Biographical Information
Communist activist Louise Todd Lambert was born in 1905 in San Francisco to German immigrant parents. Raised in a socialist family, the young Lambert was active in the suffrage movement, the Young Workers League, and Nature Friends. In 1929, Lambert joined the Communist Party in California, filling the sensitive role of organizational secretary until the mid-1940s. As a state official for the Communist Party, Lambert participated in a number of important labor actions and strikes, including the 1933 cotton strike in San Joaquin Valley and the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. She was also active in local and statewide elections, running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1931 and 1933, and working as a Communist Party campaign manager during the 1934 elections. These political efforts led to Lambert's arrest and imprisonment the following year.
In 1935, Lambert was arrested, tried, and convicted in Los Angeles on charges of perjury for allegedly making false affidavits on petitions to put the Communist Party on the 1934 state ballot. She was sentenced to prison at the Tehachapi correctional institute for women, where she was incarcerated, along with other Communist Party activists, until 1938. After she was released from Tehachapi, Lambert resumed her work for the Communist Party in California, organizing training schools for leadership, participating in elections, supporting the Communist Party's newspaper, the People's World, and serving on the state executive committee. In 1939, she married her second husband, Communist Party member Rudie Lambert. Lambert continued to work as organizational secretary until the mid-1940s, when the national Party was restructured. In 1947, she was assigned a "political action" position, and was active in efforts to put the Progressive Party on the California ballot.
Beginning in the late 1940s, intensifying anti-communist sentiment -- and arrests of Communist Party members, including Rudie Lambert, under the Smith Act -- created an atmosphere of fear within the Party. In 1950, Louise Lambert was selected to serve in the Communist Party's underground reserve leadership. For the next five years, Lambert lived under an alias on the East Coast, separated from her husband and family. She returned to California in 1955. In response to internal party politics and international events, Lambert resigned from the Communist Party in 1958, signing a joint letter of protest with other prominent members.
From the guide to the Louise Todd Lambert oral history, 1958-1976, 1976, (California Historical Society)
