“Why Does Communism Depend on Young Girls to Carry Out Its Work?” Jewishness, Girlhood, and Subversion in 1930s Los Angeles

When the Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities of the 71st Congress came to Los Angeles in 1930, their hearings focused almost entirely on communist infiltration in the city’s public high schools. Among the star witnesses was Thomas Elson, the principal of Roosevelt High located in Boyle Heights, a diverse, working-class neighborhood just east of the Los Angeles River. Boyle Heights was home to “a dozen or more” diasporic communities, including the largest concentration of Jews west of Chicago, which Mr. Elson noted in his remarks, claiming in turn that “all” of the students making trouble at his school were “Russian Jews.” They were also, as he described, mostly “girls” who were “insolently defiant” to him and other school administrators. Using Mr. Elson’s testimony and press coverage of a series of “red riots” at Roosevelt High, this presentation will explore how the Russian Jewish girls of Boyle Heights became the quintessential symbols of communist subversion in Los Angeles and, in turn, how the legacies of state violence shape the archival record of their experiences.