Johns, Dorothy

JOHNS, DOROTHY. Free speech activist, Johns played a noteworthy role during the summer of 1908 when socialists campaigned for the right to speak freely on the streets of Los Angeles. Arrested, at least thirty-five, including six women, refused bail to publicize their efforts and endured up to two-weeks in jail. Johns recorded her impressions of the abysmal jail conditions, especially in the women’s cells. Released to local newspapers, her reports prompted a widespread protest against the city’s penal system. She then published her findings in a pamphlet, Victims of the System: How Crime Grows in Jail and City Hall, which was distributed by Charles H. Kerr Company.

Born in Virginia to William Clayton Bowman, a socialist Universalist minister, Dorothy Bowman, at age fifteen, married Count Frederick von Piontkowski, supposedly a grand nephew of a Polish king. They lived together for sixteen years in Mexico, where the countess studied nursing before becoming a widow.

After relocating to Los Angeles with her two children, in 1906 she married a fellow socialist Cloudesley Johns, secretary of the local branch and friend and traveling companion of Jack London. The local branch embraced “sewer socialism” and campaigned for municipal ownership of utilities and the industrial property adjoining the city’s waterfront, a graduated property tax, and generally for improved conditions for working-class residents. Johns came to prominence, however, by joining other socialists in challenging the municipal ban on street meetings that lacked an official permit. Throughout July, 1908 socialists and trade unionists rose to the occasion; on July 18th, they formed a march, 5,000 strong, to the city hall to demand their constitutional rights to free assembly and speech. Demonstrations continued until August, when the city council withdrew their ordinance and handed the protesters a victory. Back on their soap boxes, street speakers mobilized to recall the mayor Arthur Harper, reported as the first such effort in the United States. In 1911, they came close to electing their own socialist replacement, Fred C. Wheeler, a locally prominent labor leader. Following her release from jail, Dorothy Johns began to tour the state and became applauded as an effective and popular lecturer.

“Socialist Lectures: Mrs. Dorothy Johns,” Arizona Republic (Phoenix), August 23, 1904, pp. 4

“A Notable Triumph of Free Speech" in Los Angeles, Arena, XL, October 1908, pp. 350-51.