By Paul S. Taylor and Norman Leon Gold
What really happened in San Francisco's general strike? What were the issues?
What do they mean to labor, employers, the community? What of the vigilantes
and their violent anti-Red campaign? Two Californians here give the story down
to date
Survey Graphic, September, 1934 (Vol. 23, No. 9), p. 405.
1. SIXTY-FIVE thousand trade unionists during four July days staged on the shores
of San Francisco Bay the second and most widespread general strike in United
States history. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth they carried out an
extended maneuver which surprised, bewildered, gratified, or terrified and maddened
the average citizen. To most Americans there is something reign about a general
strike, and a bit ominous—like the "dole," storm-troopers, socialists,
communists, fascists, and a lot of other things that used to seem farther away
than they do now. But to many on the Pacific Coast, experience has made the
general strike at least real, however differently they may interpret it—as
a splendid demonstration of the strength and "solidarity of labor,"
a victory for the "real leaders of labor," a "sell-out"
by labor "fakirs," a "strikers' Dictatorship," or an "insurrection."
2. The San Francisco general strike of 1934 was in no sense a "sport."
It is but the latest of a long line of conflicts between employers and employed
in that area, many of them, like the general strike, centering about the waterfront,
and focusing on the degree of control over employment to be exercised by employers
or by union. For power flows from job control. Beginning in the late eighties,
the shipowners' association established a hiring-hall as a device for breaking
union power. The sailors struck, proposed joint control, were refused, and then
beaten. In 1934 the longshoremen demanded substitution of union-control for
employer-control of hiring halls. The employers proposed joint control, here
refused, and the issue finally went to arbitration. The general strike was but
a climax to the 1934 phase of this perennial struggle for power.
3. Waterfronts the world over provide dramatic examples of the local accumulation—characteristic
of many industries-of over-supplies of under-employed workers. We lack neither
knowledge nor example of how to "decasualize" this waterfront labor.
Indeed, Seattle employers have taken the lead among American ports in achieving
regularization, and the other ports of the Pacific Coast, except San Francisco,
have more or less followed suit. But in San Francisco the "good employer,"
while maintaining his individual labor relations on a fairly advanced plane,
allowed general employment practices in his industry to lag behind those long
recognized by experts in industrial relations as intelligent and beneficial.
The philosophy of the agent who for years has managed waterfront labor there
is suggested by his characterization of marine workers as "hewers of wood
and drawers of water," and by his statement some years ago that "Really,
what we are trying to do is to put the spirit of Jesus Christ in these men,"
a profession promptly balanced with: "Of course, you've got to put the
fear of God in them, too." Under this regime, the well-known abuses of
an overcrowded labor market flourished: under-employment, low earnings for many,
long and fruitless waits at the docks, petty graft as the price of jobs. These
were the conditions, against a background of protracted unemployment and insecurity,
of anxious hope stimulated by the rights of collective bargaining under the
National Industrial Recovery Act, of a left-ward surge toward more aggressive
labor activity both within and without the trade unions, from which the waterfront
strike, and ultimately the general strike, developed.
4. THE first rumble of impending conflict on the waterfront was heard in October
1933 when 400 longshoremen struck against the Matson Navigation Company, claiming
discriminatory discharge of members of the newly formed International Longshoremen's
Association (ILA.) The company refused to recognize the ILA, but after mediation,
reinstated the men. This act sounded the death-knell of a curious organization,
the "Blue Book" union, or Longshoremen's Association of San Francisco.
Fourteen years earlier the Blue Book union had arisen during a strike from a
schism within the ILA; organized by the gang bosses as a right-wing dual union,
the employers promptly accorded it recognition and a "union shop"
agreement which consigned the original ILA to a lingering death. Strangely,
the Blue Book union later was welcomed into the San Francisco Labor Council
in 1929 as a "transformed" company union, but ejection followed in
1931 when it was ascertained that the "transformation" was not complete.
It lingered on, then in its turn went down to defeat before the rising ILA of
1933 and 1934.
