THE CRUSADE OF LABOR ACTIVIST SOL NITZBERG
By John Sheehy and Jack Withington
Hang the Jew!” an agitated member of the vigilantes bellowed. His quarry, Petaluma poultry rancher Sol Nitzberg, a labor organizer, Communist, and Jew, was standing with four comrades taken captive by the vigilantes, awaiting judgment in the yard of a feed mill in west Santa Rosa.
The conflict between vigilantes and the labor “troublemakers” arose during the Great Depression. Labor fears in Sonoma County were intensified by the general strike of 1934, during which every longshoreman union member in every port on the West Coast walked off the job. Lasting 83 days, the strike completely crippled the shipping of agricultural goods.
In response, large business interests and corporate farms formed their own statewide militant group, the Associated Farmers of California. Pushing a platform to “save America,” they lobbied for anti-union laws and legislation against picketing and strikes. They also organized vigilante groups known as “Citizens’ Armies” to end labor protests by any means necessary.
In the summer of 1935, apple pickers in Sebastopol went on strike. Anticipating riots in the orchards and fruit packing sheds, Sonoma County sheriff Harry Patteson deputized 500 citizens as an “Army of Peace.”
On the evening of August 1, 250 strikers and labor activists gathered at Santa Rosa’s Germania Hall, calling for a wage increase from 25 cents to 40 cents per hour, a nine-hour workday and time and a half for overtime. Sheriff Patteson sent his Army of Peace to break up the gathering with clubs and sticks. Among those beaten bloody was Nitzberg.
Born in Pruzany, Poland in 1897, Nitzberg came from a long line of rabbis. As a young man he studied at a yeshiva (rabbinical school.) Reflecting a lifelong commitment to social justice, he joined the Russian Social Revolution Party. During that period, he was deeply influenced by the writings and philosophy of Karl Marx. His political activities early in the 20th century placed him at odds with Russia’s ruling Romanov Dynasty, resulting in his arrest and three-year sentence in a cold and isolated Siberian labor camp.
Getting there required a 300-mile trip by dogsled. Once he arrived, Nitzberg was subjected to grueling agricultural work that, he later reflected ironically, prepared him for his future as a chicken rancher in Petaluma.
After he was released from the camp, Nitzberg found Russia in a state of turmoil, and since the government blamed many of its problems on Jewish people, he gathered his few possessions, boarded the ship “Amerika” in Hamburg, Germany, and arrived at Ellis Island in New York City on July 12, 1913. He came into the country as Schlozme Nitzberg, but soon anglicized his first name to Solomon, or just Sol.
In New York, he attended the liberal Cooper Union College and then served overseas in the U.S. Army during World War I. Feeling a sense of wanderlust, he walked across the country to California, where he found work in San Francisco in the electrical engineering field.
Bored by the confining nature of his labor, he was drawn to the small but growing Jewish community of poultry ranchers located 40 miles north of the city in Petaluma, a town which claimed the title “Egg Basket of the World.”
Petaluma offered Jewish immigrants a mix of politics, culture and Zionism, together with hard work and the easy availability of seed money to start a chicken ranch. Although these settlers came from different countries, their one commonality was a fervent belief in creating a better world. Social gatherings often revolved around loud, sometimes raucous political arguments. Sol Nitzberg had found his home.
It was at a political meeting in Petaluma that Nitzberg met Millie Rosenthal, an attractive, recently widowed woman from Canada, who had moved to Petaluma with her sons George and Leo. When the couple married, Sol adopted the boys. Raising poultry on his ranch, Sol also worked to help laborers gain a foothold in the Sonoma County economy.
Three weeks after Sheriff Harry Patteson’s Army of Peace broke up the gathering at Germania Hall on August 3, 1935, Nitzberg and other labor activists started organizing a strike of the hops harvest in Healdsburg. On the eve of harvest, August 21, a group of 300 vigilantes rounded up five of the labor activists in the middle of the night.
