For many of the years covered by this book, CP activity in the United States
followed a party line that originated in Moscow, especially during the existence
of the Communist International (1919–1943). For the 1930s especially, mate-
rial in RGASPI suggests an iterative process: U.S. party leaders met with the
Comintern’s Anglo-American Secretariat (AAS) in Moscow, reported their per-
spective on situations facing the CPUSA, and proposed a policy; their report
was discussed in the AAS and sometimes at higher levels of the Comintern;
drawing on such reports and on information from the press, the AAS drafted its
own report analyzing events and proposing policies, which report was some-
times discussed and approved at higher levels of the Comintern. [...]

The District 13 Executive Committee waited until mid-July to launch their campaign for a “United Political front.” In a letter to the state SPA, the DEC proposed “to issue jointly a call to all labor unions and workers Fraternal Organiza- tions for the purpose of placing into the field a united labor ticket.” The Socialists’ reply is not in the files, but the DEC’s five-page response, on July 21, emphasized that the CP was proposing not a joint slate of candidates but “a conference of delegates” to form a united labor front. The DEC also derided the SPA as reformist and charged them with failing to understand that “in order to abolish capitalism, and to establish Socialism, the workers must first achieve control of the governmental power as was done in Russia,” and that “all history shows that a ruling, privileged class has never given up power without resorting to force to maintain its privileged position.” After that lesson in Leninism, the DEC urged the SPA to send a committee to meet with their committee and with representatives of unions to plan a conference for a united front.

Several party members then began to work in the Imperial Valley, organizing Filipino and Mexican field workers. Local authorities responded by arresting the most prominent organizers and charging them under the criminal syndicalism law. Of the eleven arrested, three were deported and one was found not guilty. The remaining seven, including Frank Spector, were sentenced to prison terms and two were deported.51 Those events contributed to the departure of two more factional leaders, Frank Spector and Frank Waldron. Spector was convicted of criminal syndicalism in June 1930 and imprisoned in San Quentin until his conviction was reversed on appeal in July 1931. He and others used their time in prison to conduct study groups among the prisoners and recruit CP members. After his release Spector worked for a time as an ILD organizer in New York.52 Waldron, under indictment for criminal syndicalism, fled to New York, took the name Tim Ryan, went to Moscow, and was soon joined by Reggie Karasick and their one-year-old son, Tim. [...]

In early June 1931, Darcy wrote to Jack Stachel about his first six months in the district. Party headquarters was at 734 Harrison Street, in a neighborhood Darcy called the “skid-road” and the local press called the “skid-way”—an area of inexpensive residential hotels, cheap cafes, and numerous bars and pool rooms, home to many male waterfront and maritime workers and unemployed or underemployed single men, as well as poor families and single women. Darcy found party headquarters “in the hands of ‘skid-road’ elements.” He explained, “While there are many good, normal workers on the skid-road, there are also very many degenerate elements, drunkards, dope fiends. . . . They completely discredited the Party.” On Darcy’s first day, he “had a physical fight with two of them who were among seven or eight who were lying around the Party Headquarters dead drunk.” On his third day, “two Party members made a hold-up on some other Party members, and we had all we could do to prevent the police from learning of the situation.” Darcy’s first task was “to eliminate these elements and to get factory workers or at least unemployed workers into the Party and into Party leadership” and “drive out a considerable number of these degenerates from the Party and Unemployed Council.”

Throughout 1931 and early 1932 the party’s approach to farmworkers remained much like that in 1930—waiting for a spontaneous strike, usually because of wage cuts, and showing up to provide support and try to take leadership. Caroline Decker, centrally involved in those efforts, recalled, “Two-thirds of the strikes we learned about through the newspapers.” The initiative came from the workers, she explained, because “we didn’t have any forces; we didn’t have any training. We didn’t have any people. . . . Those things would have happened without us. It just so happened that we were on hand, and we wanted the Communist Party to get credit for it.” Two such instances were strikes by Santa Clara Valley cannery workers in July 1931 and by pea pickers near Half Moon Bay (on the coast south of San Francisco) in early 1932. Both were failures.20