5. By March 1934 the longshoremen were ready for aggressive action. Slack employment,
instead of deterring action, only made more acute the grievance voiced by the
numerous unemployed and underemployed unionists that favored gangs received
too large a share of the work. Both sides were in a fighting mood, the men following
militant leaders, the employers confident of victory, and willing to put up
with the possible loss of two or three million dollars as not an exorbitant
price for crushing the new union. Negotiations proceeded, both sides yielding
a bit, but neither conceding enough to avert a strike. The men asked an increase
of wages from 85 cents to $1 an hour, and $1.50 an hour for overtime, a coastwide
agreement, and union control of the hiring-hall. The last demand was crucial
and the issue was clearly joined: the men called it the foundation of their
union; the employers declared that it meant union dictation—an infringement
on the "right to select employee," and discrimination against competent
and faithful non-unionists. Curiously but significantly, the ILA now was seeking
a "union shop," which it had protested the preceding October when
employers gave force to their "union shop" agreement with the Blue
Book union and discharged some ILA men. The employers, similarly, were now resisting
a "union shop," when previously they had only too eagerly granted
one. How much depends on the kind of union!
6. Negotiation for a shift in power is peculiarly difficult. Dissatisfied, the
men called a strike for March 23, halted it upon request of President Roosevelt,
but mediation failing, called it again for May 9. The fight was on in San Francisco
and in other ports of the Pacific Coast. Along the three and one-half miles
of San Francisco's Embarcadero the corrugated steel doors remained shut. Gates,
topped with barbed wire, were closed and boarded. Pickets strolled up and down,
passing knots of police, accosting and warning those who looked as though they
might take jobs.
7. The companies advertised for strike-breakers, and recruited several hundred.
These were given steady work at the same hourly rates which the strikers refused,
plus $1.50 a day, which was in excess of the cost of board and lodging aboard
two ships fitted out for the purpose. Some people inquire incredulously how
any man can break strike. Perhaps the answer is not difficult: apart from the
few who do it for principle or for love of adventure, they act under the spur
of necessity. Many a striker and strikebreaker had this in common: each, with
his family, was on relief. Said a college premedical student who worked as a
strikebreaker: "I'd rather have salt on my torn body, but God, I have to
be a doctor!" His earnings of $150 enable him to return to college. Union
pickets sought to deter the strikebreakers with the threats and physical violence
often characteristic of American strikes. By July 9, 266 injured persons had
been reported by the police; of these 63 percent were strikebreakers and 10
percent were police.
8. The strike spread first on the side of labor. Partly in sympathy with the
longshoremen, but principally to resume actively its long-clouded leadership
of the men of its crafts, the International Seamen's Union struck on May 16.
The unions of licensed officers followed, May 19 and 21. Meanwhile the truck
drivers (under the anachronistic name of the Teamsters' Union) decided that
after May 13 they would no longer haul from the docks "hot cargo,"
i.e., cargo unloaded by strikebreakers. They continued to haul freight from
the warehouses, however, if the employers could move it that far. This the employers
did by way of the state owned Belt Line Railroad, which operates from the piers
to the warehouses. Strikebreakers loaded the cars on the piers, warehousemen
unloaded them. To stop this traffic, the longshoremen proceeded to organize
the warehousemen into a union to refuse to handle "hot cargo." On
June 14 the Teamsters' Union refused to haul "hot freight" anywhere
The tactics were effective. The railroads, connected with the piers by the Belt
Line over which freight moved to the hinterland and along the coast, gained
heavily at the expense of the shipowners, but freight movement from the waterfront
to the city was at a standstill. The docks choked with cargo, vessels could
not unload, more merchant ships lay at anchor in the Bay than at any time since
'49 when sailors deserted en masse to join the rush to the gold fields.
9. THE widening base of support on the side of labor was countered on the side
of capital. On May 20 the president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce
rallied to the support of the waterfront employers, declaring, "It is now
my duty to warn every business man in this community, that the welfare of business
and industry and of the entire public is at stake in the outcome of this crisis."
Three weeks later, the Industrial Association, organized in 1921 during a crisis
in the building trades, standing for the open shop under the name of the American
Plan, and representing the leading industrial, financial, and business interests
of the city (including the shipowners) accepted the invitation of the Chamber
of Commerce to "open the port." A corporation was formed; it acquired
trucks, a warehouse, the fastest speed boat on the Bay, assembled men to drive
trucks and work longshore, and took contracts to move freight. With the announcement
that, "We are, therefore, commencing operations to restore the streets
of San Francisco to its citizens, confident that the Police Department will
afford full protection for the full use thereof by unarmed drivers," the
Industrial Association began to haul cargo July 3. The strikebreaking drivers
were evidently of the adventurous type; in the words of an Association official,
"We've got a fine bunch of boys to drive those trucks. They are falling
all over themselves to get the jobs."
