, or even reactionary, board members, who, of course, could be counted upon to use the Dilworth Act against the public school group here. The first wave of these-- and, again, I've forgotten the exact year but it came somewhere in '54 or '55--was a group of teachers who were called to appear before the board to answer questions with regard to Communist party membership or political activities, political views.Florence Sloat and Don Weiss were among the several people called by the L.A. board, and there was a very intense and agitated campaign at that time, with ACLU heavily involved in representing these people--before the board, my appearing to appeal to the board not to invoke the Dilworth Act, and then the systematic refusal of these individuals to respond to questions, challenging the board's authority under the Dilworth Act.Of course, they were all suspended pending court hearing. In Florence Sloat's case, by unique and very fortunate fluke of things, the court hearing was held up for technical reasons, and Florence finally won reinstatement and back pay by reason of the fact that the counsel for the school board was guilty of laches, and that the appeal had gone past the point at which it could be affected on their part.But most of these people suffered very considerably. They lost their jobs, had to turn to other forms of work, some to plumbing and whatever work they could get to do. They were, I think, as a group, outstanding teachers intellectually and professionally, but suffered the special illness of having been associated in some fashion with the political left in the community.So for the rest of the fifties, we dealt with issues of this kind. The fifties were the years of virulent McCarthyism and the remnants thereof, but, from an organizational view, these were the years of building the organization. By the end of the 1950s, we had increased our membership to something approaching 6,000 or 7,000 and had tripled or quadrupled the income of the organization. The board was considerably expanded, with many new people coming to the board. We had launched, and pretty well developed, a chapter organization, so that individual members of the ACLU could be involved in the work of the organization. In a sense, we had begun to set a tone of organizational impact, which, I think it could be said, had impact not only on the community here but on the national organization itself.Before I took office here, Roger Baldwin had retired, and the new national executive director was Patrick Murphy Malin, an interesting former professor of government and government official. He's served in some government agency both during and following World War II. He was a pretentious and ostentatious kind of individual--at least, I thought so--with fortunately, a different approach to the organizational problem from that that Roger Baldwin had practiced.Pat Malin did see the importance of building a national organization, and his major contribution, I would say, to the organization, was the steady affiliation and the knitting together of all the disparate parts of the organization over the country into one single grouping. He instituted such practices as a biennial conference, at which people from all over the country met, either in New York or some other place in the country, for a three- or four-day session together, to meet each other, to talk about organizational problems and concerns.It was in that time that I think a very rapid period of growth occurred; and, as I say, the ACLU, which had been the kind of loose agglomeration of groupings here, there, and elsewhere, was knitted together into a single effective national organization.But Pat had his own weaknesses. He, too, was a pretty vigorous and outspoken anticommunist, much concerned about communist influence in the organization, and subscribed pretty heartily to a policy position which had been adopted by ACLU as early as 1940. Let me talk just a bit about that.While Baldwin was still director, and pretty much at the behest of individuals like Norman Thomas who were involved in factional disputes among the political left, the national board adopted a new policy. (Thomas represented the Socialist party and the socialist groupings; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a member of the national board and a leading Communist party member, represented other segments of the political left.) In New York during the turbulent days between 1937 and 1940, the left had engaged in a very abrasive kind of infighting politically with respect to the prevailing attitude toward the Soviet Union. The political left in New York at that time had been caught unaware and offguard by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which had offended some members of the left. The Communist party officials, of course, defended that particular pact. Then, when that field was reversed by Hitler's attack upon the Soviet Union in 1941, the whole field was scrambled again.As a result, pretty much, of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, a majority of the ACLU board decided that Communists were not to be trusted to be members of the national ACLU board. They enacted, over the efforts of an outspoken minority of the national board at that time, a policy which declared that membership on the board or staff or any position of responsibility in the organization was inappropriate for anyone who was either a member of a Nazi or fascist group or, at the other end of the spectrum, anyone who was a member of the Communist party or any communist-dominated group.That issue was fought through in 1940, and as a result, ultimately, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was called for a hearing and finally was expelled from the national board.When the affiliate here was invited in late 1951 or early 1952 to consider integrating its membership in the national organization--instead of remaining a totally separate kind of fraternal group with respect to the national ACLU, becoming an integral part of the national organization-- our board took up and considered two questions: one, whether or not it wanted to integrate with the national organization; and two, whether it would accept as a condition of that integration, adoption of the 1940 resolution here.As an example of the caliber of the board at that time, two votes were taken, I think in May of 1952, both of which carried. The first vote was to express opposition to the 1940 resolution, opposition based upon the principle that any such political qualification was innappropriate for an organization which defended the right of everyone to hold whatever personal views, to advocate whatever political doctrines, and to join whatever political organizations he wanted to. As I say, our group said in a large majority, something in the order of fifteen to three, that they were opposed to that doctrine. In the next vote, then, also by a vote of, say, sixteen to two, the board here voted, not-withstanding the 1940 resolution, to accept it as a condition for integrating and to become an integrated affiliate in the organization.It's an interesting contradiction in view. It put them clearly on record as opposed to the 1940 resolution; at the same time--and from my view, maybe pragmatically, a good thing--it brought them into full membership in the national ACLU and became an element in the growth of the organization here. Looking back on it, I think I might have approved both votes, although I was not there at the time so to vote.In the fifties, the 1940 resolution was a seemingly anachronistic piece of ACLU or organizational history. In 1954, when I attended my first biennial conference in New York as a representative of the affiliate here, I was charged by the board at that time to raise the issue of the 1940 resolution and to see if it were possible to get that position reversed or changed. I did that, much to the consternation, I would say, of Pat Malin and the staff leadership in the national office, and much to the consternation of some of the leading members of the national board there, and without very strong support from the other affiliate representatives. There was some support for it. Nonetheless, I charged boldly into the situation and introduced a resolution from our board asking the biennial conference to set aside the 1940 resolution.It proved tactically to be a mistake, because what we got instead was a reaffirmation of the 1940 resolution, in the form of a somewhat more vaguely worded, a little bit watered-down declaration of concern about individuals who might come into positions of influence and leadership in the ACLU if they held the "wrong" political views.That was my first taste of organizational politics in ACLU, and I don't know whether I learned anything from that or not. I was a little set back by it, but we worked even under the new policy notwithstanding.

Gardner

Wasn't there an oath of some kind, an advocacy oath, more or less, that went along with the resolution?

Monroe

No, there was no such oath. There's been talk about an ACLU oath. No oath was ever enacted or exacted. It was only that that particular qualification was set into the process of choosing either board members or staff people.I think the policy was honored more in the breach than in effect, and with the one exception of the expulsion of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, I know of no other instance over the country in which a person has been expelled from ACLU by reason of its having been revealed that he was a member of the Communist party at the time or previously. I'm sure, though, that that factor has been used as a criterion in selecting both board members, or candidates for boards, and candidates for appointment to staff positions by those who were on the inside and were bringing other people in. If a person had been in a community an outspoken and publicly identified member of the Communist party, I would think he would probably have had a difficult time getting himself elected to an ACLU board in that period, or appointed as executive director or a staff person. But I know of no loyalty hearings, no star chamber processes.At the time of my appointment here, that question was raised. I told the group here frankly I didn't believe in signing a loyalty oath, I would sign no loyalty oath, that they had to take me on faith, that if that was an important criterion for them they had to take it simply on faith that I met the criterion or met the standard.I think that still left some people here unsettled. I'm sure it left Paul Jacobs and Clore Warne unsettled in their minds, but the majority of the board seemed not concerned about that, and I was subjected to no investigation. There may have been an investigation that I didn't know about. It wasn't until much later on, and I want to put that in the record, that some investigation was undertaken; but at the time of my hiring, there was no requirement on my part that I declare myself one way or another.

Gardner

In 1953 or '54, in the height of the McCarthy period, Corliss Lamont was scheduled to speak out here. He had some relation, didn't he, with the national organization?

Monroe

Oh, yes.

Gardner

And then his scheduled speech was cancelled, and I ran across in the files a number of letters to you that were other than delighted at the cancellation of the speech. What was the circumstance?

Monroe

Well, let me see if I can recall that. Corliss Lamont had been on the national board at the time that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was expelled, and he was one of the people that fought most vigorously against the 1940 resolution and in her defense. He continued on the national board thereafter and was on the national board when I attended the conference in New York in 1954. He declined to run for reelection shortly thereafter, and he's been disaffected by ACLU ever since.The occasion on which Corliss was scheduled to speak was, I guess, along in '55 or so, and I don't remember-- maybe I've suppressed these facts--all of the factors involved. There was an invitation on someone's part to him. I've forgotten whether it was my invitation or someone else who was going to be here to speak to our board or to a meeting of ACLU.

Gardner

It's not clear from the files, either.

Monroe

I can't remember whether that meeting was directly and deliberately cancelled, or whether a majority of the board thought it better to hold the meeting in a more private way. There's no question that Corliss Lamont was an outspoken radical of that time, and, I think, a little uncomfortable for some of [the members], especially because of his outspoken criticism of ACLU in that period after he had left the board. He left the board, of course, and set up his own organization.

Gardner

I wasn't aware of that.

Monroe

The Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, the ECLC, which is still in existence, which he still largely finances, and which he had hoped, I think, at one time, would be a strong competitor, maybe even replace ACLU nationally. It had a relatively short active life and now is pretty much inactive and kind of redundant, although the organization itself still exists. They still publish, and Corliss Lamont is still the nominal head of the organization.Getting back to the national office, the national director, and the fifties, the strong anxiety about communism and Communists ran through that whole period of time. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but became aware of it later: on one occasion Pat Malin came to California--this may have been in, something like 1955, rather shortly after I took the job here--and conferred with Richard Coombs in Tulare, California, with regard, I guess, to my political health and well-being vis-à-vis ACLU and probably the general leadership of the Southern California affiliate. By that time we had taken some fairly forward positions--the Smith Act positions, our activities around the Dilworth and Luckel acts, our opposition to the 1940 resolution, etc.-- and I guess Pat was kind of unsettled by that.So, in a rather remarkable way, he came to California and consulted the counsel for the Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, Richard Coombs, who had been a hack lawyer for Jack Tenney and Hugh Burns for many years and found himself a nice cushy position. I think he has since retired with a sizable pension by reason of his stalwart work as the chief witch hunter and red-baiter in California, serving as the major staff person for the various committees of the state legislature engaging in that particular activity.When I discovered this, I was kind of amused by the matter and a little angered by it, and somewhat contemptuous of a national executive director of ACLU that would indulge in that kind of contradictory behavior.I never felt very close to Pat. I think he regarded me always with suspicion, not that I was a card-carrying Communist or anything of that sort, but kind of irresponsible with respect to the proprieties of the organization; and this suspicion and anxiety on his part, I guess, was capped by his visit to Mr. Coombs.The fifties rolled by, and they were marked, at least in national terms, by various biennial conferences. The one in 1954 was in New York City.The 1956 biennial conference, held in Washington, D.C., was an interesting kind of landmark in the development of the organization. There, I played a significant role in dealing with what by that time had come to be a rising tension between the national board, the national office of ACLU, and the growing, struggling affiliates of the organization across the country.Under the integrating arrangement that we'd made with the national office, we had agreed to a sharing of our income with the national organization. We were enticed to join in this fashion with a promise that we should remit only 30 percent of our membership income here and retain 70 percent of it. Later, there were efforts by the national office to cut that down to something more closely approximating 50 percent for each entity, and the 1956 biennial conference in Washington struggled regarding the division of funds.Two things occurred there to me. Two concepts emerged, and, as I say, I played a leadership role in both these respects. First, there did need to be some sensible sharing of national income. The national organization had no source of income except what members contributed over the country. There was no point in our being part of a national organization if our members here did not support the national dimension of the organization.On the other hand, it was quite clear that the important work of the organization was being done by the affiliates. They needed sufficient resources and income to do that work. Finally, after a great deal of pulling and hauling about the divisions of the pie (the pie figure was the principal one used there; what is our slice of the pie?), finally we formulated, and it was on my motion, a division of 60 percent for the affiliate, 40 percent for the national, which is maintained to this day.The other concept that emerged there, one of the most important things for the organization to do, was remarkably to increase the size of the pie: that as long as the income of the organization was so limited and so meager, we would never find a formula for the division of funds that would be satisfactory to either entity, national or local; and that only by upgrading, by increasing membership, by developing--and that, I think, is the key word, "developing"-- the organization, could we ever expect to have the money and the resources that we needed to fulfill our mission.That was my big pitch there: let's settle for this division of funds at this time, but let's set about making the organization grow so that the pie will be a much larger pie. Forty percent or 60 percent of a much larger pie will give both entities much more to work with and to operate with.Later biennial conferences were concerned with other things--sometimes policy questions, sometimes organizational questions; but I do remember the 1956 conference as an important kind of landmark in my relationship with and my impact on the national organization. At one point in that '56 conference, the tension became so great and the hostility between the affiliate representatives and the national staff so aggravated, that Pat Malin and the staff as a whole submitted their resignations there forthwith. It was a bold gesture, and I guess it worked in the sense that, of course, we refused to accept their resignations and finally, then, worked out these compromises.

Gardner

Which issues were they prepared to resign over?

Monroe

Over the division of funds. Not just the division of funds, but the beginnings of what continues to be a very important element in the organization: the tug-of-war between the interests of the national office (and I want to say something about this a little later in the discourse) and the independence and viability of the separate affiliates. That tension was emerging at that time, and I think it was that, as well as the specific and concrete dimension of so many dollars here and so many dollars there. It was a question of where the authority was going to lie, and what role the national office was going to play in relation to the affiliates: conversely, how autonomous, how independent, and how self-sufficient could the affiliates be to do their work at their level, where the infringements occur and where the work needs to be done and where the impact is greatest. That, I think, was the basic conflict there, exemplified by the pie and the question of who was going to get what.

Gardner

You mentioned before that when you started, the local affiliate was about 10 percent of the national membership. Has that remained pretty well the ratio?

Monroe

That's about what it is now, as a matter of fact. The present membership is something in the order of 150,000, I would say, solid membership; and our membership here is something over 15,000, between 15,000 and 17,000, so it's about 10 percent of the total national membership.As our membership grew rapidly here, in the fifties, I think probably we had more than a tenth of the national membership. Then, partly out of the lessons that the national learned from our operation here, and as a result of my urging on the national staff more attention to membership recruitment and building and financial income, the rest of the country has caught up with us. The New York affiliate, of course, is our present largest affiliate.

Gardner

About how large?

Monroe

Well, let's see. They may have a membership of 20-25,000.

1.7. Tape Number: IV, Side One (August 3, 1972)

Gardner

You mentioned that you would like to bring your personal life up to date. We're somewhere in the middle of the fifties at this point.

Monroe

Through the fifties, and until 1959, I was so heavily involved in this job that I had taken for a couple of years, until I could find some other kind of work, that the affairs of my family, I'm afraid I must say, were of kind of secondary importance to me. The family had moved to Los Angeles--Helen, my wife; my daughter Marilyn; and my son Michael, who by that time was four or five years old.We had rented a house for a time and then finally had found a house that I was pleased with, a very modest, older house on Mount Washington. I don't think Helen found it anywhere comparable to the house that we left in Millbrae, and she was not too happy about our buying, for $10,500, a house that would accommodate our family of four so meagerly.But we settled there; and then, as I say, I was heavily involved in work of ACLU and all of the many demands of the work, dealing with the day-to-day issues that confronted us and at the same time strenuously trying to build and expand the organization--increase the membership, increase the resources that we had to work with--initiating and carrying into effect the broadening chapter organization of our membership, and in many other ways reaching into the community for greater impact and greater effectiveness of the work.In that time, Helen found herself cut off, in a way, from my life, my involvement, preoccupied with care of the children; and, although she spoke many times of wanting or wishing that she could find work herself (she had been trained as a teacher), she, by reason of her unwillingness to subscribe to loyalty oaths, found herself cut out from that profession. No other kinds of work were either attractive to her or available to her, so she did not work. She spent her time at home sending the children off to school and waiting for them to return, and waiting for me to come back either from a late-night meeting or from a conference here and there; and on the occasions when I stayed or spent the evening at home, I spent it usually working on ACLU work.I think that must have been a deadening and unhappy period for her. I have conjectured about these factors being an element in her untimely death--I don't know about that.She had inherited sometime in the mid-fifties a small amount of money from an aunt who had been living in Santa Barbara, and something in the order of $15,000 or $18,000. At her insistence, because the house we lived in didn't meet her standards, we began to remodel and expand that house, spending her inheritance on it, partly against my advice and desire but principally because she insisted that she could not be happy in the miserable little dwelling that we had found. We began to expand, and, in the summer of 1958, had just completed the addition of a room, a large kind of interesting and attractive living room as an adjunct to the former house, remodelling the kitchen and the rest of the house to the tune of about $10,000 or $12,000.By that time, her inheritance had just about dwindled away, because my salary was not sufficient to support a reasonable standard of living. I began my work with ACLU at $6,000 a year, which in 1952 was not a miserable salary; but by 1959, I had raised it only to about $8,500, and that just wasn't enough, as inflation continued to advance, to provide for a family of four and the expenses involved in the work that I was doing and the kind of house or home that Helen wanted to have. So she plowed her inheritance into the house.That summer of '58, during my months of vacation, I spent laying a cork floor in the new living room and finishing up odds and ends of remodelling the house. During that summer, Helen began to develop unusually severe head pains. She had given evidence in previous years of being oversensitive about her health and physical well-being; she was not a hypochondriac in the classic sense of the word, but overly sensitive. Any little pain that occurred would send her scurrying to a doctor to find out what the origin was, and when the pain continued, the doctor's advice she discounted, because he hadn't found the cause of the particular pain.This summer, she developed increasingly severe head pains, which I, at first, discounted as another manifestation of her overanxiety about her physical health, but which turned out to be quite real. In the early fall of that year, in mid-October, she was discovered to have a growth in her lung, and, of course, later to be diagnosed as having a brain tumor, malignant in character.She was operated on in mid-October, partly exploratory, partly to relieve the pressure in her brain, and she deteriorated very rapidly and died two days before her fiftieth birthday--she was still forty-nine--in late January of 1959.Her death was a tragic hauling-up-short of my life. I found myself with two children, an empty house, and still a demanding and grueling kind of job to carry on. I did the best I could through that period. Marilyn was then sixteen and Michael about nine, approaching ten. The loss of their mother affected them. I took the view that they should be shielded as much as possible from the stark tragedy of that event, arranged that no funeral be held and that her death be downgraded in its importance. I think probably both children were, in a sense, psychically damaged at that time, as I certainly was, but I tried to make the least of it and tried, as I say, to protect them from the sharp edge of the tragedy. That may have had more effect upon Michael than on Marilyn, and some of his later problems as an adolescent and a young man may have had their origin in that period.I carried through that year, working away at the ACLU, and that was the occasion of the first annual garden party of ACLU, in my honor, held at the Sieroty mansion and yard and tennis court in Beverly Hills; the first occasion of what came to be an annual event, sponsored initially by the Beverly Hills chapter of ACLU, an event that raised for us at that time a phenomenal abount of money, $3,000 or $4,000, which set a high-water mark, and which is an event we continued through the current period.Interestingly enough, the upcoming garden party will again honor me, and it will be my last garden party. The historic circle will be closed on September 24 of this year.At that garden party, as a matter of fact, was a young woman that I had known in Los Angeles for a number of years, had first met in the fall of 1952, when she was active in an organization called Women for Legislative Action. That young woman--her name then was Vivian Mandel--attended that garden party, saw me there, renewed her acquaintance with me; and it developed, I guess, pretty naturally and pretty rapidly, so rapidly, as a matter of fact, that she and I were married December 12, 1959, not quite a year after Helen's death and not quite ten years after my taking over my duties here.Vivian had two sons by a previous marriage which had been dissolved by divorce. She moved her two sons into our house, took charge of the household, and I found myself with a family of six altogether; to which, about a year and a half later we added a fifth child, my younger daughter, Jaymie, now eleven years old, approaching twelve. For the early years of the sixties, and until 1970, as a matter of fact, I was the head of the household of a wife and five children-- two step-children, three of my own.

Gardner

How old were her sons?

Monroe

Michael was then ten; her older son, Eric, was nine and a half, nearly as old as Michael, and her younger son, Jonathan, was seven. We then had a family ranging from the infant, Jaymie, to the oldest, Marilyn, who was eighteen when Jaymie was born.It was a busy household. Vivian, unlike Helen, was outgoing socially, liked to entertain, and one of her first acts was to rehabilitate the rest of the house, ultimately to extend it further. After a couple of years of her residence there, we had what came to be a nine-room house, pretty comfortably appointed and reasonably well furnished, the kind of home in which Vivian could entertain as she liked to, and in which the kids had each his own living space. As I say, I found myself involved not only in the busy activities of ACLU but in the busy activities of a large and variable family, with, among other things, three teen-age boys as they came on and all of the family problems and personal problems that they represented, as well as an oldest child who had her special personal problems--as I said earlier in the interview, maybe resulting from the fact that she was named Marilyn Monroe, but others factors entered also. To introduce into that whole complex a new child was, I think I can say, a complication and a complicated pattern of life.At any rate, affairs at ACLU, as we turned into the sixties, began to take a turn into a different channel of concern and operation. By that time, the worst of the McCarthy era was over. People had been purged who were subject to purge; the virulence of anticommunism had subsided; we had come through Sputnik and the hydrogen bomb threats and the other elements of the fifties and the early sixties; the international picture was at stalemate; and the emerging dominant element in American life came to be what we called the civil rights revolution or the black problem.If the fifties were the era of McCarthyism, the sixties were the era of the civil rights movement. It dated, of course, from 1954 and the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. [Topeka] Board of Education setting forth the new doctrine of the court that segregated schools are inherently unequal and that there's no possibility of providing equal opportunity of education in schools that are separated by race. That doctrine was first promulgated then, and, looking back on it, I think I must say that I and most people here thought the court was talking pretty exclusively of southern schools and de jure segregation rather than the broader term, as we now apply it.In the early sixties, we were aware here of developments in the South: of Martin Luther King's crusade, of Medgar Evers, and of the events that were developing there; all of these certainly prompted by and stimulated by the Supreme Court's decisions, not just in Brown v. Board of Education but the subsequent rulings of the court. It was a period for blacks of rising expectations and mounting militancy, and it was inevitable that this whole wave reach California and Southern California.It did, and we began here in ACLU to take greater and greater interest in problems of equality. We had been active for a number of years in respect to the police dimension of these problems and in the fifties had already begun to call for police review boards and independent redress agencies with respect to the relationship between the police and blacks, and, here, of course, Chicanos. (We didn't call them Chicanos then; we called them Mexican-Americans.)It wasn't until the sixties that a kind of concentration developed in our work. In 1963, Martin Luther King was at the peak of his activities, and ACLU joined here with NAACP and other groupings in the community to form what we called the United Civil Rights Committee. The launching of that committee occurred in the aftermath of a massive rally at Wrigley Field, which I and other ACLU people were actively involved in organizing and in sponsoring fundraising activities around; and as a result of that exposure of King here, we launched a new organization in which ACLU played a dominant role--a dominant role in organizing, and a dominant role in holding together for a period of a year and a half or two years, when other groupings in the community had more limited resources than ACLU had by that time, and when, as a matter of fact, the fate of that organization rested, in a very important sense, upon ACLU involvement.

Gardner

Who were some of the other people around town who were active in this organization?

Monroe

Of course, the person who emerged as the black leader of the UCRC was Reverend H.H. Brookins, the minister of the First AME Church at Eighth and Towne, a very attractive, articulate, and interesting personality, and because of all these qualities the natural ultimate leader. The first chairman of UCRC was a Negro dentist whose name I don't remember now, but very rapidly the leadership of the organization fell to Brookins, who was a good deal more able and experienced and articulate than his predecessor.We set out as an organization, UCRC did, to attack problems of discrimination in four major areas: the field of employment, the employment opportunities for blacks; the field of housing and access to decent housing for blacks; in respect, continuing to the police problem as it affected blacks; and, I suppose by reason of the dominant influence of certain individuals in the group, particularly a black woman, Marnesba Tackett, we took on the school problem here.Armed with the doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education, and clearly aware of the segregated character of schools in Los Angeles, the first major demonstration and march sponsored by UCRC was against the [Los Angeles] Board of Education, where spokesmen for UCRC and ACLU appealed to the board to formulate a clear policy aimed at integrating the schools and a program of action to effect, if not integration, at least the desegregation of the schools.At one point in time in late '63, ACLU attorneys began to address themselves to this problem. We took note of the fact that Jordan High School was one notable example of a clearly gerrymandered school situation. Jordan is right at the school boundary line, Alameda Street being very near the school. Just across Alameda, in the same school complex, was South Gate High. Jordan High was virtually 100 percent white in its school enrollment. Our first lawsuit in this area was filed respecting that situation, filed against the board of education, asking that the student bodies of these two high schools be integrated and that steps be taken to change the boundary line in such a way that that particular attendance area could result in an integrated South Gate High and an integrated Jordan High.That effort was, of course, immediately resisted by counsel for the board of education, and we found ourselves involved in a highly technical and complicated lawsuit, attempting to prove board intent, for one thing, in that segregated situation, and that the practical problems of integration could be worked out.That lawsuit languished for a couple of years, was not revived until much later, and was broadened to become what is now known as Crawford v. [L.A.] Board of Education, the master, major suit here, ACLU-conducted and -sponsored, against the board of education, asking that a total program of desegregation be conceived and put into effect.While this was going on, we were also involved in singling out special industries in Los Angeles that practiced discrimination in hiring--the liquor industry for one, the bakery industry for another, and, most particularly, the large chain store operations--Ralphs and Safeway and the other major chains.Concurrent with this activity, of course, the legislature in Sacramento was activated and produced alternately, in the successive years, the Hawkins Bill, which became the Fair Employment Practices Act in California, with a commission set up to enforce it, and the Rumford Act, the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in housing--not totally, but in a significant and large measure, aimed primarily at tract developers and apartment house owners who had a notorious record of discriminating against blacks.The police problem continued in aggravated fashion, but I guess our primary attention in '64 was turned to the campaign on fair housing. The Rumford Act was enacted, if I remember correctly, in '63. The California Real Estate Association mounted a counter-campaign and circulated an initiative measure which became Proposition 14.Of course, in November, 1964, that measure was on the ballot. ACLU turned its almost total attention to an attempt to defeat that proposition, engaged with other community groups, and became an integral part of the whole fair housing campaign, involving our chapters in fair housing committees in various localities and communities, and contributing as we did both manpower, much of our staff time, and some of our resources. We got a grant from the national office for $15,000, which we invested in support of the campaign.Our campaign failed. The measure was lost by a two-to-one margin despite the very active work that was carried through. We were disheartened and discouraged by that.In the meantime, much of the steam had gone out of the civil rights movement here. UCRC fell inactive, partly because we had a very difficult problem. We'll talk about that a little bit.ACLU involvement in UCRC was pretty literally white involvement in an organization devoted to the black cause, involving a good many blacks and whites of remarkably unequal experience and competence. This is not to say that the blacks were incompetent; they were inexperienced in this degree of community organization and perhaps suspicious of the whites that were involved, although I didn't ever feel that kind of suspicion directly and bluntly. I played, and the other ACLU [people] played, as careful a role as we could--never to put ourselves forward as spokesmen or leaders of the movement, always to move blacks into the leadership and to stand behind them and to support them.But even that role was insufficient to keep the organization propped up. Money, of course, was a problem. We tried various devices, various individuals, never found blacks who had enough experience in raising money to meet the financial needs of the organization. We kept putting money in through ACLU, and some groups of organized labor--the UAW--were very helpful; but ultimately, I think UCRC fell apart because there was not sufficiently experienced and competent leadership for blacks to carry the organization forward on its own. Whites, in remote control, as we tried to stay, were simply not in a position to keep the organization viable. I think the fair housing campaign exhausted both the UCRC leadership and its white supporters. We literally knocked ourselves out trying to beat that thing, and, in the course of that, exhausted ourselves and our resources; and when the election was over, we were all kind of tired, disappointed, and disheartened. From that point on, UCRC went downhill very rapidly and finally disbanded and literally disappeared.ACLU continued its work in the education field, and, of course, we carried forward then, immediately, the court challenge to Proposition 14. Through ACLU counsel, we involved one of the most competent and best-known lawyers in Southern California, Herman [F.] Selvin, to carry the main work of the case. The appeal of the challenge to Proposition 14 ultimately went to the United States Supreme Court, and that court sustained our view that the proposition and the state action involved in repealing the Rumford Act and reimposing a condition in which landlords could discriminate were clearly a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.In the meantime, after November of '64, we came round the corner of the year and into 1965. I'm convinced that the reaction of the black community here to being rejected by the state electorate was a dominant factor in what came to be the Watts riot, so-called. Cut off from access to any opportunity for jobs and decent employment, cut off from any chance to get out of the confines of the Watts ghetto, their children subjected to faulty, bad school programs and schools, and then, of course, the running controversy between the black citizens and the police--all of these combined to lay down a community attitude which needed only a spark to set it off. The tinder for that setting off was, I think, the repudiation of Californians of the Rumford Act and Proposition 14 and that whole history. It was not difficult to understand why on a hot August night in '65, a simple confrontation between two blacks and a police squad car should escalate and run rampant out of control in the form of the four or five days of the Watts rioting.ACLU was never able, after Watts, to reestablish working relations and lines with either the leadership of the black community as it kept emerging and reemerging in different individuals, different forms, or to relate to any solid central kind of organized opposition in the Negro community to the repression that surrounded them. [recorder stopped]ACLU continued to promote the black cause on its own, carrying forward what came to be our major school desegregation case, the Crawford case, with benefit of very unique and special volunteer counsel, Bayard [F.] Berman, of the firm of Kaplan, Livingston, Goodwin, Berkowitz, and Selvin. Bayard agreed in 1965, I think, at my request, to take over the case that had been initiated earlier respecting Jordan High School and South Gate and broadened the thrust of that case into a total community pattern. He took our case to court before Judge [Alfred] Gitelson in what turned out to be 1966 or '67.Bayard, not knowing it when he agreed to undertake it, certainly had no forewarning that it was going to be a case that kept him in court virtually full time for seven months. Of course, if he had not been supported by his law firm, he would be out in the street and out of his profession by now, because, of course, we paid him nothing for his services and met only the expenses of the case, which by this time--and the case is only on its first step of appeal--have already run to between $10,000 and $15,000. It is a massive undertaking, a remarkably complicated and difficult case, and Bayard Berman has handled it magnificently with the help of some younger members of that firm. Of course, he won a decision from Judge Gitelson at the superior court level, and ultimately we expect at the United States Supreme Court level, at some distant time, to win and to conclude this very significant piece of legal history in relation to the black problem. We will win ultimately an order that the L.A. Board of Education must undertake the process of desegregating what are egregiously segregated schools in this major western community.Otherwise, ACLU continued to promote fair employment as we could, turning cases that came to our attention over to the Fair Employment Practice Commission, undertaking some challenges in instances in which there had been gross employment discrimination.We turned our attention, thereafter, to the police problem again. Remembering that the Watts riot itself was sparked by a police incident, as we approached the summer of 1966, the summer following Watts, we noted again that there was a rising tension in the black community, having reports from some of our outposts there that the black community was again experiencing repression at the hands of the police and that with hot weather, maybe once more we would have some kind of outburst there. To meet that situation, we thought if we could give some concentrated attention to the police problem that we might ventilate, in some way, the building pressures, and hopefully avert another disaster like the Watts riots.We had, for a long time, analyzed the police problem and identified what we thought was a major factor in that problem: namely, the absence of any effective means of redress or complaint processing by the police of complaints filed or reported or stated on the part of blacks in the community who felt that they had been mistreated by the police. Following the Watts riots, the McCone Commission had studied that problem, and had turned up much the same finding, and had recommended that the police department institute more effective complaint procedures. It was our observation that nothing like that had been done. The police, in characteristic fashion, were resisting any move in that direction, would brook no public criticism, and were not about to open up any channel of effective redress.So we took it on ourselves to institute an unofficial complaint process. On Beach Street between 102nd and 103rd--103rd Street being known as Charcoal Alley, the scene of the most widespread burning and looting in Watts--we rented a small storefront and instituted what we called a Police Malpractice Complaint Center, putting bold letters on the window and advertising the fact in the community that there was a place where aggrieved individuals could go. They would find a friendly person there prepared to take an account of their grievance and would receive assistance in lodging that complaint effectively with the police, police department, police commission--with somebody, somewhere in the city--and hopefully would have some accounting and get some redress from the filing of that complaint.We opened that office on something like the first of July, 1966. The opening, we announced, and it was attended by representatives of the press. A kind of ironic byplay there: there was a concentration of people at that office; press individuals and cameras and whatnot naturally attracted police attention. Several squad cars convened on the corner, and at one point two people who were approaching the office crossed the street, jaywalking. One was a black and one was a white person. The police at the scene arrested the black for jaywalking and, even though he demanded it, refused to arrest the white individual. It was almost a capsule demonstration for the press of what it was that we were setting up the office for and what the whole problem was. This kind of remarkable incident was only a small sign of the discriminatory police enforcement that had been perpetrated on the citizens of Watts for many years.We opened the office, hired a young black. He proved not to be too competent. We finally found, after shuffling around, a young black student who took on the job of manning that office, and in the course of his year or year and a half of service there, and in the two and a half years that we managed to keep that office open, we probably received in the order of 2,500 or 3,000 complaints--small things and major things.Insofar as we could, and as our resources permitted us, we lodged these complaints with the police department. We undertook some civil actions; we defended individuals who had been criminally charged as a result of an experience with the police; we did everything we could, both to assist the individuals who had complaints and problems and to try to make an impact, politically and organizationally, on the conduct of the L.A. Police Department.I have to say, at this late date, that this was almost a totally futile effort. So far as I know, the conduct of the LAPD is not remarkably different now from what it was before, before Watts and the year thereafter, and we have yet no independent body in this community that gives any attention to the complaints of citizens.

