LOOMS OPEN UP NEW INDUSTRY IN CITY
To Assist Women in Selling Goods
Mrs. K. C. Gartz, Altadena, Is at Head of Society Engaged in Work
GLORIA COTTAGE TO BE DEDICATED
Opening of Infirmary at the Scripps Home Is Set for July 8
“Gloria Cottage,” the gift of Mrs. K. C. Gartz to the William A. Scripps Home for the Aged as an infirmary and rest home, will be formally opened on July 8, with a reception and house warming.
EMERGENCY LEAGUE INTERESTED IN PROJECT TO BETTER CONDITIONS FOR WOMEN
In order to afford comfortable quarters with homelike surroundings for working women and girls, a number of prominent society women of Altadena and Pasadena, under the leadership of Mrs. K. C. Gartz, have formulated a plan which will lead to the erection of a number of bungalows for their accommodation and which will ultimately develop into the establishment of a home for old people in Pasadena.
THE LITTLE CLUB HOUSE
Mrs. K. C. Gartz has under her wing a most novel and worthwhile plan for bringing people into touch with what is going on in the world of thinkers and doers. At her beautiful Altadena home she has built a lovely little club house which she offers as a sort of open forum for the presentation of interesting things from interesting people on every conceivable subject.
MRS. K. C. GARTZ HOSTESS FOR MEETING OF THE SEVERANCE CLUB
Members and guests of the Severance Club were the guests on Saturday evening of Mrs. K. C. Gartz at her residence on Mariposa Street, Altadena, for a very interesting evening. There were about fifty men and women who were seated at the long table in the garden court for the informal supper which preceded the program.
Paul Jordan Smith was the principal speaker for the program, having just returned from England, and speaking of Thomas Harding (sic), Arthur Mankin (sic), and John Burns.
FLOYD DELL HONOR GUEST AT PATIO SUPPER PARTY
Mrs. K. C. Gartz Entertains at Supper Party and Informal Evening Affair.
Honoring Floyd Dell, author of “Moon Calf,” and Mrs. Dell and also members of the Severance Club, Mrs. K. C. Gartz was the hostess at a charmingly arranged supper party at her home on Mariposa Street, Altadena, on Saturday afternoon.
TALKS ABOUT RUSSIA
At Mrs. Gartz’ little clubhouse in Altadena yesterday, Dhan Mukerji, the brilliant young Hindu poet and philosopher, spoke at length upon the Russian Revolution. So crowded was the meeting that it overflowed upon the lawn adjacent, about one hundred people being gathered together in interested attention under the trees.
MAX EASTMAN HEARD IN INFORMAL TALK
Eminent Socialist Poet Delights Audience at “The Cloister.”
Max Eastman, eminent Socialist, poet, and editor, who has been in seclusion in Southern California for several weeks, finishing a book which he says is titled “Humor,” emerged from his retirement yesterday afternoon long enough to address several hundred people at “The Cloister,” in Altadena, upon the subject, “Poetry and Progress.”
CITIZENS’ AMNESTY COMMITTEE
Pasadena Branch
A committee is being organized in every city and town of America to present to President Wilson a petition for amnesty for political prisoners. I wish to hear from all Americans who do not believe that men and women should be jailed for the mere expression of opinion.
KATE C. GARTZ, Altadena.
MILLION NAMES WANTED FOR PARDON PLEA
One million signatures by the third week in July is the aim of the General Defense Committee which is to present a petition demanding amnesty to President Harding then....Those who will make the journey to Washington in behalf of the 100 remaining federal war-opinion prisoners now include: Kate Crane Gartz, of Altadena, Cal., etc.
REPEATS HIS TREASON TALK
Pacifist Pastor Welcomed at Altadena Home. Women Friendly to Views. Church Condemned.