10. The movement of cargo from waterfront to warehouse was little more than
a gesture, for effective picketing still prevented movement beyond. But everybody—longshoremen
and teamsters, shipowners and Industrial Association, public authorities and
the public—accepted it as a test of power. The mayor promised the Industrial
Association "adequate police protection during these operations which,
of course, is their right" and asked "the people of San Francisco
to absent themselves from the vicinity wherein the movement of merchandise is
to be conducted." But neither spectators nor pickets would remain away.
Cargo moved from waterfront to warehouse, some trucks were dumped and burned,
missiles were thrown, clubs wielded, and officers and men injured. On July 5,
"lines of battle, as clear cut as any formed on the Western Front, were
drawn along San Francisco's waterfront."
11. The pickets faced the police; this is significant. String pickets usually
confront first the strikebreakers or guards hired by the employers. Indeed,
in times past San Francisco employers have even boldly proclaimed their readiness
directly to meet force with force. In an earlier longshore strike a noted shipowner
said: "As long as we continue hauling our men to the receiving hospital
. . . we are never going to get anywhere, and I propose, that tomorrow morning,
starting in when they compel us to send one ambulance to the receiving hospital,
we send two of theirs." But in the strike of 1934 different tactics were
employed: "We didn't do as in the old days when we went out and got a lot
of ugly-faced toughs." Instead, the maintenance of physical order was left
to the police, so that when pickets were beaten it was the police who did it
rather than hired thugs. The gain in public sympathy to the employers from such
an alignment is obvious. Financially, it also offers advantages to them; as
the San Francisco employers pointed out to those in San Pedro, the port of Los
Angeles:
The item of guards, cost and boarding, amounting to about $100,000 [in San Pedro],
is one which we think should be borne by the city. Here [in San Francisco] the
police in ample numbers are supplied without cost, and the only guards employed
are those needed on the housing ships. Each company has extra guards or watchmen,
the cost being borne by the individual line.
12. On July 5, then, hundreds of police and some thousands of pickets faced
each other. The trucks of the Industrial Association began to move. The pickets
were forced back, back, in an extended maneuver covering many blocks. Thousands
of commuters from the East Bay jammed the viaduct and the sidewalks; clerks
crowded to the windows of office buildings. As police drove strikers and sightseers
up Rincon Hill, the pickets hurled bricks, and the police, at the cry of "Let
'em have it," threw tear-gas grenades. Here and there clubbing occurred
as men and police clashed. Before the ILA hall fighting was more vicious. Inspectors
of police, surrounded by angry strikers seeking to overturn their car, fired.
Two men were killed. Police, horses, strikers, and spectators were wounded.
13. THE men called it "bloody Thursday," and spoke of the "battle
of Rincon Hill." They staged a funeral parade down Market Street that contrasted
strangely in its awesome quiet and simplicity with the gay banners above, hung
in welcome to the convention of Knights Templar. At street intersections the
police stepped aside, and like other spectators bared their heads. The funeral
made a stirring emotional appeal to the strikers; the public was curious and
impressed.
14. The Governor declared a state of riot. Strike leaders had refused to allow
"hot cargo" to move over the State Belt Line "without molestation,"
so he accepted "the defi of the strikers," and ordered out the National
Guard to preserve order and "protect state property." Under the guns
of the troops, "hot freight" continued to move from waterfront to
warehouse. If the troops allowed traffic to move, their presence aided the employers;
if they did not, they would have aided the men by establishing completely effective
picketing. We are accustomed to follow the first practice. (The Governor of
Minnesota, however, has introduced a notable exception to American procedure
by permitting movement only of trucks engaged in essential services or those
whose Owners have reached an agreement with the men approved by federal officials.)
So the strikers were out-maneuvered, until to the on-looker the waterfront conflict
was made to appear a battle of employee striking not against their employers
but against the police and beyond them against the public itself. A less obvious
effect was to suggest to the strikers that the government was not impartial,
but against them. Communists were not slow to point this out to the men, ignoring,
of course, government feeding of needy strikers' families and other helpful
services.