1.8. Tape Number: IV, Side Two (August 8, 1972)

Gardner

At the end of the last session, we were talking about the office set up in Watts for police review and so forth. What was the name of the student who took over the office?

Monroe

His name was Harold Hart-Nibbrig. He later went on, after he finished his college course, to UCLA law school. He has since graduated, passed the bar, and is now a practicing attorney in Los Angeles. A remarkably fine, dedicated young man. I think his experience with us and the fact that we helped him by giving him that job and kind of steering him in the direction of the practice of law made a real contribution to his personal life, and I'm sure he will repay professionally that debt by serving well his people and the people of the community.At the time the police center seemed a good idea. We opened the one in Watts; I've talked about that already. Very shortly thereafter, and again recognizing that the police problem was not limited to the black community, we thought it advisable to open a comparable center in East Los Angeles to serve the Chicano community. That was followed by the opening of a Venice center, and one in the [San Fernando] Valley, and one in Hollywood.These proliferated like any good idea--as long as you think it's a good idea, you keep promoting it--admittedly with a tremendous strain on the limited financial and manpower resources of the organization. Looking back on it now, I think I would have practiced greater restraint in this regard, but at the time, it seemed the thing to do and we went barreling ahead despite the strain. I think as a consequence of that thrust, the affiliate here suffered financially. At a later stage, we developed a large financial deficit as a result of plunging in as heavily as we did into the police area.As I've already said, looking back on it now, it's hard to see any concrete product of this in terms of our initial objectives. We did help a great many individual people, and we did provide a ventilation point in these communities. There was at long last a place where people could go and tell their sad and angry stories, but, with regard to impact on the police department and police practices, as I've said, there isn't much evidence that we had any effect.

Gardner

While we're on the subject of police and police review, I'm curious to know your opinion of the different police chiefs who have been manning the department since you came here.

Monroe

Well, there have been three, actually. Bill [William H.] Parker was chief when I came to Los Angeles. He, at that time, was still relatively new in that job and had been brought in as chief to root out alleged corruption in the department. He was an old-line police personality, tough-minded, a strict disciplinarian, and you have to credit Parker with having managed the department with both an iron hand and an effective hand. I think the reputation that the department has of being corruption-free compared with the police departments of other cities--New York, Chicago, and so forth--is a deserved reputation.The thing about Parker was that he was so...almost... paranoid and totally insensitive to the race problem, the relationship between the police and the blacks and the Chicanos, contemptuous of them, and would simply refuse to recognize that there was anything like a problem there. In that sense, from our view, he was a bad police chief, because he would not recognize the problem and would do nothing about the problem as we saw it.When Parker retired and then died, [Thomas J.] Reddin came in with a reputation of being more sensitive and much more liberal as a person. I didn't know Reddin myself, never met him, as a matter of fact, but people who knew him spoke highly of him as an intelligent and, as I say, a relatively sensitive police chief. But about the first experience we had with Reddin turned out to be a bitter disappointment, and from that point on our relations with Reddin never improved. That was the Century City demonstration--and, if you will, police riot--that occurred on the occasion of a visit by then-President Lyndon [B.] Johnson to Los Angeles to address a group at the Century Plaza Hotel.On that occasion, several thousand, 5-6-7,000, people gathered in a neighboring park, marched on the Century Plaza Hotel with the view of going past the hotel and disbanding. There had been an effort by the leaders of the demonstration to negotiate both with the police and with the hotel management to provide an area in the vicinity of the hotel where a disbanding meeting could be held and where the whole thing could have been resolved. The hotel management, we thought, with the advice of the police and a kind of, oh, wooden-headed approach to the whole problem, refused to agree to that disbanding place; and as a result, the marchers were bottled up at the front of the hotel. Quite unaccountably, and with, we thought, no provocation at all of any significance (there were a handful of radical youngsters who sat down in front of the hotel, but that was hardly, we thought, sufficient grounds for what happened), at the critical point the order was given to disband the entire group, and the police moved in with clubs and literally beat people off the street and out of the area.It was a remarkable instance of overreaction by the police, and of course, Reddin, as chief of police, had to take responsibility for it--and did, justifying the action of his men. From that point on, his attitude hardened toward us. We were highly critical of him and the police, and we never again had what might be called open access to Chief Reddin.

Gardner

There was a case that I ran across in the files called Kunnel v. Reddin, I believe. What was the case about, what was the disposition of it eventually?

Monroe

I've forgotten how many people, maybe a score of people, were arrested on that occasion and ACLU provided the defense against the criminal charges that were lodged. I don't recall; I think the majority of those people were convicted of such offenses as disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, failure to disperse, and so forth. In addition to that, civil actions were brought on behalf of half a dozen or so individuals who were most seriously injured in the course of that incident.Those cases languished for a couple of years and finally were dismissed, for the simple fact that it's almost impossible to mount a successful civil action against the police. In the whole course of my history here, in twenty years, I think we haven't won more than three or four such cases. They take an inordinate amount of time; they drag on in the courts year after year; and the final victory, if it is that, is so nominal and inconsequential, and the event itself has receded so far in the past, that the victory is really a hollow victory.So all those actions were dismissed, and we put the Century City incident behind us. But it marked a turning point, I think, in Reddin's police career; and as I say, from that point on, his attitude hardened, and we never had access to what we had hoped might be an open relationship with him.

Gardner

Do you think the fact that he either alienated a large segment of people or failed to respond to a large segment of people helped contribute to his early retirement as police chief?

Monroe

It may have; I don't know. Word reached us, as word does, third-, fourth-, fifth-hand, that Reddin was having difficulty in the department, that he was not highly respected by his subordinates or the men on the force, and that may also have been a contributing factor. At any rate, he did resign, took a job as television commentator, and I guess he's still doing that.

Gardner

Let's continue with the Century City riots for a moment. Were there any ACLU people directly involved, who were either board members or chapter people or whatever, who were out there on the line?

Monroe

Oh, a good many. I think offhand of Ed Mosk and his wife who marched in the demonstration. I think of Aris Anagnos. There must have been fifteen or twenty ACLU board members or chapter leaders involved in the demonstration. These people had been concerned about the Vietnam War for many years and had come to be, in a different sense, a part of the peace movement here, always distinguishing carefully between their ACLU role and their peace role.Ed [Edward] Davis, when he came on, came on as a kind of carbon copy of Bill Parker. He'd come up through the department under Parker, I think admired Parker greatly, and Davis has turned out to be pretty much the same kind of cop--hard-headed and tough and a disciplinarian, given, I think, more to temperamental outbursts than Parker was. Parker had more restraint, and you could always tell what Parker was going to say. He was predictable in that sense.Davis is a little less predictable but has pretty much the same attitude of protecting his department from public criticism--indignant at any critical word, unwilling to modify or to soften or to relate the department effectively to either the black or the brown community, and continuing what has been the pretty consistent attitude of the police department here that criticisms are unfounded, that they know how to take care of their own problems, that they don't need outside groups telling them what's wrong, and that if people will just mind their own business they'll take care of the police department. As Davis indicated, he would run the police department, I should run the ACLU, as though they are two separate and unrelated entities.It's been an attitude hard to understand because it is not, from my view, one that serves the best interests of the police themselves. I have a great deal of sympathy for the ordinary policeman. He's called upon to do a service in the community much beyond either his training or capacities, and I can very well understand why, when he ventures into either the black or the brown ghetto here, he is afraid and maybe has an angry chip on his shoulder. It's not an easy assignment for him.Conversely, any program that would serve to alleviate that tension would work not only in the interests of the blacks and browns but in the interests of the policman himself. He might find a friendlier, less hostile, and less tense environment in which to do his work if some effective program of relieving that tension were instituted, but that happens not to be the police mentality or the police way.

Gardner

While we're on the subject of police here, many more questions have come up. Are there any early brutality cases that you can remember--I remember running across some in the files--under Parker, for example, that are notable?

Monroe

There have been brutality cases all through the years. I can remember a young black who came into my office many years ago to complain to me about treatment at the hands of the police. He took off his jacket and exposed his left shoulder, on which there was an open and angry wound inflicted by a policeman's club. Down through the years, there was instance after instance in which victims of police brutality presented themselves either to me or to the ACLU through other channels.I guess the most shocking instance of police brutality that's come to my attention is the case of Jerry Lee Amie, a young black Vietnam veteran not long home from the war; and the vision I have of him is his body on the morgue slab with twenty-five bullet wounds in it, all over his body, inflicted by a gang of policemen who attempted to apprehend him. He may have been intoxicated and making some kind of disturbance in the community, but the fury and the violence with which they overcame him and the resort to gunfire when he was unarmed--literally emptying their weapons into his body after he was down--is, in my memory, the most glaring example of, well, brutality, yes, but of the hysteria and total loss of control which police experience under those circumstances. Just to keep shooting into a body without being able to stop yourself is an example of some kind of insane and hysterical reaction. I don't know how many police there were, but that bullet-riddled body still looms in my mind as an example of the problem that exists.

Gardner

What do you think are some of the possible solutions to this?

Monroe

The solutions include, I think, much more careful selection of those that are entrusted to carry clubs and guns in the community; certainly a more intensive training with regard to race relations and human relations; a change of attitude in the department with respect to their function; improving, I suppose, pay and working conditions and the whole status of the police in the community; but among other things, the institution of some kind of effective independent monitoring ombudsman, whatever it might be called, so that the public and the people generally can look in on the behavior of the police and, where it is seriously out of line, effectively correct it. A part of that means a viable redress and complaint procedure, so that if one does complain, he has some sense that something will be done about that complaint and an accounting made to him in that regard. That factor is now, as I say, for all intents and purposes, totally lacking in this community.

Gardner

In the aftermath of Century City and the Century Plaza demonstration, ACLU put out a publication called Day of Protest, Night of Violence. What was the genesis of this, and then what were the effects? Did it have any on, for example, the police? Were there any reactions?

Monroe

Well, the purpose of publishing the document was to set forth to the community and, in a sense, to the world the events as we saw them, as we understood that they occurred that night, complete with graphic pictures that exposed the behavior of the police and a very objective, almost minute-by-minute, accounting of the formation of the demonstration, the march past the hotel, what actually happened there, and what followed, in terms of police pursuit of individuals and the beating of innocent, helpless, unarmed civilians. We made the document available to the press; it was noted in the press. As a matter of fact, the press carried many of the pictures that we later incorporated in our publication.Police reaction was virtually nil, and on a number of occasions, Reddin, then chief, justified the action of his officers in fairly remarkable ways, insisting that if the police had not acted as they did the whole crowd was going to storm the hotel, endanger the life of the president, etc., etc. There was no such intent and no prospect of any action of that kind, but the police set that out as the motive for their behavior, and I'm sure a good many people in the community believed the police and did not believe what we were saying about what happened; but then that's always the case.On the other hand, it was an incident which helped the white middle-class citizens of West Los Angeles understand better than they did before what the blacks and the browns had been talking about all those years. They saw and felt at first hand the club wielded by police, and as I say, understood very much better the cry about police brutality, because there it was inflicted upon 3,000 or 4,000 white, upper-middle class citizens of West Los Angeles, rather than a bunch of blacks in Watts or a bunch of Chicanos in East L.A.

Gardner

The first major riot was, of course, the Watts riot. Watts still stands, possibly, as the worst riot of its kind in American history.

Monroe

I think it was.

Gardner

Could you give some of your recollections of that August, the events surrounding the riots, and then the riots themselves?

Monroe

I suppose we were all taken by surprise and shock that such an event could occur in Los Angeles. As the black communities across the country grew more and more evidently militant, I suppose we here in Los Angeles expected something like this to occur in Harlem, in what clearly is a slum and a true ghetto, or in Detroit or in Chicago, but not in Los Angeles because here we don't have tenements. I came later to use the term "horizontal slum" rather than "vertical slums." Maybe the difference in the situation here was the rising expectation that occurred here in '61, '62, '63, the years before Watts and the years in which the black community pulled itself together in some fashion and was pushing for jobs and better schools and better treatment from the police and so forth. In the very fact that conditions here are not, from the view of climate, weather, and survival elements, as harsh and grinding as they are in other big city ghettos--maybe that fact in itself was a contributing one.The absence of jobs in the spring of 1965, the hopelessness of young people here in the black community, the long record of police harassment, bad schools, the whole pattern characteristic of every one of these ghettos existed here. It took only a spark and a particular condition to set it off: a very hot August; and again, an incident involving the police making an arrest and seeming to exceed their authority, and in characteristic fashion, push around and abuse a few people at the scene of that arrest. That triggered the whole thing.Once it was set loose, the police, I think, were as totally unprepared for the event as everybody else was. In three, four, five days of the worst part of the riot, the police would recede from the community, and then when things quieted down a little bit, they would come back into the community. Every time they did that, they simply whipped up the fervor again, and the rioting, the burning, and the looting were stimulated. They would then move out and then back in, and it looked almost deliberate from the outside, as though this were a way in which the holocaust could be kept going. I'm sure it wasn't deliberate, but it had that effect. Not until, of course, the national guard moved in and the whole of Watts was put under military control was the riot itself quelled.

Gardner

The ACLU was very deeply involved in the defense of arrest cases afterwards, wasn't it?

Monroe

Yes, we took on, again, much more of a job than we could properly manage, but there were in the order of 8,000 or 10,000 people arrested in the course of the riots. Under those circumstances, due process tends to break down unless, we thought, there was some watchful eye on what was happening in courts.We very rapidly called a meeting of volunteer lawyers, and seventy or eighty of them turned out; and we undertook then with staff counsel and a great deal of volunteer help--and we must have involved, in the course of that activity, 150 or 200 volunteer lawyers who took on the task of defending individuals either singly or in small groups--simply to see to it that ordinary elements of due process were observed in the course of handling those cases.Our batting average was pretty good. I think we figured afterward that in the cases represented by ACLU attorneys, there were more successful defenses than there were in the other instances handled by public defenders or people who represented themselves. I think our action, then, was salutary in the whole aftermath of the riot. From that point on, we were much better known in the black community and much more widely respected there. So, yes, we took on a major assignment in that regard and, I think, handled it with credit.

Gardner

Was there any similar assuming of caseload or anything like that after the East Los Angeles riot of a couple of years ago?

Monroe

No, there was not--here again, it's a question of disposition of resources and always the possibility of overstraining those resources. I think we felt the strain of Watts and then a later incident involving a number arrests, 250 or so people arrested at San Fernando Valley State College, in which we again undertook to represent all the people involved. That proved to be another backbreaking incident, marshalling volunteer lawyers and swallowing up staff time in such a way that we have not since undertaken any mass defenses.

Gardner

What was that incident?

Monroe

That was the incident involving a sit-down or a public meeting called by the students at San Fernando Valley State College, under circumstances in which the president of the college felt moved to ban all meetings on the campus. He issued such an order.The students went ahead with the meeting, anyway. The police had been called, and without any violence at all, without any provocation, police simply moved in and arrested--we thought without even proper notice or proper orders to the crowd to disperse--simply arrested as many people as they could lay their hands on and charged them with failure to disperse, illegal assembly, disturbing the peace, and so forth. It was an egregious instance of fright on the part of the college administration and heavy-handed police behavior on the part of the police.These people were tried in groups of four, and that meant marshalling sixty to seventy volunteer attorneys, each of whom was required to spend at least a week--and, in some cases, three weeks--in court. You can imagine the load that put on those volunteer attorneys and the manner in which that can simply eat up a whole legal resource for one problem, dissipating that resource for other needs at a later time.

Gardner

That was 1969, wasn't it?

Monroe

Yes. So with respect to the East Los Angeles moratorium marches and riots--no, we did not attempt to provide free legal defense for the people arrested. We were involved, however, in the final East L.A. business in two senses. The young man who was killed, young Montag, killed in East L.A. by sheriff's deputies--we did find for the parents of that lad a lawyer who filed a suit on their behalf. That suit is still in court, and we think it may eventually give some redress to the parents.In the other instance, we complained at what we thought was the improper use of lethal weapons by the sheriff's deputies and filed a suit to enjoin the sheriffs from using lethal weapons until they had exhausted all other means of dispersing a crowd, attempting to impose on the sheriff's department here standards which have been recognized by law enforcement agencies nationally, but the FBI among others, with respect to the use of lethal weapons. That case is known as Schachter v. Pitchess and is now on appeal. We've lost at the lower court, but the matter is being appealed, and we hope ultimately to win a court ruling which will impose some kind of restraint upon sheriffs and police generally. They are armed and dangerous, you might say, and some kind of restraining standard has to be imposed on them.

Gardner

Were you involved at all in the [Ruben] Salazar case?

Monroe

No, that was the previous incident in East L.A. I've forgotten the date of that. I guess we were as shocked as the community was generally by what appeared to be pretty deliberate--maybe accidental, but there is a theory that it wasn't quite as accidental as it appeared and that Salazar was a marked man in that community. The bumbling, the stupid behavior by the sheriff's deputies which resulted in Salazar's death is, again, not really so terribly remarkable. It's that kind of behavior over the years that has caused our concern.

Gardner

We talked about the police chiefs before. What sheriffs have you worked with?

Monroe

Sheriff [Peter] Pitchess has been sheriff, I think, all the time I've been here.

Gardner

And what is your impression of the efficiency of the sheriff's department and its deputies?

Monroe

Oh, I think it's comparable to the LAPD, a little less disciplined, perhaps, than the LAPD. Of course, the record of the sheriffs is most pronounced in the Chicano community.The attitude of the sheriff is pretty much like the attitude of the chief of police. Pete Pitchess is a good politician. He will brook no criticism of his department and is as defensive as Ed Davis is of the activities of his officers. I'd say they were about a tossup, and in neither case have we been able to make any headway in opening up a public accounting for the behavior of individual officers.

Gardner

To close out this area, which I think we've covered well, in the fall of 1966, there was a different sort of demonstration and riot along the Sunset Strip, mostly involved with so-called hippies, teenagers who were being rounded up and taken away from the area, and with the closing of a nightclub; and I understand that there was one incident in which you were involved directly.

Monroe

Yes, it was one of the interesting experiences of my career here. In that particular summer, for reasons that are not quite clear, the youngsters settled on the strip as the place to be. That was where the action was, and they came from all around, all the neighboring communities and all parts of the state and, I suppose, the nation, to be on the strip, to be in Hollywood, and simply, on weekend nights, to be there, to walk up and down.It did create, of course, a congestion. The old established restaurants on the strip complained bitterly because their regular clientele found it difficult to get to these restaurants and were frightened by the presence of so many hippies and odd-looking young people. I think the record is pretty clear that at the behest of these restauranteurs and merchants on the strip, the sheriff and the police department were pressed to deal with the problem pretty brutally and, we thought, quite illegally.What was done on a number of occasions was to set up a cordon of sheriffs or police who simply swept the kids off the strip, sometimes arresting them, sometimes just pushing them away. Where there were arrests, quite indiscriminately and arbitrarily, the sheriffs would load fifty or sixty kids in a bus, haul them to a sheriff's station, and then release them--no arrest made, no record, just to get them off the strip.We became concerned about this, and, again, it was a massive problem. We didn't have the resources to deal with it in a massive way, but made some public statements. On the occasion of a meeting called by leaders of the hippie community there--I'm thinking of two or three people who operated coffeehouses for the young people--a meeting was called to be held at Pandora's Box, one of the nightclubs there and a favorite hippie hangout, on such and such an evening. I've forgotten the date.The police immediately issued orders that such a meeting could not be held. We went to court and got assurances from the court that the meeting could be held. Certain limits were placed on it, time limits and so forth.Then, to observe it and test whether or not the police were behaving themselves on that occasion, I and a few other ACLU people, with ACLU armbands to identify ourselves, went to the strip and walked up and down, observed the whole scene, satisfied ourselves that the meeting was held (heavily attended, probably a couple of thousand young people either in the yard of Pandora's Box or outside where they could hear, across the street), and the meeting closed and people were dispersing.Having completed my observing, my wife and I (my wife Vivian was with me) went to the restaurant across the street from Pandora's Box, had dinner, and were leaving to go home. I made one more trip to the group around the entrance to Pandora's Box, was just kind of standing there waiting to see what happened, and was just about to leave when I heard a police whistle and saw a group of policemen march into the yard in formation and then fan out in the crowd checking ID's--I guess at that point it was about a quarter to eleven--to impose the curfew and to send home or to arrest as curfew violators any youngsters under the age of seventeen.I stayed there still and observed this process, just looking to see how the police would handle the problem and I was then quite close to the entrance of Pandora's Box, when I looked up and saw two officers bringing the only black that I had seen at the scene, a black obviously over eighteen. It turned out later that he was fifty. My immediate reaction was that here are the police again mistreating and practicing discrimination on a black.I was close enough to the three of them, as they came out of the door and were crossing the yard, to ask the question, "Are you arresting this black? Why are you taking him away?" At which the two officers turned on me and first demanded that I identify myself, "Who are you?" they said.It just so happened at the time that we were carrying a case out of Pasadena involving the question of what a person needed to do to identify himself. We took the position that people shouldn't have to carry identification cards, and that the police, without probable cause, did not have authority to stop people in the street either alone or in crowds and demand that they produce identification.With that in mind, I first indicated, pointing to my armband, that I was the ACLU. Well, that didn't satisfy the officers, and they wanted to know who I was. I said, "My name is Eason Monroe." That didn't satisfy them. They demanded identification, and although I had my wallet in my back pocket with a driver's license which would have satisfied them, I kept the wallet in my back pocket and continued to insist that I had identified myself, that's who I was, and besides, was I under arrest?That puzzled them a little bit, but not for long. They finally decided that yes, I was under arrest, and I was taken away, put in a police car with two other people who had been arrested at that scene by other policemen, taken to the Hollywood station, fingerprinted, booked, examined, the routine examination, and then put in a cell charged with, at first, interfering with an officer.The next morning, there was a newspaper account that I had got into a tussling with the officers over this person that they were arresting, and of course, that simply wasn't true. I hadn't touched anybody except with some words. Fortunately, my wife was with me.

1.9. Tape Number: V, Side One (August 8, 1972)

Monroe

As I was saying, fortunately my wife was with me on that occasion. I was able to toss her the keys to our car, and she promptly found a lawyer and arranged for my bail. I was released a couple of hours after I was lodged in the Hollywood Station jail. Later, Al Wirin persuaded the city attorney to drop the charges, and the whole matter was settled. I had no interest in bringing civil action against the police for false arrest, and there was no point in our going to court in my defense, so dismissal of the charges was satisfactory with me.

Gardner

What was the outcome for Pandora's Box and the rest of the "Sunset striplings?"

Monroe

Well, the activities on the strip continued. I think maybe as a result of our intervention, the police seemed to be a little more restrained thereafter. Ultimately, Pandora's Box was condemned and torn down, and, at the close of that summer, the youngsters dispersed, left the strip, and decided the following summer to take up their stations somewhere else. The strip didn't again become a focal point for our activities or our concern. It's interesting how things like that come and go, and how capriciously events unfold. As I say, from that summer on, the strip is just a normal sort of place for us.

Gardner

There are some questions I'd like to ask about integration, how it pertains to the Los Angeles Board of Education, and about decentralization. To start with, the case that ultimately resulted in the busing decisions, I believe, started out, or anyway the ACLU's involvement did, with a very interesting case that had to do with child-beating, didn't it? The Crawford case?