One of them was Jack Green, who was snatched from his place of business in Santa Rosa and driven to Nitzberg’s ranch in west Petaluma, where he was instructed to go to the farmhouse and lure Nitzberg outside.
Witnesses say he rapped on the front door and when it opened, scurried inside to warn the family that a mob had surrounded their home. A defiant Nitzberg yelled out to the vigilantes, warning them he was armed and, as a warning, fired off several rounds from a shotgun.
A two-hour standoff ensued, during which Nitzberg’s wife made several phone calls to law enforcement officials that went unanswered, perhaps because the group included local law enforcement officers. It ended after the vigilantes began throwing tear gas canisters through the windows.
Green and Nitzberg, along with Nitzberg’s wife and children, stumbled outside, gasping for air.
Nitzberg and Green were bound with rope and tossed into the back seat of a vigilante’s sedan, which sped off into the night, leaving Nitzberg’s wife and children at the ranch.
The vigilantes proceeded to round up three other men that evening – Edward Burton Wolff, Charles Meyers, and George Ford – taking them all to a feed mill warehouse beside the railroad tracks in Santa Rosa, where they were abused, beaten and ordered to kiss the American flag.
When Green and Nitzberg, a U.S. Army veteran, balked, they were both covered in a smelly concoction of oily tar and chicken feathers and marched through downtown Santa Rosa in the early morning hours, surrounded by a parade of people in cars who circled Courthouse Square, yelling, honking their horns and firing guns in the air. Led to the city limits, Nitzberg and Green were given 12 hours to leave the county with their families.
Thanks to the help of a passing motorist, Nitzberg made his way to the home of a friend in Penngrove. He notified his family of his whereabouts, and then went about the business of cleaning the sticky, gooey mess off his body. Instead of leaving the county as the vigilantes had ordered, he went back to his ranch to care for his family. The other victims of mob action took temporary refuge in San Francisco.
The story of the kidnapping and tar-and-feathering spread worldwide in newspapers and magazines such as Time and The Nation. Many leading citizens were identified as members of the vigilante force that evening. They included the secretary of the Healdsburg Chamber of Commerce, a member of the state legislature, the mayor and city attorney of Santa Rosa, a member of the Santa Rosa City Council, plus bankers, doctors, a California Highway patrolman and newsmen.
At first, officials refused to apprehend or prosecute the major suspects. However, at the urging of the American Civil Liberties Union, felony charges against 12 alleged vigilantes were brought in Sonoma County Superior Court by the state attorney general, acting in place of County District Attorney William Cowen, who refused to prosecute the vigilantes.
The twelve men – Frederick Cairns, Edward W. Jenkins, William Castleberry, William Maher, Frank Silano, Ernest Demostene, Arthur Meese, John Barries, D.H. Madison, Thomas J. Campion, George Maher and Sidney Elphick – were charged with the crimes of kidnapping and conspiring to act illegally against the five union men.
It took more than a year, but thanks to Green’s persistence, the trial finally started. Charges against four of the 12 were quickly dropped by a visiting judge, after which there was a four-day trial. The 12 members of the jury – eight of whom were either growers or wives of growers – deliberated just 16 minutes before returning with a “not guilty” verdict for all of the accused. Still, the victims had gotten their day in court.
After the trial, Jack Green moved out of Sonoma County. In memory of his heroic effort to force a trial in the face of strong community antagonism, he was honored with an award by the Sonoma County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Nitzberg and his family were stalked by vigilantes after the trial, and their credit was cut off at local feed mills. Doors previously opened to the family were now closed.
After enduring more than two years of living with a loaded gun, Nitzberg and his family decided to leave Sonoma County. They journeyed to New York City with plans to continue on to the Soviet Union, but the Soviet government refused their immigration request. So it was back to Petaluma, where Nitzberg returned to working in the chicken and egg business until his death in 1984.