15. TROOPS occupied the waterfront-sentries with steel helmets and gleaming
bayonets, machine-gun nests, and motorized roving patrols. Admission to the
occupied area was by pass. Guards moved about in the ferry building and forbade
commuters to loiter on the viaduct. A pier watchman who obeyed too slowly the
sentry's command to halt was bayoneted in the groin; a 19-year-old strikebreaker
who inadvertently came within the 50-foot deadline in his speedboat, and an
amateur photographer taking movies of guardsmen were shot.
16. Conceding the futility of trying to stand up against the militia, the strikers'
leaders sought other weapons to checkmate the waterfront employers who were
now actively aided by the highest financial and industrial leaders of the city.
To the strikers, confident and more impassioned than ever, the situation seemed
clear: the employers had finally used their last resource—their own strength
first, then the police, the Industrial Association, and the militia; now the
men must win reinforcements for the final test of power.
17. From the waterfront through the ranks of organized labor and to the public
went the appeal for support of a general strike. it was urged as the: first
and only possible defense-step against the aggression of anti-union employers
under the banner of the San Francisco Industrial Association....When the Industrial
Association entered the waterfront controversy, as a third party, as a strikebreaking
agency supported by guns and police clubs, labor trouble in the San Francisco
Bay Region ceased to be just a dispute between certain labor unions and certain
employers over questions relating to their specific industries. It took on the
direct and obvious form of organized warfare on the part of employers federated
in the Industrial Association against all labor organizations and the principle
of collective bargaining—progressive, unified, massed attack which unless
repelled was certain to engulf and eventually destroy more and more labor groups.
Realizatin of this fact has caused the strikes of workers, affiliated in AFofL
organizations in industries which at a glance seem to have slight unity of interest
with the waterfront unions originally involved in the disturbance. But the campaign
of the Industrial Association, with its anti-labor program and leadership, is
in reality an attack on all labor organizations, all members of organized labor
who seek to retain their legal rights of unified activities. The right of labor
to such organization and collective bargaining has been fought by certain groups
of employers ever since America became an industrial nation. It is a right which
received a powerful stimulus from President Roosevelt and the New Deal; a right
affirmed in clear words in the National Industrial Recovery Act; under which
the NRA operates. It is a right legally granted labor which has been denied
in San Francisco.
18. The sympathy of a large section of the general public was swinging to the
side of labor. Even professional and business men said, "I hope they beat
the Industrial Association," and "I'm for the longshoremen."
The overwhelming show of force was too much, and American spirit was moved to
side with the under dog. Besides, the verbatim publication of hearings before
the National Longshoremen's Board now gave the public its first opportunity
to read and compare adequate statements by all parties to the dispute.
19. One of the significant aspects of the entire situation was e relation between
aggressive strike leaders of the longshoremen, and the more conservative leaders
of unions throughout the city. In the ILA, the conservative leaders had already
been repudiated one by one. The conservative local president had been deposed;
thereafter he sought to weaken the strike by organizing a new union, and announcing
that conservative longshoremen were ready to return to work, and that more would
do so except for insufficient slice protection and the spell cast over them
by communist leadership. And when the international president, Joseph P. Ryan,
came out from the East and, together with Pacific Coast union executives, negotiated
an agreement with the employers, the members denied the authority of officials
to take a binding agreement without referendum, and voted it down. Under Harry
Bridges, sincere, militant man of the ranks, whose eleven years on San Francisco's
waterfront have not effaced his nasal-cockney Australian accent, a Joint Marine
Strike Committee was organized to take over negotiations. The employers called
the rejection of the "Ryan agreement" a "repudiation," but
clearly the men never had been bound by it, for Ryan negotiated it with neither
authority nor sufficient knowledge of the temper the men and their local leaders.
20. As the cry for a general strike sounded, the gulf between the aroused members
of the ILA and the Teamsters, on the one hand and the conservative leaders of
the San Francisco labor movement and their followers on the other, became increasingly
apparent. Indeed, the course of the general strike itself was determined by
this conflict. On July 6, the day after troops occupied the waterfront, the
Labor Council appointed a strike strategy committee of seven to "investigate."