Monroe

Oh, well, no. No. The Crawford case didn't involve that. The child-beating thing came into the picture, I've forgotten what year--1960 or '61, conceivably--we had a report from a parent of a youngster at Los Angeles High School, or it could have been at one of the junior highs; my memory for the details is not clear. At any rate, it seemed to me that there might be both a particular problem and a general problem in this regard: that treatment by school administrators, school authorities, of blacks in school might be different and harsher than that given white children. On our board at that time and very much interested in ACLU was LaRee Caughey, and since I thought that this might be an interesting area for her to explore, I called her and asked if she would look into this matter.She did, and discovered what I suppose is a fairly typical set of facts. A youngster whose mother worked--black child, black mother--was growing rapidly and out-growing her clothes and there wasn't enough money to buy new dresses for her, so she was going to school with a dress that was regarded as too short by the girls' vice-principal. For that reason, the youngster was suspended or had been subjected to corporal punishment, which she refused to accept and was therefore suspended. There was a whole fuss about this.LaRee looked into this and, I think, was able to bring some help to the mother and the child, but discovered to her shock and horror the fact of segregation in our schools. Here was a school that was inhabited almost totally by blacks. LaRee knew about the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, knew that segregated schools had been outlawed, in effect, by the court decision; but here, right under her eyes, was a segregated school. That incident, I think, moved her and her husband, John, into battle formation, and they've been conducting a campaign ever since aimed at relieving that particular problem in our schools.A little later on, then, in the early days of the United Civil Rights Committee, we filed--and I think I mentioned this earlier in the record--a case involving the clear, discernible segregation of Jordan High School in relation to South Gate High School. The Crawford case began with that involvement, and then later it came to be broadened, when Bayard Berman took over the case, to include the entire community and the self-evident record of de facto segregation, if you will. Bayard was able to prove, and the court accepted the view, that what looks like de facto is also de jure segregation, and that a whole history of inaction, or of deliberate actions, has been responsible for the continued segregation of Los Angeles schools.

Gardner

Was ACLU involved as well in the Pasadena desegregation case? The Jackson case?

Monroe

We were a friend of the court in that case. That case had gone up earlier to the California Supreme Court, and of course they are not a part of the central holding but part of the whole decision. The part of the discussion surrounding the decision took up and enunciated the affirmative obligation of school boards to integrate the schools.Of course, it was that concept that became, then, a central part of the Crawford argument and the argument of most of the desegregation cases now. It is not enough for a board simply to sit passively and administer schools without regard to the racial composition of the school; they do, in fact, have an affirmative duty to reorganize, reassign pupils in such a way as to effect both desegregation and integration. And these are distinguishable things. It's one thing to desegregate schools, and it's an additional thing to integrate them. I think we've always held that the practical possibility exists to desegregate the schools, even though, at least at the present time, it may not be possible to effect complete integration of the student bodies.That was the notable thing in Jackson; and as I say, ACLU didn't handle the case centrally, but we were a friend of the court in that case, and argued, and were gratified by the ruling of the court. That led on, then, to the action that we did take centrally in the Crawford case, and the Crawford case is certainly the master case affecting Los Angeles schools and probably a master case nationally. Ultimately, it will get to the United States Supreme Court, and we expect there to win.One notable thing about Judge Gitelson's ruling (which was condemned, of course, as soon as it was handed down, as an order to bus) is that there is nothing in the decision or Judge Gitelson's ruling about busing at all. It simply said that you've got to come up with a program to relieve this problem, however you find ways to do it; and that was immediately interpreted by the school authorities here as an order to bus children. It was not.

Gardner

Judge Gitelson has turned out to be a martyr on the cross of busing and integration and so forth. Could you tell some more about Judge Gitelson and about his decision?

Monroe

Judge Gitelson is a remarkably competent judge. He's been a lawyer in this community, an associate of Goodwin Knight, who was Republican governor for a time. By no stretch of the imagination could Judge Gitelson be held to be a radical or way-out judge.To indicate the degree of his integrity, let me just indicate this: it would have been possible, because he'd been involved in writing his opinion for a number of weeks (and after the trial, which lasted six or seven months altogether it was just a preoccupation with him) --it would have been possible for him to delay announcing his decision for, I think, something like five or six days. He would never have passed the deadline, then, at which other candidates for that judgeship could have filed. He chose to bring his decision down irrespective of that fact, and to stand on his record, almost as though he ignored the fact that he was up for reelection at that time. I think that's a mark, really, of a person with a high degree of integrity. He had finished the decision; it was time to announce it; he announced it and took the risk, which he must have known existed, that the reaction to that decision would have for him.As a matter of fact, it did. Other people did file, and on the contention that Judge Gitelson had ordered massive busing in the community, he was defeated for the judgeship and is now back in private practice.

Gardner

You spoke before about the passivity of the board of education and how that, of course, affects integration in the city. Could you speak about some of the members of the board of education whom you confronted during your years at the ACLU?

Monroe

The board has changed a number of times in the course of my tenure here. My early experience with the board of education was dealing with the Dilworth Act victims. At that time, there were two members of the board, two women who, if the Birch Society was operative then, I'm sure would have been charter members of it. They were, to say the least, highly reactionary, right-wing, rabidly so, representative of that political philosophy, and repeatedly raised issues respecting the whole UNESCO controversy--whether or not teaching in the L.A. public schools about the United Nations was a subversive doctrine. These two women, and I guess ultimately a majority of the board, thought it was, and that program was in effect outlawed in our schools. That's just a sample of the mentality of these people.Later on, when we came to the integration problem, the board was composed in its usual balanced fashion. [J.C.] Chambers was on the board then, and [Arthur F.] Gardner, Ralph Richardson, Georgiana Hardy, an ultraconservative named [Charles Reed] Smoot, and another member whose name I've forgotten. At any rate, the liberal-conservative balance was just about exact.When we began to present our case to the board, and that went back to the early part of 1962, late '61, again following LaRee Caughey's observation that the schools of Los Angeles were segregated schools, we found an attitude of incredulousness on the part of these board members, even the liberal ones: of course, they were not guilty of segregating schools. Of course, Chambers insisted that the 1954 decidion didn't mean what it said at all. That had no bearing on Los Angeles schools, because people went to school where they lived. That wasn't the school board's fault. Even the liberal members, Ralph Richardson and Georgiana Hardy, bridled a bit under our attack or under our exposing this problem, and there was a great deal of semantic mincing of words and carrying on.Finally, we began to get some movement there, and then our effort became absorbed in the effort of the United Civil Rights Committee to push for better schools, integrated schools. Then the liberal board members, Georgiana and Ralph, began to speak out and to take actions that were affirmative, but always with total opposition by Chambers and Smoot and even Arthur Gardner, who was a moderate, sort of in-between guy, not very distinguished. He found it possible to come down on the conservative side more than on the other side.Finally, it became necessary to threaten and to under-take legal action, and as soon as that was done, then Chambers had the device of saying, "Well, the matter's in court; we can't discuss it here." The effort it took, and the repeated pleadings that were made to the board, even to formulate and promulgate a positive statement of policy with regard to integration came so slowly and so laboriously that I recognized way back that this board was not going to do anything, and that only by taking the matter to court and, in a sense, blasting open the whole situation could we make any progress.And, of course, that's true today. In the meantime, of course, ACLU, not officially, but unofficially, was active in the election of Reverend [James] Jones to the board and then later Julian Nava, to bring some kind of representation from the minority communities, which we hoped and thought might speed things. It turned out that neither of these individuals is gutty enough, or was gutty enough, to do anything about the problem. Reverend Jones, of course, lost after one term, and Julian's on the board now. The only person on the present board now who understands and who has any disposition to take action is Dr. [Robert] Docter. His one vote we can always count on, but usually there are six votes against him.

Gardner

The issue of decentralization became a fairly important one, because, for one thing, it was used in other cities, notably New York, and for another, it seemed like a sort of parry on the part of the board of education. In addition, it caused some sort of minor crisis, I understand, in the ACLU board. Can you comment on that?

Monroe

The whole thrust toward decentralization, not just in respect to schools but in other aspects of the life of the black community, I've always thought was a direct product of total frustration and the bitter result of total failure on the part of the black community to move out of its condition. In effect, what the young militants came to say is, "Keep your white community, leave us alone, and we'll make it on our own." Partly it was a search for self-identity, I think: "Black is beautiful; I'm proud to be black; I'll make it on my own; and I don't need the help of you white honkies"--this general attitude.The general attitude led on, then, particularly with respect to schools, on the part of some blacks, I think not a large number of blacks, to the view that if they could control their own schools, decide on what's to be taught, select the teachers, have a direct control over their own schools, that somehow their children would fare better in those schools. This idea, I guess, came to its clearest practice in New York City in the black districts there.There were efforts in that direction, even here in Los Angeles, an interesting joining up of two legislators--Assemblyman [John L.] Harmer, out of Glendale, who, I think it is safe to say, is a racist and a segregationist; and one of the outstanding black legislators--coauthoring a bill, the effect of which would be to carve Los Angeles School District into first it was twenty-four, I think, and then later it settled down to be twelve [districts].

Gardner

Who was the black legislator? Do you recall?

Monroe

Bill [William] Greene. It was the Harmer-Greene bill. Each had his own special interest in this. For Greene, it was to appeal to his black constituency; for Harmer, it was to insure the fact that the integration of the schools in the L.A. School District could not be effected. The effect of carving the thing up would be to solidify and to make totally inflexible the separate school districts, with their separate district lines and therefore no easy means by which children could be either bused or assigned across those district lines.Our board members and our board generally reacted in very interesting fashion. There is a phenomenon which I think is described as "radical chic" which was adopted pretty wholeheartedly by some of our board members. This is the view that whatever the blacks want, we should try to give them. It has about it a paternalistic aspect, but it is to say that they've suffered so long, and we're at fault, and we feel guilty about it; therefore, if they want the moon, we'll try to help them get the moon. We may not believe that that's what is the best thing for them, but if they want it, that's right.That attitude crept into our board, and then we found ourselves with a conflict between what had been the classic position of ACLU to support integrated schools, to oppose any measure which would stand in the way of integrating or desegregating the schools, and over and against that, the view that maybe that was now anachronistic, we were behind the times, and that we shouldn't press for integrated schools, but that we should support what appeared to be the desire of some blacks that they have their own schools.We had three or four very heated board meetings about this--one time the vote was something like 18 to 18, and that failed to adopt a particular decentralization statement; and thereafter, the votes were pretty equally balanced in that fashion. At the final session, the measure aiming at changing our policy, or incorporating decentralization into our policy, failed, and I guess we've left that issue behind us now, with the policy of standing for integrated schools our prevailing policy.Of course, the notion that blacks may have, or that anybody may have, that schools can be improved through decentralization, through community control, overlooks, in my view, the realities of the situation. Schools are bad and made deliberately bad, because they are black schools, without adequate control of the economic resources to upgrade those schools. The schools can't be improved, and if anybody thinks that the majority white community is going to permit blacks to have any real say about school financing and adequate support of decentralized schools, they have to be out of their minds, because that isn't the way it goes. I think, conversely, only through a process of desegregation are we going to get anything like equitable financing, servicing of schools, and therefore an improved quality of schools.Of course, I take a dim view of the quality of schools generally, for whites as well as blacks. As a person who had a large stake in good schools throughout my whole life, I deplore the fact that we've relegated schools to a pretty low priority among our national or state priorities, and regard other things like the Vietnam war as very much more important to spend money on. Money isn't the only answer to improve the schools, but it's one of the answers, and we underinvest very seriously in the education of our children. I've noted now that the pressure for decentralized schools has declined, there isn't very much steam in that boiler left; and I would say that the black leaders and the black community are swinging back to the view that only through integrated schools can their children get a fair break.

Gardner

Who were the board members who were the most powerful on either side of the argument?

Monroe

Well, I would say the Caugheys certainly were the bulwark. Joyce Fiske, Everett Moore, and a number of others that I've forgotten now were the ones who maintained that integration should continue being our policy.On the other side, Marvin Schachter, chairman of the board, took a very outstanding position arguing for a decentralization policy. Joseph Friedman, and some other members of the board, well, I would say Roger Wood. Roger Wood is an Episcopal minister whose assignment is in the Chicano community, and I think he was caught up in the view that the Chicanos wanted their own schools and supported that view.That was kind of the way the thing broke down, with the division of the board being almost exact. One more vote one way or another might have tipped it in the other direction. But the Caugheys, very, very patiently and with great concern, argued their position, wrote statements, worked very hard at developing support for their view and for the classic position of the organization.

Gardner

Could you talk for a few minutes about John and LaRee Caughey? How long have you known them and how has the association been?

Monroe

I've known John and LaRee almost since the time I came here. Neither was a member of the board when I took the job, but John Caughey was elected to the board very shortly after I came here. I knew of John before that because I had identified him as a nonsigner of the Regents' Oath, and that marked him in a very special way as an important person. LaRee, I didn't meet until after I had known John.On the occasion of the court's ruling on the Regents' Oath, and at that same time upholding the Levering Act and Oath, I wrote John a congratulatory note. I feel certain that it was a heavy burden for him, having refused, and having succeeded in that refusal, to subscribe to the Regents' Oath, then, as a condition of returning to his job, to have to sign the Levering Oath. I never made a point of that with John, but I know it must have been a burden for him.Over the years, then, John and LaRee have alternated tenure on the board; they've both been tremendously valuable people. It was John Caughey, for example, who first brought the question of capital punishment to our board, back in '57 or '58, raising the question at that time in historic context whether capital punishment violated the Eighth Amendment. I remember that period, I remember our discussions then, and it was a rather easy matter for our board to decide that yes, in fact, this institution was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. Ours was the first affiliate to adopt that position, and the national office for a number of years refused to adopt it--since has. It's another instance in which the ACLU of Southern California has been out in front of the pack, and John and LaRee were responsible for that forward position at that particular time.They are tremendously admirable people, and I've been fond of them and worked with them. Sometimes I found their inflexibility troublesome, but not really, and I have tried to be patient with them in that regard, tried on occasion to explain the views of people who differed from theirs, which they found, in some cases, inexplicable.It's been a very warm and very cordial and, I think, mutually respectful relationship over the years. They've been generous financially. As they prospered in their writing and publishing, ACLU has reaped some of the fruits of their harvest. I count them as two of the people in this world that I've been very glad to know and to love.

Gardner

You mentioned John Caughey's bringing up the problem of capital punishment and the ACLU board accepting it. Now that the Supreme Court has gone along with the abolition of the death penalty, could you discuss the progress of that over the fifteen or sixteen years?

Monroe

This area, I think, is a unique and almost classic example of first, the formulation of an idea, and then the long steady patient work that has to be done until ultimately that idea is brought to full effect.In the late fifties, as I indicated, our board adopted the view that capital punishment, per se, is a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Having taken that view and formulated that position, we set it forth and said that's where we stand. That didn't abolish capital punishment, obviously.In the years that followed, then, we supported, in the legislature, bills that were introduced aimed at abolishing capital punishment. I remember Lester McMillan was the assemblyman who was the perennial author of the abolition bills. He had, I think, been responding to pressures brought by the American Friends Service Committee, the Quakers, but then ACLU joined in that pressure, joined with the Quakers in supporting McMillan's bills, mounting whatever kind of legislative campaign we could in the hope that we could effect abolition in that fashion.We consistently failed, and McMillan's bills first were submitted to a watering-down process, a moratorium on the death penalty for a time, or the death penalty reserved for only certain particular capital crimes. But no matter how the matter was watered down, it failed of passage in the legislature.Then, our attorneys began to think about the possibility of introducing our position into court. As I said earlier, we were the only affiliate in the country that had adopted that particular view. The Northern California affiliate rejected it and the national board of ACLU rejected that view, so in a sense we were all alone here working at that particular problem. A local lawyer named Gerald Gottlieb came on our board, and he's a very interesting, very thoughtful person. He was, I think, the first one to take just the bare idea and to expand that idea into a statement that provided a working basis for our lawyers to go to court.I've forgotten the year, but once we manuevered into that position, then Gottlieb, Ed Mosk and Al Wirin became involved in a capital case in Long Beach, presenting, I think for the first time, a brief containing our views in this regard. That case was mooted out because the jury or the judge, I've forgotten which, gave the defendant the life imprisonment sentence, rather than the capital sentence, so that case melted in our hands.Of course, [Caryl] Chessman came along in about that period; the Chessman case raised to the level of highest public concern the whole question of the propriety of the death penalty. In this case, the death penalty was assigned, even though he had not taken a life but had been convicted of the Little Lindbergh Law of kidnap with intent to do bodily harm. He never took a life, but that crime was sufficient, and I suppose his behavior in court may have made it possible for the jury, in their antagonism to him, to give him the death penalty.Al Wirin became involved in the Chessman case in various ways, and then for a time after Chessman was executed, ACLU lawyers attached themselves as a friend of the court in virtually every capital case coming through the courts here. I've forgotten the names of the cases and I've forgotten the sequence of events, but Gottlieb and Wirin, Fred Okrand and Ed Mosk were among those who were most actively involved in this particular campaign. We were still trying in the legislature to get capital punishment abolished, and we were beginning in the courts to seek a court ruling that would have that effect.By that time, the rest of the union joined in our position and at the national level, I think in company with NAACP, began to broaden the court attack. I think it was in that context that Tony [Anthony G.] Amsterdam became interested in the problem. Then, of course, when he moved to California to take up the post at Stanford law school, he was handy to the Northern California affiliate, which by that time had joined the union, adopted our position on capital punishment, and then made capital punishment their highest priority for this particular year.Amsterdam is a remarkably competent lawyer, and I think he, in a sense, gathered up the work of all the others who had been plowing around in the field, more or less ineffectively, and put together an argument and a brief which, much to my surprise admittedly, persuaded six members of the California Supreme Court early this year that yes, we were right, and that capital punishment did violate the California Constitution in respect to its being both cruel and unusual-- California Constitution is cruel or unusual--is disjunctive, no matter how you cut it. The court decided that capital punishment was unconstitutional.Then, much to my greater surprise, the United States Supreme Court, more recently, not quite so directly or completely, but in effect ruled that capital punishment, in the cases before it, was an unconstitutional punishment. So we're on the way now, it seems to me, to abolishing, if not in the letter of the law, at least in respect to the enforcement of the law, this old barbaric institution. Now of course, the law enforcement people have secured enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot. It will appear as a proposition in November, and my own prediction is that the voters of California will, by a majority of three or four to one, vote for the restoration of capital punishment, out of their ignorance and their prejudices and their racism. But I have a further view that the state supreme court will shortly thereafter strike down that proposition, which is clearly in conflict with their own previous ruling, and that the capital punishment battle will be won in California. And I think the influence of California across the country will mean that the United States Supreme Court will continue to develop along that same line, depending on the personnel of the court. Even though the Unites States Supreme Court might reverse its position in another ten or fifteen years, maybe, at the most, it will come back to the substance of its recent ruling and will join the California Supreme Court in abolishing totally the use of the death penalty to deal with those who commit capital offenses.

Gardner

One of the cases that the proponents of capital punishment and the proposition [17, 1972] cite very often is the Sirhan case. Wasn't the ACLU involved in Sirhan's defense? At least Al Wirin was.

Monroe

Well, not in his defense. What we did, solely and simply, was to respond to Sirhan's request to see an ACLU lawyer. I haven't the slightest idea where Sirhan heard about the ACLU, but the night of his arrest, or the following early morning, he requested of the sheriff that he be permitted to see an ACLU lawyer. His interest at that time was in securing counsel of his own choice. He, I think, may have accepted Al Wirin as his defense attorney, but that would have been a totally inappropriate action on ACLU's part. There, the only issue at court was the factual question: was he in fact guilty or innocent? There's no constitutional issue raised by that question.What we did for Sirhan was to go through the process--Al Wirin did--of securing him a competent, experienced criminal lawyer. Grant Cooper finally took on the task, and Sirhan was satisfied with that. We were out of the case; we had fulfilled our commitment to him, whatever it may have been. It was a commitment to insure that he had counsel of his own choice, and that was the extent of our involvement in the Sirhan trial and case.

Gardner

What is your response to those who would cite, say, the Sirhan case, and then Manson and his friends, to support the case for the death penalty? What is the response of the ACLU and the constitutionalists?

Monroe

Well, we would make no exceptions in these notorious cases. If the death penalty is unconstitutional, it's unconstitutional for any person who might fall, in the public eyes, into the category of people who do not deserve to live. So it would be unconstitutional from our view to apply that punishment to Manson, or to Sirhan, or to any individual convicted of even the most heinous and repulsive of crimes.I have no problem with that. In a sense, a society descends to the level of bestiality of the person that it wants to exterminate if it resorts to coldblooded, calculated murder by the state of a person who has committed, in passion or out of insanity, out of sheer cussedness, a capital crime.

1.10. Tape Number: V, Side Two (August 8, 1972)

Gardner

To start with on this side, could we discuss some of the areas in which the ACLU has been operative, and to begin with, the area of immigration and naturalization?

Monroe

The ACLU over the years has been concerned about the use of immigration and naturalization statutes as instruments to punish people for their political views. To deport a person who is a member of the Communist party or a member of any other political organization, in our view, is unconscionable and unconstitutional.That whole attitude came to focus, I think, shortly after 1952, which was the year the immigration statute was revised, updated, and reenacted as the McCarran-Walter Act. The two authors of the bill suggest something about its character. Both had long, notorious records as witch hunters, people anxious about the communist menace, and they poured into that bill new provisions which made it possible for the authorities to apprehend and to deport individuals whose politics were on left side of things, or who were accused of being members of the Communist party.The first instance that came to my mind was one of the cases handled by what was called the Committee for the Protection of Foreign-Born, a committee cited as a communist front--I suppose the usual, flimsy evidence, that if there were any Communists involved, that made it a communist front. The purpose of that organization was to protect the status of individuals who were foreign-born and who by that reason might find it either difficult to become naturalized citizens or they might find themselves subject to deportation.The committee had been in existence for a number of years, and one of their cases involved a young architect named David Hyun. Remembering that the Korean War was just over then, in early 1953, Koreans were subject here to special scrutiny by the immigration authorities. Hyun came up with what was sufficient to support the allegation that he was a Communist and therefore subject to deportation back to Korea. He happened to have been born in Korea; his father was a Methodist bishop there; and he had moved to the United States I think at a very early age. He had assumed that he was a United States citizen by reason of, not the place of his birth, but his parents' citizenship. The authorities held that he was not properly a citizen and therefore could be subjected to deportation.I got involved personally. I met Hyun and arranged for ACLU attorneys to handle some aspects of his case. I think when we finally went to court, ACLU was a friend of the court in that case. Ultimately, several years later, he was vindicated and his deportation was dropped.In that period, partly out of normal ACLU concern for the issue, the problem, and partly at the urging of staff members of the Committee for the Protection of Foreign-Born I undertook what I had hoped at the time might become a fairly broad movement in the community aimed at repeal or modification of the McCarran-Walter Act.I took the normal kind of step. I was then, as the leading ACLU staff member, active with the Community Relations Conference, which was a grouping in the community which had been set up several years previously to deal with race relations and human relations generally. We had been instrumental in forming that conference, or that broad representative grouping in the community; and as I say, as a part of my duties, I felt it incumbent upon me to attend their meetings regularly and to be active with that group, in a sense to support their broader program.In consequence, I did two things. First, with respect to the McCarran-Walter campaign, if it can be called that, I called a meeting of individuals in the community that I thought might have some interest in that matter. Some people showed for that meeting. At the same time, I brought the question of McCarran-Walter Act repeal before the board of the Community Relations Conference, much to the anxiety of some of the people active with that group, because, of course, in 1953, any opposition to a clearly and openly anticommunist statute, law or regulation or proceeding was a fearsome thing for the ordinary leaders of the ordinary organizations.What happened then was a very interesting process and my first experience with what I would call organizational piracy. By processes that partly went on without my being present and partly under my very eyes, this effort to deal with the McCarran-Walter Act was literally taken over by two members of the Jewish community staff leadership here-- Joe [Joseph] Roos, who is executive director of the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish community, and Max Mont, who is the executive of the Jewish Labor Committee. Their interest, I suppose, was justified in the sense that I was too friendly with people who were, at least on their books, Communist party members, and I was involving other people in a process that might expose them to communist influence; and therefore, it was incumbent upon them to take over the undertaking, take it out of my incompetent hands, handle it themselves, and, of course, screen out of any involvement in that anyone who could remotely be thought to be close to the Communist party leadership.It was a neat job; and I learned a good deal in the process of that, and lost almost all of my ardor for being active with the Community Relations Conference, and vowed never to submit anything that I had anything to do with to the tender mercies of either Joe Roos or Max Mont again. Pretty largely, I've been able to manage that.Max, then, at a later time, pirated the campaign against Proposition 14, became the campaign director, cashing in on efforts which ACLU people made at an earlier stage. He did, in fact, operate in a broader field than we did and had command of some union funds, so I guess it was not inappropriate for him to become centrally involved there. But this has been Max's role in this community: to serve as hatchet man and organizational pirate whenever either the labor movement here--that is, the labor leadership--or the Jewish community leadership found it advisable or necessary either to obstruct or to abort or to take over a movement of any broad significance in the community. I must say Max has been very skillful at that, and I have great respect for his skill, but I have managed in these later years to stay out of his reach.That effort, of course, petered out, because, under the kind of restricted controls that Roos and Mont imposed along this grouping, no real enthusiasm, no real campaign could be mounted. It wasn't until very much later that any modification of the McCarran-Walter Act was effected; and, of course, with the receding of the McCarthy period, deportation of people of questionable political views has receded.One dimension of the problem that I think does continue and pops up every now and then is the fairly systematic combing through the Mexican or the Chicano community here, looking for people who are illegal entrants. That's been a bone in the throat of the Chicano community ever since I've been around: the manner in which employers have on occasion used immigration agents to take care of early union organizing efforts in their plants; the manner in which some unscrupulous business people have, in fact, hired wetbacks, worked them for a time, and then had them deported before they had to pay them any wages. California history is rife with incidents of that kind and the use of immigration law and agencies in the interests of protecting industrialists, landlords, ranchers, and others who are prepared to use these miserable people who come across the border illegally in any way they can.Another outstanding instance of our activity on behalf of individuals subjected to--well, not in that case deportation, so much as kidnap and return to a military dictator. We had word here in 1957 that a Spanish destroyer had come into San Diego harbor and anchored, and sailors were given shore leave; and then, following that report, that five of these sailors, in an effort to free themselves from the Franco regime, from service in Franco's navy, had crossed the border into Baja California and were attempting to establish residence in Mexico. They had been apprehended in this, at the request of the Spanish captain apprehended by United States Naval personnel in Baja California and were being returned to San Diego with a view to loading them back on the ship, which was about to sail.This information came to us by way of a Spanish professor at USC whose name escapes me. He called Al Wirin, acquainted Al with the problem; and Al took off like a fire horse, got to the scene in time, got an injunction from a federal judge in San Diego. The sailors were then interned or set up in quarters, I guess, on the naval station there, pending a trial on whether or not they could properly be returned to the ship.Ultimately, several months later, the result of the trial was favorable. The court ruled that the navy had exceeded its authority in literally kidnapping these people, bringing them back, and that they were entitled to be returned to Baja California and then they were on their own. It was a signal victory.What's happened to those five people, I don't know, but they disappeared into Mexico, and I assume that they're still there somewhere. It's an example of the kind of quick action, effective action, that ACLU has been able to take on occasion, literally, we thought, to save the lives of these people, who, if they had been returned to the Spanish ship, would have been subjected to very severe penalties and probably put to death.

Gardner

You mentioned the problem of so-called wetbacks and illegal immigrants and aliens in the barrio. What are some of the things that ACLU has done and can do either to protect the rights of the immigrants or to protect the rights of the other citizens who are legal citizens?

Monroe

Well, we've complained about the indiscriminate character of the searches made by immigration agents, stopping, as they do, legal residents, people who were born here who are citizens of the United States, as well as those who are thought to be illegal entrants.The whole wetback problem is a very difficult one for ACLU. We do not oppose reasonable requirements on the part of people to be admitted to this country or to become citizens of the United States if they choose. We have criticized the quotas that have been imposed, because we have observed that those quotas militate against people in certain parts of the world. They are racist quotas. They favor the white Northern Europeans, and discriminate against Southern Europeans and Africans and Asians and Malaysians, and so forth. But we have not been able to attack on constitutional grounds any federal statute which seeks only to regulate the process of admitting people and establishing their citizenship here.So the wetback problem is a difficult one, and these people clearly have been lured here in years past out of the misery and poverty of Mexico, lured by the possibility of earning money here which they can take back there. They've been exploited by the agricultural businessmen, and I'm sure that there are probably in East L.A. today thousands of Chicanos who do not have proper papers, who came here illegally and have managed to live here for many years.I suppose, from our view, we would support an action by the government which established citizenship on any person who's been here, hasn't been deported, for a certain length of time, some statute of limitations on the matter of deportability. But, as I say, this has been a very nagging and anxiety-producing problem for the Mexican-American community here.

Gardner

Another area in which the ACLU has been active has been in the area of battling censorship, and censorship in Los Angeles has taken many shapes and forms. I wonder if you could discuss--in general first, and then later in particular--some of the problems.

