In California as in Ancient Rome
In June and July 2025, I was given the opportunity to travel to the United States to undertake archival research for my dissertation. This archival ‘odyssey’ — generously funded by Pitsburg State University, the University of St Andrews’s School of Classics and St Leonards’ Postgraduate Travel Award — consisted of visits to the San Francisco State Labor Archives & Research Center, the California Historical Society Collection at Stanford, and the Axe Collections of Freethought, Socialism, Radicalism, and Anarchy at Pittsburg State University. While I found plenty of material that now informs my research, I wanted to focus on a single archival find which happens to fall beyond the scope of my PhD dissertation, but nevertheless fascinates me.
In San Francisco State’s Collection, I came across a small, 32-page pamphlet published by the California Branch of the General Defense Committee (GDC) in 1924 entitled ‘To the Beasts’– In California as in Ancient Rome. The GDC was the legal advocacy organisation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that was formed in 1917 after 74 predominantly loggers were arrested in Seattle, Washington, following the events known as the Everett massacre.[1] For the next decades – and up until today – the GDC continued to work to defend those “who are in prison for labor’s cause.”[2] The GDC’s work in California was particularly intense as the IWW and GDC fought against the California Criminal Syndicalism Act, which made it a felony – punishable by up to fourteen years in prison – to be a member of the IWW or other radical labour unions due to their use of industrial “sabotage” and direct action.[3]
In California, anti-labour politicians and capitalists frequently used the Criminal Syndicalism Act against labour activists, socialists, and communists. In the five years between the passing of the Act in 1919 and the publication of In California, “three hundred and seven persons under indictment have faced juries; 140 have been convicted and 167 were acquitted or dismissed after juries had failed to agree. One hundred remain in penitentiaries and trials are pending for forty-nine.”[4] It is in this context that In California was published, making specific references, connections, and analogies from the persecution of labour agitators in California to the persecutions of enslaved people, early Christians, and general dissidents under Rome.
In California – alongside the titular reference to damnatio ad bestias – opens with a quote from Cyrenus Osborne Ward’s Ancient Lowly – where Ward is quoting De Quincey – which details the “story of Caligula who took delight in feeding the wild animals of the amphitheatre with the quivering flesh of human beings. […] These were prisoners committed, not for punishment, but for trial.”[5] The pamphlet continues citing a much later section of Ward’s on the aftermath of the Spartacus revolts,
To see them thrown to the wild beasts and eaten alive or to train them for the ghastly habit of cutting each others’ throats on the sands of an amphitheatre, was to their truly ferocious character the natural way of getting rid of them. This in part answers the inquirer’s question as to the cause of the rapid and phenomenal decline of morals at Rome…..
Blood money reigned triumphant.[6]
From here In California moves on to modernity and “the story of these one hundred I.W.W. members who occupy cells in San Quentin and Folsom because the Criminal Syndicalism Law permits the infliction of penal servitude for the reason that men hold opinions.”[7] One of these ‘men’ highlighted by the author is Charlotte Anita Whitney, a pacifist during WWI who joined the anti-war Socialist Party of America (SPA) and later the Communist Labor Party (CLP) after viewing the SPA as too conservative.[8] Whitney had returned to her native California and began attempting to boost the numbers of the CLP until one night, following a speech in Oakland, CA, she was arrested under the Criminal Syndicalism Act. She was charged with five counts of violating the act solely due to her membership in the CLP. The trial involved the prosecution attempting to establish links between the IWW, the CLP, and the recently established Bolshevik government. Moreover, Whitney and other agitators imprisoned at San Quentin and Folsom Prison were accused of allegedly aiding a 1914 confrontation in Wheatland, CA, between IWW-supported hop pickers and local authorities controlled by the company that led to the death of five people. Across California, “ordinary social workers and I.W.W. members” like Whitney were arrested, tried, and convicted for nothing more than their “human right – the right as industrial wage workers to organize in one big union.”[9]
Returning to Rome and the analogous oppression, the anonymous author writes of the differences in outcomes and motivations between the early Christians who were martyred for their religious beliefs and those members of the IWW persecuted for their belief in industrial unionism:
It is customary to pose the early Christian martyrs as exemplars of persecution stoically sustained, but these were not accused as disciples of Christ but because they openly and positively refused to sacrifice to ancient gods. Incense was there, statues of the gods were there and the only demand was that the prisoners drop a grain of incense into the fire. Refusal meant death, but none who suffered did aught but strive for a personal crown and these one hundred expect no reward here or hereafter.[10]
At the end of the pamphlet, in a strong call to arms titled “Rouse, ye workers!” the author reintroduces the connections between the early Christians under Rome and these workers. This time, however, the workers are seen to be even more significant than their ancient predecessors based on the fact that they are fighting for a better material, living world for all rather than an idealist, spiritual afterlife for themselves:
All the Christian martyrs hailed their pangs as the price of eternal individual bliss and concentrated every one upon the saving of his own soul; but these modernists expect only toil, sweat and agony. Beyond these generations they see a beautiful world, wherein humanity, educated, race conscious, ennobled by knowledge will dwell in harmony, everyone contributing, all sharing and enjoying the product as workers should do.[11]
This post was written by Christopher Anaforian, PhD Candidate, School of Classics / School of History, University of St Andrews, Scotland. His dissertation focuses on the reception of classical antiquity in the Little Blue Books.
[1] For more on the Everett Massacre, see Smith, Walker C. The Everett Massacre: A History of the Class Struggle in the Lumber Industry. Chicago: IWW Publishing Bureau, 1918 and the Everett Massacre Collection at the Everett Public Library, https://nw.epls.org/digital/collection/EvrtMassacre/.
[2] “The General Defense Committee – 20 Years of Activity, October 1917-October 1937” The One Big Union Monthly 1, no. 10 (October 1937): 20-21. https://libcom.org/article/one-big-union-monthly-october-1937.
[3] See White, Ahmed A. “The Crime of Economic Radicalism: Criminal Syndicalism Laws and the Industrial Workers of the World, 1917–1927.” Oregon Law Review 85, no. 3 (2006): 652 andWhitten, Woodrow C. “Criminal Syndicalism and the Law in California: 1919-1972.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 59, no. 2 (March 1969): 3-73.
[4] General Defense Committee. In California as in Ancient Rome. San Francisco, CA: California Branch of the General Defense Committee, 1924, p. 8.
[5] General Defense Committee. In California as in Ancient Rome. San Francisco, CA: California Branch of the General Defense Committee, 1924, p. 3. Ward, Cyrenus Osborne. The Ancient Lowly, Volume 1. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1888, p. 280.
[6] General Defense Committee. In California as in Ancient Rome. San Francisco, CA: California Branch of the General Defense Committee, 1924, p. 3. Ward, Cyrenus Osborne. The Ancient Lowly, Volume 1. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1888, p.331-332.
[7] General Defense Committee. In California as in Ancient Rome. San Francisco, CA: California Branch of the General Defense Committee, 1924, p.12.
[8] For more on Whitney, see Rubens, Lisa. “The Patrician Radical: Charlotte Anita Whitney.” California History 65, no. 3 (September 1986): 158-171 and Strum, Philippa. Speaking Freely: Whitney V. California and American Speech Law. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015.
[9] General Defense Committee. In California as in Ancient Rome. San Francisco, CA: California Branch of the General Defense Committee, 1924, p.12.
[10] General Defense Committee. In California as in Ancient Rome. San Francisco, CA: California Branch of the General Defense Committee, 1924, p.6.
[11] General Defense Committee. In California as in Ancient Rome. San Francisco, CA: California Branch of the General Defense Committee, 1924, p.26-27.
