Biography
W. H. Huffine was a defendant in the Sacramento criminal-syndicalism prosecution arising from the organizing campaigns of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. The prosecution followed the California agricultural strikes of 1933 and the arrests of union organizers and supporters in 1934. W. H. Huffine was acquitted on April 1, 1935, when the jury returned its verdicts. Eight other defendants were convicted; their convictions were reversed on appeal in September 1937.
Daily Worker, August 23, 1934, page 1: The Sacramento dispatch individually lists this defendant among seventeen facing six criminal-syndicalism counts. It describes the Sacramento prisoners collectively as crowded fourteen to a cell, with no beds or blankets for two weeks and a hole in the floor for a toilet. The stated six-to-eighty-four-year range was potential exposure if convicted, not an imposed sentence. The account’s unnamed Chinese detainee is not identified with any named defendant.
A Sacramento defense statement dated February 27, 1935, printed in the Daily Worker on March 5, included this defendant among fourteen signers. The statement defended the International Labor Defense and its conduct of the trial and bail campaign against factional criticism. It also named Luther Mincy and John Fisher as acquitted about a week before the statement. Its allegations about other defendants’ cooperation with police are partisan claims, not independently established facts. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n055-NAT-mar-05-1935-DW-Q.pdf#page=3
The complete Sacramento roster on PDF pages 17–18 individually names this defendant among seventeen indicted for criminal syndicalism during the 1934 strike crackdown. Printed variants include Lorent Norman, W. H. Huffine and Harry J. Collentz. The threatened six-to-eighty-four-year range is exposure, not an imposed sentence or actual service. This corroborates the existing Sacramento prosecution; no new arrest, personal prison admission, release day or verdict is inferred from the roster.
The caption identifies Wm. Huffine among the Sacramento defendants. Matching the same prosecution supports the existing W. H. Huffine identity. No precise custody endpoint is inferred.
In his first-person account, W. H. Huffine states that he was arrested on July 21, 1934, in the Hall of Justice corridor while attending a preliminary hearing for defendants seized in the July 20 raids. He says he had been in jail since July 21. He distinguishes his August 27 vagrancy acquittal from an August 15 criminal-syndicalism indictment; the acquittal did not end the confinement described in this account. The article supplies no physical release date or completed custody total. His statement that he was born in Arkansas fifty-six years earlier is retained as a historical age statement, without assigning an exact birth date.
Huffine recalls joining the Carpenters’ Union in Omaha in 1903, when he was also a Socialist Party member, and joining the Industrial Workers of the World in Seattle in November 1913. He describes migratory and railway work, moving to California in 1926 and working in a cannery, losing his job in March 1932, organizing with the Unemployed Council for relief, and later selling working-class newspapers in Sacramento.
