“WE HAVE TO BE CONSCIOUS OF THE NEED TO FIGHT FOR OUR
CHILDREN’S MINDS.”

CITY COUNCILWOMAN AND COMMUNITY ORGANIZER. Even in Berkeley, a town where what would be considered radical elsewhere is commonplace, Florence McDonald is a contro­versial political figure. Her first action upon her elec­tion as City Auditor in 1975 was to cut her salary to that of the highest paid worker in her office, and use the $10,000 difference to hire an employee to help community service groups. While on the City Council she was arrested in a demonstration trying to stop the Bay Area Transit District from evicting the Berkeley Flea Market, an insti­tution that serves low-income people. She helped found Berkeley Citizens’ Action, an electoral coalition respon­sible for electing Ron Dellums to Congress on an anti-Vietnam war platform, a city-wide rent control ordinance, and other progressive measures.
In appearance, with her plain print blouses and slightly hunched figure, McDonald looks like she could be anyone’s grandmother, an image which is a part of her politics. She is known as a city official whose door is always open, espe­cially to the poor and those having trouble with the system. In one instance when a poor woman came to her office com­plaining that she couldn’t afford to pay her utility bill, she paid it for her. McDonald comes from a family with a long tradition of radicalism, and she is proud that she has passed that tradition down to her children and grandchild­ren. She is the mother of the prominent rock-folk protest singer, “Country Joe” McDonald. At the time of the inter­view she was a candidate for State Controller, running on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.

I came from a family of Eastern European Jews who came to America to find asylum. And they were determined to maintain the culture they had in Eastern Europe and to carry that culture on through their children. My mother was a very independent woman. She was one of the first women to drive a delivery truck in Washington, D.C. She participated in the 1905 Revolution in Russia and later became a charter member of the Communist Party in the United States, but my father was an anarchist. It is hard for people nowadays to understand the significance of that, but that represented some differences between people who wanted to change society as to the best way to go. And an anarchist is not this vision we have with long flowing hair, a beard, and a bomb in his hand. An anarchist is someone who doesn’t believe in any government at all. And because they don’t believe in any government, they don’t believe in any organization. So my father wasn’t a very active member of an anarchist organization, whereas my mother was active in strong poli­tical organizations, and she took a much more pragmatic ap­proach to me, making sure that she educated me along the lines that she wanted. Before it was over, my father had lost me politically, although we were very close emotion­ally. I was even closer to him emotionally, but I agreed with her politically.

They were both very active in the Jewish cultural move­ment–not the religious movement. In the Jewish community then as now, there was a split between the secularists and the religious people. Some were determined to continue the culture of the Eastern European Jews, the writing, and the art expressing the struggle of the Jewish people and the beauty of the Yiddish language; others tended mote towards the religion and to relate to the creation of a Jewish home­land in Palestine–what is now Israel–and were more into Hebrew, which wasn’t even a spoken language until Israel got going.

I never went to a synagogue, but I went to a school to study Yiddish. I went every day after school for about ten years. We were taught the literature of Eastern Europe, like Peretz and Sholom Aleichem. We put on plays by Jewish art­ists and sang songs. We were taught the history of the Jew­ish people, but that the Red Sea most likely had a low tide, that the bush was most likely struck by lightning, and so forth. And especially we were taught the political significance of the holidays. I have always been proud that most of the Jewish holidays have a real historical people’s movement orientation to them–Chanukah speaks to the strug­gle of the Maccabees for liberation, and Passover the celebration of people escaping from slavery.

This was a uniquely socialist Jewish movement. My parents were concerned that we remember not just the old country, but the struggles of the old people for the con­struction of a decent society. They were smart, my parents; they didn’t nag me or do it to the point where I would rebel. They understood that kids want to have fun, and we had a lot of fun while we were doing it. We had clubs and activities, singing and dancing, and putting on plays, and then during the summer we would go to summer camp. And then of course we were heavily involved every time there was a big strike. We participated in raising money for the strik­ers, or if someone was mistreated we would get involved to right the wrong.

There were thousands of Jewish kids who grew up in this cocoon-like atmosphere, where we knew we were despised by the society at large. The Soviet Union wasn’t even recog­nized by the United States, and to say that you were sympa­thetic to the Russian Revolution, that you were not religious, that you were an atheist, that you were against racial discrimination in Washington, D.C., which was like the deep South, a complete Jim Crow town–that really brought the wrath down.

