FoundSF

Historical Essay

by Carla Leshne, with excerpts from "The Film & Photo League of San Francisco, Film History: An International Journal - Volume 18, Number 4, 2006, pp. 361–373

In the 1930s, San Francisco and other urban centers had a vibrant cultural life centered around political activism. Communists, anarchists, socialists and fellow travelers knew how to have fun, and artists created groups and collectives to support a rich, engaged creative scene. From the Blue Blouse Players (theater) to the John Reed Clubs (writing and graphics), from the Red Dancers to the Film and Photo Leagues, cultural workers were following – and leading - industrial and agricultural workers in their efforts to unite.

In the Film and Photo Leagues, building on earlier international communications movements such as the German Workers FilmFoto movement, agit-trains of the Soviet revolution with their moving film shows, and silent era labor films, members worked to support workers’ organizing efforts, as well as showcase the lives, issues and experiences of people in the Depression era.

As Sam Brody put it in 1934:

Ours is a gigantic task, challenging the most institutionalized of all the bourgeois arts with its monster monopolies and gigantic network for mass distribution.

The New York chapter of the Film and Photo League formed in 1930 with the help of Workers International Relief, an organization created by the Soviet Communist Party to help striking workers across the world. They started by holding benefit screening of films to raise money for the campaigns, but soon crossed over into shooting films of the strikes, distributing photographs to publications such as The Labor Defender and the Daily Worker, and putting out a newsreels.

It was in 1933 that members of the New York League set off on a cross country trip that would land them in San Francisco, where they would join the west coast chapter of the League.

Lester Balog, a young editor, projectionist, and photographer, and Ed Royce, an organizer for the Workers International Relief, set out from New York on their trans-continental film tour in September of 1933. Departing from New York in Ed’s car after an evening screening at the New York League headquarters, they loaded a projector, a print of Vsevold Pudovkin's Mother, and some New York Film & Photo League newsreels into the car and set off north, hitting Rochester and Buffalo then driving onto Detroit, Chicago and westward. Hopping from one town to the next, they had showings in 51 locales across the country at workers' halls, ethnic clubs, community theaters, and private homes. The second half of the film tour was in California, where they traveled down the coast and back up the valley during the fall of 1933 at the time of the largest agricultural strikes in California history. Along the way, Lester Balog shot footage of strikes, demonstrations, the World's Fair in Chicago, and a trial of labor organizers in Utah. The trip served as a benefit tour for the WIR, raising money to support striking workers (and Lester and Ed). After an adventure in Utah, during which Balog's undeveloped film was confiscated by authorities while he was recording a trial of union activists and the pair gave an evening screening at a roller rink between the towns of Price and Helper, the film tour proceeded to the west coast. We arrived in Frisco on our very last gallon of gas. We didn't have one penny, and we thought we can get into California for free. The only things we didn't figure with were the Vallejo Toll Bridge and the Oakland Ferry. We solved the problem by leaving my 97 cents watch at the bridge and getting rid of Ed's sweater (worth several bucks) at the Ferry.

The night of their arrival in San Francisco, Balog and Royce showed the film to an audience of 1000 at the Fillmore Workers' Center, which Balog described as "very enthusiastic." They continued to Carmel for a showing the next night, where he observed that the audience in this "sort of artist colony" was not as enthusiastic as at other showings, and "although they liked the shorts, the feature didn't go over very big." Balog spent October 9 preparing for the continuing tour down the California coast, by helping to print 15,000 publicity leaflets. Over the next two months, they showed the films throughout California. 1933 was the year of the biggest wave of agricultural strikes in California history fruit, lettuce and cotton pickers from the Imperial Valley up through the entire Central Valley, were walking off the job, demanding living wages, and being organized by the CIO-affiliated Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU). In October, the situation in Tulare County was heating up, and deputized vigilantes attacked a group of strikers, killing two men in Pixley. Royce, Balog and Sam Darcy, the regional head of the Communist Party in San Francisco, traveled together to the strike area, arriving on October 10. After camping for the night outside of Tulare, they arrived at the cotton strike headquarters just in time to join 500 strikers as the assembly set off to the county seat of Visalia to protest the murders of two Mexican workers by vigilantes in Pixley the day before. Balog remarked "They had no parade permit, so I got the camera ready.”