But if the business agents at the Labor Temple were calm and cautious, the rank
and file of a number of unions were eager for action. "Bloody Thursday"
and the ensuing funeral had dramatized the struggle to all labor. The Teamsters
voted 1220 to 271 for a complete walkout in San Francisco; said Michael Casey,
their "responsible," conservative officer:
I warned them that it was strictly against the rules of the brotherhood and
that they will undoubtedly lose all strike benefits . . . but nothing on earth
could have prevented that vote. In all my thirty years of leading these men,
I have never seen them so worked up, so determined to walk out.
21. Union after union voted to strike or (about half of them) to abide by the
decision of the General Strike Committee formed by appointment of President
Vandeleur of the Labor Council as the labor directorate of the strike. In vain
their leaders urged arbitration and warned against a general strike. "All
right, boys, I'm with you," said one, and later he told a friend, "It
was an avalanche. I saw it coming, so I ran ahead before it crushed me."
22. The employers agreed now to arbitrate all issues with the longshoremen,
and to bargain (but not to arbitrate) with elected representatives of the seafaring
crafts. The longshoremen remained adamant; they would not arbitrate "control
of the hiring-hall," and they would not settle unless the seafaring crafts
were guaranteed a satisfactory settlement. And now the men were marching out.
On July 12 the truck drivers ceased work; gasoline trucks could make no deliveries
and taxis were driven back to their garages. Butchers, ship boilermakers, machinists,
welders, and laundry workers followed. The building-trades, cleaners, cooks
and waiters, barbers, auto mechanics, cleaners and dyers, streetcar men, and
many others waited only the call of the General Strike Committee. In the East
Bay similar stands were taken by excited unionists.
23. The National Longshoremen's Board worked furiously for a settlement. The
striking teamsters allowed only emergency trucks to operate in the city. Fire
trucks, police cars, hospital services, scavengers were unmolested; other essential-service
trucks required union permits. A ring of teamsters' pickets began to turn back
food trucks bound for the Bay cities. Still people were asking: "Is there
going to be a general strike?" Vandeleur as head of the General Strike
Committee replied: "Do you fellows have to see a haystack before you can
see which way the straws are blowing?"
24. Grocery stores were jammed. As the contagion spread, more and more people
rushed to the stores to stock up. In the more affluent districts vegetables
soon were "picked over" and gaps appeared on grocers' shelves. Canned
goods sold rapidly, but stocks were large. With meat no longer obtainable, an
inspired advertisement announced "X-brand tuna, an ideal meat substitute
. . . can be served in countless ways." In the poorer districts trade was
brisk, but slower than elsewhere; there were no funds for large purchases. The
Knights Templar terminated their convention and left the city while teamsters
would still haul their baggage.
25. By Saturday night, July 14, a general strike seemed inevitable. Said Michael
Casey: "Logic has all gone out of the window! This thing is being ruled
now by passion and hatred." But now the leaders were well ahead of the
prodding followers, and they guided the action. The general strike was timed
for 8 o'clock Monday morning in San Francisco, and Tuesday in the East Bay.
But the militant unionists were not in control. Harry Bridges was defeated for
the vice-presidency of the meeting formed by delegates from every union in San
Francisco, and he was smothered as the only maritime representative on the appointed
General Strike Committee of twenty-five.
26. Monday morning no streetcars ran. The streets were filled with pedestrians.
Autos were left at home to conserve gasoline. A holiday mood was in the air.
Two thousand more soldiers entered the city; armored tanks appeared on the waterfront.
There was practically no violence. Long lines of people waited their turn for
meals before nineteen restaurants officially opened by the strike committee.
27. But already the strike, which was general but never complete, was being
checked. From within, the strike leaders decided the first day that the municipal
carmen should return. The next day food trucks were given free passage by the
pickets. More restaurants were opened by union permit, then all restaurants.
Soon the embargo on gasoline trucks was lifted, and finally on July 19, the
general strike was called off at the close of its fourth day. The General Strike
Committee urged arbitration of all issues by all unions and employers party
to the original dispute, and the National Longshoremen's Board announced a closely
similar position.
