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The West Coast strikes of 1934 came as the Executive Committee of the Comintern was moving away from the Third Period analysis and toward what in France was called the Front populaire, the People’s Front, and was usually called the Popular Front in the United States. Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Co…

The striking unions agreed to arbitration. The CP generally opposed arbitration. In the end, the arbitration board granted the ILA’s major demands: the six- hour day, a wage increase (less than the union had wanted, but significant), and union control of dispatching through a jointly funded hiring …

During the general strike, anti-Communist actions erupted across the Bay Area. On the first day of the general strike, Oakland police raided that city’s CP office and beat and arrested those inside; 50 men attacked the party office in Hayward, beat its occupants, and burned its furnishings; and 150…

On July 5—known on the waterfront ever after as “Bloody Thursday”—police killed two unionists, Howard Sperry, a longshoreman, and Nicholas Bordoise (George Counderakis), a party member and member of the cooks’ union who was volunteering in the union’s soup kitchen. A hundred more were injured durin…

Disputes within the local CP leadership escalated during the longshore and maritime strikes. Hynes was gone, but Harrison George remained to defend ideological orthodoxy against Darcy’s more flexible approach. George, under various pseudonyms, wrote long letters to Browder complaining about Darcy. …