Otto Hagel and Hansel Mieth, a young couple from Germany, had been working as pickers in the fields earlier in 1933. By the end of October of that year, Mieth was back in San Francisco, having broken up temporarily with Otto and gone off and married Avedano Motroni, a shop window decorator. Hagel and Balog began to travel together showing films, and perhaps collaborating on shooting them. The Film & Photo League set up shop at the Workers’ Cultural Center at 121 Haight Street, in San Francisco. Also known as the Ruthenberg House, the building functioned much like Workers’ Centers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other towns. Usually housing the Communist Party Headquarters as well as Workers’ Schools, John Reed Clubs, bookstores, libraries, soup kitchens, Labor Sports Unions, workers’ theatre groups, and Film & Photo Leagues, Workers’ Centers were prominent in left cultural life of the period. A December 1933 issue of the Western Worker announced the opening of the center on Haight Street. A library, showers and a restaurant were on the first floor, a ballroom was on the third, and on the second floor, adjacent to the school classrooms, the Film & Foto League will conduct their classes in conjunction with the school, and they have, as well, a darkroom in the basement.

By February 1934, the WIR had also set up a "permanent strike relief apparatus" in the building, and a stage was built by the Workers' Theatre to put on plays. Lester Balog is listed in the Spring, 1934 San Francisco Workers' School Catalog as a "Cinematography" instructor, along with "P. Otto," (likely a pseudonym for Otto Hagel, who hadn’t immigrated legally to the U.S.) The class was to be a training ground for "Criticism of bourgeois practices, analysis of Soviet newsreels, documentary and acted films, Montage, film production and projection of working class newsreels and films." The catalog also listed a course in “Still Photography,” with P. Allen and J. Fidiam instructing. While teaching at the Worker's School, Balog and Hagel continued to put on screenings of Soviet films and their own newsreels around the state. Like other Film and Photo League groups around the country, they shot still photographs and film footage that would display social contradiction and the uneven distribution of wealth in Depression-era America. Although Mieth, by her own account, was not involved in shooting of moving film, she was involved with post-production. It is not clear where the editing took place, but for some of the time, according to Mieth, it was in an apartment she rented with Otto Hagel, where Lester Balog sometimes slept in the bath tub. (This information is complicated by the fact that in later interviews Mieth never mentioned her marriage to Motroni.) Although Mieth has maintained that she and Hagel had created the film and that she had been with him when he filmed the Cotton Strike, it seems likely that Balog contributed. In a 1974 letter to Tom Brandon, Balog described the film as started in Chicago by Leo Seltzer at the '33 World's Fair. Then a Milwaukee anti-fascist demonstration by yours truly. Next scenes in San Francisco of rusting heavy equipment and WPA pick-and-shovel project by Otto Hagel. Also by Hagel, a march in Sacramento. Finally my own stuff: the 1933 San Joaquin Cotton Strike.

The film footage of the Cotton Strike was considered missing for many years. Hansel Mieth told various interviewers in the 1980s and 1990s that she thought the film and their movie camera had been stolen by the police in the 1930s. Indeed, the San Francisco Chronicle finds Edward Royce arrested in September 1934 at the police station for being a Communist when he went in looking for articles (very likely films) that had been confiscated during the San Francisco General Strike in the summer of 1934. Somehow Balog had possession or regained possession of a copy of Century of Progress and screened it over the years in various venues, including organizing events for the United Farm Workers in the 1960s.

As part of their Film and Photo League activities, Hagel and Balog toured California, exhibiting Russian films that Royce had procured from a New York distributor associated with the W.I.R.. In May 1934, returning north from a screening in Los Angeles, they passed through Tulare County, the site of the Cotton Strike and the Pixley murders the year before. Balog recounts that some of the farm workers, they caught us, saw us, and they said, hey, what about the pictures you took? So all right, I said, let me show you. So that night they closed the pool hall for business and had a movie. And Pat Chambers was there... And while we were running it - no charge, of course, there was no admission fee or anything, and the business was closed - no pool. So while I was projecting, about four troopers came in, big son-of-a-guns, you know? I am not tall, but they were about 6 1/2 feet, and they stood around me - I didn't know what to do, I finished the film. I understand Pat meanwhile sneaked out, and when it was over they practically picked me up and took me to jail... they charged me with running a business without a license...they kept me 13 days in the police station, and then I got 45 days.

