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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 during a violent, daylong battle over efforts to reopen the port using strikebreak- ers. The governor then sent in the National Guard and the port reopened, using strikebreakers. On July 9 Darcy helped organize a funeral march by thousands of silent strikers and strike supporters from the waterfront up Market Street, filling that great thoroughfare as they followed flatbed trucks carrying the caskets of the two men killed on July 5. The police reluctantly agreed to stay away from the route of the funeral procession but specified that there were to be no Communists involved. The ILA funeral arrangements committee instead placed Darcy in one of the lead cars next to Julia Bordoise, widow of Nicholas Bordoise. Bordoise was taken to Cypress Lawn Cemetery, just south of the city, where Darcy delivered a stirring funeral address.
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 men attacked a communist meeting in Oakland. On the next day, as George was composing his letter about Darcy’s lapses, San Francisco police backed by National Guardsmen with machine guns raided the MWIU office and arrested everyone—85 in all—in the vicinity. Anonymous vigilantes, armed with rocks and clubs and wearing heavy leather jackets, attacked the office of the Western Worker and CP headquarters at 121 Haight Street. At each place a car drove past and men hurled bricks through the windows. Then more cars drove up, and men rushed into the building, broke up furniture and equipment, beat up anyone inside, and quickly departed. Next police arrived and arrested those who had just been beaten. Seven locations were raided that way on July 17. Total arrests that day numbered 350. More raids followed
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 hall with a union dispatcher. ILA members returned to work late in July.
federal arbritation i think
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 Comintern, formally announced the change of direction in mid-1935, due largely to Hitler’s rise to power and his evisceration of the German CP. By then, events in California and France were already moving toward a Popular Front.
Though national party leaders had quashed Darcy’s efforts in the 1934 state election, detailed analysis of the West Coast strikes led the party further away from the millenarian thinking and Third Period sectarianism of the 1920s and early 1930s and toward the mainstream of organized labor. By the mid-1930s, many CP members in California were actively involved in unions and some had been elected to union office. Instead of preparing to lead the supposedly imminent uprising of the workers, they found themselves immersed in collective bargaining and contract enforcement.
Throughout 1935 the Western Worker continued to attack Roosevelt and the New Deal, condemning the work-relief programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as “a wage-cutting, anti-strike club held over the heads of every worker.” The Western Worker also condemned “the strike-breaking activities of Roosevelt’s Labor Relation Boards, and the strike-breaking, company union Wagner Labor Disputes Bill.” The party also continued to decry “social fascists,” especially Upton Sinclair and his EPIC organization. In April 1935 the WW saw the defeat of EPIC candidates in Los Angeles elections as evidence of “the fallacy of its program of ‘reformism’ and ‘liberalism.’”
odd
Though the CPUSA moved toward the Front populaire slowly and uncertainly in 1935 and 1936, the party was fully committed to working with New Deal Democrats by mid-1937. During 1937–1939 the California CP moved very close to the political mainstream—partly through circumstances over which the party had no influence, partly due to the presence of party members or supporters in CIO unions, and partly because of the People’s Front line of the Comintern. The closer the CP moved to embrace Roosevelt and the New Deal, the greater grew their potential to influence local and state politics. Circumstances in California came together briefly during 1937–1939 to put the CP into a position where its leaders could meet with Democratic candidates for state and legislative office to discuss campaign tactics and legislative initiatives. Issues that the party had pressed for years became part of mainstream politics, if only for a short while.
The party soon completed its transition from persistent and vitriolic critic of Roosevelt and the New Deal to staunch supporter. On January 1, 1938, District 13 launched a new newspaper, People’s World (PW), a daily paper replacing the semiweekly WW. Al Richmond, the new managing editor, twenty-three years old, brought three years of experience at the Daily Worker. Harrison George became executive editor, his duties limited to writing editorials and a personal column. Like the party, the new paper moved toward the mainstream, featuring some news stories with little or no political commentary. The final page became a sports page, and columns dealt with movies, radio programs, art, and helpful hints for women. Typical of most daily papers at the time, photos of attractive young women in skimpy outfits appeared regularly. Saturday’s paper included a magazine with articles by prominent liberals as well as CP members, a woman’s page (including Comrade Kitty’s tips on how to be fashionable on a budget), a page for children, and a page of comics—though the comics were definitely political. Glowing accounts about the Soviet Union and Stalin’s speeches still appeared but were fewer in number. Articles by non-Communist liberals began to appear, including Upton Sinclair, no longer a fascist or social fascist. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and, especially, Abraham Lincoln all received positive stories. Along with the new format came a full-blown embrace of FDR and the New Deal. On January 5, 1938, an editorial announced, “Mr. President, We’re Behind You!”
damn that's crazy
In the 1938 general election, a coalition of business and conservative groups tried to constrain the state’s robust union movement through a ballot initiative. Proposition 1 originated with the Industrial Association of San Francisco (which a U.S. Senate investigating committee chaired by Robert La Follette Jr. had recently called “an example par excellence of . . . success in denying labor its collective-bargaining rights”), the Associated Farmers (which Carey McWilliams labeled “farm fascism” and which the La Follette Committee accused of “flagrant and violent infringement of civil liberties”), the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of Los Angeles (the state’s oldest, and highly successful, advocate of the open shop; the La Follette Committee claimed it “arrogated to itself the determination of what constituted law and order”), the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and Southern Californians Inc. (an arch-conservative group dedicated to “preservation of industrial freedom”).
Proposition 1 proposed to restrict picketing, prohibit secondary boycotts, make unions liable for damages caused by members, and more. Its supporters launched the state’s most expensive campaign for a proposition up to that time. Those efforts were closely tied to leading Republican candidates, Frank Merriam, the incumbent governor who was seeking a third term, and Philip Bancroft, candidate for U.S. Senate, who had connections to the Associated Farmers.
near the end
The 1934 strikes were important catalysts for many. Edith Arnstein’s family came to San Francisco during the Gold Rush and were related to several of the city’s elite German Jewish families. She later described the summer of 1934: “A long and bloody strike has divided the city. In middle-class homes the family is sharply divided, so that dinner tables are barricades—mothers and children on the side of the strikers, businessmen fathers on the side of the employers.” She recalled that she and a friend borrowed twenty-five dollars (equivalent to more than five hundred dollars in 2023) from her mother to contribute to the MWIU, and how, on the day of a dramatic funeral march down Market Street, she and her cousin watched from the sidewalk: “She says, ‘I am going to march.’ I join her. I hope our fathers are not watching. . . . We pledge our lives that Sperry and Bordoise have not laid down their lives in vain.” Angela Gizzi, daughter of middle-class Italian immigrants, left work to stand in respect during the funeral procession down Market Street; she called it “the most spectacular thing I’ve ever seen,” and said it made her “a radical.”
In the early 1930s, party members formed “fractions” within union locals, which typically met before union meetings and formulated a position that CP members were to follow when the meeting started. However, as Dorothy Ray Healey later recalled, “Some of our closest allies were unhappy about it,” and as CP members became more integrated into unions as members and leaders, the party abandoned its fraction meetings. Jack Olsen recalled, of the mid- and late 1930s, “The CP set up Party clubs on an industry-by-industry basis. There were warehousemen’s, seamen’s, and longshoremen’s clubs. Each club had its own officer and its own delegates to the CP county committee, a literature agent, and an education director. . . . We used to meet and first take up political issues like the anti-fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War, the current election campaign, or an ongoing legal defense case.”
lol