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.