The arrest was reported in the Visalia Times Delta, which characterized the screening as a presentation by Chambers, who was notorious in the area for his organizing efforts with the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) the year before: Pat Chambers, strike agitator, and communist candidate for United States senator, lost motion picture equipment, a ten-reel soviet picture and an operator last night when he ventured to appear as a showman in exhibiting the communist propaganda picture, "The Road to Life" in a Mexican pool hall in Tulare..... Between 75 and 100 persons, most of them Mexicans 20 years old or younger, attended the four hour performance. Members of the Tulare police department sat through the entire show. Neither the equipment nor the films belonged to Pat Chambers. While Pat Chambers eluded arrest, Lester Balog and Lillian Dinkin, an organizer for the Communist Party, were taken in to the Visalia jailhouse. The Western Worker of June 18 reported the results of their short court trial on June 5th. Taking only five minutes to arrive at a verdict they were already sure of, the jury yesterday found Lillian Dinkin and Lester Balog "guilty" of showing a picture without a license, and Judge Cross lost no time in slapping on a sentence of 45 days and $100 fine for each... Deliberate mis-statement by prosecution witnesses of the talk Comrade Dinkin gave between the Bonus March film and the "Road to Life" formed a large part of the "evidence" the jury used to justify their helping the frame-up.

When they arrested Balog, the police confiscated the projector, some sound equipment and Victrola records, the films he had been screening, and some money. After his release, he was picked up by Joe Wilson of the International Labor Defense, and driven directly out of Tulare, for there was a rumor that he would be picked up again for “vagrancy” if he were found walking in town. The following year, Balog was still trying to get the films and other items returned. A letter from Hirsch & Kaye, the company from which he had leased the projector and screen, and who had sent an employee to Visalia to reclaim the equipment while Balog was in jail, read: Dear Mr. Balog: The only equipment that we received from the police department in Tulare is that equipment which we have delivered to you through Mr. Reynolds. The chief of police in Tulare may truthfully feel that he delivered “everything” but that could also be a general term.

Finally, the chief of Police issued a letter on February 26, 1935 certifying that “the entire equipment, including films, taken from Lester Balog in Tulare at the time of his arrest was turned over to Mr. H. L. Bush of the Hirsch & Kaye Company of San Francisco.” The letter continues on however, “The Films were later turned over to this Dept. and were returned to the Garrison Film Distributors Company of New York on February 12th 1935.” Perhaps the Cotton Strike footage and/or the more finely edited Century of Progress was one of the returned films, and Balog was able to retrieve it at some point from Garrison.

While Lester Balog was in jail in Tulare County, the 1934 San Francisco General Strike was getting underway. Balog got out of the Tulare jail and was driven to San Francisco just in time to be present for the vigilante raids on July 17th, the second day of the General Strike. Many sites of political/cultural activity that had flourished were destroyed, including The Workers Cultural Center at the Ruthenberg House on Haight Street, the Western Worker editorial offices and the printing plant that the paper contracted with, the longshoreman's strike kitchen, the Mission Workers' Neighborhood House, and the Workers' Open Forum at 1223 Fillmore ––where Balog and Royce had presented a film program upon their arrival to San Francisco in October, 1933. Unknown men, hired by the employer groups, and closely followed by police, broke in and demolished as much as possible of the workers' cultural movement as the General Strike began to affect the city. [insert image 10] The vigilante raids of the 1934 General Strike in San Francisco were not an isolated incident, but rather the culmination of a pattern of political repression in Depression-era California. In the summer of 1932, the Western Worker reported that police had raided the John Reed Club of Los Angeles just as they were organizing a statewide conference. According to the Western Worker, The attack on the JRC is part of the campaign of terror which has been launched by the "Red Squad" within the last few weeks, and which has resulted in the breaking up of many workers' meetings and daily raids on workers' headquarters.