One of Pasadena’s millionaire homes was opened yesterday to Rev. I. F. Tanner, who again delivered the so-called “treason sermon.” He spoke at a peace meeting at the residence of Mrs. K. C. Gartz in Altadena. It was the minister’s first public address since the exciting incident in Los Angeles.
Taking “The War Proposition” for his subject, Dr. Tanner gave utterance to the same views which brought a storm of opposition the previous Sunday in the Los Angeles church. This time, however, he found sympathetic hearers since most of Mrs. Gartz’s guests are strongly opposed to war. This sympathy with the views which Los Angeles church people condemned was shown at a home from which one of the Gartz family went to Europe to serve with the French Ambulance Corps.
RICH WOMAN DEFENDS “REDS”
Mrs. Kate Crane Gartz, wealthy resident of Southern California, created a sensation when she arose at a meeting in Oakland, where her name was mentioned as a sympathizer with radicals and proceeded to defend herself.
Woodworth Clum, managing director of the Better America Federation, was in the middle of an address in which he was scoring radical and social political propagandists of the United States, etc.
ALTADENA WOMAN IN DRAMATIC DEFENSE
“Wealthy women are supporting radicalism,” boomed Woodworth Clum, managing director of the Better America Federation, at a recent address in Oakland. “There is Mrs. Kate Crane Gartz at Altadena, for instance. She—”
“She is here and will defend herself,” came a woman’s voice from the rear of the meeting hall, and Mrs. Gartz rose. For several moments, while the audience sat silent, she defended Max Eastman, whom Clum had accused of a recent campaign to finance radical interests, and herself.
“He is an idealist, not a conformist,” said Mrs. Gartz. She said she was a member of the Nonpartisan League. Clum and other representatives of the federation are touring California from their headquarters in Los Angeles. Mrs. Gartz is a wealthy resident of the exclusive suburb of Altadena.
LETTERS OF K. C. G.
MISS MARGARET WILSON,
White House,
WASHINGTON, D. C.
My dear Margaret Wilson: Because I am the sister of Charles R. Crane, who is a close friend of yours and your father’s, and having met you in Chicago, I am venturing to enlist your sympathy and love of justice in behalf of this high-minded man—Ricardo Magon—whom the Department of Justice has seen fit to put behind iron bars as a “common criminal.”
I am enclosing one of his letters to his adored wife, whom I saw only yesterday, living in abject squalor, but on a plane as far above her surroundings as either you or I could hold ourselves. She, too, has spent eight months in our filthy Los Angeles jail, ruining her health by the degrading work she was given to do—and all because she dreamed of a kinder, juster world, where all human beings may dwell in peace and happiness.
And while I am appealing to you to intercede with your father in behalf of this man, the George Washington of his country, Mexico, I wish to raise my voice in behalf of all our conscientious objectors. Such men have been released automatically in all other countries, even the most benighted, since the signing of the armistice. How can we think to stifle all the voices crying out for freedom and justice, by putting them in dungeons, and otherwise mistreating them?
America, once the beacon star of all the world’s oppressed, is now lagging far behind in leadership. What has become of the lofty words that spurred us on toward a realization of our ideals? Every man who utters them now is clapped into jail—even Debs, the most Christlike man in our country, for uttering the very words your father uttered. Our government by its blindness is driving the people toward a violent revolution. Please try to awaken your father before it is too late, and we are face to face with inevitable chaos. And please, in any case, let me send you some of the facts about this man, Magon, who is going blind in jail, and will never see his loved ones again.
Yours for more humanity in our public officials,
KATE CRANE GARTZ.
January, 1918.
MR. THOMAS LEE WOOLWINE,
District Attorney,
Los ANGELES,
CAL.
Dear Sir: I have called twice at your office, each time in company with a number of busy people, to discuss with you the case of Raoul Palma, the Mexican lad, son-in-law of Ricardo Magon, and accused of robbery and murder. It must have occurred to you to wonder that people whose time is occupied with important affairs, should consider it worthwhile to come to you about the case of a man indicted for such a crime. But there are aspects of this case which we are able to understand, and which you have failed to realize. We are acquainted with this boy, and the work in which he has been engaged, and the reputation which he has established in the movement for social justice. These things mean something to us, and are the basis for our belief that the boy is unjustly accused.