28. FROM without, press and public officials were declaring the general strike
a labor "dictatorship" and "insurrection," a strike against
the public. "Strike bred in Moscow AFL avers," "Citizens open
food, gas sales in spite of unions; Bridges admits defeat of plot to starve
city into surrender," declared the headlines. Said Mayor Rossi "In
the presence of a general strike nothing can be accomplished. That strike must
be ended." Oil trucks were operated under armed guard; union "permits"
were indignantly refused, by interests which, only a few years earlier had supported
the Industrial Association's "permit" system which compelled the "open
shop" in the building trades. But now they said, "Are we going to
recognize another government or our own?" Guardsmen stripped the permit
signs from cars which entered the occupied zone, and some, over-zealous, even
took union badges from the strikers. "Imagine permits!" said an oil
man, "I see red every time I see one those signs. What a fizzle! What have
they gained? Nothing but the hatred of the public. I like what General Johnson
said; nothing but civil war, insurrection... general strike!" The sympathy
of the public was turning away from the strikers as their inconvenience grew.
"They were trying to set up another city government of their own. They
found that our sympathy was gone when we couldn't get our carrots," said
a professional man. "The longshoremen should have endured almost anything
rather than let people go hungry and cause anything like a general strike";
"Working people can't be trusted," said middle-class housewives. Many
rank and file unionists, too, like a Key Route conductor were glad that it ended
the way it did. It might have been worse. If it had lasted longer the company
would have ordered us back to work and then we would have been called "scabs"
or we'd have lost a year's pension rights. A general strike? That's socialistic.
The AFofL don't believe in that. We had nothing to do with the making of it,
yet we were brought into it. We lost three days' wages and are paying for it
yet. Such men, and those who genuinely doubted the tactical wisdom of a general
strike of indefinite duration, were the support of the conservative leaders.
29. The Mayor "officially" announced the end of the general strike,
saying, "I congratulate the real leaders of organized labor on their decision.
San Francisco has stamped out without bargains or compromise any attempt to
import into its life the very real danger of revolt."
30. The maritime strike went on to its conclusion. The fate of the longshoremen's
strike hung on the teamsters whose position was strategic. What would they do?
Delay, refusal to admit Bridges to the Teamsters' Hall, then the vote. The teamsters
would go back to work "unconditionally." The last prop was pulled,
and the longshoremen reluctantly, if overwhelmingly, voted to return to work.
The strike was over.
31. The newspapers brought pressure on the employers to arbitrate with all crafts.
They accepted, and the role of the national government as mediator at last became
that of arbitrator.
32. To the employers, forestalling a victorious general strike meant victory
for themselves. In 1893 San Francisco employers after a series of crushing victories
over labor had exulted:
The Manufacturers' and Employers' Association can look with complacency upon
its work during the last two years. One after another the unions have been taught
a salutary lesson until out of the horde of unions only one or two are left
of any strength. This association has taken hold of the shipowners' struggle
and it is only a question of time when the Sailors' Union will have gone the
way of the rest. It is of most vital importance that this good work should go
on. Trade unionism among workmen is like tares in the field of wheat. The word
and the act should be placed among the things prohibited by law.
33. One of the leading capitalists of San Francisco, according to a quotation
appearing in a New York paper, evidently thought in 1934 very much in the terms
of the victory of '93:
This strike is the best thing that ever happened to San Francisco. It's costing
us money, certainly. We have lost millions on the waterfront in the last few
months. But it's a good investment, a marvelous investment. It's solving the
labor problem for years to come, perhaps forever.
Mark my words. When this nonsense is out of the way and the 'men have been driven
back to their jobs, we won't have to worry about them any more. They'll have
learned their lesson. Not only do I believe we'll never have another general
strike but I don't think we'll have a strike of any kind in San Francisco during
this generation. Labor is licked.
34. In order to mobilize support for the employers, it was declared early in
the strike that the longshoremen were "led by a radical and communistic
group . . . whose objective is to create civil disturbance, not only in the
waterfront trades, but in all other trades." As the strike proceeded, and
especially when the general strike was declared, the press and public officials
broke into a torrential attack upon "reds" and "subversive influences"
among the strikers. Even the conservative Ryan, whose agreement was upset by
Bridges and his followers, supported the employers in the charge that "the
Communist Party, led by Harry Bridges, is in control of the San Francisco situation,"
although a local committee of conservative labor leaders denied that Bridges
and his committeemen were "reds." The Communists, indeed, were active
in San Francisco, as they are elsewhere; they followed a twofold policy: to
"bore from within" the conservative trade unions; to form a "dual"
union, the Marine Workers' Industrial Union. The first tactic met with considerable
success, the second with comparatively little. They advertised widely their
asserted influence in San Francisco. Whether Bridges is or is not a Communist
is extremely difficult to prove; certainly neither the maritime strike nor the
general strike were basically "communist strikes." The central issue
of the longshoremen's strike was an old one; the position of the parties was
not greatly different than in numerous earlier conflicts stretching back a half
century. In 1893 the agent of the employers called the striking Sailors' Union
of Andrew Furuseth an "anarchistic society." In 1934 the presence
of Communists on the scene, and such influence as they exerted on men and on
tactics, were seized upon to defeat aggressive, but essentially orthodox unions
and unionists.
