Workers in many unions met all Monday. Sentiment clearly was in favor of a general strike. That evening, at an emergency meeting of five hundred union leaders, the labor council called for a county-wide “work holiday” to protest the police violence, support the Kahn’s and Hastings strikers, and demand that police never again escort strikebreakers. The council created a strike steering committee and set up subcommittees to deal with communication among strikers, coordinate food distribution to participants, and keep essential services going in the city.

Union members in 142 AFL unions received notice of the council’s decision by telephone, telegram, and radio reports. The word spread far beyond the retail and trade unions at the heart of the dispute. Musician Earl Watkins, working at a popular nightclub in east Oakland, Slim Jenkins’ Place, remembered receiving the word there from his union’s business agent that no one would be playing until the strike was over.

When the first Key System streetcar rolled up to the police blockade early Sunday morning, police tried to move it through the gathering crowd. But the driver, Al Brown, an officer in the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192, learned from the strikers what had happened. He removed the controls from the streetcar and left his vehicle standing in the middle of the street. Next Brown convinced the drivers of the streetcars behind him to do the same. Bus drivers passing through the area also halted their vehicles and joined the picket lines, which by now swelled with union sympathizers. A police three-wheeler ran over one streetcar driver, Newton Selvidge. He had to be taken to the hospital.

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 and would remain impartial in labor disputes. On the strength of that statement, Bob Ash and the other strike committee leaders called an end to the general strike Thursday morning, December 5, at 11 A.M.

Many union members were upset at the decision, figuring that if the CIO unions—representing 30,000 workers at the docks, in heavy industry, in warehouses, and at the public utilities—joined them, they would be invincible. But AFL leaders believed they had achieved the main goal of the general strike. In addition, they feared association with Communists in the CIO leadership and perhaps worried they might lose direction of the general strike to the militant CIO if it became involved. AFL leaders were also concerned at the possible effect of Beck’s back-to-work order on the crucial support of the Teamster drivers.

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. Yet, almost immediately, police were again escorting strikebreakers through the picket lines at Kahn’s and Hastings. Although angry at this violation of the agreement, AFL union leaders were nonetheless not about to call another general strike. What they did do was quite effective, however, in its own way.

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 without the politicizing environment of an economy in collapse. The differences between the two Bay Area citywide general strikes reflect the moments in which they took place. The events and elements of 1934—massive employer and police violence, the desperate and radicalized workforce, a relative vacuum where labor laws should have been—were not replicated in 1946, which featured a battle fought over different stakes—to maintain recognition for the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively, and continued respect and status for union leaders—by a larger, more stable labor movement seeking its place in the postwar order. The two strikes were very different bookends for the most dynamic period of growth in working-class consciousness and power in California history.

Here—a stone’s throw from where John Steinbeck set the events of his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath—they slept, cooked their meals, and talked over what California had done to their dreams of reestablishing themselves as farmers. They also talked about Joseph DiGiorgio and as they talked they got angry. One of the first to join Local 218 was Phineas Parks, a preacher who worked in DiGiorgio’s packing sheds and who pitched in immediately for the cause. Hasiwar recalled how Parks would start the meetings, telling the workers,

My God, we need a Union! We got to stand up like men. The bosses are no more men than we are. They get into their pants just like we do, one leg at a time. These guys got so much money they buy Cadillacs so big that when they make a turn they need hinges on them.

A Bakersfield Central Labor Council committee collected and distributed over one hundred thousand dollars worth of clothes, food, and money to the strikers’ families. Much of this support arrived in caravans sent by the Los Angeles and San Francisco labor councils, including one in March 1948, with over three hundred cars and trucks. Victor Van Bourg, a teenaged apprentice painter, rode in a bus chartered by his Communist-controlled Hollywood Painters union local to the DiGiorgio picket lines. It was a formative experience for the young Van Bourg; years later, after he became an attorney, he volunteered his time doing legal work for the farmworker cause.

Teamster drivers and winery workers refused to cross Local 218 picket lines. The Retail Clerks union informed DiGiorgio that they would not handle his produce in Los Angeles, and the California State Labor Federation, AFL, contributed five hundred dollars a month to the strike and called for a consumer boycott of DiGiorgio products. The national AFL, thanks to a personal friendship between AFL president William Green and H.L. Mitchell, also pitched in, covering Hasiwar’s expenses.

The Hollywood Film Council consisted of a group of craft unions dominated by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE, or simply “the IA”). The IA had just emerged triumphant from a bloody two-year struggle with progressive unions over job control on Hollywood movie sets. This was a more extreme version of the traditional jurisdictional divisions encouraged by studio producers for decades between AFL building trade unions and the IA. Beginning with the successful Disney studio animators’ strike of 1941, painter’s union leader Herb Sorrell built a credible democratic union federation, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), as an alternative to the corrupt IA, which had been controlled by Chicago mobsters since the early 1930s.

Although the mob’s number one enforcer in Hollywood, Willie Bioff, and the IA national president, Richard Walsh, had gone to prison in 1940 along with a producer who had colluded with their money-skimming schemes, most IA Hollywood locals remained in the hands of the old guard. IA activists who had hoped for a revival of union democracy were disappointed; the meetings mostly had no quorums, a legacy of years of intimidation and shakedowns by Bioff’s associates. Studio workers interested in improving conditions turned to the Conference of Studio Unions.

Disneyland opened in summer 1955. A million eager visitors streamed in in the first seven weeks. Working families came on their days off from Bethlehem and Kaiser steel mills, from car manufacturing plants in Maywood, South Gate, and Van Nuys, from downtown Los Angeles garment factories, and from the area’s largest employer, aerospace. The other employees of “Uncle Walt”, who labored in Disney’s Burbank studios, came too, alongside the rest of the Hollywood workforce. From near and far, the children of the AFL and CIO made their pilgrimages to the spectacular new Anaheim amusement park, strolling up Main Street USA to Tomorrowland.

Four in ten members of the state’s workforce belonged to unions. In the industrial sectors, union density hovered around 50 percent. California, the third-ranking manufacturing state, led the nation in agricultural production and in international shipping. Automobile production in Los Angeles County was second only to Detroit.

Within their growing affluence, people were thinking of themselves less as “workers” in the way they understood that term in the Great Depression and more as “consumers” in a successful, middle-class society. To Waldie, whose father was an engineer at a gas company, “There was no obvious way to tell a factory worker from a business owner or a professional man when I grew up.”

Unionism, too, came to be understood differently. No longer did most labor organizations face the nagging, persistent threat of extinction. Now, some companies accepted unions as part of the cost of doing business in an American economy dependent on workers’ spending. A few forward-looking business leaders even embraced unions wholeheartedly as an advance over the bad old ways of violent class conflict. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, bankrolled by the capitalist family whose nineteenth-century forebear founded the Standard Oil empire and was notorious for a 1914 massacre of striking miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, issued a report in 1958 that would have startled John D. Rockefeller.

Since labor’s role in economic growth is so vital, it is important to establish and maintain an environment which will call for the most honorable, responsible, and imaginative trade union leadership. . . . Cooperation with responsible labor leadership should serve to stimulate the full contribution labor can make to growth and eliminate the forces which might take root in a strained and troubled labor movement.