Between the Covers

Unbound. Small archive of documents from the First Pacific Coast Congress, a gathering of liberal and left-wing organizations opposed to war and fascist governments in Europe. Included are 13 separate items, of various sizes and formats including broadsides, handbills, pamphlets, programs, and ephemera. Overall very good or better with creases from being mailed or stored, light toning and some occasion edgewear.

With the shadow of fascism spreading in Europe and increasing militarism growing across the Pacific, labor unions and sympathetic organizations chaired by Lincoln Steffens organized under the banner of the First Pacific Coast Congress Against War and Fascism. Waldo McNutt, an active member of the American League Against War and Fascism (later the American League for Peace and Democracy), was named the national organizer. The two-day event, held in San Francisco at the Building Trades Temple on April 27 and 28 in 1935, was attended largely by West Coast organizations including the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, whose president Langston Hughes was in attendance.

The material here shows the effort to organize and attract attendees, including two carbon typescript lists showing the organizations sending or endorsing the Congress and the proposed agenda. Also present are broadsides and pamphlets, touting the message of the Pacific Coast Congress, such as worker’s rights, calls for a general strike, and warning of war profiteering, showing an image of a gas-mask wearing Nazi with a bayonet and a dead soldier superimposed against a stock chart showing rising profits. Laid into the four-page mimeograph program for the Congress is a "proposed draft" of the Manifesto of the Pacific Coast Congress which lays out their goals, and it is accompanied by a larger 54-page booklet providing the minutes and proceedings of the Congress, with a list of member of the presiding committee, various organizational committees with their reports and recommendations, and a 20-page list of the organizations that attended or supported the gathering.

A wonderful archive of material for the overlooked but important gathering of West Coast communist organization in the years just before World War II.

Item #415822