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

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.

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.”

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.” [...]

The second and third issues of the Waterfront Worker, in February and March 1933, apparently also Hynes’s work, hinted at some new organization on the docks but provided no further information. The fourth issue, in April 1933, acknowledged the MWIU. The fifth issue, in May 1933, cited the MWIU as the only viable organization for longshoremen and called for a “United Front” of seamen, teamsters, and stevedores. The same issue carried a letter from Roy Hudson, head of the MWIU, and a long article on the refusal of Seattle longshoremen to load military supplies in 1919 for U.S. troops in Siberia, concluding, “The longshoremen hold a strategic position in the struggle.” The June issue was highly critical of the newly chartered local of the International Longshoremen’s Association, AFL, and pushed the MWIU as an alternative.45

Bridges, Schmidt, and another Albion Hall militant won election to the local’s executive committee. In March 1934, as ILA locals all up and down the Pacific Coast moved toward a coastwise strike, the San Francisco local elected a large strike committee that then elected Bridges as chair. On May 9 ten thousand to fifteen thousand longshoremen walked out from northern Washington to Southern California, demanding a coastwise contract, union hiring halls, a six-hour day, and better wages, demands established by the ILA district leaders in July 1933. Greeted by picket lines upon entering Pacific Coast ports, ships’ crews and officers quickly went on strike with issues of their own, adding more than six thousand seamen, marine firemen, marine cooks and stewards, marine engineers, and masters, mates, and pilots to the number on strike. Most teamsters refused to move cargoes unloaded by strikebreakers. Bridges, chairman of the strike committee for the largest ILA local, rapidly emerged as de facto leader of the local and, increasingly, for the entire coastwise strike.

The Young Communist League called a meeting on the waterfront for noon, Memorial Day, May 30, to demonstrate against war and fascism and support the strikers. The YCL distributed leaflets widely, but the police refused a permit for the demonstration. Party officials tried to call off the meeting, but 250–300 young people gathered, milling in confusion when no speakers appeared. One version of events was that a YCL leader was hoisted to another’s shoulders to explain that the meeting had been canceled. When he spoke, police attacked the crowd with nightsticks and blackjacks. The police version was that they were pelted with rocks before they attacked the crowd. A committee representing twenty-two organizations, headed by a Presbyterian minister, interviewed witnesses before calling it a “riot planned in advance by the police,” one of the first usages of the concept of a police riot.

In July, Darcy encouraged radicals among the longshoremen to join the newly chartered local of the International Longshoremen’s Association and to form a militant, but not exclusively CP, caucus there. The caucus included Harry Bridges, Henry Schmidt, and other militants who were neither CP members nor sympathizers. They met at Equality Hall on Albion Street and called themselves Albion Hall. In September the district secretariat approved a “line” for its “opposition group” within the ILA: “To create distinct TUUL group as soon as possible, which group to issue the ‘Waterfront Worker.’” The Albion Hall caucus was too politically diverse to be considered a “distinct TUUL group,” and it never advocated for the MWIU, but some members of it, including Bridges, took responsibility for the Waterfront Worker, which now stated that it was issued by “a rank and file group in the ILA.” When the Albion Hall group presented a slate in the local elections that month, they called themselves the “Committee of 500 Bona Fide Longshoremen Now Working on the S.F. Waterfront.”50

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. On May 26, seventeen days after the strike began, George sent a four-page, single-spaced, typed letter criticizing Darcy’s conduct:

Now, if half what I hear is true, the strike—from a Party viewpoint—is in such condition that although I’m busy as hell I simply must say something to you, since I cannot say anything to swell-head [Darcy]. . . . 1. The Party face has been hidden, much to the injury of the Party and equally to the injury of the strike. 2.-A policy of “Tailism” is being carried out, and Economism; with almost no politicalization of the strike. If the role of the State is even mentioned, I have not heard of it.

“Hiding the face of the party” meant concealing the role of the party and keeping secret the party affiliations of those in the union. “Tailism” meant that the party was following the workers rather than leading them. “Economism,” related to tailism, referred to focusing on economic issues such as wages and hours. George concluded by urging the national office to order the district committee “to bring the Party into the picture in its rightful place, and to politicalize the strike.”53 “Politicalization”—i.e., politicization—meant turning the workers from concern with immediate economic issues toward recognizing the repressive role of the state, accepting the leadership of the party, and committing to the defense of the Soviet Union. Ten days later, George again wrote to Browder: “Exceptionalism of the rankest sort is expressed by both the comrades on the Strike Committee, (which we might understand) and by the comrades around the Dist Office. . . . An opportunist and syndicalist line is followed.”54 “Exceptionalism” referred to the argument, associated with Jay Lovestone and rejected by the party and the Comintern, that the United States was an exception to Marxist-Leninist theories of economic development.55

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.