So our parents were smart enough to provide us this whole social support fabric of dancing, singing and summer camp. These activities were part of the Workmen’s Circle, the large Jewish fraternal organization, and then later the International Workers’ Order, the IWO. It is hard to realize the importance of fraternal organizations then. But in those days, there was no Social Security, Workmen’s Compensation, or government protection of any kind–if you broke your arm and couldn’t work anymore, that was it. So people created these organizations to help each other out, and they created these big insurance and funeral societies to take care of the families of their fellow members. These were really extended family support organizations, and they were an im­portant part of the social fabric of the whole society. There were fraternal organizations all over the world, and in America they were mainly created on nationalist lines. There were Ge=an organizations, Hungarian organizations, Italian organizations; there were the Masons and the Kiwanis, and the Workmen’s Circle was the big Jewish one. But then over Israel, or Palestine as it was called then, there was a terrible split.

on the one side were people who were very adamant that Palestine, the homeland, had to be created in Palestine, no matter what happened to the Arab people who lived there. On the other side were people who felt the British were using the Jews as a pawn in their effort to dominate the Arabs. And it became just as it is today, a very emotional issue among Jewish people. So you had different organizations, and my father went on to become more Zionist oriented, and my mother was more involved with left-wing organizations that were very supportive of Jewish liberation and the fight against anti-Semitism, and the maintenance of Jewish culture, but felt–as did many of the people who helped start Israel-­that it had to be a nation of many people because that is what had been there.

There were terrible fights. I saw guys beat each other up. My best friend’s father and my father had a big fight and all. There was bloodshed in the Jewish community and a big split took place. A new organization came into being, the International Workers order (IWO), into which the more non-Zionist Jews went. The IWO was a big organization com­bining the fraternal groups of many different nationalities, not just the Jewish. It was just an amazing organization with hundreds of thousands of members and all kinds of cul­tural activities. Their chorus, for example, was renowned. They would have concerts at Carnegie Hall and people would come from all around. My mother was in a women’s group called the Emma Lazarus Club; these clubs still exist today.

I joined the Young Pioneers, which was the children’s movement of the Communist Party. We actually went out and organized other children. When I was 12 years old we went into the black community in Washington, D.C., which was really depressed. It was called the Foggy Bottom; where the Pentagon and all those fancy buildings are there were shacks with no electricity or plumbing. We organized groups of black and white kids with singing and dancing and talk of making a better life. We did the same things a Cub Scout troop does. We had a slick national magazine, just like any other kids’ magazine, with crossword puzzles and games, except that ours talked about not hating each other, world peace, and building a better life.

With the coming of the depression, McDonald became involved in the struggles around unemployment. She was in Washington when the Bonus Marchers arrived and set up their tent city waiting for the government to respond to their requests, and she remembers resorting to clandestine schemes to pass out leaflets to the soldiers explaining the march­ers# cause and asking the troops to not shoot their fellow workers. At that time passing out leaflets was grounds for arrest.
McDonald met her husband Mac while active in the American League Against War and Fascism, which exposed the collaboration between American industries and the developing war machines of Germany, Italy, and Japan that would lead to World War II. During the McCarthy period the government destroyed the IWO, taking away its insurance license. They also closed the summer camps which were a focus of the McDonalds’ family activities. Fleeing the repression of radicals in Washington, D.C., the McDonalds moved to Los Angeles. There she found herself raising a family in a much different political and cultural environment than in her youth. When her husband was called before HUAC, re­sulting in his being fired from his job and blacklisted, her neighbors and their children stopped talking to her family.

In Los Angeles we couldn’t find that same small commu­nity, so we just looked around. We went to the Unitarian Church because it was a very progressive group, and they accepted mixed couples–my husband was Presbyterian. Our daughter was interested in pacifism so we took her to the American Friends’ Service Committee. We always tried to take our children places where they could meet young people who came from the same background and had the same feelings, but it took a lot of work on our part to do it. And some­times they would rebel as children do and decide they didn’t want to go. But you just have to try and create a circle around you.
And by the way, I made up my mind when I started having kids that I was going to find that happy medium between being active and being a good mother. As much as possible I involved myself in activities that the children could be active in so as not to make my children feel they had been neglected. I had seen young people turn away from what their parents believe. We have to just put the brakes on sometimes because there is just so much to do. You could spend every waking hour doing something to stop injustices and to stop nuclear war, this that and the other. But you have to figure that if you are a parent the child is going to begin to see that activity as a threat.

I wish there was more energy spent getting our kids together, but that takes time too, and part of the problem today is we have so many single parents. I was fortunate to have a partner to help me all this time. But I think that we have to be conscious of the need to fight for our children’s minds. The Catholics know that and we need to know that too.