35. NOT only was this accomplished, but creating an hysteria the like of which
California had not witnessed since the war, employers and industrial leaders,
the press, and officials fostered thereby an attack against "reds"
which has spread over the Bay region and beyond. Labor was importuned to "run
subversive influences from its ranks like rats," and some union laborers
did physically attack Communists, although not in most of the cases where it
was attributed to them. Police and vigilantes raided communist "lairs,"
and arrested "reds," characterized by the approving press as "alley
spawn." Vigilante committees were rapidly organized; business men, professors,
and other staid citizens armed with pick handles and other weapons patrolled
cities of the East Bay while more halls were raided and bricks with warnings
attached were thrown through windows of homes. A protecting picket line was
thrown around fashionable Piedmont; a librarian was ordered by resolution to
submit for destruction a list of books "praising the virtues and advantages
of Communism." A student editor urged that "student vigilantes must
quell student radicals," opening his editorial with Voltaire's famous statement:
"I may disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right
to say it." The tactical theory of the vigilantes was explained by a member:
"If you shoot the reds, then they become heroes, but they don't like it
so well if you work them over with pick handles."
36. The farmers of California have been organizing vigilante groups and prodding
officials to action for months. In the wake of the general strike came the opportunity
to arrest communist leaders of farm strikes on charges of vagrancy and criminal
syndicalism under cover of hysteria, for the criminal syndicalism laws work
most effectively when fear is abroad. A warning scaffold appeared in rural Hayward
where fruit pickers had struck in sympathy with the longshoremen.
37. The most significant aspect of the general strike, perhaps, is the fact
that officials, business men, and other conservative citizens have been so effectively
agitated, that they are convinced of the immediate necessity, and of the suitability
of storm-troop tactics to "save America," and "democratic government,
including civil liberties such as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly
and trial by jury." Few audible voices have been raised in protest-the
victims first, of course, then a judge, and later a couple of editors;—for
the harvests seem less prone to interruption, industries less exposed to "demoralization"
when strike leaders are in jail.
The San Francisco Waterfront
Oliver Carlson
--San Francisco, January 11
1. WE'VE got to go along with the young fellows, cause they're the ones that
run the union now. Lots of us old stiffs would be glad to work for almost anything--to
sign up under almost any kind of an agreement. But damn it all, it's the young
pups what runs the I. L. A. around here. Look at 'em--young fellows of twenty-five
or thereabouts--with lots o' fight and mighty well educated. Say, you'd be surprised
at the number of college boys who are longshoring nowadays. They tell us to
let them run the union and they'll get us better conditions than we ever had
before."
2. What the grayheaded old stevedore told me on the San Francisco waterfront
a few weeks ago was undoubtedly true. I've been down to the docks at Oakland
and San Francisco and I've covered the waterfront at San Pedro and Terminal
Island. The stevedores--and the sailors too--are young men. Not only are they
young, but many of them are well educated. They are part of that generation
whose potential professional careers as teachers, lawyers, doctors, chemists,
or engineers were cut short by the depression. In their desperation to do something,
to get a job no matter how lowly, many of these ambitious youngsters turned
to the ships and the waterfront.
3. The shipping companies and the stevedoring concerns were glad to get young,
ambitious fellows. College boys had been used successfully in the past to break
strikes among the longshoremen and sailors; why couldn't the same thing be done
again? So reasoned the bosses, as they tightened down on their men from 1930
to 1932. The immediate effect of this policy was undoubtedly profitable to the
waterfront employers. The ex-football players looked upon their jobs as temporary.