Monroe

Of course, the ACLU takes the very strong view that the First Amendment means what it says, and that freedom of speech and freedom of press are guarantees which prohibit any censoring act by an agent of government, or even by a private person.The most amusing and one of the first instances of that kind of censorship that came to my attention here involved an art dealer in Beverly Hills who had displayed in his window for the public view several replicas of famous classic nude statues. Michelangelo's David was one of these. Some citizen in Beverly Hills complained to the police, and the art dealer was arrested for violating a Beverly Hills ordinance prohibiting the exposure of nudity, I guess, to public view. We interceded in his case and the ordinance was declared unconstitutional, but it was a classic example of the manner in which attempts by government to censor turn up this ridiculous and laughable enforcement of the law.Over the years, we have been interested in and concerned about censorship of movies. Nationally, some of the classic cases of ACLU have involved censorship of The Moon is Blue, and others that were not X-rated then, but I suppose X-rated movies. We favor the least possible restraint upon motion pictures, books, paintings, any expression of human beings.We were involved in a very central way in the censorship of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which came under fire as a result, I think, of county authorities indicting a bookseller for selling that particular book. The bookseller was represented by a private counsel, and we went in on a friend-of-the-court basis on behalf of, if I remember correctly, Paul Ferguson, who was a teacher of English at Los Angeles City College. Ferguson's position was that, as a teacher of English and as a reader of literature, he was being denied his right to purchase that book and to read it and to recommend it for reading in his English classes if he saw fit.Somehow we beat the private attorney to the state supreme court and got there, of course, a clear anticensorship ruling from the court, not only halting the prosecution of the bookseller for selling that book, but laying down, in California terms, a doctrine that an expression, a work of art, or a book, or a movie had to be totally without redeeming social significance in order to be classified as obscene and therefore subject to prohibition. Of course, that term has been broad enough to support the circulation and the exchange of expression of almost anything in the state.That doctrine and that court decidion, and later, of course, the United States Supreme Court decisions upholding that same view, are now under attack, as a result again of an initiative on the ballot which will remove that language from California statutes and will apply stricter and tighter censoring controls. That's been tried before, and it's failed. I suspect that measure will probably be defeated on the coming ballot.

Gardner

Could you discuss here the first defeat of such an attempt, Proposition 16 in 1966?

Monroe

Proposition 16 in '66. If the Committee for Decent Literature and its various counterparts just keep working in this field, there are, I suppose, a great many people who are so frightened by what they regard as obscene, they keep trying to prevent other people from being subjected to what they regard as improper. They did succeed in that year in getting the proposition on the ballot. ACLU opposed it. We did not conduct what I would call as active a campaign as we have on certain other measures. The press and the Library Association and others joined in the effort against the measure, and it was defeated. We've always thought since then that in the privacy of the voting booth, maybe the average citizen decides that he might enjoy seeing some nudity here and there, and that he's not about to deprive himself of that possibility. Maybe it's because the voter does understand that the First Amendment guarantees his right.

Gardner

A couple of the cases that I ran across in the files were also interesting to me because I recalled them. One was of the African Ballet that came to perform, I believe, at the Sports Arena.

Monroe

No, that was at the Biltmore Theatre. There was, in conjunction with the Biltmore Hotel at that time, a theatre at the corner of Sixth and Grand. It's since been torn down; it's a parking lot now.Yes, the African Ballet came to town, and this group was accustomed to dancing au naturel, namely without covering over the breasts of the women in the ballet. Somebody raised a fuss about that; and the chief of police, I think it was Parker at that time--or the city attorney, I've forgotten which one--issued an order to the ballet that they had to cover their breasts. Again, it was such a ridiculous and nonsensical flap about very little.We went to court on behalf of the dancers and failed. We didn't get a temporary injunction. The judge thought this was a reasonable regulation, and there wasn't time really. This was on the eve, almost, of their opening here. There wasn't time.Finally, a settlement was worked out. The female dancers wore little ribbons or strips across their breasts, flesh-colored, so they were not noticeable; but at least they were not completely exposed, and they didn't feel too inhibited by this, so the performance went on.It's another example of the idiotic and unaccountable behavior, from my view, of people, officials, and citizens generally, in this whole area. Why one individual should believe that he has the authority to impose his standards of taste upon another individual has always escaped me, just in practical terms, let alone constitutional terms.

Gardner

Another one that I ran across was the American Dictionary of Slang, which I remember was taken off the shelves in the libraries, wasn't it?

Monroe

It was removed in some school libraries, I think. This was a flap that Max Rafferty raised. I don't know whether it was a part of one of his campaigns or what. Rafferty was the kind of person who seldom did anything like this casually; it had to serve some purpose on his part. The impression I have is that it may have been either in the course of the campaign or just before he was running for reelection or something. He took out against the American Dictionary of Slang. We took no action in court on that but issued a public statement ridiculing Rafferty's position and got into a brief exchange with him on that. He was not one that was especially friendly to ACLU, and that expression on our part did not further endear us to him; but then we would have regarded ourselves with some suspicion of Max Rafferty had liked us.

Gardner

Since censorship applies to the First Amendment, there was another area that is also under the First Amendment that I think is close to ACLU, and that's free speech. One of the cases that I ran across that seems to be more or less a landmark in Southern California was Danskin v. San Diego Board of Education. Could you comment on that?

Monroe

Yes, that was an oath case, as a matter of fact, a requirement that an oath be subscribed to in order to use a school auditorium in San Diego, by a group that I think wanted to form an ACLU committee there. That was before my time and I don't know all the facts about that, but this was, yes, clearly a pristine First Amendment issue. That case went to the California Supreme Court, and we won there a decision in that case, removing that particular requirement and, in a sense, propping up and supporting the right of public assembly and free speech for all citizens.

Gardner

What are some of the cases in which you've confronted it during your time? I know that the ACLU has gotten many compliments and also much criticism for its evenhanded application of the First Amendment, such as applications to the American Nazi party during the days of George Lincoln Rockwell, as well as for the extreme left. Have there been cases in which Danskin has applied?

Monroe

Well, yes, insofar as Danskin was in a sense an updating and a propping up of the basic First Amendment right in California, I would say that Danskin was useful. But a whole series of cases--as a matter of fact, the supreme court decision striking down the Levering Oath--are in that same category of actions by the courts to reinstate or to shore up the First Amendment right of free speech and free association.One experience that we had here illustrates more clearly for me, and I think for others, the evenhanded character of the ACLU with respect to First Amendment rights and the consistency with which it carries its commitment through. A few years back in the late sixties--I forget which year it was, '67, '66--in the very same week, two events occurred which are a kind of remarkable juxtaposition. First, Eldridge Cleaver, who was then a militant black leader, announced his intention to come to Los Angeles and to hold a mass meeting in one of the public parks in South Los Angeles under the jurisdiction of the board of supervisors. When the board and the county park commission heard of this, they, of course, got up-tight about it and refused to grant Cleaver and his group a permit to use the park. Our attorneys went to court and very handily won a reversal of that administrative decision, and then the court ruled that Cleaver was entitled to a permit. That would appear to be an action on the part of ACLU in support of the black cause, black leadership.The very next week, ACLU attorneys, the same attorneys, appeared in San Bernardino Superior Court against an order issued by the San Bernardino county sheriff prohibiting a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan there on private property in San Bernardino County--I suppose a meeting and a cross-burning, or whatever they were going to do. The effect of the order of course was to deny that group of people their rights, their First Amendment rights, in the same fashion that the board of supervisors here had tried to deny Cleaver his rights. So we appeared in court there and got a reversal of that sheriff's order and a court order permitting the Klan to hold its meeting.I think you put the two of them together, the ordinary person is a little puzzled by what appears to be a contradictory role, that you can't really be for the black and for the Ku Klux Klan at the same time because they're obviously sworn enemies. Of course, what is the underlying element is that in both cases, individuals entitled to free speech had been denied it, and that was the proper concern of ACLU, properly in both cases. The fact that we were concerned demonstrates that we take not a partisan or a personalized position with regard to the exercise of these rights, but a basic constitutional position that everyone is entitled to the enjoyment of his rights, and that it's our task, if those rights are infringed, to take whatever action is required to reinstate those rights.

Gardner

In line with that, did you meet Cleaver when he was here?

Monroe

No, I did not.

Gardner

And to swing over to the other side of the spectrum, how about Rockwell: did you ever get to meet him?

Monroe

No, I never met Rockwell. I did on one occasion meet Gerald L.K. Smith. This was fairly early. Smith was indicted for libel by reason of something that he had published in his publication, The Cross and the Flag. Smith had his own private attorney, but sought ACLU help, and Al Wirin, our counsel, who on a previous occasion had interceded on behalf of Gerald L.K. Smith (that's an interesting story too; I should tell that, or maybe Al will tell it in the course of his oral history), served as friend of the court, went to court on behalf of Smith. We, on appeal, got a reversal of the conviction on First Amendment grounds. Smith, I think, had called somebody a liar, and that was permissible and protected speech, and he could not be subjected to libel action by reason of that statement.

Gardner

What's the other story?

Monroe

The other story involving Gerald L.K. Smith involves not only Al Wirin, but Loren Miller, long a black attorney and long a pillar of the civil rights legal profession in Los Angeles. Shortly after World War II, Gerald L.K. Smith, who had been inactive during the war, proposed to hold a meeting at Hollywood High School, and there was great flap and furor in the community. Most left-wing and progressive organizations appeared before the board of education complaining about the permit. Al Wirin was the only person to go before the board and insist that Smith was entitled to a permit to use the auditorium at Hollywood High School for his mass meeting. The board agreed with Al, granted the permit, as I say, much to the consternation and antagonism of a lot of the liberal and progressive people in the community.On the occasion of the meeting, there was a picket line formed outside the meeting, and Al Wirin and Loren Miller--I guess Loren had been involved in some way in this--both took up picket signs and marched as pickets, complaining about what was going on inside the meeting. In that sense, Al had practiced two kinds of rights. He had insisted upon defending Smith's right to meet, but then exercised his own right to picket and demonstrate against what Smith was saying. It's one of the memorable things about Al Wirin's career. People remember him for it.

Gardner

What are your recollections about Smith?

Monroe

Smith...I haven't seen him for a number of years. He was a big man and personable, a little oily, I thought, and because he was asking for help, a little obsequious. I never got to an exchange of news with him. The only discussion we had was whether or not his case was appropriately a matter of interest to ACLU. He came to my office and he talked to me about it, and I talked with him as I would with anybody else who came in with a proper case for ACLU to concern itself with.I never saw him after that. He put me on the mailing list of The Cross and the Flag for a time. I used to get the publication--I never read it, would never care--but after a while he discontinued, and I guess someone was shocked to discover that the ACLU was receiving this publication. We were purged from the mailing list. Certainly we never subscribed to it.This whole area, as what I've just been talking about implies, has been a very difficult one for the American Civil Liberties Union. There is widespread misunderstanding about our role. There's widespread assumption that whenever we take up the cause of a particular person that we are identifying ourselves with that cause and with his views and with his actions.It's for that reason, of course, that we have in some quarters a reputation of being a left-wing organization. Some people accuse us of being a communist front, because on occasion we have involved ourselves in issues that involved Communists. It's always puzzled me, however, that when we get ourselves involved in an issue involving a Nazi, that we seem not to come out with a right-wing designation. The balance doesn't carry through.The formulation which has been most helpful to me is to point out to people that the ACLU never defends an individual, never defends a person, never defends a group, never defends a doctrine. The ACLU defends only the rights of the person or the group, or the right of people to espouse a doctrine and to promulgate it if they choose; and it is the right involved and not the people or the individuals. Therefore, we can't possibly be attached to any of our clients or their views. We are attached only to the First Amendment principle involved. If more people would understand that, perhaps more people would understand why we get involved as we do, sometimes in highly controversial cases--and there are those who support ACLU who would like us not to be involved in controversial things, because that means that people will misunderstand. But, of course we must be involved in controversy. That's the very nature of our work and our commitment, and to shun controversy would be to turn our back on a mission that we must perform.

Gardner

Have there been instances in which the failure to shun controversy has caused any difficulties in fundraising, for example, or in membership?

Monroe

On the occasion when, in Washington, D.C., our ACLU representative there took an action in court to defend the rights of George Lincoln Rockwell, word spread across the country, spread largely by one or two of the Jewish publications. We had a massive resignation from membership in this area. I don't know how many scores or even hundreds of members resigned, accusing us of supporting the views of George Lincoln Rockwell and so forth. That was the most notable time.I think as time has gone on, and as we've tried harder to clarify for our members and their friends what is is that we're about, we've had much fewer problems of this sort; although currently, not a day goes by in our office when we don't get a resignation from some member because of some position that we've taken--recently someone who objects to our capital punishment position, recently a member resigning because of our position on school busing, or that we're defending criminals and that we're not defending the good people who live according to the law.It boils down to the fact that if we are active at all, we are going to offend somebody's special sense of propriety, and if we have to do that we have to do it. And we do. But we can't please all of our members all of the time.

1.11. Tape Number: VI, Side One (August 15, 1972)

Gardner

To begin with today, Mr. Monroe, I thought that we could talk about some issues that may have importance in the years to come. First of all, I know the ACLU was involved in the oil-spill case up in Santa Barbara. Could you comment on that?

Monroe

Yes, we were involved in that incident, the incident of one of the wells breaking loose there and spewing oil on the beaches and corrupting the whole waterfront in Santa Barbara. This is an instance which illustrates a trend in ACLU in recent years: namely, to broaden and to extend the range of our work into areas that several years ago would have been thought not to involve civil liberties at all.For a number of years, members of ACLU in Southern California have been concerned about the smog problem. One of our chapters decided smog was a threat to civil liberties, held a meeting on it, and tried to persuade our board to strike out against smog. Our board resisted the invitation at that time, but by the time oil had come to Santa Barbara, we were ready to take on, as a constitutional question, the irresponsibility of the oil companies in letting their wells break loose and, in pretty careless fashion, corroding and despoiling the waterfront--not only the commercial waterfront at Santa Barbara, but the whole beach area along the coast there. We justified that in kind of sophisticated fashion, that there is a constitutional right for people to live in a clean environment.Under that general doctrine, we proceeded then to join with the county counsel in Santa Barbara County. Al Wirin and Fred Okrand undertook the case, and for several months, they and ACLU legal resources were tied up around the clock, attempting to fight the opposing counsel of the six major oil companies in California. We lost, of course, in the main sense. Some little recognition was given by the government to the need to control the oil companies and their drilling, but in the main it was a futile fight and probably one that ACLU will not soon undertake again.

Gardner

Another of the issues, and one that is getting a good deal of play and prominence this year, especially since it is an election year, is the abortion issue. Does ACLU have a stand on that?

Monroe

Yes, we do: under the general notion that a person's body ought to be totally within his own control, and that a woman's body ought to be within her control, that a woman has a right, if she becomes pregnant, to decide for herself whether or not she wishes to bear that child. That general policy is a fairly new one; it again represents one of the expanding areas of ACLU policy and concern.Under it, we undertook here in California, as a friend of the court, a defense of a physician who had performed an abortion or who had, I think, recommended some person who could perform the abortion for a woman. That physician, Dr. Leon Belous, was charged with conspiracy to perform an illegal abortion. He had his own counsel, but ACLU intervened as a friend of the court, and, at the state supreme court level, won a reversal of his conviction and established, I think--maybe not finally, but at least in the initial sense--the doctrine pretty much along the line of ACLU policy: that in fact, a woman does have such a right and that the courts are bound to respect it.In the meantime, while that case was proceeding, the California legislature repealed or revoked much of the earlier antiabortion statute and replaced it with a so-called liberalized abortion statute. The two working together--the court decision and the legislative action--have very considerably alleviated the abortion problem in California.We have a way yet to go. The so-called liberalized abortion statute still does not grant in the absolute or full sense the right that we think women should enjoy. My guess is that now, with women's lib coming on strongly and with the start that we've made in this field that in a very few years we will have a much more open and much freer access by women to that right--abortion on demand, if you will, but, more appropriately stated, the right of each woman to decide for herself whether she will bear a child or not.

Gardner

I know that in New York, there had been a liberalized abortion law, and it was rescinded, I believe, by the legislature this past year. Was ACLU in New York involved in any way?

Monroe

I'm not sure it was rescinded. Yes, the New York Civil Liberties Union has been active in the same field, and of course, across the country ACLU has been. I think what we're seeing now is a kind of backlash nationwide, prompted for the most part by the Catholic Church--again, the old view that one institution has, somehow, the authority to impose its views on the whole society. The Catholic view, of course, is that abortion is a form of murder, that a fetus has life at the instant of conception and that life is precious, etc., etc.; the effect of which, of course, is to deny non-Catholics, as well as Catholics, their rights under the Consitution.It is the Catholic Church, I am sure, that is now spearheading, not only in New York but in California and in other parts of the country, an effort to turn back the clock with respect to the right to an abortion, and to reimpose the old restraints--regardless of whether the mother wants to bear the child, regardless of the chances of that child having anything like a decent prospect of life, that that fetus has to be permitted to develop and that child has to be born (maybe with the hope that that child will be recruited in the Catholic Church and add to the members on their roster and to their coffers).I don't think the effort is going to succeed fully; and, like most historic developments, we push ahead and then are not always able to maintain the progress that is registered, stepping back a bit, two steps forward and one back, as they say. In this case, maybe the same phenomenon is unfolding. But my guess is that the women of the United States are going to have, for the rest of time, much greater access to a decision for themselves with regard to bearing children or not bearing them.

Gardner

LaRee Caughey said that one of the areas of your genius was the handling of the finances of ACLU, and I do know that there's been a huge jump in the financial capacities of ACLU compared to what it was when you took over. Would you care to comment on some of the financial problems and some of your successes?

Monroe

I suppose one of my contributions to ACLU, both locally and nationally over the period of my twenty years with it, has been to emphasize the importance of financial resources. Obviously, if ACLU's mission is important, and I think it is, and I think it has been, it is important to develop maximum resources for fulfilling that mission.When I began my work here, as I think I indicated earlier in this record, membership in ACLU in Southern California--that is, in the ten southern counties of the state-- probably did not exceed 800 or 900, that in a population of then, oh, 10 million or so. We were an infinitesimal speck numerically and politically. The total annual income of the affiliate the year I took on here, 1952, was something under $20,000, barely enough to pay a substandard salary to the director, hire one secretary, pay the minimal costs of rent and telephone and the publication of Open Forum. There wasn't much left over after that. I think the retainer we paid Al Wirin at that time was $250 a month, for which I think you have to say you can't buy an awful lot of legal talent.So it occurred to me, very early in my experience here, that one thing needed was to increase membership, increase financial income, in order to permit the organization simply to fulfill the announced goal that it subscribed to, if in fact it took seriously this commitment, and at least I took that commitment seriously. If ACLU set itself up to defend the rights and liberties of all the people, a momentous undertaking, then, as an organization, it needed a great deal more strength, financially, numerically, and in every other sense than it had developed by that time.I set about, as one of my very first priorities, programs to increase the membership of the organization and to increase its income. Over the period of the first five, six, seven years of my work here, we made steady progress in that regard. Along the line, it occurred to me that a somewhat comparable effort needed to be made at the national level: that is, a national organization with an income very much aroung the $100,000 mark for the whole country couldn't haul very much civil liberties freight unless that figure was considerably increased. And I was one to speak in national meetings, time and again, in support of a more active membership-recruitment and fund-raising program for the organization. We came to call that effort a development program, and I think I can say that I was one, at least--there were other people also interested--of those that gave major attention to that. Not that fund raising in and of itself is a mark of value for an organization, but an organization, to do good work and to do it effectively, has to have the means to do it. That made for me, and I think for other people, the processes of recruitment, retention of members, the upgrading of individual gifts to ACLU and fund raising, generally, matters of utmost and prime importance.Our roles steadily increased here, and the income of the affiliate advanced, so that today we have almost 20,000 members. I've just recently computed our membership here, and it's between 18,000 and 19,000 members; and our total annual income this year from all sources will come close to $400,000. That begins to be enough money for us to do effective work here. Concomitantly, the income of the national organization probably now is in the order of between $3 and $4 million. That begins to be enough to permit the national organization to have impact and effect with regard to its commitment to the society.

Gardner

You mentioned fund raising. In addition to membership and increasing the membership rolls, what are some of the means of fund raising that you've employed?

Monroe

Well, we've done about everything we could think of doing. One device that's been used again and again is the so-called garden party. Outdoors, during the summer months in Southern California, it is possible to hold large parties for members, charge nominal admission--many of our chapters do this now, two-dollar admission or five-dollar admission or whatever traffic will bear--and to bring people together for interesting programs of some sort, and in that way, give them an opportunity not only to come together, but to contribute in that fashion to the work of the union.Because this is where Hollywood is located, we've developed good working relations with the film industry. A number of our members are producers, directors, writers, actors, and that has given access to new films as they have been produced, so we've used from time to time the device of the preview. For example, last year we secured permission to show Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun. That was a particularly popular preview. We filled the Academy Theatre for two showings; some 1,600 people paid five dollars apiece to see the movie before it was released to the public. We did very well with that. We've shown a number of movies in that fashion.Then, every device that one could think of--we even went to the extent, one year, through our Arts Division, of attempting to raffle a Rolls-Royce. It seemed like an interesting idea at the time; it turned out to be a pretty colossal flop, because we were charging people $100 a chance at what we proposed to be a drawing. First, we ran afoul of the U.S. mails, because raffles and lotteries are illegal, and one cannot use the mails to promote that kind of money fraud. Second, we couldn't find enough takers at a hundred bucks a chance to make what we had intended to make, $30,000 or $40,000 gross, so that we could buy a Rolls-Royce for something like $15,000 to $18,000 and still have a substantial net profit. So we had to scrap that project in midstream, but it's an illustration of the reach, at least, if not the grasp, with which we attempted to practice fund raising.For several years, I did my damnedest to try to get a rock concert staged as a benefit for ACLU and came within, I think, reasonably close distance of it two or three times, only to have that project wash out also, because the popular groups at that particular time either got themselves so fully booked that they had no time for us, or because most of the youngsters involved in these groups have little understanding of ACLU, they couldn't care less about doing a benefit for ACLU. We've never pulled off a rock concert; maybe one day that will be done. But we've used every other device we could think of, and over the years, we've raised, in addition to membership income, sums varying from $20,000 to $75,000 annually to augment the contributions of our members and again to permit us to do more and better work.For the most part, both nationally and locally, ACLU has been a non-tax-deductible institution or organization. This is to say that individuals who contribute to it cannot deduct their contributions for income tax purposes. Recently, that matter has changed, and we now have, both at the national level and at the local level, tax-deductible foundations that are adjuncts to the regular or main organization. The ACLU Foundation of Southern California, for example, will be raising this year approximately $100,000 in tax-deductible gifts--for the most part, $1,000 or more from each donor--and that money, that tax-deductible or soft money, as we call it, will just about finance our total legal action program. This frees the non-tax-deductible money for use in our legislative and chapter and general educational work. The two together, now, expand and increase the sources of money and the size of the contributions and account for what is this year's projected financial goal, something in the order of $400,000. A hundred thousand of that will be tax-deductible money; the other $300,000 will be non-tax-deductible, or hard money.

Gardner

Who are some of the major contributors to ACLU, besides just the general membership or small contributors? Have there been any angels, shall we say?

Monroe

Yes, we have a few of those; and, of course, those show up on the tax-deductible side. Mr. Lloyd [E.] Rigler, who is the owner of Adolph's [Food] Products, has been a very generous contributor to ACLU, over the years, I suppose averaging between $5,000 and $10,000 per year, that always in tax-deductible form. Burt Lancaster, the screen actor, has been another very significant contributor, and his contributions have averaged probably between $10,000 and $20,000 a year. Then a few other people: the Caugheys have been generous contributors; Lloyd [M.] Smith, through his Claremore Fund and his family foundation, has been generous; Robert [J.] Stoller, the psychiatrist at UCLA, has contributed generously. Then through the efforts of Burt Lancaster, who is chairman still of our foundation here, individuals like Frank Sinatra and others in that particular group--Dan Schwartz--have been persuaded to give substantial amounts of money. Hugh Hefner, a fairly recent recruit to our foundation here, is a generous contributor, both nationally and locally. The roster of our foundation contributors includes many of the high-salaried Hollywood actors or producers. Burt Lancaster has been a very important help to our work and a very substantial and stalwart supporter of the ACLU here.

Gardner

Your mention of Hugh Hefner triggered a memory response. Didn't he host a party for ACLU in his Holmby Hills home recently?

Monroe

He did. That was last year, last November. It was the occasion of the opening of his West Coast mansion, comparable to his Chicago mansion, and ACLU was offered that as a kind of coming-out party for Mr. Hefner. Unfortunately, the affair was badly managed, both by Hefner's people and by the ACLU Foundation people, so that it became necessary to paper the house considerably in order to have a decent showing, and we ran into a good deal of flack from the women's lib leaders in the community at that time, who take a dim view of Mr. Hefner and his Playboy institution. I would say it was not one of our most successful or salubrious occasions. We made a little money, some $50,000 or $60,000, which is only a portion of what might have been taken in with such an event if it had been more adequately handled. I can claim almost no responsibility because I had nothing to do with it except to be the agent to pass the invitation on to the people who were then in charge of the foundation program. I didn't even attend the event, because I wasn't very much excited by it. [laughter]

Gardner

Not even by the bunnies?

Monroe

Not even by the bunnies, no.

Gardner

Are there any other similar but more successful parties or previews in recent years that you can think of?

Monroe

I can't recall. The impression I have is just a constant grinding away. The money dimension of this work is one of the hardest, most grinding kind of concerns that an organization can have, and the people responsible for the organization and the staff members have constantly to submit to that grinding process.Of course, it's a kind of vicious circle. You begin to expand. In the early stage, you upgrade membership a little bit, and then you begin to extend and strain even that gain; and then you find yourself projecting 15, 20, 30 percent income increases year after year, budgeting in accordance with that, starting at the beginning of the year to spend at that rate; and then, by God, you better make that budget or you're out of business.It's a driving, compelling aspect of the work which has to be done, and does get done, but doesn't have about it the fun or the intellectual satisfaction that dealing in important constitutional questions or issues may have. But no freight is hauled unless there is a money train to see that it gets hauled; and, therefore, those people who spurn money and who claim not to like to dirty their hands with fund-raising processes are simply empty-headed visionaries who do not understand the practicality of organizational work. Sooner or later, their visions of good work to be done fade away, and no work gets done.I would say a director of ACLU anywhere must be a visionary with enough practical, hardheaded business sense to understand that the bills have to be paid and that if more and more work has to get done--and of course that's been our record over the past forty years: that the more we do, the more there is to do--then that director had better understand the importance of keeping the gap closed between the work and the funds, between the projection of need and the means by which that need can be fulfilled.

Gardner

You mentioned that when you first arrived, the finances were capable of handling yourself, one secretary, and $250 a month in the pool to keep Al Wirin happy. What would the comparative figures be today?

Monroe

Well, let's see. We have now a staff of approximately fifteen; that has exceeded twenty from time to time. In the period 1965 through 1969, in that four-year period, we had begun to expand our chapter program with the addition of coordinators in several regions--that, in addition to what we were putting into our police malpractice complaint centers; so that at one point, our total staff exceeded twenty. Now, by reason of having extended ourselves too far in those two or three directions, and having failed in some fund-raising projects, namely, the rock concert which we were counting heavily on, we sustained a serious deficit and we've had to cut staff back. Our present staff includes three full-time lawyers, to which we will this year add a fourth, a full-time chapter director, one field coordinator, a full-time development director, a public relations director, a legislative advocate in Sacramento, and a secretarial staff--small, to be sure, and inadequate, but a secretary and an office staff sufficient to serve that executive staff.There are about fifteen of us now, with, as I say, a great deal more to do than needed to get done or could have been attempted in 1952. We'll never catch up with the need, but we're closer now, certainly, than we were twenty years ago to being manned adequately in order to take on not only whatever comes down the pike, but to undertake affirmatively, and to take the initiative, with regard to certain problems, looking to the future.

Gardner

One of the areas in which you've combined both publicity of the issues and publicity of ACLU, and I suppose some fund raising, has been through the different media in and around town. One of the first things I ran into when I was going through the files was the radio program that you did almost immediately upon your coming in the fall of 1952. Could you talk about that?