Artists, writers, theatre groups, filmmakers, and photographers whose cultural and media work strengthened the left became targets. The mainstream mass media was used to arouse public sentiment against those who threatened the capitalist system during the Depression. The John Reed Club headquarters in Los Angeles was hit again in February of 1933. Newsboys were arrested for selling the Western Worker, bookstores selling radical publications were shut down and their owners thrown in jail, street theatre players were beaten up. In July 1934, while Balog languished in jail, San Diego police arrested Louis Siminow of the Los Angeles Film & Photo League for showing a film. With San Francisco in disarray, and the local Film & Photo League darkroom and meeting space destroyed, the people who created the short-lived Film & Photo League movement in San Francisco dispersed. It is doubtful whether the Film and Photo League ever re-established itself as a group in San Francisco after the destruction at the Ruthenberg House. Lester Balog and Consuelo Kanaga sneaked into the raided Western Worker office and took photos of the destruction. Ed Royce was arrested a couple of months later, apparently for being a “Red,” when he went to the police station to claim property (which probably included films) that police had taken during the July raids. Another collective effort, the Photo-Commentors, a short-lived group that included Balog, Hagel and Mieth, Dorothea Lange, Consuelo Kanaga, Willard Van Dyke and Ansel Adams, among others, organized a large photo show at the Gelber-Lilienthal Gallery and Bookstore sometime in 1934, bringing together one hundred "photographs of social significance". According to Balog, the pictures went up and they were up one day, two days maybe. There was criticism by the American Legion and they ordered a couple, two or three pictures, taken out. First, the Tom Mooney picture. Dorothea Lange had a beautiful picture of a pair of legs: a girl sitting on a bar - not a bar, a drug-store stool, legs crossed, a beautiful pair of legs, with an enormous run in her stocking. And she called it "USA, 1934." It was very clever, and I liked it. It was beautiful. That was objected to... and there may have been one other...Anyhow, the group was very indignant and they said we either have all or none, so they took it out.

Balog's description of reaction to Lange's "USA, 1934” reflects a common theme of censorship during the thirties. Though the expression of sexuality was the more publicized complaint of censoring boards, political censorship was rampant. Was it the legs or the message that Lange's photo conveyed that brought the wrath of the Legionnaires and the pressure from the gallery? The gallery exhibition was shut down; the Film & Photo League space at the Ruthenberg House was destroyed. Two of the most active filmmakers had been arrested and jailed for projecting films. In the chaos of either the vigilante raids in the city or the rural repression of union organizing, Hagel and Mieth lost their films and camera. The collective was fragmented, not by internal divisions, but by external circumstance and a militantly repressive right wing.

The New Deal was also coming into being. Hansel Mieth got a job, not in the WPA Art project - they told her that her portfolio work was not "Art," but propaganda. She joined the women's sewing project until she convinced the administrators of the WPA Youth Project to let her run a photography project in San Francisco's Mission District. From there, she went to work for Life magazine. Otto Hagel produced a pictorial book on waterfront workers in 1937 for the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union, and also published photographs in Life. They moved to New York for a few years, and then returned west to buy a chicken farm in Santa Rosa, and raised chickens between their photo assignments. Lester Balog went to work for the California Conservation Core in Plumas County, photographing forest service projects. In 1941, he took perhaps his best know photograph, of Woody Guthrie holding a guitar with letters painted on the front: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Balog served in the military during WWII as a photographer and film editor. In the late forties, he, like Hagel a few years before, worked for the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union, as a photographer for their newspaper, "The Dispatcher." In the fifties, he moved to Cambria with his wife, Francis, and ran a movie theatre, though the audiences for the radical fare that he most liked to program were sparse. In his later years, Balog was known around the state for his continued commitment to radical film. [insert image 12] In 1953, former Communist leader Louis Rosser, a party member from 1932 to 1944, read from the 1934 catalog of the San Francisco Workers School and named Lester Balog at the state Un-American Activities Hearings. When Tom Brandon asked Balog in the seventies what had happened to the films, he answered: Burned them! Believe it or not. I must have had 7 or 8 400-foot reels, silent, 16mm. And what happens is, there were many people on it, some of whom were Lefts, Communists, Socialists, who were in demonstrations that may have had signs... in '52, we had some "visitors" and that worried me, and my wife too... I didn't want to incriminate people who may have changed since then... after three or four days, I burned the stuff. Yeah, I know, it broke my heart.