The 1933 cotton strike was the largest single strike in the history of agricultural labor up to that time. By then CAWIU organizers had gained practical experience, and they prepared carefully, holding meetings with farmworkers throughout Kern and Kings counties. They asked for one dollar per hundred pounds of cotton. The growers offered 60 cents. The strike began on October 4. Growers responded with attacks on the organizers and strikers. Local authorities looked the other way or joined in. The Kings County district attorney later admitted, “The sheriff and I told the growers not to worry much about the pickers’ rights.” Evicted from grower-owned housing, strikers camped wherever they could. State authorities eventually used federal relief funds to provide them with necessities. One camp near Corcoran housed some three thousand people.28

By the time of the cotton strike, John Steinbeck had become acquainted with members of the John Reed Club in Carmel. The John Reed Club was the party’s organization for intellectuals, and club members were avid supporters of the CAWIU. Not limited to party members, the Carmel club included Lincoln Steffens, the Progressive Era muckraking journalist, and his wife, Ella Winter. Through the John Reed Club, Steinbeck met two organizers from the cotton strike, hiding near Carmel to avoid arrest for criminal syndicalism. Steinbeck talked with them about their experiences, and those conversations led to his description of the strike and the Communist organizer, Mack, in In Dubious Battle, published in 1936. Steffens sent Darcy a copy of the book and wrote that Mack was modeled on Darcy. Darcy, then in Moscow, was incensed by Steinbeck’s account of Mack delivering a baby despite having no experience. Darcy recalled that he replied to Steffens, “Steinbeck is a jerk. If I’d caught an organizer doing anything like that, as adventurous an act as risking a child’s life, I’d throw him the hell out.”

In May 1934, longshore workers from Bellingham in northern Washington to San Diego in Southern California went on strike under the leadership of the Pacific Coast District of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA-PCD). They were soon joined by shipboard workers, organized in several unions including the TUUL’s Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU). The MWIU played only a small and early role in the strike. In mid-June striking longshore workers rejected a settlement negotiated by their international president, Joseph Ryan, and increasingly looked for leadership to the chair of the strike committee of the San Francisco ILA local, Harry Bridges. On July 5 a daylong battle between San Francisco police and strike supporters left two dead and more than a hundred injured. The governor sent in National Guard troops to protect the strikebreakers. The San Francisco Labor Council then led a four-day general strike to protest police violence and the use of the National Guard. The strikes ended in late July, and a federal arbitration board gave the striking longshore workers nearly everything they had sought. Those events have attracted many historians and journalists. I have written at length elsewhere on Bridges, the longshore workers, and the development of organization on the waterfront. What follows is my understanding of the role of the CP in the early organization of longshore workers in San Francisco and during the strikes, especially the internal divisions within the CP over the correct response to those events.

As of March 1932 in all of California there were only five CP members in the marine industry—all of them, apparently, MWIU functionaries. In his memoirs, Darcy recalled that in early 1932, District 13 leaders met for several days, examined the San Francisco waterfront, studied a failed longshore strike in 1919, and laid plans to develop an organization. On March 15, 1932, the district secretariat adopted an organizational plan that included “immediately to begin to issue the West Coast Bulletin for the marine workers.” Other parts of the plan included attendance by Darcy and three others, including James Branch and Emmet Kirby, at the morning shape-up, where longshore workers sought work for the day, and recruiting of longshore workers through public speaking and individual discussions. Branch and Kirby, like Darcy, were not longshore workers. Branch was managing editor of the Western Worker, and Kirby was the paper’s artist.41

Hynes’s most important project in San Francisco seems to have been launch-
ing the Waterfront Worker, a mimeographed newsletter, part of the plan adopted
in March 1932 to “immediately . . . issue the West Coast Bulletin for the marine
workers.” The first issue was less than immediate, perhaps one of Darcy’s com-
plaints about Hynes and his MWIU comrades. The Waterfront Worker finally
appeared in December 1932. It announced only that it was “issued by a group of
longshoremen for longshoremen.” [...]