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Unlike the San Francisco General Strike a dozen years earlier, the Oakland General Strike did not usher in a new era for working people. Rather, the 1946 strike wave, including what happened in Oakland, might better be understood as a late flower of the mass militancy of the prewar period but witho…

The Oakland General Strike had ended, but the Kahn’s and Hastings workers who started it all were still on strike. The immediate result of more than one hundred thousand workers taking to the streets was simply an agreement that the city would no longer allow its police to protect strikebreakers. Y…

The Oakland General Strike had ended, but the Kahn’s and Hastings workers who started it all were still on strike. The immediate result of more than one hundred thousand workers taking to the streets was simply an agreement that the city would no longer allow its police to protect strikebreakers. Y…

Whatever might have resulted either from the exercise of those emergency powers or the CIO’s entry into the strike will never be known. Late Wednesday night, Oakland city manager J.F. Hassler issued a verbal assurance to union leaders that the police would not in the future escort strikebreakers an…

The next day, Tuesday, December 3, 1946, the city of Oakland came to a stop. Hundreds of buses and streetcars sat empty in their yards, resulting in massive traffic jams on the Bay Bridge. Remembering the furious antiunion propaganda produced by San Francisco newspapers during the 1934 General Stri…