Monroe

As a matter of fact, I simply filled out a commitment which Al Heist had made. Al had persuaded the manager of KFWB, which at that time was not the all-news station but a general AM broadcasting station, to permit him a quarter-of-an-hour broadcast on Sunday afternoon. It was dead time on radio, I think, and the owner wasn't really giving away very much; but it was a public contribution on his part, and Al Heist had been recording a program for several weeks. When I took on here, I took up simultaneously the remainder of that year--I've forgotten how many broadcasts, but pretty regularly, on a weekly basis, fifteen minutes of commentary on some event that had occurred during the week, or some general observations on the state of the nation with regard to McCarthyism and so forth.I think it was useful, but I thought it was taking too much of my time. It cost me half a day or more to write a creditable script to read and then to record, and I was jealous of any time taken for that purpose, because I wanted to plow it into organizational growth and development. So, with mutual consent, I discontinued that broadcast.Over the years, as we did more and more things, and as we were more and more noticed in the public press and by the media, increasing demands or opportunities came to us, to appear either on radio or on television or to have access to reports in the press. Initially, I think it could be said that ACLU had a rather weak and unfavorable public image--if "image" is the word--in this community. It was regarded by the press generally as a not-very-important and kind of inconsequential group of do-gooders. (Of course, I've never quite understood why that is an attribute of scorn; doing good, I would think, is a useful and valuable thing, but people who do good are referred to scornfully as do-gooders and usually discounted. And so ACLU was discounted.)Plus the fact, of course, that there was the reputation about, that we were really a communist front, a kind of left-wing, ragtag bunch of revolutionaries, which again is difficult to understand. One of the most conservative things that the group could do, in my judgment, is to defend the Bill of Rights, a document some 200 years old, and that gets to be pretty conservative. At any rate, I found it difficult to get notice of ACLU events in the public press and media in the early part of my work here.Today, I think that whole picture is changed. Our views are sought by leading writers for the L.A. Times; Gene Blake, Jack Jones, and others call our office on a pretty regular basis to inquire about our view of a particular court decision or event. Whenever the United States Supreme Court announces an important decision in the area of civil liberties or civil rights, my phone rings, Al Wirin's phone rings; we are immediately contacted for an expression of our views. Our views are valued, respected, and I would say generally that the organization and the leaders of the organization are given not only adequate and proper attention, but even what might be regarded as extraordinary attention.On the occasion of my resignation here, I have been on three television programs, talking about my work with ACLU, my leaving that work and returning to teaching. I was the subject of the Newsmakers program on CBS recently. This is just indicative of the whole change that's been affected in this period of time, from a nonentity as an organization to an organization that is looked to for a particular point of view, for authoritative views, and with respect for those views.In that sense, we do well, I think now, with the media; they do well with us. It's a development which I think promises for the future continued expansion and deepening of our work, and I would expect the press and media people to continue their contact with us, with a view to reporting, as important news, what the ACLU does.

Gardner

Are there any early cases that you can think of-- I'm sure you can--in which either the newspapers, or, say, TV or radio stations portrayed ACLU in the sort of light that created difficulty?

Monroe

No particular instance comes to mind, except, I suppose most notably, my involvement in the Dilworth Act hearing in Costa Mesa, in the St. John case, which prompted a good deal of commentary among the newspapers there. The Santa Ana Register, of course, didn't out-and-out call me a Communist, but expressed serious concern and anxiety about the position we were taking; and I would say that the major press here, the L.A. Times and the two or three other papers that existed at that time, took note of this by ignoring the whole matter, that it was such an inconsequential thing that it didn't even deserve to be reported. In that sense, either by just blacking us out entirely, or, if we were not, to be totally misreported and misunderstood, was the kind of standard condition at that time. I think the Steinmetz case was another of those. Again, because these cases involved a question of whether or not individuals were Communists, the fact that we were involved in those cases in defense of the rights of those particular individuals helped, I suppose, to strengthen the public concept that we were in fact some kind of communist outfit.

Gardner

You mentioned Gene Blake and Jack Jones. Who were some of the other reporters and/or journalists-- editors and so forth--during the years, with whom you've worked or who have done stories on you? By "you," I mean ACLU.

Monroe

Saul Halpert of CBS has been a frequent interviewer of ACLU people. No particular individual stands out over the years. As reporters have come and gone, different people have appeared on the scene. The only general impression I can give is, that again, CBS, NBC, ABC, the major television media here, consult our public relations director on a pretty regular basis, out of their news departments or their program departments. As far as the L.A. Times is concerned, when we call a press conference, and we call them frequently now, we can always count on a reporter from the Times, a responsible reporter from the Times, appearing there and participating in the conference.No, I don't think of any particular individual who has been outstanding as far as covering our work is concerned. In a sense, that's a good thing, that we don't depend upon the interest of a particular individual reporter, but that we are good news, we are hard news, we are important news, for the editorial departments of these various publications and outlets. In that sense, the reporter that shows is less important than the fact that he is sent there.

Gardner

You mentioned the public relations director. Who is the director now? And who have been some of the past directors?

Monroe

We've had four over the period of time. Hannah Shields (I first knew Hannah as Hannah Bloom before she married Milt Shields) was involved in the Southern California Federation to Repeal the Levering Act, going back to 1951. She was a free-lance writer then and was involved by the people here at a pretty early stage in preparing leaflets and writing press releases and so forth in the Proposition 5 and 6 campaign.Then, when I began my work here, of course, funds didn't permit the employment of a publicist, or a public relations director, or an editor. I edited, and rather badly, the early issues of Open Forum that I was responsible for. I'm not a competent journalist, really. I write well enough, but when it comes to putting the stuff together on a printed page, I'm awkward and slow at it. So, as I say, my first few issues of Open Forum were not really journalistic masterpieces, and one of the things I wanted first to do was to get out of that business, to permit me to do the things that I could do better and to get that responsibility handled by a competent person.In 1953 or '54, we hired Hannah Shields, to serve as editor of Open Forum and to handle general public relations. It was a part-time assignment. We couldn't expect very much in the way of expansive PR for the very little that we paid her; but she did produce, I think, a quite creditable monthly publication, which reached our members, and in increasing numbers as our membership expended. Hannah, over a period of several years, produced issue after issue of Open Forum, in interesting format, well written, and well edited. She left that job because she and her husband were moving north--they still live in San Mateo County--and she was unable to continue to edit the publication here.We next hired Esther LeBoy--she was, when she was hired; she became Esther Peck, marrying Jim Peck, now public relations director for the Teamsters' [Union] here. Esther Peck was Open Forum editor and public relations director for a period of two or three years. Then, Esther proved not to be terribly competent in that capacity.

1.12. Tape Number: VI, Side Two (August 15, 1972)

Monroe

Esther [Peck] had some degrees of competence. She was a very attractive person with a good sense of public relations. Her handling of Open Forum left, in my view, something to be desired, and finally, it became necessary for me to discharge her.I did, and hired in her place Ed Cray. Ed had been a free-lance writer and on the staff of Frontier magazine, published by Gifford Phillips, edited by Phil Kerby. Phil is now on the editorial staff of the L.A. Times, the old publication, Frontier, having discontinued and having been absorbed by Carey McWilliams's Nation. Ed came on the staff as editor of Open Forum, public relations director, and director of our publications generally. Ed is a remarkably facile writer, a very clever and creative individual, and he did very, very good work for ACLU for the years that he served in that capacity. I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Ed.We lost him a couple of years ago to the Music Center, where he was attracted by a salary nearly twice what we could pay him and what looked to him like a promising career as publicist and public relations expert for the symphony. It turned out that was not a terribly congenial place for him, and he left that job and is now free-lancing it, has been for several months. I think Ed would like very much to return to ACLU, and it may develop that that's a possibility sometime in the future.When Ed left us, Harriet Katz, who had been a part-time assistant to Ed, took on Ed's work and continued producing a creditable Open Forum and doing good public relations work. She does not have either the speed or facility that Ed had, and her range of action is not nearly as great as his. We lost a good deal when Ed left, and that loss hasn't been fully replaced.Harriet is now Harriet Berman, having married a young attorney that she met through ACLU, the young attorney who is now candidate for an assembly seat, and Mrs. Berman divides her interest now between ACLU and his campaign. She proposes to reduce her time with ACLU to half time during the months of September and October so she can do door-to-door work for her candidate husband. If she is elected in November, then the Bermans will move to Sacramento, and the ACLU staff here will have a position for a public relations person.So there have been four people; and, I think, of those four, Ed Cray certainly has done the most to promote ACLU, to work toward the condition which I described earlier of bringing ACLU into a position of respect and authority, and to being taken seriously in the community.

Gardner

You mentioned Frontier magazine. That's a subject that I'm curious about, because many people around Los Angeles don't even recall Frontier and yet it was a fairly important magazine for many years in the liberal community.

Monroe

Well, it was. It was the West Coast liberal publication, published by Gifford Phillips. Gifford I've known for many years, since I first came here. He's a man of considerable means who was interested in politics and public affairs generally and found through the publication of that magazine an outlet for his interests. Giff came here from Colorado--that's my impression, at any rate--and Kerby and Phillips had known each other in Colorado. When Gifford came here, Phil came shortly thereafter and became the first editor of Frontier. I don't know how many years Frontier was published--five, six, seven, anyway, maybe more than that. It was an interesting publication. It could never quite compete financially, and it was always a tax write-off for Phillips, but it served a purpose. In the mid-fifties, it was, like the Nation, and New Republic, and Progressive magazine, one of the few places where one could find serious criticism of what was developing in the country, commentaries on McCarthyism and the phenomena that engulfed that particular time. In that sense, it was confortable reading for many of us who otherwise found only the steady drumbeat of support for the anticommunist crusade.

Gardner

John Caughey did some writing for Frontier.

Monroe

Yes, he did.

Gardner

Did you ever do any writing, or did any other ACLU people?

Monroe

I didn't. John was, I think, history editor or something like that for Frontier for a time. I've always admired John Caughey's writing. I've never known whether it was John or LaRee that did the fine honing of his writing that it came to represent, but the Caugheys together, I think, are two of the best writers that I've known. Their style is lean and straightforward and precise, and this is hard to find among the run-of-the-mill writers these days. Yes, the Caugheys wrote, and of course, Gifford Phillips wrote regularly an editorial comment, or a publisher's note, for the magazine.

Gardner

To get back to part of the original question, was the KFWB show the only regular ACLU radio show?

Monroe

That was the only regular commitment that I made. I've done a few scattered things for KPFK and from time to time special things for radio, sometimes only answering a radio editorial on some issue, frequently at KNX, responding to a KNX editorial. But, no, no regular thing. It was a demand on my time that I didn't want to commit myself to.This may be worth noting. Some organizational heads try deliberately to become the spokesman or the individual kind of personification of the organization, and in that capacity, it becomes necessary then for them to do all of the speaking and all of the appearing. Maybe out of laziness on my part, but I think more because I had a different view, I did myself, and I encouraged our public relations people, to spread the responsibility over a much wider group of people; in that sense, to give the community the impression that not just one individual was the organization, but that many people spoke for ACLU--spoke competently, spoke with authority--and whenever ACLU appeared, it would be in the form of a different person speaking on our behalf.I thought that would give the community the impression that there were many more of us, not just one individual sitting in an office somewhere, and because no one person can know enough about all of the many issues that we're involved in, we could, by that means, present a more authoritative face to the public, a more authoritative voice to the public.And I think that's been true. Our speakers' bureau now--and this is a matter of placing the speakers before service clubs, church groups, labor unions, and all kinds of forums--numbers in the scores of people who are willing to do that and who are competent to appear before groups. We're involved now in two major campaigns, the death penalty initiative and the school assignment initiative, and in these special categories we will have probably fifteen or twenty experienced speakers appearing before public groups in the course of these two campaigns, in each of them.Again, over the years, when press conferences have been called, we've tried to involve not just Al Wirin--Al is pretty much a hardy perennial--but other attorneys as well, so that not just one lawyer or one director is the only person appearing.

Gardner

The connection of ACLU to television is very interesting, too. I noticed that ACLU helped put together a show on KCET called Forum West which seems to have been a precursor of The Advocates, which is now national.

Monroe

Yes, this was one of the projects that Esther Peck conceived and pushed through to some degree of fulfillment. She was able to persuade KCET to undertake what was called Forum West in a format, as you point out, remarkably like the present Advocates. We had three or four gos at this here; then I think station financing faltered, and the program folded. It was an interesting approach to not only general questions of controversy in the community, but particular civil liberties issues. We valued the opportunity we had, and we're disappointed that we couldn't continue it. It might have developed under our auspices or with our support as The Advocates--The Advocates West, if you will. It has been interesting to see that particular educational program continue and flourish and serve, I think, a very useful purpose in the general realm of public enlightenment and public understanding of sometimes very abstract and difficult concepts.

Gardner

Do you recall any of the specific programs? I think A.L. Wirin was perhaps the first of the advocates or defenders on one of the early programs.

Monroe

It seems to me that capital punishment was one of the subjects, and I have the impression that abortion was another one of them. The topics were clearly controversial ones, and Esther did a quite honest and professional job in mounting substantial spokesmen for the two opposing points of view. It was not a program rigged in our direction, but it was a program designed to air and to open up and to ventilate for the public, for the interested public, issues which were in the forefront of public concern.

Gardner

Could you describe the format briefly?

Monroe

It involved, simply, a master of ceremonies or a commentator to introduce the topic; then the presentation of both sides, alternately, of the issue; then an exchange and cross-questioning in the form of a cross-examination; and then a rebuttal and summation, pretty much as the present Advocates program does it. It's a modified debate form; it's a kind of combination panel discussion and debate. I think in that format, it did very well, to set out the views of the opposing sides, then to explore those views, and then to clinch the argument on either side.

Gardner

There is record in the archives of various suggestions for TV shows having to do with ACLU. Could you talk about those for a moment?

Monroe

Well, let me go back to what I think might be the forerunner of all of these, and the forerunner of what is now pretty standard fare on television. One of the members of ACLU here came to my attention several years ago; this must have been in 1956 or '57. Our office was then on West Ninth Street, and I recall this individual coming to that office to inquire about records and reports that we might have about ACLU's legal cases. This individual was James Whitmore, who has gone on to rather creditable fame on the American stage as Will Rogers, in a one-man show. Jim was interested at that time both in ACLU and in the prospect of a television series based up on ACLU cases. He took home with him a number of our scrapbooks and back issues of Open Forum and pored through them.This effort on his part finally eventuated in what I think was the first lawyer series, The Law and Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones was Abraham Lincoln Jones, and by interesting coincidence, our chief counsel, Wirin is Abraham Lincoln Wirin. So Mr. Jones was in a sense modelled after an ACLU-type lawyer, and the cases involved in that program were frequently cases that had civil liberties or civil rights overtones or impact. That, I think, was the first.Of course, now, a television series, to succeed, has either to be about a lawyer who is winning every case for his clients in our courts, or a doctor who always performs successful operations. As I say, I think Jim Whitmore would be responsible for one division of that. I understand he is now preparing a television series in which he will be a doctor, so that will fill out the scope of things for Jim.There have been a number of inquiries. At least eight or ten individuals in the entertainment industry have either phoned me or have come to see me with regard to the content of ACLU and the prospect of somehow molding that into dramatic format, suitable for a television series. It's interesting that The Law and Mr. Jones, which started out boldly to be an ACLU program, soon dropped its designation, and so do all the other programs that come along. It's a little too heady an association for typical network program people; and I would be surprised, I don't expect to live to see the day, in which there will be a series called ACLU and the Courts, or ACLU and the People, or ACLU and the Constitution. But we've encouraged, always--I've encouraged and ACLU has encouraged--any treatment of the material, with or without our commercial attached, in the interest of getting that material, that point of view, before the American public, in entertaining form or otherwise.The most recent inquiry I've had, and what I think may be a creditable possibility, comes from a writer who is now working on a script for All in the Family, in which he indicates that he will have Archie Bunker in some fashion contact his local ACLU to help him with some problem that Archie gets involved in. That will be an interesting day, and maybe it will happen. The writer assures me that it's to be included in the fall program.In passing, I might just say that both the Norman Lears and Bud Yorkin are ACLU members, very supportive of ACLU work. I don't know whether Archie Bunker is or not, but Carroll O'Connor is very friendly to ACLU, as, of course, is his son-in-law Rob Reiner. Carl Reiner, Rob's father, has long been a member of ACLU and supporter of our work, so we may see ACLU appear in clear and pristine form in the show this fall.

Gardner

All in the Family engendered some controversy last fall--well, lots of controversy. One of the controversies even among the liberals has been that perhaps the venting of the various vulgar names for minorities and so forth does not always have a positive reactive effect, that perhaps in some ways it helps feed the bigots, and that a lot of people, rather than laughing at Archie, identify with him. What's your opinion of that?

Monroe

Well, I don't have strong feelings about that. It just happens that I saw the Lenny Bruce show [Lenny] last Saturday evening, and my wife and I were commenting on the differences between Bruce's attack on this problem and All in the Family. I don't react negatively to All in the Family, as some people do. This may be a simple product of the fact that, as a white Anglo-Saxon, I don't come within the orbit of these derogatory terms; to be called WASP does not really offend me, except that I regard myself not as a WASP, but, as I put it, as a "WASA," a white Anglo-Saxon atheist.I'm not at all sure that it isn't a healthy thing to bandy these words about. Words, after all, are only words, and the old "sticks-and-stones" formulation seems to me to be a valid one. Of course, it depends entirely on how the words are used and the intent of their use. Rather than conceal and submerge and suppress, it seems to me always useful to open things up; and certainly Archie Bunker has done that. Whereas I guess the viewers tend to identify with him as a kind of lovable old curmudgeon, I'm not at all sure that they adopt, at the same time, his bigotry as a part of that attachment. And if there's any way to destroy bigotry, I think it's by talking about it and discussing it openly, rather than to bury it and to leave it hidden down underneath. It comes out then in more virulent forms, in more destructive forms.

Gardner

You mentioned Lenny Bruce. Lenny Bruce's last few years were sort of a recitation of assaults on his civil liberties. Was the ACLU involved in any of his cases?

Monroe

Yes, we were involved. Lenny had his own attorneys; as he says in the performance, he spent all of his money on them. We were involved in the San Francisco prosecutions and I think later in the New York prosecutions. We were not involved with him here, but in other parts of the country, ACLU attorneys appeared as friends of the court in his trials. That, I'm quite sure, is true in San Francisco, and I have the impression that this is also true in New York.

Gardner

Did you ever meet Lenny Bruce?

Monroe

I never met him, no. And I never saw him in person.

Gardner

He was out here at the end; I think he died out here. Died August 3, 1966, in Hollywood. [Who Was Who in America, 1960-1968]

Monroe

No, he died in New York, in jail, allegedly of an overdose of heroin. That's a matter of dispute. I think the record is clear that he was never really convicted of narcotics use, and it may well have been that if he'd stayed in a more restricted area of commentary.... My own theory is that when he took on the Catholic Church, he provoked the kind of treatment that he received. They didn't attack him on that basis, but on the general basis of obscenity; and of course, as the critics point out, the show which is now called Lenny couldn't have been produced in that time without being closed down. Now it's come from a long run in New York and is playing here, and in the older sense of the term, it is an obscene show. But of course, there's nothing obscene about it at all. It's words and things, and bodies. It's a commentary on the life of a man who somehow or other (you see, people get hooked in this way, and it's always perplexing to understand why), finally, besides making his living as an entertainer, took on the task of, as he put it, freeing the people from their old, outworn, tribal taboos, and paid a heavy price for that crusade. Again, my hunch is that it was the Catholic Church that got up-tight about his performances and his satire about Catholics. That was his final undoing.

Gardner

There is an irony, I suppose, that stand-up comics in Las Vegas today are certainly as obscene, or more so, as Lenny Bruce and play to turnaway crowds.

Monroe

Yes, of course. The content of their acts may not be as provocative. You see, it's one thing to use fourletter words freely and to speak about human processes on the stage; it's another thing to attack a powerful institution like the Catholic Church. I don't have a special thing about Catholics, except I think the Catholic Church has been one of the most exploiting and negative influences in Western civilization by reason of their control over the minds of people.

Gardner

Another area in which the ACLU has involved itself in the media is through advertising. This has had to do, I know, with various of the propositions that it's either supported or fought. I was wondering in what other areas has advertising time been bought, on either radio or TV or in the newspapers.

Monroe

Well, we've had very limited resources for buying advertising. Whenever we could, we placed ads in the L.A. Times. I think there was a small ad with respect to Propositions 5 and 6 and I guess Proposition 14--we may have done some advertising then.We have often debated the wisdom to taking a full-page advertisement in the L.A. Times, appealing to people to join the ACLU. Some people have insisted that if we did that, we would get certainly our costs back and a lot of new members. I've always been of the view that this would really not pay for itself, that this is not the way to recruit members to ACLU. We've had far too limited resources and funds for adequate, not to speak of effective, advertising.

Gardner

This brings us full circle to Open Forum, which is at the same time an historical organ and the in-house publication of ACLU. You've already spoken about the editors. I was wondering if you could say something about the origin of Open Forum and about its growth and development as a newspaper.

Monroe

Open Forum may prove to be one of the oldest continuing publications in the country, with newspapers going out of circulation these days. [laughter] Open Forum began its publication in 1924 and has been published continuously since that time, either as a monthly publication, or a biweekly publication, or I think in some period as a weekly sheet. Currently, it's published once a month, twelve issues a year; and as various people have edited the publication, it's an attempt to report in news fashion, with journalistic intent, the activities of ACLU, to inform our members with regard to what issues are involved in the cases and the campaigns that we undertake, and to serve as a kind of house organ for the organization, as a promoter of our chapters and chapter leadership, and as a recruiting instrument.It's pretty difficult for one publication to serve all of those purposes, and I'm not at all sure that Open Forum has always done that. In the main, I think, and at least through my period here, it has been more nearly a journal than a house organ, and much more nearly the expression of an organization than the views of an individual person, either the director or the person who happened to be putting the thing out. I think it's a useful device that gives the casual member of ACLU--that is, the person who considers himself a member, who makes a nominal annual contribution to our work--it gives that member some sense of attachment to the organization and some information as to what his money and his interests are being expended for.

Gardner

Is the circulation of Open Forum just among membership?

Monroe

Our membership plus a couple of thousand complimentary issues. I think we now mail about 20,000 copies of Open Forum each month. That would mean one copy per member, plus a copy to each of the affiliates across the country, to every member of the national board of the union, the national office, to a very substantial press list in Southern California, to almost all the libraries, I think, in Southern California, and then copies to current legislators in Sacramento and the California delegation in Congress, with, I suppose, an addition of a few complimentary copies to important people here and there. That's the extent of our distribution. In the main, it's designed for our members.

Gardner

Have there ever been any controversies over things published in the Open Forum? Has Open Forum ever gotten ACLU into any interesting hot spots?

Monroe

No, I can't recall any, except when Ed Cray was editor. Well, in the interesting case that we handled involving conviction of a young man for having emblazoned on his jacket the words "fuck the draft." He was arrested and prosecuted and convicted of violating a state statute. By that reason, we took his case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, won it there. In Ed's writing about the case, he was tempted to spell the first word "f---," but his integrity wouldn't permit him to do that, and so he spelled the whole word out. And there were two or three worried comments from some of our readers about that outspoken language--just an indication that the fact that a person is a member of ACLU doesn't mean that he has left behind him all of his own hangups.We get an interesting kind of intake of letters from our members, proving, of course, again and again, that we are not a monolithic society, and that our 18,000 members are not in lock step intellectually. A good many of our members, for example, do not agree with the ACLU position on the death penalty, and they do not agree with our position on abortion, and they regard sometimes as frivolous and sometimes as threatening, actions on our part to defend a person convicted of, say, wearing a jacket that has "fuck the draft" on it.I don't think of any instance in which Open Forum, per se, has stirred up a controversy in our membership. Some people think they can do a better job of editing it, and some people think they can do a better job of writing it, and some people think that it should contain more of this and less of that, but there are always experts around in every group that think they can do a better job than those who are doing that particular job. I think in the main, Open Forum has not been a provocative publication; and it's pretty well served its purpose.

Gardner

What is your feeling on content of Open Forum? I noticed in some of the earlier issues, and of course I haven't studied it closely enough to know where the editorial changes were, there seemed to be more attention given to issues that were coming up. Now it seems to be more oriented towards activities, if you see what I mean.

Monroe

Yes. Part of that is forced on us by economies. Ed Cray, I think, is the one who did most to open up new issues and to expound at greater length on some of the central issues and controversies, but he did that when he was working with an eight-page publication. That is considerably more expensive than the four-page present issue, and the reason for that is that we don't have money enough in the budget to provide for expanded publication. Four pages, tabloid size, is really not very much space to cover; and the use of pictures, which are, I think, needed in order to attract people's interest and attention, cuts down still further on the space left for type. There's a very great deal every month, a great deal of activity to report; and for that reason, I suppose, the current Open Forum has come to be pretty much a reporting of activities, organizational processes and whatnot, rather than the kind of thing that it was with Ed--more of a journal, both to report organizational activities and to discuss at greater length and to a deeper exposition some of the issues that we were concerned with.

Gardner

It's interesting that Open Forum was a budget casualty. Out of curiosity, where would the money that kept Open Forum alive as an eight-page paper be going today?

Monroe

When we were forced, by reason of the mounting deficit, to cut staff salaries and to cut operating costs generally, there was really, literally, no part of the budget that escaped the scalpel.

Gardner

When was this?

Monroe

Three years ago, when we found ourselves, by reason of the failure of some local fund-raising events, notably the rock concert on which we had counted too heavily for too much of the budget, with a deficit over $100,000. As a result of that, several of our more affluent board members had to sign notes, we had to borrow; then it became apparent that to bail out of that, we needed not only to hold expenditures and increase income, but to cut substantially into the provision made in the budget for staff salaries, for staff positions, and such things as Open Forum. So Open Forum was one of the casualties, but the staff took a 10 percent cut across the board. Only recently, this year, half of that cut was restored, and only as a result of that kind of very strict and painful economy, painful because we had before that been building and growing and expanding, and coming closer and closer to the kind of staff provision and organizational resources that would permit us to do a decent job. To have to cut that back was indeed a painful thing. We're just now getting to the point again where the new administration here will soon be able to think in terms of expanding staff, program, and resources again, and hopefully prevent the occurrence of deficits.

Gardner

To sum up, what do you think is the most effective use of the media that the ACLU can make?

Monroe

Oh, unquestionably, television is, I think, the medium. If someone could bring into entertaining format and presentation, on a prime-time television series, the character of, the intent of, the commitment of ACLU, through characters and incidents that would interpret this accurately and faithfully to the television audience--this would be the most effective thing that could happen to indicate to the American people what ACLU is all about, which it is so difficult for us to get through to now. Short of that, some way of stepping up or increasing exposure of ACLU spokesmen and ACLU points of view on discussion programs, Newsmakers, that kind of thing. I have the impression that those programs on television are not widely viewed and have limited impact. No, the prime-time shows, the prime-time series, I think would be the proper format for ACLU to make maximum impact on the country.

Gardner

As you said before, that's not something you expect to see during your lifetime.

Monroe

That's right.

Gardner

In the short run, and while you're still alive, what do you think can be done?

Monroe

Well, I think just continuing pretty much what we've done here and what is being done increasingly over the country. We're in a period now in which ACLU is steadily expanding, enlarging, deepening and reaching more and more-- more and more people, having more and more impact on the course of American affairs. I guess there is no way in which that can mystically or magically be given a leap forward. We just have to keep digging away at what we've been doing and to continue that, counting, then, on the snow-balling effect of that, both nationally and locally. There is no answer to that question, and there is no one single and sure way of achieving, overnight, national impact or national acceptance.

1.13. Tape Number: VII, Side One (August 15, 1972)

Gardner

To begin this tape, I think we'll get down now to the procedure of ACLU, of the affiliates and chapters and so forth. Could you explain what the relations are of the national to the affiliate to the chapter?

Monroe

The American Civil Liberties Union is a national organization with a national membership, concerned to fulfill its mission on the national scene. We follow what I suppose is generally referred to as a federal system, namely, that the national organization is made up of the state affiliates over the country. In California, for historic reasons and because almost everything here is divided between Northern and Southern California, there are two affiliates. In most of the other parts of the country, state affiliates occupy in each case their particular fields.The relationship between the affiliates and the national body is a fairly close one. The membership of every affiliate is integrated as both a national membership and an affiliate membership and, in most cases, a chapter membership. That has its financial dimension as well as its constituent dimension. Financially, for each dollar contributed by a member, approximately 40 percent of that dollar, or forty cents, is remitted by the affiliate to the national organization as that member's contribution to the national program. The remaining 60 percent, or sixty cents of that dollar, stays with the affiliate. That balance, the sixty: forty balance, reflects, I think, pretty accurately, the view that the more important work of the organization is done by the affiliate at the state or the local level, but that there is need for a national impact by the organization, both in respect to Congress and the Supreme Court, but also as a national entity.Sixty: forty is a formula that, as a matter of fact, I was the author of in 1956 at the biennial conference held in Washington, D.C., where, as I indicated earlier in the record, there was serious controversy about the division of funds between the affiliates and the national organization. Sixty: forty turned out to be a livable arrangement at that time and has been maintained since.The relationship is further augmented by the fact that on the national board, a national board made up of about thirty at-large members plus affiliate representatives, there is one representative from each of the forty-eight affiliates. It's somewhat in the fashion of the United States Senate, not strictly a one-man, one-vote arrangement (and some of us have been concerned about that imbalance), but one voice from each affiliate, whether that affiliate is small, as the Nevada affiliate would be, or large, as the New York or the Southern California affiliate would be. The national board meets roughly four or five times a year, and on that occasion, there's opportunity for the affiliate representative to express the views of his affiliate with regard either to the formulation of national policy or the implementation of that policy through national programs.

