[2] Jotham had arrived in California in 1852 from Maine, where he and several cousins had formed Flint, Bixby & Company, which acquired major landholdings, including the 27,000-acre Rancho Los Cerritos in what is now Long Beach.
[2] Fanny grew up wealthy, and although she was an active philanthropist, when she died in 1930 her $2.5 million estate was the largest ever probated in Orange County up to that point.
[2] Fanny Bixby wrote about his abolitionist activities, including turning his house into a station on the Underground Railroad, in her pamphlet entitled How I Became a Socialist.
[2] On leaving college, she moved back to Long Beach, where she founded the Newsboy Club in the basement of a building her father owned so that the paper delivery boys would have somewhere to go that was off the streets.
She published some poetry in the California Socialist Party's newspaper, the Oakland World,[7] and she attended at least one antiwar meeting in Pasadena before the Espionage Act of 1917 made it risky to speak out against the government.
[3] She was strongly against militaristic symbolism, such as standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, forcing children to sing the national anthem in schools, and saluting the flag.
A couple of years before she died, she wrote to her cousin Sarah Bixby Smith: "I have three lines of work, bringing up my foster children, helping my neighbors (mostly Japanese farmers) and banging my head against the stone wall of militarism and conservatism that hems me in.