 She was appointed a deputy labor commissioner by Governor Culbert Olson in 1940 and served as the Chairman of the Los Angeles Communist Party (1945).In 1952, she was arrested under the Smith Act.She appeared on college campuses in support of the antiwar movement in the 1960s, and in 1969, she openly opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1969; she effectively removed herself from the Communist Party because of this.