They had little in common with the semi-literate workers. In fact, there was
plenty of bad blood between the two groups. The youngsters knew little--and
cared less--about the unions.
4. But the depression didn't end. More and more college and high-school boys
applied for jobs. The employers tightened the screws upon those who had work.
Wages dropped. Hours lengthened. Speed-up was in the air.
5. Within the past two years most of these young men have come to the conclusion
that unionization is a good thing. The early days of the NRA saw them pouring
into the waterfront organizations. The program of the progressive and left-wing
groups within the unions sounded much more sensible to them than did the windy
orations of the old-time business agents and officials. So they turned to the
left, gave the left wing numerical support, financial support, oral support
Harry Bridges is merely the official spokesman for an enthusiastic army of young,
literate, and vocal elements out to establish newer and higher standards for
the workers an the waterfront than they have ever had before. California shipping
interests are in a frenzy. They cannot understand what has happened. Almost
overnight, so it seems, their ships are organized from bridge to forecastle.
The Master-Mates' and Pilots' Union takes care of the officers. The radio men,
so essential to modern shipping, are nearly 100 per cent organized. The crews
belong to the International Seamen's Union. At the piers are to be found the
men in the International Longshoremen's Association, as well as those who carry
their cards in the Teamsters' Union. And these unions are developing an unusual
degree of cooperation. Ships are tied up at a moment's notice by the unions
when they find the owners are trying to break the rules laid down or the contracts
entered into. The longshoremen refuse to load or unload ships whose cargo has
once been handled by non-union labor or strikebreakers, or whose crew is non-union.
6. No stone is being left unturned by the anti-labor forces on the Pacific Coast
to break the maritime unions. They have already established a huge war chest.
During the fall and summer of 1935 they tried to precipitate a strike which
they knew would wreck the unions. The good old ladies of San Francisco are being
worked into a frenzy of hatred for the "reds on the waterfront who want
to destroy our fair city." Harry Bridges is pictured as a sinister figure,
incredibly vile.
7. Speeches made in Moscow last summer at the sessions of the Communist International
by Sam Darcy and Earl Browder telling of the amount of Communist influence in
the maritime unions and of the great labor struggles soon to develop were given
front-page spreads by the California press and emphasized by long and violent
editorials calling upon all good citizens to join in stamping out this Communist
menace. Such tactics on the part of representatives of the Communist Party have
played into the hands of the reactionaries, and have added to the many problems
which the militant leadership of the Maritime Federation must face.
8. William J. Lewis, district president of the I. L. A., and A. A.H. Peterson,
district organizer, are devoting all their time to fighting Bridges and his
lieutenants. There is no question in my mind that they have been working hand
in hand with the Waterfront Employers' Association. Between them they are prepared
to rule or ruin the I. L. A.
9. At this point it may be of interest to report that the Waterfront Employers'
Association boasts that it has four men in the San Francisco headquarters of
the I. L. A. and another four in the sailors' union. Whether this be so or not,
it is a fact that copies of all wires sent to either of these local organizations
are delivered to the Waterfront Employers' Association. Time and again the association
has announced to the press the contents of confidential union telegrams.
10. The "news" that the San Francisco papers publish about the waterfront
situation is so colored that the Associated Press has had to establish its own
service; and it checks carefully every story it gets from the Chronicle, the
Examiner the Call-Bulletin, or the News. Waterfront "news," I am told,
is at least 50 per cent fake. It is part of the build-up made use of by a hostile
press to turn the rest of the population against the waterfront employees.
11. Meanwhile, a new "labor" paper has appeared on the streets of
the Bay cities. It is called the California Federationist and is the personal
property of one or more of the conservative labor leaders. The Federationist
is as bitter as the daily press in its attacks upon the radicals in the water
front unions. Rumor has it that the money for this paper was put up by none
other than William Randolph Hearst At any rate, Allen T. Baum--who is not a
member of the San Francisco chapter of the Newspaper Guild--is editing the sheet.
Baum is the former labor editor of Hearst's San Francisco Examiner.
12. Some time ago a streamer headline across a page of the San Francisco Bulletin
announced, "Vigilante Dead Line Nears!" A two-column boxed editorial
on the front page let it be known that vigilante efforts would be resorted to
unless peace could be established on the waterfront. "Peace," of course,
meant a complete knuckling under by the unions.