We have attended his trial, and listened to all the evidence which the state has been able to produce against him, and we are more than ever convinced that the accusation is baseless. We implore you to think of the endless burden of injustice which is heaped upon the weak and helpless by the strong and powerful, and the protests which this inevitably engenders; the bitterness aroused in the heart of social protestors by cases of police persecution such as this.
You are preparing here in Los Angeles another Mooney case, and the story of it will go all over the world. It will have its effect even in Russia and in Germany, as the Mooney case is doing today.
I tell you my soul has been outraged by the daily evidence of prejudice and injustice which I have seen in the conduct of this case. The persecution of a boy of a fine type, so high above the average that those charged with enforcing the law cannot understand him, or the idealism which he is preaching.
We should go to courts of justice as to a church, knowing that we shall be defended rather than persecuted. The whole system is bad enough, even when dealing with the guilty; when dealing with the innocent it is intolerable. Does it not occur to you that there should be a defender, as relentless in protecting the poor and despised, as the public prosecutor is in seeking for legal points against him?
I have been a pacifist I thought I was a non-resistant But the things which I have seen in connection with this case, have made me fear that that role is possible only for angels. I beg of you as a public official, with a sense of public responsibility, to realize the bitterness of feeling which this case is engendering, and at least admit this boy to bail, as you have done in cases far more flagrant.
I am so wrought up by this case of Palma that I cannot sleep nights, and am even now writing my protest in the wee small hours of the morning with aching heart and streaming eyes. I am not sure that I would feel so about it if it were an ordinary man unjustly accused. But Palma has a message, a message we must all hear, a message such as Tolstoi taught, which is nothing more or less than the “Brotherhood of Man.”
Yours truly,
KATE CRANE GARTZ.
October 16, 1919.
EDITOR,
The Star-News,
PASADENA, CAL.
I gave you credit for more intelligence and understanding than your editorial on Bolshevism displays.
Of course all capitalists are frightened today; they don’t want their privileges and dividends interfered with. But what about the workman, who creates this capital for them? Is it not about time for him to have a larger share in the production of his own hands?
This calling the workers “foul beings,” because they want a new social order, a little more justice, a little more leisure, is absurd.
In our Declaration of Independence we are told that we may revolt against injustices of government; this is not only a right, but a duty. Lincoln told us the same thing.
A good way to make Bolsheviks is to keep our boys in Russia, to jail all people asking self-determination, to continue the infamous “espionage law” a year after the armistice, and to imprison men and women opposed to war as a means for settling international disputes.
And we were right, were we not? Has anything been settled? Have we not more chaos and unrest than ever? Are we not starving to death, by our infamous blockade, men, women and children—not only of our enemy but of our ally?
What does our boasted Americanism mean? Does it mean standing for one’s country, right or wrong? Approving its brutal prison system, child-labor, the jailing of people because they belong to the “Industrial Workers of the World,” because they demand woman’s suffrage, or free speech?
Yes, it is time we woke up and rid ourselves of a system which allows poverty to exist, the crime which makes all other crimes.
Yours truly,
KATE CRANE GARTZ.
October 23, 1919.
EDITOR,
The Los Angeles Times,
Los ANGELES, CAL.
Dear Sir: Thanks for including me among those great names of “radicals”! I am proud to be the only woman. You give me credit for influence. I do not deserve. I know and admire Sinclair, also Harriman, and I have shaken hands with Steffens; I did not know Foster until you made his name so popular.
Because I want social and economic justice to all humanity, my name is anathema to you. But to how many thousands of people is the L. A. Times in that category—reactionaries, and radicals alike! Radicalism will harm no righteous cause, and will eradicate nothing but injustice, and if there were no wrongs there would be no revolution. I feel that I am in the best of company with our intellectual magazines (which I need not enumerate to you) backing the cause, and teaching truths which only blind men cannot see.
