PBA Galleries

8pp. 11.5 x 17”. With the front cover story: “Child Labor, Degradation and Filth Found in Sweat Shops of San Francisco Chinatown / Competitive Contracts in Garment Trades Force ‘Slave Conditions’ on Women and Children Despite N.R.A.”, continued on Pg. 2 as “S.F.Working Girls Degraded as in Days of Chinese Slavery”. Remarkably well preserved, given the printing on cheap, fragile newsprint.  Few issues are ever seen outside of institutional collections.

Second issue of a weekly political newspaper produced in support of the historic candidacy of muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair, Socialist-turned-Democrat, for Governor of California in the 1934 election. Unexpected popular support for Sinclair’s campaign to “End Poverty In California”  became manifest within few months when readership of this 5-cent throw-a-way newspaper reached nearly a million. Sinclair was ultimately defeated in November by a lavishly-funded Republican-business coalition (and tepid support from Roosevelt's New Deal Administration in Washington) but many of the social and economic issues he brought to the fore entered the public consciousness – like this revelation, based on a trade union report, that Chinese women clothing workers were “slipping back toward the slavery conditions that tourists shuddered over in pre-fire days.”