The Industrial Association declared the port “open” and announced that in observance of Independence Day no cargo would be moved on the next day, July 4. But July 5, promptly at 8 A.M., the trucks rolled again as police launched tear gas grenades into the line of four thousand pickets. In an instant the fighting resumed more fiercely than two days before. An eyewitness reported:

Struggling knots of longshoremen, closely pressed by officers mounted and on foot, swarmed everywhere. The air was filled with blinding gas. The howl of the sirens. The low boom of the gas guns. The crack of pistol-fire. The whine of the bullets. The shouts and curses of sweating men. Everywhere was a rhythmical waving of arms—like trees in the wind—swinging clubs, swinging fists, hurling rocks, hurling bombs. As the police moved from one group to the next, men lay bloody, unconscious, or in convulsions—in the gutters, on the sidewalks, in the streets. Around on Madison Street, a plain-clothes-man dismounted from a radio car, waved his shotgun nervously at the shouting pickets who scattered. I saw nothing thrown at him. Suddenly he fired up and down the street and two men fell in a pool of gore—one evidently dead, the other, half attempting to rise, but weakening fast.

That night heavily armed National Guard troops were deployed onto the docks, where they stayed for several weeks. One might think that the strikers would have given up in the face of such a display of force. But the events of that day, seemingly a defeat, were instead the turning point of the great maritime strike of 1934.