We women of WSP working for peace have walked thousands of miles, written plane-loads of letters to our president, our congressmen and the heads of our states. We’ve vigil-ed at the Federal Building; we’ve attended conferences of women like ourselves around the world. And at the same time, we’ve made hundreds of thousands of beds, changed a million diapers and cooked two million meals—not to mention the mountains of dishes we’ve washed.39
The first recipe was for “Russian Borscht”; the second, “Rushin’ Borscht” (“make in 10 minutes in the morning before rushing off to your WSP meeting”). Others included “Albondigas Soup” (“Mexico’s contribution to the peace movement—all in one dish”), “Chicken Kiev” (“If this is Russian propaganda, we’re all for it!”), and Lime pie (“Neglected your family lately? All will be forgiven with this divine pie”). (It included a pint of whipped cream.)
The meeting with Vietnamese women in Jakarta in mid 1965 had come at a time when no one in Congress was calling for an immediate end to the Vietnam war, and when much of the peace movement was demanding “Negotiations Now” rather than “Out Now.” In this respect the trip constitued a huge step, with reverberations that extended far beyond the near-term media attention received by WSP. For one, it strengthened women’s standing to speak on foreign policy issues, usually the preserve of men and “experts.” They spoke first of all on the familiar ground, as women defending children—but now they added to this a knowledge of history that was lacking in government leaders. Indeed, the firsthand authority they gained from speaking to Vietnamese women enabled them to directly challenge the dominant US narrative of the Cold War, which portrayed Vietnam as a front of a worldwide battle between “freedom” and “Communist tyranny.” The WSP women could now counter that they had seen firsthand how the cruelty and destruction of this particular war was based on ignorance of its local origins and meaning.
They had a decade more of activism ahead of them, including draft resistance work, an official trip to Hanoi in 1967, a demonstration against Lyndon Johnson that brought a massive turnout to Century City that same year, and Gene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. Through it all, they remained an all-female organization that openly rejected male political culture. They challenged the age-old claim that wars are waged by men to protect women and children, and instead proclaimed their ties with women around the world, including women in “enemy” countries.40 Moreover, they remained an anti-hierarchical organization with impressive local autonomy. Their meeting with Vietnamese women in 1965 had made WSP, in L.A. and nationally, some of the most effective leaders of the anti-war movement.
From Bach to “Tanya”: KPFK Radio (1959–74)
On June 24, 1960, L.A.’s listener-supported FM station, KPFK, aired a “Special Report” on the protests against the HUAC hearing in San Francisco the previous month, which had “investigated” the Communist Party in California. KPFK had begun broadcasting a year earlier as Southern California’s first non-commercial FM station, part of the Pacifica Radio Network of three stations, which had started in Berkeley and now included New York. For the first time people had taken to the streets in a tumultuous protest against the committee. While 4,000 demonstrators marched and shouted and chanted outside San Francisco city hall, inside the hearing room thirty-six out of thirty-eight witnesses refused to cooperate with the committee, and the audience jeered committee members and the witnesses who were friendly to them. The program on KPFK, produced by the Berkeley Pacifica station, KPFA, had been recorded on site, and listeners heard the whole thing: the chanting crowd outside; a friendly witness telling committee members that he had been a “one-time hard-core member” of the party and that he had concluded that “the Communist Party lowers man to the level of a beast in the field”; and the audience’s laughter when committee counsel Richard Ahrens asked the witness, “You have found your way back to God and patriotism, is that correct?”1
Nothing like that had ever happened at a HUAC hearing before. History was being made that day, and KPFK told the full story, including the part—described by demonstrators—where “officers of the San Francisco motorcycle squad, in helmets and leather jackets, appeared behind the barricade on the steps of city hall,” and turned fire hoses on the demonstrators, but “we just stood our ground … so they shut off the hoses and without any warning at all the cops just charged … the cops were picking up the students bodily” and throwing them down the stairs. Listeners heard the crowd singing and cheering, and the students chanting; the crowd roar became more intense; above the roar, you could hear screams of a girl; and then, clearly, the singing: “We shall not, we shall not be moved.”2
The documentary went on with the testimony inside the hearing room—including that of Bill Mandel, a Marxist with a show on KPFK, who opened his statement as follows:
Honorable beaters of children, and sadists, uniformed and in plain clothes, distinguished Dixiecrat wearing the clothing of a gentleman, eminent Republican who opposes an accommodation with the one country with whom we must live in peace in order for us all and our children to survive … If you think that I am going to cooperate with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution—if you think I’ll cooperate with you in any way, you are insane!”3
It was great radio, and all of it was on KPFK in June 1960.
Of course, the HUAC documentary wasn’t the only piece about the Left aired on the station. It also ran programs on the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which trained civil rights workers; on proposals for a police review board in L.A. (a cause for the next several decades); and a documentary about opposition to the death penalty. Also featured were physicist Hans Bethe and the Lobby for Peace, discussing nuclear disarmament; a series on “Californians of Mexican Descent”; and a program on “America’s involvement in Africa.”
KPFK in its first year—1959—also took another step that would shape its history for the next decade, and contribute to the history of L.A.: it invited Dorothy Healey, chairman of the Communist Party in Los Angeles, to produce a regular fifteen-minute public affairs show with the bold name “Communist Commentary.” In the wake of Krushchev’s “Crimes of Stalin” speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the party was at a low point by 1959, with fewer than 500 members in L.A.—they had had more than 3,000 a decade earlier.4 The national office tried to get rid of Dorothy because she led a group of reformers seeking a more democratic and less secretive party, but she held on to her position because the LA people recognized what Bettina Aptheker, activist and daughter of a prominent party leader, called her “energy and charisma.” In subsequent decades, Dorothy would mentor the younger generation of LA activists.
Giving Dorothy Healey a show on KPFK aroused the red-hunters, and in 1962 the Federal Communications Commission withheld the license renewal of KPFK (and the other two Pacifica stations) pending its investigation into “Communist affiliations.” In January 1963, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) subpoenaed KPFK and the other two Pacifica stations—because, the San Francisco News Call Bulletin reported, “the Los Angeles station has permitted a woman Communist to comment on current affairs.”5 When the SISS announced that its hearings would be held in secret, Pacifica leaders demanded that they be open to the public and requested permission to broadcast the proceedings. The request was denied.6
James O. Eastland, Mississippi Democrat and champion of segregation, chaired the subcommittee, with Thomas Dodd of Connecticut as vice chairman. Also in attendance at the KPFK hearing: Senators Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, Kenneth Keating of New York and Roman Hruska—a Republican windbag from Nebraska best known for his 1970 speech in support of Nixon’s nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Carswell’s critics had called him a “mediocrity.”