The 1934 strikes were important catalysts for many. Edith Arnstein’s family came to San Francisco during the Gold Rush and were related to several of the city’s elite German Jewish families. She later described the summer of 1934: “A long and bloody strike has divided the city. In middle-class homes the family is sharply divided, so that dinner tables are barricades—mothers and children on the side of the strikers, businessmen fathers on the side of the employers.” She recalled that she and a friend borrowed twenty-five dollars (equivalent to more than five hundred dollars in 2023) from her mother to contribute to the MWIU, and how, on the day of a dramatic funeral march down Market Street, she and her cousin watched from the sidewalk: “She says, ‘I am going to march.’ I join her. I hope our fathers are not watching. . . . We pledge our lives that Sperry and Bordoise have not laid down their lives in vain.” Angela Gizzi, daughter of middle-class Italian immigrants, left work to stand in respect during the funeral procession down Market Street; she called it “the most spectacular thing I’ve ever seen,” and said it made her “a radical.”

In the early 1930s, party members formed “fractions” within union locals, which typically met before union meetings and formulated a position that CP members were to follow when the meeting started. However, as Dorothy Ray Healey later recalled, “Some of our closest allies were unhappy about it,” and as CP members became more integrated into unions as members and leaders, the party abandoned its fraction meetings. Jack Olsen recalled, of the mid- and late 1930s, “The CP set up Party clubs on an industry-by-industry basis. There were warehousemen’s, seamen’s, and longshoremen’s clubs. Each club had its own officer and its own delegates to the CP county committee, a literature agent, and an education director. . . . We used to meet and first take up political issues like the anti-fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War, the current election campaign, or an ongoing legal defense case.”

For Brown and Yoneda, party membership led them into union activity. Angela Gizzi’s experience provides a different pattern. Her interest in the left led her to union activism and then to the CP. She was born in San Francisco’s North Beach, an Italian neighborhood. Her parents were middle-class Italian immigrants and nominal Catholics. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, (UC—Berkeley) in 1931, amid the Depression, but couldn’t find a job. In 1933 she was hired by the Bank of America because of her fluent Italian and ability with Spanish and French. She’d begun to move left politically at Berkeley and after witnessing the funeral march on Market Street. In early 1936 she attended a meeting of an AFL organizing committee for white-collar workers. After speaking up in the meeting, she was invited to a party recruiting session, led by Arthur Kent. She joined. Kent, however, was an informer. He gave employers the names of those who joined the union, and they were fired. Gizzi soon met Caroline Decker, who had recently been released from prison, and they became close friends. In 1937 Gizzi was elected president of a CIO organizing committee for office workers, and she continued to work as a CIO union organizer.

Estolv Ward’s efforts to found a union led him to the CP, which led him to positions with CIO unions and central bodies. He was born in Los Angeles in 1899. His father was a lawyer and former Populist who became a Socialist, and his mother was a physician, Quaker, and feminist. They moved to the Bay Area shortly after Estolv’s birth. After attending the University of California, Ward became a reporter and eventually assistant editor for the Oakland Tribune. Covering the San Francisco general strike in 1934 led him to join the Newspaper Guild, for which he was fired. He joined the CP in 1936 and held staff positions with CIO central bodies, labor publications, and Labor’s Non-Partisan League. He was executive secretary of the Harry Bridges Defense Committee in 1939. He and Angela Gizzi were married in 1939.

Arnstein graduated in 1935 and then continued for another three semesters, including some time in the law school. In 1936, while in law school, she became section organizer for the party’s professional section. She later recalled “everything was so secretive” that she didn’t even know who was in the professional section. Membership lists were kept secret, and everyone used a code name. The code name she chose was Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century advocate for women’s rights. Having a membership card was “too dangerous,” so no one had one. She remembered the professional section as composed of several units of about eight people each; each unit met every week or two at a member’s house. Concluding that she should be a member of the working class, she quit law school, went to a business school, gave up learning to type, and got a job as a cashier at a department store in San Francisco.

Observers then and later have disagreed regarding the degree to which the CP succeeded in its ambition to be a tightly disciplined organization. Even membership could be ambiguous. Caroline Decker recalled, “I never carried a book, I never paid dues. . . . As far as I was concerned, I was a member; I was prepared to give my life and I gave an awful lot of it. But . . . no evaluation papers or applications, and not even membership books. Not even dues. Where was I going to get money to pay dues?” Dorothy Ray Healey similarly recalled, “I never regularly paid dues until 1946. When you moved around a great deal, the way I did, the bookkeeping never kept up with you.” But, like Decker, she specified that “you could still be a Communist accepted by others as a Communist, whether you paid dues or not.” She added, “There is this myth that the Party ran like some kind of well-oiled machine, but it was never that well organized internally. . . . The FBI did a much better job of keeping track of our members than we did, unfortunately.”