The wielding of excessive force bringing chaos, injury and death across American cities by officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement makes for painful viewing when captured by social media.
American history is checkered with federal, state and local police actions carried out against advocates of labor unions, marchers for civil rights, and anti-war protesters, among many others — and it can’t be sanitized or erased by those who prefer their history viewed through rose-colored lenses.
San Diego’s past also includes major government-sanctioned violence.
In the heart of downtown, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and E Street, the city’s worst street violence — the Free Speech Riots — emanated in 1912 from February through May when police and vigilantes violently assaulted members of the militant/anarchist labor union International Workers of the World, known as the IWW or “Wobblies.”
In January, the City Council had acted to curb public assemblies in the city of 45,000 residents at the behest of business and real estate owners. They feared an increase in the number of union members coming to San Diego to organize streetcar and construction workers — many of whom were immigrants — and to back radical factions in the ongoing Mexican Revolution. An armed group of Wobblies supporting a radical Mexican faction had assisted in a brief capture of Tijuana, then a border town with less than 1,000 people, in spring 1911 during an initial phase of the revolution.
The council passed an ordinance prohibiting gatherings within a six-block zone centered at Fifth and E, known as “Soapbox Row” or “Heller’s Corner” after the name of a local grocery store at the intersection. The location had been a focal point since the 1890s for free expression and speech-making, from socialists to the Salvation Army.
At the time of the council action, the local IWW chapter had merely 50 members. But over the next many weeks, many hundreds of Wobblies began arriving in San Diego to protest the ordinance and were attacked and arrested by police and police-encouraged vigilantes — one group called itself the horsewhip committee — when they assembled at or near the intersection.
Police used high-powered water hoses on a crowd of thousands downtown in March. At least two men were killed by police during the period, one from injuries to the groin suffered in a jail beating and the second fatally shot four times outside IWW offices after what patrolmen said was an attempted ax attack. Neither death was investigated, and Police Chief J. Ken Wilson described the protesters as “worse than animals.”
The brutality gradually extended to areas outside of downtown. The district attorney charged many violators not with misdemeanors for disturbing the peace or ignoring a city ordinance, but with felonies alleging conspiracy to violate a law. As the jail became overwhelmed with hundreds of prisoners and courts were clogged with trials, local officials and police gave vigilante groups carte blanche to act more violently.
One large group of Wobblies was trucked to Sorrento Valley by police and turned over to a citizen mob who brutally clubbed the men for hours. County supervisors authorized vigilantes to patrol the Orange County line, and in one incident, a posse of 400 men yanked 150 Wobblies off a southbound train at San Onofre, herding them to a cattle ranch where they slashed and wounded them with rifle butts and pickaxe handles.
An editorial in the Evening Tribune, owned by business potentate John D. Spreckels, asserted that the protestors “would be much better dead … they are the waste matter of creation and should be drained off into the sewer of oblivion.”
When nationally known labor anarchist Emma Goldman arrived on May 21 to attempt a speech, police soon escorted her back onto a Los Angeles-bound train but looked the other way as her companion Ben Reitman was kidnapped from their U.S. Grant Hotel room downtown by a citizen gang. He was placed traumatized aboard a midnight train only after hours of torture by a large gathering on Linda Vista Mesa where he had been stripped naked, branded on the buttocks with ‘I.W.W.’, tarred and covered with sagebrush.
The San Diego Union, also owned by Spreckels, rhapsodized over Reitman’s ordeal when it became public, applauding the mob’s insistence that a battered Reitman kiss the American flag and sing the Star-Spangled Banner before his release, all while taunted by the crowd screaming, “We’re Americans, and we’ll teach you to keep away from San Diego.”
By late spring the IWW had all but abandoned the fight in the face of the beatings and mass jailings, especially after smallpox broke out among the prisoners. If the IWW activities had continued indefinitely, the city planned to corral the people arrested at a stockade to be built at its penal farm on Torrey Mesa.
While much state and national criticism ensued against San Diego politicians and police, and a special representative of California Gov. Hiram Johnson held hearings in the city court house in late April, no one was ever prosecuted for the actions. State Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb failed in his effort to secure grand jury indictments against vigilantes.
Real estate businessman and key vigilante leader J.M. Porter told a committee convened by the American Federation of Labor, “We are fighting for our homes … only troops can stop us.” Soapbox Row lost its niche as a free-speech location.
David Smollar is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer. He lives in Tierrasanta.
