Robinson Jeffers may have been Carmel’s least political “Bohemian” in the 1930s, yet he became the countercultural face of the town, especially after the upheavals of the summer of 1934. Despite their political differences, Robin and Una Jeffers became intimate friends with their more flamboyant and left-leaning fellow Carmelites, including the aged muckraker Lincoln Steffens, the writer and editor Ella Winter (who was married to Steffens), and the poet Langston Hughes. Steffens was the most famous Carmelite of the era. Even those who didn’t share his’ admiration of the Soviet Union were charmed by his gentle and charismatic personality, and everyone in Carmel was impressed by the scope and popularity of his autobiography, which appeared a few years after his arrival in town. Australian-born journalist Ella Winter, frustrated by Carmel’s political seclusion, started her own newspaper, The Carmelite, as a way of continuing her political work and connecting herself to her new home. It was chiefly through this organ, and the John Reed Club chapter which she founded in 1932, that Winter became the most notorious Carmelite of the 1930s.
In the summer of 1933, Langston Hughes came to Carmel and quickly made a mark on the town. Adrift after severing his relationship with his wealthy white patroness, Hughes was elated when, in 1933, Noel Sullivan, a wealthy writer and patron of the arts in California, offered him the use of a Carmel bungalow for one year, rent-free. Hughes’ year in Carmel was highly productive. For the first time in his life he was able to work freely on what pleased him without fear of financial strain. Steffens and Jeffers provided emotional support, while photographer Edward Weston invited Hughes to dinner parties. He also became close with Ella Winter, and for a time the two worked on a play about the agricultural strikes that were then raging up and down the Central Valley. Local papers noted his arrival with interest; he was even featured in the society pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. Carmel initially seemed to Hughes a “prejudice-free little town.”
All this changed when California’s political climate came to a boil in the summer of 1934. A longshoreman’s strike, joined by scores of other unions, brought the economy of the West Coast to a halt. The government responded with military force and the waterfront became a battleground. In far away Carmel, Ella Winter’s chapter of the John Reed Club supported the strikers and their cause. Strikers were invited to speak before the club. This was too much for many in town and soon a burlesque of vigilantism came to Carmel-by-the-Sea. A post of the American Legion was formed as was a semi-military “Citizens Committee. Meetings of the JRC were broken up and the owner of the hall in which it met was threatened. Local newspaper editors began questioning the presence of Langston Hughes and his friendships with white women. One night, a menacing crowd of men came to his bungalow. Soon after, Hughes left town.
By the end of 1934, Hughes was gone and the John Reed Club had disbanded, in part because it had nowhere to meet. Steffens would soon die and Winter would leave for Hollywood. The anti-radical groups in Carmel, led by local real estate agents and shopkeepers, had carried the day and perhaps forever changed the balance of power between Bohemians and businesspeople in Carmel. Of the brightest lights, only the “non-political” Jeffers would remain, his politics safely “hidden in plain sight,” on the pages of his books.