Review: <i>J. Stitt Wilson: Socialist, Christian, Mayor of Berkeley</i>, by Stephen E. Barton

Mayor Wilson led Berkeley from 1911 to 1913 as a proud Christian, Socialist, labor union activist, and fervent supporter of temperance and women’s suffrage. In J. Stitt Wilson: Socialist, Christian, Mayor of Berkeley, Stephen E. Barton combines an account of Wilson’s life as an idealistic activist, inspired by his faith, with thorough coverage of early socialist campaigns that aimed to create a more equitable American society.The City of Berkeley is sometimes affectionately called the “People’s Republic of Berkeley,” a lampoon of its socialist leanings. Visitors to Telegraph Avenue can buy sweatshirts or buttons with the hammer and sickle, the universal symbol of a proletariat society. Contemporary socialism in Berkeley is conflated with Telegraph Avenue’s countercultural lifestyle, where nudity and marijuana use have long been part of the scenery. The Free Speech Movement—a series of protests at UC Berkeley that culminated in the arrest of eight hundred activists on December 3, 1964—still represents the largest mass arrest of peaceful protesters in the world. J. Stitt Wilson: Socialist, Christian, Mayor of Berkeley contextualizes this post-1960s identity by taking a deep dive into the fight for social justice in Berkeley five decades before the Free Speech Movement.Barton, currently president of the Bay Area Community Land Trust, researched Wilson as a pastime while he directed the City of Berkeley’s Housing Department. He ably connects Wilson’s memoirs with themes of political activism, the power of communities to act responsibly on behalf of all members of society, and, above all, the righteous political and social-justice pursuits of a devoted Christian.Jackson Stitt Wilson was born on March 19, 1868, in a small farming community on the Maitland River in Ontario, Canada. The next week, on March 23, Governor Henry Haight signed the Organic Act, calling for the charter of the University of California, the second land grant university west of the Mississippi (after the University of Washington).1 When UC Berkeley graduated its first woman, Rosa Scrivner, in 1874, grade schooler Jackson Stitt Wilson was preoccupied with his first confrontation with injustice: the practice of whipping errant students with a heavy leather strap. As a teen, he experienced a profound “spiritual illumination” that inspired a lifelong devotion to pursuing his belief that “socialism is applied Christianity.”2At the age of twenty-one, Wilson enrolled at Northwestern Academy and began his ministry as a pastor and labor activist in Spring Valley, Illinois. “I hope to bring together on common ground all classes, trade-unionists, socialists, single-taxers, laborers,” Wilson promised his new parishioners, mostly coal miners and other laborers from the Spring Valley Coal Company.3In 1900, Wilson joined Henry Herron, a presidential campaign surrogate for Eugene Debs, in establishing a new Social Gospel movement. They called it the “Gospel Crusade” and based its philosophy on the teachings of Jesus and the literal practice of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:10): “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus was a carpenter who sought to bring social justice to the economically disadvantaged, they reminded parishioners. Herron secured funding from his benefactress Caroline Rand for Wilson’s master’s degree, and Wilson began working on his thesis, “Social Value of Religious Work of a Section of the City of Chicago,” based on interviews of religious leaders in the West Town area of Chicago.In 1901, the same year Debs founded the Socialist Party of America, Wilson broke with Henry Herron when Herron’s wife, Mary, filed for divorce “on the grounds of desertion and cruelty” to her and their four children. Herron then married his benefactress’s daughter, Carrie Rand, the newly appointed dean of women at Iowa College. Wilson and other clergy felt blindsided by Herron’s infidelity—they pronounced Herron’s “actions unacceptable and his religious claims a sham” (69). Upended by this scandal, Wilson moved to California with his family. After a year in Los Angeles, Wilson and his wife decided to move to Berkeley: “We went to Berkeley…without ever having seen the city. It was the seat of the State University—that was enough” (87).Once settled in a spacious home built by his contemporary, the famous architect Bernard Maybeck, Wilson renewed his zeal for preaching social Christianity. His sermons kept him on the road, mostly in Los Angeles, but the 1906 San Francisco earthquake redirected his plans. Wilson spent the year after the earthquake fundraising on behalf of unhoused families, then rented out his Berkeley home and moved to Britain for a year.In 1908, Wilson moved back to the United States in time to rally Christians to vote for Socialist Eugene Debs in his third run for president. He also campaigned for other Socialists up and down the ticket, including his own brother, Benjamin Franklin Wilson, who ran for Congress in Kansas. Ben Wilson likely shared the stage with fellow labor activist Mother Jones at the Socialist District Convention in Girard, Kansas, on February 19, 1908.J. Stitt Wilson launched his mayoral campaign in 1911. His close friend Job Harriman—America’s first Socialist vice-presidential candidate, running alongside Debs—teased Wilson about his nomination: “Berkeley! Why, Wilson, your vote would be so small it would be a joke.…[Bourgeois Berkeley is] the last city in the state, Wilson, that will elect a Socialist. Don’t accept it.”Wilson realized that becoming mayor of Berkeley was a chance to put his socialist ideals to the test: Berkeley’s private water supply was expensive and its quality was poor. If he could prove that community-owned utilities improved prices and quality for all citizens, this would show Americans that socialism could be both practical and effective.By 1913, Wilson had succeeded in paving the streets of West Berkeley and passing bonds for a new sewer system, but he lost his incumbency as mayor to the well-funded campaigns of Charles D. Heywood and Samuel C. Irving, wealthy Berkeley businessmen. In one of his last speeches as mayor, Wilson said, “I dream of a city called Berkeley where the unemployed will not wander the streets like vagabond dogs.…I dream of a Berkeley where the people shall own their own public utilities.…Truth, justice and the good must be…held up as social ideals” (216). Throughout the rest of his life, Wilson continued to campaign for women’s suffrage, labor rights, and farmer and consumer cooperatives. In his final years he passionately backed FDR’s New Deal.Barton cites many women who profoundly influenced Wilson, including his grandmothers Ann Stitt and Ann Wilson, his mother Sarah Ann Stitt Wilson, his wife Emma Agnew Wilson, his sister-in-law Leila Agnew Wilson, his daughters Violette Rose Wilson and Gladys Viola Wilson, and the Midwest mother-daughter power brokers Caroline Rand and Carrie Rand. However, the broader stories of these women are omitted. Also omitted is the political influence of Wilson’s contemporary, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, arguably the most powerful female power broker from Berkeley until 1997, when UC Berkeley economics professor Janet Yellen was appointed to chair the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.Including women’s views on socialism and how politics influenced the course of their lives would deepen our understanding of what was at stake for American families. Socialism’s rise in Americans’ consciousness happened in tandem with the women’s suffrage movement. Referencing how women wielded their newly obtained right to vote could have illuminated some of the reasons why socialism didn’t spread beyond a small percentage of the American electorate. Nevertheless, J. Stitt Wilson: Socialist, Christian, Mayor of Berkeley succeeds in documenting one man’s dedication to Christianity-inspired socialism, and demonstrates the power and challenge of individual agency in mobilizing societal change.

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