Gardner

Do you sit on that board?

Monroe

I do not. It doesn't have to be the president, but the president of our affiliate is that affiliate representative on the national board. We happen now to have two members from the Southern California affiliate on the national board, one of whom has been elected as a member-at-large. He was our former affiliate representative; that's George Slaff, former chairman of the board. George and Marvin Schachter, our current board chairman, are our representatives there. In that fashion, the affiliates are interrelated with the national entity, and we become in that body a national organization.The relationship of the affiliate to the chapters is a matter of interest to me. Again, I think this is one of the contributions that I may have made, if it is a contribution to the organization.One of the first projects I undertook when I came here was to develop membership chapters. It seemed to me that if we were going to try to expand membership, we had to do two things: we had to get away from the view that ACLU was a lawyers' organization, that only lawyers could belong, that only lawyers were invited to membership, because everything we did was in respect to the courts and it was lawyers' work; second, that there had to be some way in which a person, if he chose, could be more actively involved with ACLU. That wasn't possible so long as the organization here was made up of a board for Southern California composed of eighteen or twenty individuals and a staff counsel and a few volunteer lawyers. As long as our program consisted of only going to court occasionally as a friend of the court, to participate in some relevant case or cause, how then do you involve people, how do you involve nonlawyers in the processes of the organization? It seemed to me that some kind of grass-roots development was required. I think no affiliate across the country had, at that time, anything like chapters or grass-roots involvement.I proceeded to start deliberately to carve out certain territories on the map and to call people, call the members together in those areas to discuss with them the possibility of forming chapters, and to invite them to undertake such a project. I think the first such chapter was the Hollywood chapter, and after that the Wilshire chapter, and others as I could get to them and as people expressed interest in forming chapters.With that early beginning, and with persistent supporting effort on my part and on the part of staff added for that purpose, we undertood the program. I remember recruiting to the staff a young man named Bill Carpenter, who was with us for several years. One of his major responsibilities was to meet with chapter leaders and to stimulate the development of chapters. That effort went on: Katie Walton became chapter director later; and then Ruth Abraham, our current chapter director, came with us eight or nine years ago. Under Ruth, our chapter program has advanced very considerably. Now in virtually every area of our membership, with the rare exceptions of, say, Imperial County, the Lancaster-Mojave Desert area, we have chapters formed in various degrees of activity. Some of our chapters meet regularly and undertake serious and regular projects in their community; others are somewhat more nominal in character and really only a few individuals who meet from time to time and who are available if an emergency arises.We now have, as I say, chapters in virtually every part of our membership: county chapters in some cases, like the Riverside County chapter, San Bernardino County chapter, or the Ventura County chapter, Santa Barbara County; community chapters in other instances, the Long Beach, the Pasadena, the San Fernando Valley chapter; or metropolitan chapters, that is, portions of metropolitan L.A., the Hollywood, the Wilshire, the Northeast, the Southwest, the West Side chapter, the Westwood chapter, and so forth.This program does give the individual member a chance to be involved in ACLU work and activities. It has considerably increased the reach of our membership promotion efforts, and I think maybe is one of the factors that can be attributed for the increase in our total membership here over the years.We look to our chapters to do several things: first, to be watchdogs with respect to civil liberties issues, concerns, in their part of the affiliate territory; we look to them to conduct educational programs and to be a means by which ACLU point of view can be expressed in their community; we look to them to recruit new members and to help retain our membership and to raise funds; we look to them to be legislative pressure groups, in relation to their assemblymen or state senators or congressmen; and from time to time, we look to them to carry the brunt of special campaigns, like the death penalty campaign, or like the current school assignment, or what was actually a school segregation initiative.All in all, although in some views I have been disappointed that our chapters haven't flourished more extravagantly, and that we haven't been able to find always active and competent leadership in every chapter area, in the main, our chapter program, I think, has been a very useful and very strengthening factor. This pattern has been picked up and emulated in virtually every other affiliate area now. Chapters of membership are the common thing in affiliates, and the chapter, then, as the local unit, close to the community, becomes in some senses the most effective and the most promising avenue throught which ACLU work can get done.

Gardner

The growth of the chapters has created a similar growth on the board of the Southern California affiliate. Could you describe what the board was like originally and what you expect it to grow into?

Monroe

Well, when I took on here, as I've already indicated, the board was a fairly small group of people who had been attached to ACLU for a number of years. There were between fifteen and twenty members of the board at that time, and many of those people were in their fifties or sixties. They were an older group; they were a small and kind of embattled group, and in some senses a narrow group in that they reflected not necessarily the membership of the organization or the geography of the affiliate, but the history of individuals who somehow had come to be associated and attached to ACLU.Successively, in order to bring new people to the board, I persuaded the board to take steps to expand. That board I think went first to twenty-five and then to forty people elected at large, and then as the chapters became more and more a part of the scheme of things here, there began to be agitation for a chapter representation on the board. Our present format for the board is an at-large membership of thirty, I believe, plus one representative from each of our thirty-two or so active chapters, which gives us a board of between sixty and seventy as a total board, with every chapter represented in almost identically the fashion that our affiliate is represented on the national board.Again, it lacks the one-man, one-vote criterion, but for our purpose, I think maybe that is a formalism that doesn't have a great deal of substance. At every board meeting, attendance is representative of both groupings on the board. The at-large members are quite faithful in their attendance, and the chapters tend also to be generally represented; so as far as the viewpoint, or the views, or the criticisms, or the urgings of our membership-at-large, I think we have a device now that provides for the airing of almost any view, and functionally, it's a fairly easy and comfortable kind of organizational device to carry through.My relations with the board over the years have been pretty generally cordial. It's been my professional view that it's my obligation not to set policy, not to try to make policy. I have rarely been an active participant in board debate on policy questions because it's my view that that matter is for the board to decide. Implementation of policy, on the other hand, or conduct of program, I have considered myself primarily responsible for, reporting to the board, asking the board's advice, but not submitting original questions of procedure to the board unless those procedures in some sense affected the policy of the organization. That distinction between policy and procedure I've tried to respect, and I think I have; and in consequence, I think I would say in the main my relations with the board as a group and with individual board members has been cordial.

Gardner

Has the growth of the board diluted its effectiveness in any way? Is there now another group, an executive board of some kind, that stands more or less above or apart from the general board?

Monroe

Our bylaws provide for, I think, six regular meetings a year of the board. The board meets in January, and then in March, and then in May, and so forth, every other month. When questions or problems arise between board meetings, two things are possible: one, emergency or special board meetings can be called if the matter is that important; or two, an executive committee elected by the board can be called on reasonable notice to consider that particular problem and to resolve it.Just recently, for example, I guess our most recent controversy centered around the extent to which we would assume an active commitment for conducting these two current campaigns, one on the death penalty initiative and the other on the school segregation initiative. Because an important consideration in that question, yes or no, affected our finances, it proved necessary to call a meeting of the executive committe to consider the matter, and I insisted upon that being called. If funds were going to be expended and if the deficit were goind to be deliberately increased by the end of the year in order to pursue active campaigns, then I thought it ought not be the decision of just a chairman or just the executive director but of the executive committee itself.It turned out that the executive committee approved a particular program. That then was reported to the last meeting of the board, my last board meeting, incidentally, and there was considerable debate on the matter there. Finally, the matter was resolved by a vote of the board to adopt the executive committee's position on that, and in a sense the board as a whole was informed and participated in that decision.So, yes, there is an executive committee that meets not on a regular basis but on call, either of the chairman or the executive director or any two or three members of that committee who think a meeting is required. In that way, there's flexibility. At the same time, the entire board is not called into session to determine how many postage stamps we should buy this month, that kind of thing.

Gardner

One of your roles has always been, from everything I've understood, that of mediator. Have you had to mediate between, say, the lawyers and the laymen who the board has comprised through the years?

Monroe

No, I don't think so, and I really can think of few instances in which I have served as mediator. I guess I haven't thought it was necessary for me to do that, nor did I presume to take on the role. What I have done, I think, most consistently, as I've perceived problems or issues arising, either in the organization as a whole, or in the board, or between groupings of board members, was to bring the matter into the open for open board discussion.I referred earlier in this record to the controversy between those who favored integration of schools and those who thought decentralization was the way to handle that. That got to be a pretty up-tight situation, probably the most up-tight of any I've experienced myself, and there I did not consider it my role to mediate that particular controversy. What I did instead was to bring the matter, to bring both views, to open up the board agenda--that is, the agenda of board meetings--for the expression of both views, and to let the matter be fought out, in a sense, through debate and discussion and the honest thinking about the problem which individual board members and the board as a group could undertake. We finally resolved that matter, but I wouldn't take the credit in any sense at all for having mediated that particular controversy.There have been occasions in which certain segments of chapter leadership have felt that they were not close enough to the inner workings of the board, that their views were not being considered. In those instances, rather than mediating, I simply opened up the possibility for them to express those views, and in some instances, changes were affected. The fact that we now have a board composed partly of chapter representatives was the result of that. It was not my architecture nor my mediation, but simply the process of opening up the problem and the response, the natural response, of our regular board members to that appeal.In the early stage of things here--and remembering that I came to the board in 1952, when even ACLU people were worried about communism and Communists and the infiltration of the organization by agents of the Communist party and so forth--there was, I think, a good deal of apprehension on the part of then-members of the board about this chapter program. I suspect that some of the board members then were suspicious of me, that I was somehow opening up the organization to infiltration, and that maybe we would be taken over by we-don't-know-who.I stuck to my guns then, and resolved that problem in the way that is most convincing, by demonstrating that chapters were perfectly safe and, at the same time, useful additions to the organization. After a while, that apprehension disappeared, especially when more and more of the new board members came to the board by reason of having been leaders of particular chapters. I would say that our present board is made up of not only chapter representatives, but the at-large members of the board are 75 percent people who were active for a period of time as chapter leaders and then were recognized as potential board members and elected to the board. So as that process occurred, all of the apprehension about chapters disappeared, because the board became, in a sense, chapter-minded people.

Gardner

Has there been friction between the lawyers on the board and the laymen, let's say?

Monroe

I don't think any notable friction. I think there have been times when board discussion was dominated by lawyers, and lawyers as a group and by profession are, I suppose, more articulate or are given readier to speech and sometimes verbosity and even pomposity than nonlawyers on the board. There have been times when I think nonlawyers on the board have chafed a bit at the kind of monopolizing of discussion which the lawyers undertook and, at the same time, the somewhat technical character of the discussion which left the nonlawyer members, in a sense, out in the cold. Part of my answer to this, I guess, was to work to increase the number of nonlawyer members on the board and to reduce the lawyer contingent on the board.At the present time, I think our board may be no more than 15 or 20 percent lawyers, and the remaining 80 or 85 percent, nonlawyers. And that, maybe, is a good balance. The kinds of questions we have to resolve, we could always get professional advice on from the lawyer members, but they are not really legal questions. They are questions of social policy, or constitutional policy, and it doesn't take a lawyer to understand the Constitution. It doesn't take a lawyer to understand when free speech is being infringed, or free press infringed, or the right of privacy violated.In that balance, I think, I do not at the present time perceive any serious imbalance or rift between the lawyer members and the nonlawyer members; and if there has been anything like that in the past, I think it was rather in the character of the nonlawyer members being slightly intimidated by the more outspoken behavior of the attorneys and by their special jargon and presumed expertise. But I don't think of that as having been a serious matter.

Gardner

How many chapters are there in the Southern California affiliate, and what is the geographical boundary?

Monroe

The geographical boundary of our affiliate is the ten southern counties of the state. There is across the map of California, at the northern boundary of San Luis Obispo County and Kern County and San Bernardino County, a virtually straight line which marks the northern boundary of our affiliate, gives us the ten southern counties of the state; and about 60 percent of the population lives south of that particular Mason-Dixon line. In that territory at the present time, we have approximately--give or take a couple--thirty active chapters, and those chapters are of the three types that I described earlier. They are either county chapters, embracing the ACLU membership of a particular county; or community chapters, like Long Beach and the surrounding suburbs; or a portion of metropolitan Los Angeles.

Gardner

This is a good moment for me to ask about the relations between Southern and Northern California, based on the correspondence I ran into between yourself and Ernest Besig.

Monroe

Ernest Besig, as a matter of fact, was a member of the Southern California board way back, I think, in either the late twenties or early thirties--remembering again that the affiliate was formed here in the latter part of 1923, became a viable organization in the early part of 1924. Besig had somehow, coming from the East, landed in Southern California and had become involved in ACLU activities as a member of the board here.He left Los Angeles, I don't know exactly when in the mid-thirties, and popped up in San Francisco, and, I guess recognizing the need for such an organization there, became the instrument for forming the Northern California ACLU, of which he became the first executive director and which he directed until very recently, from roughly, I would guess, 1936 to 1970. He retired in 1970, so that was a long span of years.Besig's view of the organization, I think, was formulated in an earlier period. This is not to say that he was an old fogey, but it was formulated in the thirties and forties, and pretty much became the lawyer-type organization. Besig was trained as a lawyer. I think he was never admitted to the California bar because he didn't get around to taking the bar exam for whatever his reasons were; but he was disciplined intellectually as a lawyer, and rather thought of himself as a lawyer-director. For a number of years there, he carried on, almost exclusively himself, the activities of the organization, publishing a newsletter or newspaper which he personally wrote and edited and had printed, plus doing whatever he could do as a lawyer not admitted to the bar, appearing, for example, in immigration proceedings, in security hearings and whatnot, negotiating--he was a toughminded negotiator for the ACLU position. He had a small board, was content with that smallness and with a relatively limited income, limited membership that permitted him to do what he liked to do. He had some lawyers attached to the organization--Wayne Collins, for example, was general counsel, I think without retainer, which meant that Collins got some publicity from that and maybe some business as a result of it--but no staff counsel for many years. It wasn't until much later that staff counsel were employed there.Among his other qualities, he was a feisty, kind of, from my view, tight-minded individual. I met him first and got to know him in the course of the oath controversy in 1950. I had very limited dealings with him because I was concerned about other things than the litigation, and I wasn't party to the challenging cases that grew out of the oath; and so I knew very little about him, very little about ACLU.When I took the job here, a year and a half later, and in the period when I was coming here, I paid Ernie a visit and talked with him about his work. He was cordial enough at that time, explained to me his reason, or the reason of the Northern California group, for not integrating with the national organization. (As a matter of fact, he maintained that position until just very recently. The Northern California affiliate, until a year and a half or so ago, was the only affiliate nonintegrated in the national organization. They were a separate, independent entity--made no financial contribution to the national work, received no help from the national office, but had their own kind of private, independent operation there, which pleased and suited Ernie Besig.) One of the reasons he advanced for that, which I never gave credit, really, was the 1940 resolution of the national board. Knowing Ernie, as I did, an anticommunist resolution would not be a very important reason for his remaining out of the organization. I'm quite sure that he was much more concerned to preserve his own independence and separateness so he could run his show as he saw fit, without interference from a national office or from other affiliates.At any rate, I came here and took up my work with the union, and was invited to speak in San Francisco sometime in the course of that fall, the fall of 1952. My speaking engagement was publicly announced, and I got an irate communication--I've forgotten whether it was a phone call or a letter, I think first a letter--from Besig, in a sense ordering me not to cross the Mason-Dixon line into Northern California because that was his territory. That was followed by a phone call from me in which I had a heated discussion with him about the matter of my appearing there before a group that, I think, represented the remnants of the old Federation [for the Repeal of the Levering Act] at that time, a group of which Besig did not fully approve, and about which he had certain worries as to whether or not it contained some Communists, whether it was a communist-front organization.This was a difficult problem for me, and my inclination, of course, was to tell Besig to go to hell, that no one was going to tell me where I could appear and when or that I had to have a passport to go from Southern California to Northern California. On the other hand, I recognized that it represented the controversy between the north and the south, so I reluctantly put the matter to my board at that time and was persuaded by them that in the interests of harmony, north and south, I should decline the speaking engagement and point out to my friends there that I couldn't do it because of the ACLU controversy. I backed down, not terribly proudly but pragmatically, in the interest of advancing the work here and not taking on controversies that I didn't need, battles that I didn't need to fight.From that time on, relations between me and Besig were cool. We had virtually no contact except occasional national meetings when we would greet each other with some degree of cordiality, maybe have a drink together. He ran his show and I ran mine. We had some little exchange about straggling members in communities like Fresno and Modesto and Merced who somehow had got themselves attached to Southern California, and Besig considered them his. In the exchange, he got the members north of that line. I never got, because he never made available to me, his members south of the line. It was a kind of one-sided exchange, but not very many people were involved anyway, and it wasn't worth fighting about.As I began to develop the program here, there got to be a kind of subtle exchange of influence between north and south by reason of the fact that some people who were active with ACLU here moved to Northern California, and, if they had been active in chapters here, began to raise the question there, "Where are the ACLU chapters in Northern California?" This, I think, caused Ernie a good deal of concern and aggravation, because he preferred to conduct his work without benefit of chapters or anything of the sort. Finally, though, chapters were formed as a result of pressure on him and on the board there.The next controversy arose over whether or not the Northern California affiliate would join the Southern California affiliate in both the expenditure of funds and the assignment of staff personnel to the lobbying operation in Sacramento. Besig took the view that we couldn't be effective anyway, it was a waste of money; or that if anything needed to be done, all he needed to do was to call up his good friend who was legislative counsel and the matter could be taken care of very quietly and very inexpensively.That, quite evidently, at least from my view, was an erroneous interpretation of the matter, and we finally, pretty directly and deliberately, brought pressure on certain members of the board. Again, one board member in the north who had been a member of the board here in the south, Ralph Atkinson, who first served here and was one of the very impressive and very effective members of this board, and who, when he moved to Northern California, was finally elected to the board there, became one of the people to join in pressing Ernie and the board and the Northern California office to move in that direction. Others joined in that, and finally Ernie was outvoted.Incidentally, despite the fact that he was the employed director of the affiliate, he maintained a membership on the board. He was a member of the board of directors, and so voted on every matter coming to the board. It's a curious and I think outmoded status.That's been changed in Northern California, and of course, that never was the case here. I've never been a member of the board here, and it's inappropriate for a staff member to have that kind of status.In a succession of votes on the matter of the legislative program, Ernie was outvoted unanimously by the board in votes like twenty-five to one, or twenty-three to one-- Ernie voting negative constantly, but his board as a whole voting to move in that direction.As I say, I'm sure that Ernie has, over the years, never had any special love for me and has regarded the Southern California affiliate as a kind of troublesome burden under his saddle. On the other hand, I have to say that for many years, Ernie did a very, very conscientious and workmanlike job within a limited range, pretty much following the bent of his own interests in doing ACLU work there.It was, I think, a kind of shame that the Northern California affiliate sat out almost entirely the civil rights movement in Northern California. When the sit-ins were occurring on Automobile Row on Van Ness Avenue, ACLU was just not around. They left that to other organizations. They played a very limited role in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and this was primarily, I think, because Ernie liked to limit, and he had in his own mind a fairly strict boundary within which he would conduct his work, and he was just not about to budge out of that. Our view here--my view here, and the view of our board--has been one of a constantly expanding field of responsibility. Maybe too far; maybe we've gone past reasonable limits. But it's better to do that, in my view, even though it is a constant strain on our resources, than to carve out a nice, safe, comfortable, and very small area of ACLU work and say, "This I will do and no more."

Gardner

You mentioned the lobbying activities of ACLU. Coleman Blease is the lobbyist, is he not?

Monroe

Yes he is. Coleman graduated from the University of California law school, I don't know how far back; first became interested in public affairs by way of the Friends Committee on Legislation in San Francisco; joined the staff of the FCL there; finally moved to Los Angeles, and continued his work with FCL, and went into private practice here. Then, at a little later time--1956, '57, '58, along that period--I persuaded Cole to share his work between FCL and ACLU; and then finally we took him over, on first a part-time basis and then a nominal full-time basis as the ACLU legislative advocate.

1.14. Tape Number: VII, Side Two (August 15, 1972)

Monroe

I was talking about Coleman Blease and indicating that we had taken him on our staff as a full-time legislative representative. During the regular legislative session, he would take up residence in Sacramento to be at the scene of the legislature, then return to Los Angeles when the session was over. He got himself married and didn't really enjoy private practice of law at that time, moved to Berkeley and, for a time, taught at the University of California there in the speech department.Finally I persuaded Cole, with the benefit of an increased compensation, to move to Sacramento permanently, so that he wouldn't have to spend half of his life commuting and he could have a year-round relationship and contact with the state capital and the seat of government. He did that, and, of course, he's been there ever since.Cole is one of the brightest and ablest young men I've ever known, a remarkably competent lawyer, a remarkably competent legislative advocate. He's won the respect of, I think, everybody in Sacramento. They may disagree with his view, but they have great respect for him. I would say over the years, Cole has done about as much as any individual in California at that stage of things, first, to prevent the enactment of stupid, unwise, or unconstitutional legislation. He looks on that as his primary function--to get bills killed in committee. As a matter of fact, in the fairly early stage of his work there, he saw the importance of having a committee instituted in the assembly that would be a friendly committee, to our view, and one that could be used as a bill-killer where needed. That was first the Criminal Procedure Committee in the assembly, and now it's called the Criminal Justice Committee, I think. As long as the leadership of the assembly was somewhat democratic and liberal, Cole was able to get that committee composed in such a way as to be amenable to, or at least responsive to, our point of view; so many bad bills have gone down the drain in that committee. That's not the only one Cole operates in, and as I say, he's been remarkably effective.He now has a wife and two adopted children and a nice home in Sacramento, and in addition to his work for ACLU, has a growing private practice of law there, which means that he's making a comfortable income now and is in much solider position than he was in the earlier stages when he was commuting and floating around here and there.I guess Cole's major drawback or personality flaw is his impatience with run-of-the-mill, people of run-of-the-mill intelligence. He's so very bright himself and so thoroughly schooled in the matters of ACLU concern that he's impatient with people who either do not understand or have a view different from his. In that sense, Cole is sometimes thought of unfavorably by some of our board members, but that's never been an important factor with me because I look to people not whether I like them or they're nice to me or whether they agree with me, but whether or not they get things done; and there's no question that Cole has. I would count him a valuable member of our staff and one that I hope will stay on and continue his work for us.

Gardner

I'm interested in the role of the various committees and divisions that have been formed at times within the Southern California affiliate. I suppose the most interesting one from many points of view is the Arts Division.

Monroe

I had in mind at one stage of things proliferating our organization in three directions: one, the chapter program, which, in simple geographic terms, would embrace any members that happened to live in a particular area; second, through committees assigned to particular problems--a censorship committee, an academic freedom committee, and so forth--that those groupings would concern themselves with portions of the whole scope of our work; and then the third dimension was a divisional dimension, and the term "division" was used as applied to that, that is, to group people by reason of their profession or their special field of interest.At one time we had four divisions, at least on paper. One is the Lawyers' Division, which has continued to exist, and which in a way is made up of all the lawyer members of the organization here, then focussed in what we call the Lawyers' Division Executive Committee, which meets regularly to consider cases brought to our attention and which is a kind of expansion of staff counsel and a means by which we reach volunteer lawyers. The Lawyers' Division from time to time has held events in its name. On one occasion, we had a dinner honoring former Chief Justice Gibson of the state supreme court, and we've had lawyer luncheons from time to time in the name of the Lawyers' Division--that kind of activity.We've had a Women's Division for a short time, the precursor of women's lib, as a matter of fact; and we had a Youth Division for a time--Students' Division or Youth Division, we called it.Then, of course, we had what we called our Arts Division, and my former wife, Vivian, had a great deal to do with the organization of that division. She encouraged me to take note of the fact that in our membership we had a scattering of Hollywood personalities--Robert Ryan and James Whitmore and Robert Wise, people who were identified as either stars or workers in the industry--and that there might be considerable profit for ACLU if we could expand that membership: that it would be a source of increased income because these were people who were earning high salaries and could give more money than the ordinary kind of person; second, it would open up the possibility of talent being made available for our fund-raising purposes; third, through this, we could get access to movies, the kind of movies that we use in our previews and so forth.As I say, Vivian was extremely helpful and worked very hard with me as a volunteer in what must have been 1960, very shortly after we were married, until she took over her work later as director of the Constitutional Rights Foundation.For two or three years, and reaching its high point I would say in 1963, at the time of Martin Luther King's activities, the Arts Division formed itself.One other thing should be noted here. The Hollywood community had been organization-shy for a number of years by reason of the Hollywood Ten and the whole blacklisting process, and it wasn't until the late fifties and the early sixties that these people again began to get up enough courage to, in a sense, expose themselves to organizations, to become members of organizations, and to take a public stand in support of certain ideas or organizations.The first meeting of the Arts Division was held at Robert Ryan's home, in his backyard, as a matter of fact. We spent about $400, I think, renting a tent on a fairly cold evening that fall or winter. We had gone through our file and had called in two or three people who knew individuals in Hollywood. I couldn't recognize them. The name Robert Wise didn't mean anything to me then. Burt Lancaster's name I did recognize, and one or two others--Dana Andrews, John Forsythe, people of that sort--but for directors, writers, producers, agents, and so forth, we called in those who were familiar with the names and filtered out about 200 or 250 individuals who had some attachment to the Hollywood industries.It was arranged with Robert Ryan to use his name and his address for the meeting, and we sent out an announcement, attractive enough, indicating what this was all about and asking people to spread the word to their friends. Well, we turned up about 450 or 500 people on that occasion. It was an amazing turnout and show of interest; and on that, of course, we selected a leadership, mostly Jim Whitmore, Bob Wise, Sy Gomberg, Jim Pollak, Robert Presnell, and a half a dozen or so others who were interested enough to give some time and attention to this.We conducted an Arts Division program for a couple of years, the high point of which, as I say, occurred in about 1963, when we held a meeting at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on the whole question of the employment of blacks in the Hollywood industries. I think we were the first such group to raise that issue here. That meeting was attended by Marlon Brando, for one, and two or three other important Hollywood personalities, and we had an overflow crowd, probably 600 or 700 people, in attendance.Then, partly by reason of the diffusion of the interests of these people in the peace movement, partly by reason of literally not having enough staff time to service (one of the things the Arts Division did was to create a group of radio spots recorded by name people, television spots; we had a number of projects, but there were more projects than we could get completed, actually), finally in the course of things, as priorities shifted, as the civil rights matter receded, and as staff got involved in other things, we had to let the Arts Division kind of go by default.It still exists on paper, and whenever we want to do anything in the name of the Arts Division, Jim Whitmore, Bob Wise, or Sy Gomberg are always willing to serve as the signers of a communication from the Arts Division; but there's been no meeting of that group, and there's no ongoing program. That may be in part attributable to the fact that my wife, Vivian, moved on to paying work, rather than just volunteer work, with the Constitutional Rights Foundation, and she's built that into a very substantial income for herself and a very effective organization; and she simply wasn't available to continue to shepherd the Arts Division.But I think for more reasons than that: people's interests wax and wane; it was a kind of coming-out time--and I think we can look with some gratitude to that sense--for Hollywood people who had been undercover and frightened and removed and anonymous ever since the raging blacklisting processes of the late forties and early fifties. It was an instrument, it was a kind of bridge for them back into political activities; and now Hollywood people have been important supporters and activators of the peace movement and all kinds of causes and are heavily involved in party politics. In the current campaign, people will divide themselves up between supporters of Nixon and McGovern, and be open and frank and honest in the public arena. I think our Arts Division had something to do with that fact.

Gardner

Who were some of the people who were involved in that who still remain active in ACLU?

Monroe

Jim Whitmore, for one, Robert Wise, John Forsythe, Sy Gomberg, Leslie Parrish, Whitney Blake, Jim Pollak, a number of writers whose names escape me now. Not very many of the stars, the big stars. Burt Lancaster, for example, was never active with the Arts Division. He became active with the ACLU Foundation later on. Robert Ryan, of course, spends most of his time in the East. Melvyn Douglas, when he was here, attended some meetings. For the most part, the active people with the Arts Division were the non-name individuals, the lesser writers, the lesser producers, directors, not the big shots. In that sense, their attachment was more honest than, maybe, the attachment of the outstanding stars to whatever causes they become involved with.

Gardner

You mentioned the more issue-oriented committees and setting the committees up as separate from the divisions and the chapters. Which of those committees do you think were the most effective through the years?

