Upton Sinclair Arrested for Reading the First Amendment

Picture the scene: May fifteenth, nineteen twenty-three. Dockworkers from the Industrial Workers of the World have been on strike at the Port of San Pedro for weeks. Their supporters have gathered at a lot in the neighborhood they called Liberty Hill, and a famous man has driven down from Los Angeles to address them. His name is Upton Sinclair. He wrote The Jungle. He is the most widely read political novelist in America. He stands up at Liberty Hill and begins to read the First Amendment of the United States Constitution aloud to the crowd.

He is arrested before he finishes.

The officer's charge was disturbing the peace. Sinclair was held briefly and released, but the arrest made national news. The image of a man being stopped by police for reading the Bill of Rights to a crowd of workers landed with force in the national press. The case became one of the most publicized civil liberties confrontations of the decade. It drew attention to San Pedro's waterfront as one of the most aggressively policed labor zones in the country, a port where the employer-controlled hiring system, known as the shape-up, gave dock bosses absolute daily authority over who worked and who did not, effectively making union organizing a firing offense.

The IWW had been organizing at San Pedro since nineteen oh-five. The nineteen twenty-three strike was part of a labor war that lasted decades. It would not be fully resolved until the great West Coast longshore strike of nineteen thirty-four, which lasted eighty-three days and ended when federal mediation established union hiring halls on the Pacific waterfront.

The Port of Los Angeles today processes more cargo than any other port in the Western Hemisphere. It does not have a marker at Liberty Hill. The hill itself has no formal historical designation. The corner where Sinclair stood and was stopped is on a street in a neighborhood of bungalows, unremarked.