Flashback Fridays: Communists in Echo Park!

I've only found two pictures of Manewitz and they are both slightly creepy.

Big news! A suspected communist was arrested at his apartment at 1420 Echo Park Ave. and charged with “teaching and advocating overthrow of the U.S. government by violence”… on September 17, 1952.

Echo Park was home to a lot of communists and socialists during the couple of decades after the first Red Scare (in the 1920’s) and before the second Red Scare (in the 1950’s). However, it’s difficult to find information on the group’s activities as it is (understandably) not widely published. Most of the information we have are personal accounts and newspaper articles. That’s where the handy-dandy Los Angeles Times archive at the L.A. Public Library comes in!

I found an interesting little nugget of an article about a man named Robert Manewitz who was picked up by the FBI at his apartment in Echo Park. A long-time Communist Party member and the son of Russian immigrants, Manewitz first started organizing laborers and protests in the Midwest in the 1930’s. According to the article, he came to Los Angeles from Missouri in order to “take over the duties of some of California Communist Party leaders who had been arrested on similar charges of Smith Act violations.”

The Smith Act is a statute that basically says it’s illegal to do or say anything that could be seen as an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. And you wanna know the really fun part? Although most of the cases under it were thrown out as unconstitutional, it’s still on the books today.

And what did Manewitz say to the press? “He refused to comment on the charges against him, saying only: ‘I don’t know what it is all about.'” Good man.

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  1. Samantha Manewitz says:

    I only just found this site now… Three years too late is better than never, I guess.

    Bob Manewitz was my grandfather.

    When I was growing up, he talked very little about his involvement with the communist party, so I’m afraid he took a lot of that history to his grave. My dad told me some amazing and inspiring stories about my grandfather from that period and int the 50’s and 60’s, when he owned a bumper plating plant in Chicago. According to my dad, Bob made a point of hiring men with… Umm… Colorful backgrounds, because he knew what it was like to serve time and believed in giving people the chance to turn their lives around.

    I just remember him as a big man with a warm, boisterous voice. He was always happy and smiling, so it’s strange to see him looking so dour in these old photos. I also remember that he and my grandmother (who was a force of nature in her own right, and a feminist before the word even existed) took a lot of trips to the Soviet Union during Glastnost and the beginning of perestroika. They were called international friendship tours, or something to that effect. At the time, all I really cared about was the fact that they brought back a stuffed bear for me to sleep with. I was five.

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