Monroe

Well, I suppose the Academic Freedom Committee and our Censorship Committee; and Everett Moore, I remember, gave a good deal of time to censorship questions and issues. At varying times, different committees played roles. More recently, the Education Committee, which is John and LaRee Caughey's committee, actually, performed its function very well. Our Equal Rights Committee and Police Practices Committee--the committee problem is a difficult one because one can invest a very great deal amount of staff time in the servicing of standing, formalized committees. What we finally come to is the establishment of some fifteen or twenty areas of ACLU concern--academic freedom, censorship, freedom of speech and association, privacy, etc.--with designated experts, board members and others, attached to those committee titles. These committees do not meet regularly, but they're available to assist the director and the board with respect to any novel policy problem arising in any particular field, and from time to time can be activated to deal with special problems that occur.For the current year, for example, 1972, we have that committee framework, then, in addition, set three priority areas in which the more active committees were involved: first, in prison reform and the whole pattern of problems with regard to prison life and parole and the treatment of prisoners; second, the rights of women, appropriate in this particular year, a women's rights priority; and third, a priority assigned to the rights of young people at this time. Those three committees have been somewhat more actively engaged in their tasks. The other committee experts or personnel are simply on paper, available to be assigned special problems or to be activated if the need arises. Again, there are only so many balls that a limited staff can keep in the air at one time, and to conduct a regular committee program for five or six or eight or ten committees would mean that we wouldn't do much else.

Gardner

You had mentioned, at various times when the tape was off, about the fiftieth anniversary celebration of ACLU. Could you talk about that?

Monroe

Yes. The ACLU was fifty years old in 1970. There had been, from time to time, discussion at national meetings with regard to some kind of special marking of that anniversary. An organization doesn't get to be fifty years old very often, and having got to that point, the first half-century might well be noted in some special way. But no very concrete plans were developed. I had fairly limited interest in this matter. I had all I could attend to here in Southern California.I had at one time entertained the notion of applying for the national executive directorship; that was at the point that Pat Malin resigned, and that Jack Pemberton, who had been national executive director for a number of years, took the job. I didn't apply in that year--I think it was 1959 or '60 that Jack took that job on--for two or three reasons, one of which is that the very recent death of my first wife had kind of dislocated my life; that plus my marriage to Vivian and the change in my life that that effected; plus the fact that I was just getting things going here by that time and had a lot of unfinished work to do, and preferred living in California anyway, and the move to New York would be something to consider. So I let the chance go by, didn't even apply for the position; and Pemberton took the job and was holding it, not always with what I thought was full effectiveness, and that's another whole story.At any rate, there had been talk of a fiftieth anniversary program. Nothing had been done very much by the national office, and it was certainly very far from being uppermost in my mind. In the summer of 1969, Vivian and I took a trip to Europe, our second trip, this time going first to Amsterdam, then to Italy, then to Yugoslavia, then back to London. I was sound asleep in Rome at about two o'clock in the morning there, when the phone rang, woke me; and a familiar voice came through, the voice of Jay Miller, asking if I would be interested in taking on the job of directing the fiftieth anniversary program of ACLU. And (a) because I was still half asleep, and (b) because it was the farthest thing from my mind and geographically so remote that I couldn't comprehend it, I gave him some kind of noncommittal response that I would think about it or something and let the matter rest. The next day, I got a second telephone call, this time from Jack, urging me to take it on, and I thought no more about it through the remainder of the trip.When I got home, I began to think about it, and it brought together two or three things that in my personal life then were at kind of loose ends, and in respect to ACLU were at loose ends. For reasons which are not even historically important, and which I'm not at all sure that I can sort out, I began towards the end of the sixties-- '67, '68, '69, in that period--to be bored and, in a sense, emotionally fatigued with my job with ACLU.I don't quite know how to account for that, because the work was still there to be done, and it was still being more and more effectively done. We had come on the financial problem that I've referred to a number of times, the growing deficit, a deficit which resulted principally because I had not been able to find for the staff a competent development director and fund raiser. I was trying to do that myself along with the other chores of the directorship.At any rate, I had a strong growing sense of futility, I suppose a Sisyphus complex, that no matter how hard I worked and how much we did, it was never done, and that in a sense I was spending my life spinning my wheels, telling myself on the one hand that ACLU was engaged in a most important mission, and on the other hand recognizing that in a sense we were building in sand, and that no sooner did we get one thing done than there were two more things to be done, and when those two got done, four more things, and so forth--that the more we did, the more there was to do. There seemed no end to this process, much of which, no matter what we did, washed out, either by later court decisions, or by the act of the legislature, or by insane public notions about civil liberties and civil rights. Maybe the election of Richard Nixon had something to do with the matter.At any rate, in my personal life, and I mean my individual personal life, I had begun to come into this stalemating and kind of depressing state of mind. That, I'm sure, spread to my family life and to my relationship with other people and was one of the factors which led, I think not very long thereafter, to my separation from Vivian and subsequent divorce.At the same time, I had a growing dissatisfaction with the conduct of the national office. I was very fond of Jack Pemberton, who is one of the finest people I've ever known--gentle, and humanistic, and fairly vigorous in one dimension, but from my view, not competent organizationally to direct the national program of ACLU. He thought, still, in lawyer terms, and his concept of the national program was a lawyer's concept of it. There was no effective development program at the national office, although I and others (mostly I), on many occasions, called for an emphasis on development, with maybe some sharp criticism of Jack and national staff people; and I'd long had a feeling that that condition must change, that Jack must reorganize the national office as the director, that the national board members in New York had a greater responsibility to get some things done, that certain members of the national board may have been responsible for holding back the development of the organization. On one occasion, I mounted a kind of one-man campaign to get three or four of the national board members unelected, which made me very unpopular with them and with some other national board members; but this was kind of out of frustration, because no matter what was decided at meetings of the organization nationally, no matter what advice was given, no matter what I said, nothing changed. So there was that organizational discontent.When I was asked to take on the fiftieth anniversary program, I recognized that this was almost at the end of the year before the anniversary; that there had been no planning, no direction given to it, there was nothing; and that I had, in effect, only about three or four months in which to get something off the ground and to make a creditable showing. I rationalized that disadvantage, even though I had just turned sixty: "I am still young enough and strong enough and vigorous enough to perform some kind of small miracle there, and I'll just show everybody that I can do that, including myself." That was part of it. The other part was the recognition that this might open the possibility for my coming to closer terms with the national office, and maybe if I were there a good part of the time, I could do more to get that condition changed, the outside chance that Jack Pemberton could be persuaded to resign and that maybe I would be considered for that post.All of these things kind of jumbled up together, and I finally decided first that I would go to New York and talk with Jack and others about the thing, and then finally that led on into talking myself into undertaking what was a defeated program at the outset, because no one in the organization had much enthusiasm for it. The national board approved it in the sense of voting to tolerate some program. Those people who were in closed control of the national affairs were either hostile to it or so preoccupied with financial anxiety about the expenditure involved that they literally choked the program to death by their constant meetings and constant reports and constant reconstruction of budgets and whatnot.So there really wasn't a chance of it succeeding, but I took it on nonetheless and, for the rest of 1969, committed myself to about half time here and half time in New York, commuting by plane. It harked back for me to my early experience as an employee of the University of California when I spent part of one week teaching in Los Angeles and the other part in Berkeley. It was like that, except now on a national scale. And I wasn't nearly as young when I took the fiftieth anniversary program on as when I undertook that other kind of backbreaking assignment.I started with it, and almost immediately--as a matter of fact, in October of '69--a person I'd known for a number of years in ACLU who had been active first as a volunteer in Ohio, then came ultimately to be the executive director of the Ohio affiliate, and then had moved with her husband to Seattle, Washington, was active with ACLU there; then upon separating from her husband, and with the intent of going to New York, calling Jack and me, separately and then together, with regard to possible employment there--Jack and I readily agreed that Laura, then Laura Ober, would be the ideal person to bring on the staff of the fiftieth anniversary program.Laura left Seattle, came to Los Angeles to stay a couple of days here with me to talk about the program, spent those two days at what was then my home on Milton Court when I was still married to Vivian, and then went on to New York to establish residence there and to take up her first assignment as the fiftieth anniversary staff member in charge of relations with affiliates. Because she had been in so many parts of the country and knew so many people in the organization, she seemed the ideal person for that assignment. Later, she changed title and was advanced to associate director, and she and I together, actually, carried through whatever program was carried.As I've already indicated, there had been no planning in advance; almost nothing had been done; there was no interest in any degree on the part of the national board, or the affiliates, for that matter; and it started out to be a kind of formalism that we were involved in, because somehow or other, it just seemed that the fiftieth anniversary should be celebrated. I tried as I could to infuse something more by way of enthusiasm to mark this year as important, and through discussions with Laura and others, drew up the blueprint for an ambitious anniversary program, including very importantly, one heavy emphasis on fund raising in connection with the fiftieth anniversary program, fund raising both of tax-deductible and of non-tax-deductible money. Central to that plan was, again, somehow mounting a rock concert somewhere in the country that would produce--if not $100,000--$75,000 or $80,000 in net income of the ACLU.Again, all through this [grew] the antagonisms that I had developed on the part of certain national board members, two of whom I had tried to get voted off the board. I found these two guys on the committee that oversaw my activity with the fiftieth anniversary program.

Gardner

Who were they?

Monroe

George Soll was one and Herb Prashker was another. They have since resigned from the national board, and I think the national board is well rid of them. Whether this was deliberate design on Pemberton's part, or whether it just worked out that way, these two people, who hated my guts, were put in charge of overseeing the program that I had been brought to the national level to direct. They were both very articulate and very persuasive and very negative individuals, who I think had a kind of private commitment, each of them, to see to it that that program didn't succeed; because if it succeeded, that somehow would advance my status in the organization, and they were determined that that not occur.So with all those handicaps and all those problems, some of which I foresaw, most of which I didn't, I embarked on this kind of insane undertaking. It became clear in 1970 (which was not a vintage year, financially, for the country, a year in which it proved more and more difficult to raise money) that it just wasn't going to be possible to meet the financial goals, it wasn't going to be possible to carry through a program of any self-respecting quality, that it better be lopped off, and that we better cut our losses to that point. In June of 1970, at the biennial conference which was held in New York, I resigned; and in a sense, I resigned the fiftieth anniversary program, while working out a relationship so that Laura could continue to finish up whatever was finishable and taper the thing off before the end of the year. Some aspects of the program did carry through, and others were terminated at that point.Of course, by then, my relationship with Laura had turned from that of a colleague to something much more intimate, and in the course of that very trying and traumatic period of six months, from January to June 1970, I had separated myself from Vivian, had moved in with Laura in her New York apartment, and then when I returned here, brought her here, or invited her to join me here, almost immediately. She came in the latter part of June of 1970.That was the end of the fiftieth anniversary program, which left a pretty faint and, I would say, not highly indelible mark on American history. It did mark the date. We got some press, mostly eastern press, but because the provision had simply not been made for it, it could not be the kind of program it should have been, could not be the kind of program that I wanted it to be, and what I did, in effect, was to cut it off before it cost very much money. As a matter of fact, we came out pretty close to being even, income against expenditures, for the program; and everything considered, that was something of an achievement in itself.By that time, by reason of the change in my personal life and by reason of the early demise of the fiftieth anniversary program, I was no longer a contender for the national executive directorship. Jack Pemberton, by that time, had resigned, under pressure, a pressure which I guess I have to claim some hand in. The position was open, and the various candidates considered no longer included me, although I had been interviewed for the position at one time--again, thinking I had some opportunity for it, but now, as I look back, recognizing that those New Yorkers were not about to hire me, personally, or anyone from outside the New York area. Among other things, at the national level, ACLU is probably the most provincial and New York-bound organization in the country. The provincialism is expressed again and again, and in this respect, as I say, they were not to hire someone who came all the way from California to New York. I recognized that in retrospect; I didn't recognize it then.At any rate, a new executive director was duly appointed, a young man who was one of the factors in the failure of the fiftieth anniversary program, a young man whose position I was responsible for creating. When he originally came to ACLU, he came as field development director, after my harping for years that we should have such a person. He took the job, performed it not in a very distinguished way, used it as an instrument to step into the directorship of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and from that to become the national executive director. He was right there in New York; he's the kind of person who understands how to play effective politics organizationally; and he's one who understands also how to beat down the opposition.

Gardner

What is his name?

Monroe

His name is Aryeh Neier. He is now the national executive director. He's a very young, very brash, very bright, very ambitious young man, who I think will do a creditable job for ACLU, but through certain characteristics, I think has certain dangers for the organization.What he did to me, in order to insure the fact that the fiftieth anniversary program would not succeed and therefore my candicacy would not be advanced, was to pirate a part of the operation. To insist that because we were operating in New York, his affiliate could properly claim 50 percent of all the money we raised in New York really put the finishing touches on the fund-raising possibilities. He came up with what I think are preposterous assertions with regard to what he had intended to do in that particular year that were justifications for, as I say, his piracy of the fiftieth program and his exploitation of it, not just for the financial benefit for his affiliate, but for his personal ambitious goals. He doesn't happen to be one of my favorite people, and I knew, kind of, at the time what he was about; but I didn't think he was quite as deliberate and bald in his effort as proved to be the case.At any rate, the fiftieth anniversary program went down the drain. Some things were done, very few, and the leadership of the national organization changed in the course of that year. It may have, in that sense, been an interesting crucial year. In one sense, it was part of my undoing, because I wore myself out, or wore myself down, in the course of trying as hard as I did. It may have been a much more important factor than I can account for in the dissolution of one marriage and the beginning of another.

1.15. Tape Number: VIII, Side One (August 28, 1972)

Gardner

Mr. Monroe, at the end of the last tape, we had been talking about the fiftieth anniversary celebration of ACLU and of the changes in your personal life at that time. Would you like to continue on that?

Monroe

Well, in the course of the fiftieth anniversary program, I renewed a fond acquaintance with a person that I've known for a number of years in the American Civil Liberties Union, who, as it just happened coincidentally, was on her way to New York, leaving Seattle, Washington, and was interested in taking a job. She was clearly the most competent person that we could find at that time and hire for the program, and in the course of our work together, I as director and she ultimately as associate director, developed something more than an acquaintance and more than just fondness. I fell in love with Laura, and she with me; and that led in turn to my, at a later time, divorcing my second wife, Vivian. Now Laura is my wife, and we [will] move to San Francisco together. For all of what I still think was the kind of down and depressing failure of the fiftieth anniversary program, by reason of all of the impediments, handicaps and obstacles that had to be overcome (I think I detailed those in my last tape), out of this came a new relationship, a new life, and in a sense was preparatory to what I am about to do this week: leave the ACLU; leave ACLU employment; and return to San Francisco State to resume my teaching duties there again.

Gardner

Since you mentioned returning to San Francisco State, this might be a good place to discuss the case and the trial that you went through, "trial" used in both the legal and psychological senses, making it possible now for you to return to San Francisco State in a teaching capacity.

Monroe

There's an interesting rounding-out of both history in the general sense and personal history in the more particular sense. I came to ACLU determined to do everything I could to defeat Propositions 5 and 6 in the employment here, to enlist the ACLU in that cause, and to defeat the Levering Oath. Having failed that at that time, I never lost my interest or my concern to root this thing out whenever it was possible and in the course of time. Then, in the sixties, came a series of United States Supreme Court decisions involving loyalty oaths comparable to the Levering Oath, out of Arizona, out of the state of Washington, out of New York state. These states were more favorably situated, clearly, because Earl Warren was chief justice of the United States Supreme Court; and it would have been difficult, I think, for Warren to have accepted a case challenging the Levering Oath, since he had asked that that Levering Oath be enacted.At any rate, by 1966 or '67, it looked as though we might be able here, through court action, successfully to dislodge the Levering Oath. This was a matter that I discussed with Al Wirin and Fred Okrand, our staff counsel at that time. It was their view that what we should do is to undertake a taxpayer's suit and find an appropriate individual who was both a taxpayer and a respected individual in the community.We selected Robert Vogel, who had been a chairman of the board of directors here, who's a well-known Quaker--of course, Quakers have a historic and traditional opposition to oaths. We selected Bob as a taxpayer, went to superior court before Judge Robert Kenny, as it fortuitously happened; and of course, Kenny ruled in our favor. That case was then appealed by the county; and ultimately, in the state supreme court, we got a ruling in line with the four or five United States Supreme Court decisions holding that a negative oath of this type violates the First Amendment, that it's vague and overly broad and does not specifically declare the crime that one must not commit if he takes such an oath and so forth. On pretty clearly First Amendment grounds, though, the California Supreme Court overturned, reversed itself in a sense--and of course, by that time the court was made up of, I think, almost completely different individuals, with maybe one exception--struck down the oath, and that was that. In that sense, I had fulfilled my mission and had done better than I might have expected in a relatively short period of time, as things go, having achieved the objective that I set for myself many years before.Then, of course, the personal dimension of the matter began to merge in my feelings and my thinking, that if I had been right about the oath then, in saying it was unconstitutional, and if ultimately the courts had decided that I was correct, then there might be a basis on which I could bring an action on my own behalf for some kind of redress for the dislodging, for my career, for the--"pain" is too strong a word--for the discomfort which I'd been subjected to; and it was worth at least a try. I prevailed upon Wirin and Okrand to begin such an action on my behalf, with a view to saying, in effect, that when people are damaged and injured in this way by the state, the state has an obligation to afford them redress, to make right, to make whole their condition, so that in that particular case, fairness is achieved; but, more important than that, to be assigned to other people, that it is safe in a sense to take a forward position for a good cause because there's a chance that if you win, if you're right, if you believe you're right, then you will be restored--if not completely, in some measure.The case went into court. First we filed a claim with the state personnel board, and that was denied, and then ultimately we were ready to go into superior court. It went, then, not before Judge Kenny, but before another judge, a highly conservative judge. Of course, he turned the matter down forthwith, and sustained a demurrer entered by counsel for the state college trustees; and then the matter went up on appeal. It became almost immediately evident to Al Wirin and Fred that it was a weightier matter than they either had time or interest to carry, and so Al decided that he would take this case to a well-known, very prominent attorney locally and ask him to handle it.Sam [Samuel O.] Pruitt, of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, one of the major law firms locally, had been counsel for the California Real Estate Association in support of Proposition 14. He was hired as their counsel, and he plugged his case vigorously and effectively--ultimately lost. In the course of that, he indicated to Al, who was opposing counsel, that at some appropriate time, he might be willing to take a case for the ACLU, probably by way of balancing his record. He's a pretty good guy, and I think his Proposition 14 service was a purely financial and professional one.Apparently it wasn't very difficult to persuade Sam Pruitt to take my case, and Pruitt agreed to do so, and from that point on, on appeal, in the court of appeal and then in the state supreme court, Pruitt was my lawyer. He involved a number of the younger members of the firm, and ultimately, rather to my surprise, I must say, and also disappointment, I won my case: that is, I won a court decision holding that I was entitled to be reinstated at the college. I had asked, in the course of my petition, for back pay--namely, the differential between what I have earned here with ACLU and what I would have earned had I been continued in my employment at San Francisco State--and restoration of my pension rights for the full span of years from 1947 to the present. The court agreed with one of my pleas, that I was entitled to reinstatement. They declined to give me back pay, indicating that I sould be satisfied with the vindication involved, that because of a statute of limitations and because of laches and other technicalities in the law, I was not entitled to back pay. But if I paid back what I would have contributed to the pension program, I was entitled to a pension status from 1947 to 1950 and from 1968 on to the present and to the end of my employment with the college.So it was only a partial victory; it seemed a little hollow to me at the time. At any rate, in that sense, I won what I am now going to enjoy, namely, the right to return to the institution from which I was discharged in 1950, vindicating and fulfilling what was then an overstated promise that I would one day return to the college, as I told the students at their mass meeting. I had doubted that very considerably through the intervening years, but now I can make good that promise, and I intend to in the middle of September of this year.

Gardner

What was the chronology of the case? How long did it take actually in court?

Monroe

It took about a year and a half, which is a fairly short time for such things to transpire. Let me see. The original case was filed in the early part of 1968 and the decision came down on.... No, excuse me, it is longer than that--nearly three years. It came down on December 31, 1971, so it was nearly four years.

Gardner

And a happy New Year, 1972.

Monroe

Yes. That was a kind of interesting New Year's gift. Yes, it was. It took longer than I thought it had. But that is the normal course of things on appeal. The courts are jammed and cluttered up with all kinds of prosecutions for meaningless crimes, as I think I've stated earlier in the record; and therefore it does take a long time for matters of this kind to get through superior court, through the court of appeals, and to the state supreme court. And, of course, the state did not appeal this decision to the United States Supreme Court, and so that decision stands.

Gardner

To wrap up the many strands of your personal life, a question of curiosity more than any other, I'd be interested to know where your children are, your many children, at this point.

Monroe

Well, I have many children now, in the course of three marriages. My oldest child is now thirty-two. She's married; she's living in the state of Washington. It was her misfortune--and again, I guess I'm repeating myself; I did mention it earlier--to be called Marilyn Monroe, because that seemed a very good name for a Monroe child, quite before the more famous lady by that name was even known to us. The giving of that name to her, I think, may have had something to do with the development of her personality. She is a shy but warm and affectionate person. I think she's doing very well. She's finished college and is an elementary school teacher. They had taught for a time in California down in the desert near the Salton Sea, decided to move to greener climes and did so, and now they are living and working in the state of Washington.Next, chronologically, is my son Michael, named Michael Ward Monroe, Ward for his mother's maiden name. Michael is a handsome, strapping lad, now of twenty-four or twenty-five, very close to his mother, closer I think than his sister felt or was. First children have a much more difficult time than those that come after them, I think. I don't know whether the fact that he was a boy and she was a girl made the difference, but at any rate, I think his mother's death had a stronger impact on him than it did on his sister. One never knows about such things; my handling of the matter may have been at fault. At any rate, he was involved closely in my second marriage, and, in the joining of two families, had a difficult adjustment time for a while.Now after being in and out of college and university over a period of five, six, seven years, [he] has returned to the University of California at Berkeley and, everything being favorable still, will complete a bachelor's degree. He's decided to concentrate and major in the new field of environmental protection, ecology and pollution problems. I don't know whether he'll be able to get employment when he finishes that or not, but at any rate, he will have completed college. Beyond that, I think probably Mike will be a steady, and sensible, and pretty attractive person. Both of those children are, in my view, attractive, personable, good to look at--maybe endowed with some of their mother's good looks, rather than from the other side of the family.Then, with my second marriage, I married Vivian Mandel. She brought with her two sons, Eric and Jonathan, who were respectively ten and seven and a half when they moved into our household. We were then a family of six--my two children, her two children, and she and I.It was, in some senses, a difficult family adjustment problem, although for a number of years, my work involvement and my life with Vivian was good. She worked with me in the ACLU, had a large hand in initiating the Arts Division which I referred to earlier, and then I helped her and she developed for herself a separate career as executive director of the Constitutional Rights Foundation.The Constitutional Rights Foundation was the first tax-deductible entity in Southern California, formed a number of years ago so that a few people could make contributions to ACLU that would be tax-deductible. We never really pushed the thing. There didn't seem to be time for it, and admittedly I didn't quite understand well enough the value of a tax-deductible adjunct.Viv took that over, and in a sense, the foundation went its own way, separated from ACLU; but that has provided her, and I'm gratified that this is true, a career, one of respect, and a pretty good income, so that when I got around to the question of divorcing her, it was not as difficult for me as it might have been if she had been more dependent upon me.Within two years of that marriage, a fifth child was born, my youngest child, Jaymie, named by her mother. Monroe being a Scotch name, Jaymie seems to go well with it. Although Vivian is Jewish, she never made much of a thing about Jewishness, even with her children and moving into a non-religious home, any religious or specifically cultural thing dropped out of her life, their life, and my life. Jaymie is a beautiful little child now of eleven and a half; she'll be twelve next year. I think my divorce has been, probably, a highly unsettling thing for her, but she's coming through pretty well, and I expect that she will survive that and develop to be an interesting and attractive person.Now, in my new marriage, I have three new children, stepchildren. Laura had two daughters by her first marriage (this, incidentally, for her is a third marriage; third time being a charm or something like that, it may work out well), Peggy and Claudia, now respectively twenty-four and twenty-one. Peggy is married to a young student at Harvard law school who has just completed his first year of law school, brilliantly. She works as a social worker, rather unhappily, in the maze of social work in Boston, Massachusetts, and the environs. Claudia has been in and out of college and universities, at the present time is out, living alone, in Boston, and is still kind of searching for herself and what she wants to be and do. Both girls are very attractive, bright and interesting people.Laura's youngest child is a boy, Anthony David Ober, who is just a couple of months older than Jaymie, so they're just about at the same point in time. Tony was born in January, Jaymie in March; he will be twelve next January, she, next March; so they're very close together chronologically. They're rather different children. Tony is quick, bright and energetic, just a dynamo of energy.He has lived with us this past year, and the matter of Laura's securing custody of him was one of the problems we overcame this past year and a half or two years. He's been in Seattle with his father through the summer; he will return in September. He'll meet us in San Francisco, and he'll be with us the coming year. Thereafter, I don't know whether he will continue to stay with us or return to his father.He's a bright and happy child and I think he'll do well in school. Jaymie does well in school. They have a kind of interesting love-hate relationship, which I think may turn more to love than to hate as time goes on. The sibling rivalry and the special qualities of that rivalry now are a little sharp at times for both of them, but I'm sure they'll both make their adjustment to it, and in the years ahead, develop respect and maybe even love for each other.

Gardner

Does your second wife have custody of Jaymie?

Monroe

Yes, Vivian has custody of Jaymie. Marilyn is in Washington; Mike is in Berkeley. Eric lives in Santa Cruz; he finished University of California at Santa Cruz. Jonathan is in Portland. He went a year to Reed College, then dropped out of that and has been involved in a community college program of some sort, kind of working and going to school, thinking and studying. He's having a difficult time finding himself, too.So the boys are all gone, and Viv and Jaymie are left here. Vivian has a housekeeper, and they live in the house that Helen and I first moved into and refurbished and re-modelled and added to. It's a comfortable place for Viv and Jaymie, and I'm delighted that they have a comfortable place to live and relatively secure professional status. Jaymie has one more year at Mt. Washington School; beyond that, I don't know what Viv's plans are going to be.

Gardner

In a week, or even less, I suppose, you'll be in San Francisco, and in another three weeks, you'll be back in front of a class teaching. Exactly what will you be teaching?

Monroe

Well, as I understand it, my assignment for the fall semester will include twelve hours of teaching, which is standard at the state college or state university level. The basic course will be a course entitled Literature and Society in the English department, a three-unit offering with which I have complete freedom to do with as I choose. What I want to do in that course, and I hope I'll be well enough prepared and I hope I can succeed, is to help the students who take it come to some better understanding of democratic principles in American society as they have developed and as they are illuminated through particular pieces of literature. The most obvious kind of thing is the Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Stories, novels, plays--I want to use [Arthur] Miller's The Crucible, and I'm looking now for novels or plays which illuminate the McCarthy era. I was just discussing this evening the possibility of using the movie, Point of Order, the recasting of the Army-McCarthy hearings, which really began the downfall of Joe McCarthy. He exposed himself to the American people at that time, and what they saw they didn't like. I want to use pieces of literature that reflect how the system works. Then I think I have in mind a final unit or portion of the course on utopias, [Aldous] Huxley's Brave New World, [George] Orwell's 1984, on the horrendous side; and I'm inclined to use Charles Reich's book, The Greening of America, something on the upbeat, on the more affirmative side. I'm not sure that Reich's predictions are accurate, but I think they will stimulate; and I hope the students, if I decide to use that book, respond to it.I want, though, not to return--and this is one of my more difficult problems--to the classroom with ten or fifteen books in mind which I will require students reading, and my talking about them, or their discussing them, in that kind of fixed way. If I can work out a combination of some appropriate direction or leadership on my part and an individualized program for each of the students in which he reads as much as he can about whatever he finds most interesting and compelling in the whole framework--and goodness knows, it's a large enough framework, literature and society--so that there is some degree of individual motivation. I just don't think people learn well by being told what they should learn. I think they learn only really what they need to learn, what they want to learn. It's that combination--I used to do that in my teaching. Whether I can come back to an appropriate formula in this particular field again, I don't know; I'm going to try.Related to that course will be another three-unit offering for a more select group, a smaller group of students, maybe only fifteen, who, besides the Literature and Society course, will take a work-study-arranged course with me. These students I will want to assign or to help find institutions in the society where they can observe, in which they can be involved, by way of testing the operation of the institutions in relation to the principles; in short, the system ought to work this way, but it works this way-- the difference between should be and what is. The municipal court, for example, or the welfare offices, or the women's rights organizations...

Gardner

Or the ACLU.