I may be a “parlor Bolshevik,” simply because I am not capable of being the real thing. But I know that I am living on the bounty of thousands of working men and women, and I am ashamed of myself for it. Until all have bread, and plenty of it, I resent eating cake, and shall fight with the fighters until no man must ask another man for a job, and until religion and education stop justifying war, and until profiteers are ashamed to face their victims.
Yours truly,
KATE CRANE GARTZ.
October 23, 1919.
EDITOR,
The Star-News,
PASADENA, CAL.
Dear Sir: I want to congratulate you on your hymn of hate in your front page editorial of this evening. I counted forty-seven words of hate in one half-column. I did not know there were so many in the dictionary. You have the satisfaction of knowing you have out-Kaisered the Kaiser. Anatole France said the other day, the greatest thing in the world is to hate hate. You evidently did not see it, or you would not be guilty of writing that editorial, which is only one of many your paper has published in the last few years.
Oh, for more understanding of this great age of Re-construction, and not just hate and slander for a people struggling for a saner system of civilization!
Yours truly,
KATE CRANE GARTZ.
November 2, 1919.
PROFESSOR IRA CROSS,
University of California,
BERKELEY, CAL.
Dear Mr. Cross: I admire you so much, and feel so humble in your presence, you being a college professor, and I only a sympathizer with the dispossessed, not a real student of economics as you are. But I note that you wish merely to “reconcile” Capital and Labor, admitting the necessity of two classes of human beings, workers and drones, forever. To perpetuate such a system is your idea of a just and happy society! For employers to be kind is to you the only solution for a distraught world. The employer can still go on piling up millions of profit, made from the broken lives of men, women and children toilers. Why should not the workers reap the benefit of their own toil, and not just make parasites of the rest of us? How can it be right for them to create all the good things of life, but never enjoy these things themselves?
No, the system is wrong, it must be changed. We must get rid of poverty, and you, a learned professor, ought to find out the way and tell the rest of us.
Yours truly,
KATE CRANE GARTZ.
November 13, 1919.
EDITOR,
The Star-News,
PASADENA, CAL,
> Dear Sir: Can’t you advise your editorial writer to use less violence in his tirades against Bolshevism and all other “isms” which he seems to have on the brain? I should think, after so many explosions, his ardor would cool off a little.
It is foolish for me to try to tell you that “radicalism” is not the dangerous doctrine you would try to make us believe. It is simply a working class movement for better conditions for all, and my sympathy is altogether with them. I hate to see myself maligned every day in your paper. Belonging to the capitalist class, as I do, I should be ashamed to condemn the “radicals”—knowing that the poor victims of exploitation can never be heard, and only have to go to jail when they try.
I should like to look into the face of the writer of all this hate stuff. I understand he is a Christian Scientist, and they are not supposed to recognize Hate. Can’t you see that the unrest is caused by an unjust economic system?
Yours truly,
KATE CRANE GARTZ.
April 21, 1920.
EDITOR,
Pasadena Press,
PASADENA, CAL.
My Dear Sir: An American woman, the mother of two American soldiers, wishes to submit to you a few reflections upon the I. W. W. trials now going on, and which she attended continuously.
I noticed that at the beginning of the first trial men were admitted to the jury box who confessed to intense prejudice against the organization of which the persecuted man was accused of being a member. The judge would cajole the prospective jurors into a reluctant statement that they might possibly be able to change their point of view, and then he would force their acceptance as jurors.
In the midst of the trial I saw a man arrested, charged with perjury, his crime having been that he dared to appear and testify in favor of the defendant. At the conclusion of the trial I heard the prosecuting attorney justify and practically incite the tarring and feathering of the defendant’s attorney.
Kate Crane Gartz Page 3