Monroe

...or the ACLU, exactly! I think one or two or three of them may be placed with ACLU to get that contact with what's going on in the world, in the community, in the county, in the state, in their society. It's a kind of six-unit package which will constitute half of my program.A third course in public discussion, and I've always enjoyed teaching speech. I think I speak fairly well and have some skill in public discussion. Here, I have in mind that these will be upper-division students, have in mind turning them loose as quickly as I can on the four or five upcoming propositions on the ballot--the pros and cons of the death penalty, of the Wakefield initiative, of the obscenity initiative, of the marijuana initiative, of the farm labor initiative--and if they can develop themselves rapidly enough, then rather than have them simply discuss in the classroom these things, farm them out as a kind of speaker's service to clubs in the community, to luncheon clubs, to women's groups, to any group of people interested in hearing about the propositions. I even have the way-out scheme of getting them on television in some fashion, presenting objectively both sides of these major current social issues. I can't think of any better experience than this for kids who are interested in developing their ability to discuss and to speak.The final course, again a three-unit course, is for a fairly small group, eight or ten or so, of teachers of English, who are preparing and are in practice teaching or in internship in high school and college, who will meet there the problems of students at that level who have either great difficulty reading, lack of interest in reading, or who in some degree are functionally illiterate. Many of these I think will be blacks, some of them browns, but there'll be whites among them, too. Since this was my very early field of specialization, and since I'm presumptuous enough to think that not very much has happened in that field that I didn't know about twenty-five years ago, I come back to this old field, and I'll be working with those teachers in relation to their teaching assignments.So it's a fairly diverse kind of assignment. The major mechanical attribute officially is that I will have a Tuesday and Thursday teaching schedule, nothing earlier than eleven o'clock, a time of day by which I am alive. Earlier, I would have problems. And I will teach into the afternoon and probably have a night program.

Gardner

I've been trying to figure out how to frame this question now for the last few minutes. Since you're returning to teaching at the age of sixty-two, what do you foresee as your future in teaching? Are there courses besides the ones that you'll be teaching this semester, which sound fascinating, other areas in which you'd like to teach?

Monroe

Well, I may, but I'm not crossing any bridges except the fall semester bridge. I think of it in two or three respects. First, I will return to teaching, I presume, and will very soon be sixty-three. That means that my years of teaching are numbered to two or three or four, possibly five, depending upon compulsory retirement years, and that in that dimension, I simply expect to fill out the rest of my professional career reporting to class and teaching as well as I can, for whatever satisfactions it has.Second, it may very well be that the experiment of the first semester will lead me to go in more heavily, and I may find a following among the students in, let's say, the Literature and Society program, and that may be the bulk of my second semester teaching. Or, on the other hand, I may do better in the public discussion or speech area; I may shift in that direction. I'm going to feel my way on that.Then, in terms of long-range professional involvements, I must confess I am a little amused by hearing from my old advisor at Stanford and my very good friend, Holland Roberts, who, when he learned that it was possible for me to come back to San Francisco State, urged me to do it, because he said that education needs leadership today more than ever and that I have only to appear on the scene and in no time at all, I can be advanced to the college presidency or something. He sees for me a twenty-five year career, picking up where I left off before and simply carrying on. I'm amused, and I guess that's my dominant attitude toward that. I think there's no reality in this at all.I think there is literally no possibility today in the American society for the development of effective educational programs at any level. The people, the American people, do not understand education, even though they pay lip service to it. They do not accept their obligation to pay for education; and with the priorities of the society so distorted, and our resources being so drained in wasteful, destructive, murderous processes, I don't see the schools ranking at all in the order of priorities. Until the people want good education and good schools, we won't have them. If I've learned anything at all from my past twenty years' experience, it is that you do not continue to beat your head against an immovable stone wall. You find a place where you can move it a little bit and you settle for that.So I do not subscribe to Holland's view, but to be a little more optimistic, and not to think of this as just a kind of serving out of my time, since I have always wanted to write and have never written, I may just find it possible, if my teaching program will permit it and as soon as I can get over the early problems of preparing myself and feeling confident about teaching, maybe I'll find time to do some writing. And who knows? The Great American Novel may yet come out of this experience.

Gardner

It might very well. Let me ask a twofold question, then, resultant from that. First of all, do you see any future ties between yourself and the ACLU after your twentyyear alignment? Beyond that, as a second part of the question, what do you foresee for the ACLU without you?

Monroe

Well, of course, I go to San Francisco with an inseparable tie to ACLU. Laura will be taking on a job there as associate director of the Northern California affiliate, giving her a chance to continue her now fairly long career with ACLU, and to be involved in the kind of work that she loves and does so very effectively. In that sense, it will be impossible for me to separate myself from ACLU.I do not intend, when I go to San Francisco--I'll put it one way--to meddle in the affairs of the Northern California affiliate. I don't know whether I will be asked to do anything or not. If I am, I will decline it, because in the practical sense, I've had enough of ACLU involvement for quite a while. After a year, or two, or three, who can tell?As far as ACLU itself is concerned, I think it has a long, long lifeline. Whereas I came to ACLU for more specific [reasons] and out of more personal concerns, and, as I've reported earlier, took the job here for a short period of time until I could get back into teaching, as I became more and more involved in the ACLU, I began to develop two kinds of feelings which I guess are contradictory.One is that the ACLU is one of the most important organizations in the country. It has a unique, unique mission; it has a unique manner and approach to problems; it offers at once the immediacy of being concerned in the things that are vital at a particular time, but psychologically and, in a sense, legalistically, the distance that gives an organization more perspective on things. I think over the years, ACLU has made an enormous contribution to the stability of the society and to its long-term health and growth.On the other hand, the other side of the coin has been my realization that ACLU cannot save the world. It is not either powerful enough or big enough; it doesn't have the resources; it is limited in its reach, as well as its grasp; and for that reason, ACLU may perform only one very important mission, fulfill one purpose.I expect major and massive changes to occur in the American society in the next fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years. I don't know whether there'll be a revolution; I hope it doesn't have the violent quality of a revolution. I think massive changes must be effected. I think they're overdue; each one of the major problems--the problems of blacks, of the Chicanos, of the minorities generally; the problems of the poor people; the problems of the wasting of our resources, the crapping up of the environment--all of these will be solved and must be solved by major changes, maybe in the governmental structure, maybe in the redistribution of wealth. I would myself favor some kind of socialist government or arrangement here--I think of myself as a socialist, with a small "s."But no eventuation from these processes of massive change would be tolerable to me if that society at that time, the people living in that society, did not retain and carry through with them a respect for and an understanding of the substantive elements of the Bill of Rights, the value of free speech--not the suppression of speech as we see in other societies that have turned to socialism--the right of the people to assemble, the protections against government that are embodied in that Bill of Rights. I see that as maybe the historic, ultimate contribution of ACLU, to be the major element or a major element in carrying through into that future society the meaning of the Bill of Rights for people at that time.You can say it in fairly small terms: it'll be a major, very difficult undertaking; but I think ACLU may be able to do it, and I think it's the only organization in this society that has the commitment and possibly, as it grows and strengthens, the skill, expertise, and dedication that can do that. I expect it to be a dominant voice, and increasingly so, through the process of these major changes, and then to be existent and effective and respected in that later time, whatever the character of that society is, whatever its goals, and whatever the processes are by which life is carried through then, that ACLU will be part of it. And so it's in this sense, with that expectation, and with that belief, that I have some sense of satisfaction in having been an element in building ACLU here, and nationally, if that product is the final product of the organization.

1.16. Tape Number: VIII, Side Two (August 28, 1972)

Gardner

On this last side of the last tape, I thought we could start out by going through some of the personalities with whom you've come into contact through the years. To start with, in the last issue of Open Forum, there was a picture of you on a stage with Martin Luther King, and I'd like to hear of your association with him.

Monroe

It was a very brief association. King came here in the summer of 1963, when he was just getting his national crusade underway, partly to expose himself and his views to the Los Angeles metropolitan community and partly to raise money. By that time, ACLU had become more involved in civil rights matters, and as I said earlier, the sixties for us, if there were a single priority, it was the civil rights movement and our support of that movement. As McCarthyism had been the emphasis in the fifties, civil rights, integration, desegregation were the emphases in the sixties.King came; I was part of the committee that arranged for a mass meeting at Wrigley Field, one of the largest that had been held here; and that evening a fund-raising event was held at the home of Burt Lancaster, then in Beverly Hills (not their Bel-Air mansion, which had burned down the previous year). King spoke there, I introduced him, and that was the extent of my contact with him. I can say that I shook his hand and spoke to the man. I had the impression of a truly magnificent individual, but that was the limit. I never saw him again; I never had personal contact with him again.

Gardner

Another of the men with whom you were pictured was Cesar Chavez. Is this fairly similar?

Monroe

Yes, it's quite similar. At our garden party in 1966, we selected Cesar as the honoree, as I am to be the honoree this year, and he agreed and came. We had a magnificent turnout for him. This was at the very beginning of the very exciting work that he was doing. I was familiar enough with the history of efforts to organize agricultural workers, and clearly, he's the first one who has had any degree of success at all in that field. The others were either killed, or tarred and feathered, or run out of town, or treated appropriately by the Associated Farmers and their related groups.Cesar at that time was a modest, retiring kind of person. There again, all I did was to introduce him, and he spoke and we shook hands; but, again, the quality of strength is evident in his person, in his eyes, in his handshake, and to a large extent in his voice. He is quite articulate.He had with him his company of people from their office in Delano, and the admiration with which they regarded him was a reflection of his very real, very sincere effort to do the virtually impossible, to bring transient agricultural workers--many, most, Chicanos, poor whites, Filipinos, people of this kind--into a labor organization and give them some opportunity to make a decent living for themselves.

Gardner

Three men with whom you're much more familiar, because you've worked much more closely with them, are the three attorneys who are identified with the ACLU, notably, of course, Mr. Wirin, and also Mr. Okrand and Mr. Sperber.

Monroe

I was checking old Open Forums today to discover when it was that Al Wirin first appeared on the scene here. It was 1933, so he would have been around in this community and with ACLU for nearly forty years.As a matter of fact, these three represent a very interesting relationship among themselves, complementing and supplementing each other. Al is, as I've known him over the years, I think one of the most creative, imaginative lawyers that I've known. I had known no lawyers at all before I came here. Al was one of the first people I met here, and I began to work with him. Whatever I've learned about the law, I think I've learned from Al. As much as I know--that isn't very much.Al has always been the person to whom I could go with a problem, describe the problem and the infringement of the deprivation or the abuse of rights that I saw in it, and Al would always formulate or always be able to formulate a manner through which ACLU could attack that problem. This hasn't been true of many other lawyers; as a matter of fact, it's not so true of either Fred or Larry. Al, therefore, has been, if the term is right, the mastermind of our legal program here over the years. I'm very fond of Al. Al has his cupidities and eccentricities, and he's a very complex personality, but he and I have always had a very, very friendly, very fond and warm relationship. And I will miss Al when I leave.Fred, on the other hand, is a very industrious, hardworking, energetic technician in the law, a very good one. It is Fred who remembers the case citations, and it is Fred who goes to the library and digs out the stuff. It is Fred who writes the basic briefs, which Al then edits. In that way, they have been a good working team. They complement each other.For a number of years, I tried very hard to get both Al and Fred to turn their attention to the enlistment of more volunteer lawyers. If we had only two lawyers, they could do only what two lawyers could do, but if we had two lawyers and ten volunteers, we could do that much more. Neither one of them either was interested or understood how to address himself to that problem. When Larry Sperber joined the staff, six, seven years ago now, he took on that dimension of the problem, and in that sense, he fitted into the gap that Al and Fred left. Larry, I must say, has done, at the present time, a magnificent job of organizing our Lawyers' Division, of marshalling volunteers, of being a field general in a sense, in those cases--the Watts case, the San Fernando Valley cases--where it's been necessary to deal with a large number of lawyers, assigning problems to them and seeing that they get the work done.So the three of them have been, in the last, say, five, six years, a very, very good working team. Now we need more lawyers because there's more to be done. We'll be adding younger lawyers. I think youth now is maybe the element we need more than anything else on our legal staff. Al is seventy-three, Fred is fifty-five, and Larry is fifty-five. When you get in those years, you begin to lose some of your zip and some of your inclination to think up new problems, because if you think up new problems, then you have to solve them. It's better not to think of them.

Gardner

That doesn't seem to be a disease that's bothered you, though.

Monroe

Well, it's coming on.Younger lawyers, I think, with more energy, more zest, more--excuse the expression--piss and vinegar, are now needed. We just hired one. I would hope in the years ahead, the next two or three, that two or three more lawyers can be hired. There is great value in having a staff lawyer, or a staff of lawyers. Volunteers are great--Sam Pruitt did a magnificent job, or his firm did, for me; Bayard Berman really went far beyond the call of duty in his work for ACLU--but these are rare things. Volunteer lawyers can do certain things, they can't do other things. They can't be expected, really, to give longtime commitments or to make the practice of ACLU law a twenty-four-hour commitment. So, with an enlarged legal staff and now a large body of available volunteers, I think we are hauling and we can haul important freight.

Gardner

You've seen a lot of board chairmen come and go in twenty years. You mentioned that it might be best, in dealing with them, to go through them in a chronological way. If your memory is good, go ahead.

Monroe

Yes, my memory is good. [laughter] I was going through some old papers of mine the other day, and I came on the handwritten text of a telegram that I sent to my first board chairman, Jerome McNair, dated May 16, 1952. I addressed him at his office at 215 West Seventh Street, Los Angeles, as follows: "Pleased and honored to accept position executive director ACLU Southern California branch. Understand salary $6,000 a year, one month paid vacation annually, moving expenses to Los Angeles. Understand that conditions discussed with board, and in recent letter, form basis for my appointment and acceptance. Will begin work July 1. Cordial greetings to you and members of the board." The passage about the recent letter referred to the interest of some members of the board that I take an oath here that I wasn't a member of either the Communist party or the American Nazi party, in conformance with the 1940 resolution--which, of course, I refused to do. I worked that out satisfactorily so that everyone was happy. Jerome McNair was my first chairman. He was chairman for two or three years after I came. He was a fine gentleman, very friendly, very warm, very supportive; an older man and a little worried about some my innovations, but not seriously so.

Gardner

What was he in private life?

Monroe

He was a businessman, lived in Eagle Rock, beside Occidental [College] campus. Nice home, a lovely old wife who died recently. He has since died. I had an enormous liking for him and respect for him.He was followed by Ed Cooke, who was one of the three that voted against my employment. Ed and I had a very cagey time with each other, always very proper and very polite. He also was a little worried; he was a quite conservative person. He later became a judge, appointed, I guess, by Pat Brown, and is now dead. Ed was always proper, but wary and concerned about, as I say, my innovations, my doing things differently.Cooke was followed by Dr. Robert Pettengill, who made my life miserable at that time. This was along in '56, '57. The worst impact of the McCarthy era was over, and we were crawling out of that, but Pettengill was still stuck back there in Joe McCarthy's time. Partly, I think, out of that concern, partly, as I learned later, because he wanted to get away from his wife. He had a girlfriend in town some-where that he was living with; he was a professor at USC then. He would come to our office daily to look in on things and see if everything was all right, then disappear for several hours and then return. [laughter] If anyone called, we were to say that he was out briefly and he would return their call. I was not very happy with Dr. Pettengill. He's in Michigan or someplace now. He was a pompous and self-righteous kind of individual who turned out to be a kind of a rascal.Pettengill was followed by Bob Vogel, who was a very solid and very helpful board chairman. Bob had the value of being a conciliator and could resolve, in Quakerly fashion, the conflicts among groups on the board. By that time, things were rolling, or beginning to roll, and there were a number of times when Bob had to be called in to support me with things. He always gave that support, and I have a great fond feeling for him.Bob was followed by Lloyd Smith, who was chairman for a number of years, five or six years. Lloyd is the son of a Mrs. Ralph Smith, who was a member of the board when I came here. She was an elderly and already kind of senile woman, [of] great wealth, a kind of distinguished lady. I never could quite carry through a conversation with her, because it didn't always come through coherently, but she did give us money and she was on the board and she professed to understand what we were trying to do. This is Lloyd Smith's mother that I'm describing now.He came on our board, I guess, after she resigned from the board. We gave a fund-raising cocktail party, and she had a very deep prejudice about drinking cocktails and what-not, so she resigned from the board in a kind of huff. Lloyd, who I think is more understanding of that sort of thing, in a sense replaced her. He then became chairman.Lloyd is a man of very considerable means, very humble and self-effacing and modest, but very bright, and in some circumstances a fairly strong person. My relationship with Lloyd was always very friendly, very warm. He respected me; I respected him.Lloyd was succeeded by George Slaff, who became known to me as counsel for Sam Goldwyn. I had known about him earlier. I was responsible for proposing him for election to the board. He came on and impressed the board, and when Lloyd decided not to run for chairmanship again, George was nominated and elected. George was chairman for five years, I guess.Those were good years for ACLU; George was an able chairman. He has a little tendency to overspeak and be a bit pompous on occasion, people think of him that way, but is a genuinely generous guy and, again, I consider him a very good friend of mine.George was succeeded by Marvin Schachter, who is the present president. Marv came to the ACLU board after a period of service with the Friends Committee on Legislation. He is quite interested in politics and in the legislative process. He was our Legislative Committee chairman for a time. He's a well-organized, well-spoken person, and effective, I think. I have certain disagreements philosophically and in terms of policy with Marv, and I think as a matter of fact Marv is not terribly unhappy that I'm leaving. He looks forward, I think, to playing a stronger hand in the control of the policy of the program and I think feels that he can do that with the new director.But with a couple of exceptions, I have been blessed with good chairmen (never a chairwoman, and that's been one of the unfortunate things about the organization), people who respected me, who had confidence in me, trust. It wasn't a matter of their letting me do what I wanted to do, they were amenable to my reasons for doing what I thought needed to be done. Only in the case of Ed Cooke, who didn't get too much in the way, and Pettengill, who was a nuisance, did I have any problems with board chairmen or with board members. I think I've had with, again, just a handful of exceptions, good relations, friendship and friendliness, with members of the board of directors here.

Gardner

Among the names that I ran across most often going through the ACLU file were Ed Mosk and John Anson Ford. Can you talk about them for a while?

Monroe

Well, yes. They're quite different. Let me talk about John Anson Ford. John Anson Ford was a member of the [Los Angeles County] Board of Supervisors when I came here. He was an old man then; he's older, still, now. He's still alive. Insofar as it was politically possible for him, he had an interest in and a kind of commitment to ACLU. He was not, I think, a member, but whatever problems developed that could be dealt with through a supervisor, he was always available, always friendly, always sympathetic to the problem, and usually effective in doing something about it.He's a very religious man. I remember on one occasion we were discussing, and as a matter of fact, had virtually decided, I think, to enter court, file a suit, to have the cross on county property removed. This distressed John Anson highly, and he came to see me and plead that we not do that. We haven't done it, not for that reason, but because the logistics of the thing were never worked out. He's a great old man and a true democrat and liberal.Ed Mosk is a much younger man, brother of Stanley Mosk, and Ed's been on our board quite a long while. He was vice-chairman for a number of years. I think at one point if George Slaff had decided to step aside, that Ed would have accepted the chairmanship. He's highly respected on the board. He's a very sensible and sobering influence on the board. He speaks very well and from time to time has taken on legal assignments; he was heavily involved in our capital punishment program at the very early stages, he and Gerry Gottlieb. So Ed's been a good guy and a very helpful member of the board.

Gardner

Another board member of a long time ago was Wilson Riles, who is now state superintendent of education.

Monroe

I think probably Wilson was the first black elected to our board. He was then the executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation here. He's come to that post from, I think, a teaching job in Arizona. He was then quite a young man, handsome and sincere, with all the qualities that made him attractive and a kind of lovable person. He came on the board, was elected to vice-chairmanship of the board--he and Bob Vogel were chairman and vice-chairman during Bob's term. He participated in board meetings, took some committee work, had a special sympathy for conscientious objectors. He came out of the liberal religious context.Wilson left our board only when he moved to Sacramento to take a job in the state Department of Education, and I think he's been a successful politician in the course of that, defeated Max Rafferty in the last election.Now, I think Wilson--and maybe it's a necessary thing but I'm sure it does impinge on some of his earlier principled views of life--has become now kind of accommodating politician. For example, this ought to be part of the history: I've been trying to reach Wilson for the last two weeks, personally, to discuss with him some of the things he can do in the campaign against the Wakefield initiative. And he does not return my calls. He asked one of his underlings to return the call on one occasion, and some very uninformed, if not stupid, young man came on the line and wanted to know what I wanted. I finally sent Wilson a wire to his home, imploring him to phone me; he has not yet phoned me.I suspect that this is his view that either an association with ACLU or with me may be a little too politically dangerous; or it may be that he wants to duck the Wakefield initiative thing entirely, which, it seems to me, is an outrageous evasion on his part. This is the thing that he, when he went to the state Department of Education, he was committed to advance: that is, the desegregation of schools. His preoccupation now with early childhood education suggests to me that he finds that a safer area in which to work, and of course it is. I'm not, at this point of history, condemning Wilson as a turnabout, but I'm disappointed and a little surprised that he seems to be, at least he gives me the appearance of, turning his back on what he stood for.

Gardner

One politician who has been close to you--and, in fact, I understand he is the landlord of ACLU's office--is Alan Sieroty.

Monroe

Alan Sieroty. Alan has been a gem. I've known Alan for many years here, before he ran for office, before he was elected. He's a very unusual guy, I think an intelligent and able person, trained as a lawyer, an effective politician. But Alan has never lost his humility and his friendly human qualities, which are much more pronounced than anything else about him. He's just a nice guy and a good man.Yes, he is our landlord. He and his sister own the building that our office is in, and some twelve years ago, when we were outgrowing our quarters on West Ninth Street, I called Alan and discussed with him the possibility of his having some office space somewhere. We were thinking then of the possibility of moving into the Eastern-Columbia building at Ninth and Broadway, but he urged us to move into our present building at 323 West Fifth, which then was totally vacant except for the restaurant, and at that time there was a jewelry store down on the street level. The second floor was completely vacant; the third and fourth, absolutely nothing. We finally agreed to move in and lived that way for a long while, just wide-open space, with desks, tables and things around; and then about four or five years ago, we prevailed on Alan to advance the money, some $25,000, to remodel the office as it is currently remodelled. He increased our rent from $200 a month for 3,000 square feet to $475 a month, in order to write off that advance. So he's been wonderful in that way, very generous, and pretty regular in attendance at board meetings, and counts his ACLU board membership as a very serious and kind of permanent commitment.

Gardner

Are there any other local politicians who have been involved closely?

Monroe

Not many. George Brown, of course, has been friendly to ACLU, and we've honored him on occasion. [State Senator] Mervyn Dymally has been friendly. Let's see, what others will there have been? Just offhand, Charlie [Charles H.] Warren has been helpful. There's no one individual who stands out here. We've had good working relations, of course, with the Democratic assemblymen and senators, and occasionally with a Republican legislator, though our posture with them has been, for the most part, one of pushing them to do things that they might not want to do. Our causes don't happen always to have been the most popular ones for them to take up and run with. So it's been a matter of pushing, and most legislators, even though they do understand and have some affinity for our work, maintain a kind of political distance from us because they don't want to be identified.Alan, in this respect, is so different from the others, possibly because he runs in a safe district. He's well known and probably, as long as he wants to be the assembly-man, will retain his seat. If he decides to run for higher office, then he may be dumped. He's unique in a sense, that he has identified with us, he's proud of it, it's part of his public record, and he makes no pretense about it.

Gardner

Two judges above all have been identified with ACLU. One is Robert Kenny, of course, and the other is Jerry Pacht.

Monroe

I was told when I came to Los Angeles that one of the people I should see here was Bob Kenny. I finally did and sat down with him, and found him a remarkable combination of grace and dignity and the ability to use the English language well, as well as being just the most amazing store-house of information--some large pieces, some minutiae, but it was all there; and all I had to do was to start Bob talking and a lot of interesting stuff came out. Among other things, he reached in his file when I made some comment about Earl Warren and my feelings about him at that time, drew out a handwritten letter of several pages from Earl Warren, reassuring Bob that he was 100 percent for civil liberties, civil rights and so forth. I took it with a grain of salt then, but Bob treasured that. Bob was attorney general under Earl Warren and one of the brightest, clearly one of the brightest, best-read, and most magnificent people in this community.Jerry Pacht, in his way, is also a charming and very interesting guy. I'm very fond of Jerry. My first experience with him was when, again in the federation days, Hannah Shields arranged a debate on KMPC involving Harold Levering and a guy whose name I've forgotten who is a notorious right-winger and American Legionnaire at that time, against Jerry Pacht and me. Jerry and I carried the negative on the oath and debated these two characters, neither of whom was very bright, and we clearly won the debate. That was my first experience with Jerry.Since then, he's practiced law, has run for public office, and is now a judge.Of course, our lawyers yearn for the days when Kenny and Pacht were available to hear writs because we could always count on getting the kind of decision that our cases deserved, not necessarily the one we asked for. That doesn't happen to be the case now. I don't know what Jerry is doing in court now, but he's far removed from that, as, of course, is Bob Kenny. One is so much younger that the other, but when Jerry is as old as Bob Kenny, he may be as rich in personality as Bob.

Gardner

Do you have any judges right now who are leaning slightly toward you?

Monroe

As a matter of fact, the judges in the superior court and the federal court here are notoriously--"conservative" is the wrong word--anti-civil liberties in their views. If we can't win on some very substantial point of law, we just have very little chance. What we try to do is to lose the case in the superior court as quickly as we can, so we can get up in the appellate court levels, where the judges are better. And of course, we have, I think, the best state supreme court in the country. That's some relief from the overburdening and constant pressure of not being able to get anything from our local judges.

Gardner

One name that's been closely associated with the ACLU office for a long time, from everyone's comments is Ruth Abraham. Could you speak about her for a while?

Monroe

Yes. Ruth is a relative newcomer; she thinks of herself now as a veteran. Bill Carpenter was one of our first employees. Well, the very first employed besides myself was Valentine Mitchell, whom I hired about six months after I started here. I think that's the way she has it worked out. At the end of this year, she will have put in her twenty years also. Val is an interesting, kind of erratic, temperamental character. She's still with us and represents some problem, really.Bill Carpenter was a young recent graduate who was our first chapter director. John McClung was a member of the staff for a number of years as our fund-raiser. Secretaries have come and gone. Katherine Walton came in, first as office manager, and then became chapter director. Hannah Shields was the editor. I did the editing of Open Forum for a little while, until I could get rid of it. Hannah Shields took it on and was editor for a number of years. She was followed by Esther Peck and Ed Cray; and Ed was followed by Harriet Katz, now Harriet Berman.Ruth has a great deal of energy. She's a quite attractive person, personable, people like her and she likes people; and over the years, she's done, I think, a creditable job of chapter organizing and maintaining our chapter program. She doubles in legislative work, too; she's also the legislative director. So it's been a fairly heavy load for her. She's had some personal kind of tragic events in her family life. I think of Ruth as having done a creditable job, and I would hope that she doesn't stay at the work too much longer, until she wears herself out either physically or emotionally, or until she's unable to keep up the kind of pace that she likes to keep up in meeting chapter groups in the evening all over Southern California. But, yes, Ruth, I will also miss.

Gardner

Friday, Ramona Ripston becomes the executive director of the Southern California ACLU. Could you comment on her?

Monroe

Yes. She's a very lovely, and bright, and articulate woman, coming from fairly long experience with ACLU in other parts of the country--New York and New Jersey. She has all the experience and preparation she needs. She has recently worked with the Urban Coalition in New York. Philosophically, intellectually, personally, and in terms of experience, she's fully equipped to do, I think, an excellent job. I think she will do things differently from the way I've done things--that's to be expected. Maybe it's a good thing. My present hope is that she will be able to build on the foundation that I think is there. Some staff changes need to be made. She will not be without problems, but I think she will know how to handle them; and I would expect, oh, in six months' time that she will have a firm hold on the matter here, and that the program will go zooming ahead.

Gardner

In closing, if you had some words of advice to pass along to her, a game plan, words based on experience you've had with ACLU, what would you say?

Monroe

I think it's quite important for her to keep her board informed and involved in the course of decisions being made, without letting the board run the organization or run her, but to be sure that she has their constant, steady understanding and support for what she proposes and carries forward. I would hope that she can continue to emphasize the grass-roots character of our membership here and to find ways of stimulating and promoting our chapter program, which I think is one of the most valuable elements of our work.Apart from that, I don't think Ramona needs my advice, frankly. I have been discussing a number of details and things with her, but I don't thing anyone can invent a formula for success for somebody else, particularly when that person doesn't need somebody else's formula and is perfectly capable of developing her own formula; and that she will do. Any advice that I give her is kind of empty and meaningless, anyway, because she knows what she's about and she'll get it done, but in her way and using her method, rather than my method. So, in a sense, advice is superfluous.