Paul Eliel was at the time a top-ranking staff member of the Industrial Association, the employers' premier anti-union force and, at that moment, the shipowners' strikebreaking agency. In his detailed account of that summer's strikes, he called the funeral "the most theatrically ominous and significant event in the history of the entire longshore and general strike." He insisted-with only partial accuracy-that it was largely the creation of the strike leaders-"a brilliant and theatric piece of propaganda." It was not the first time, or the last, that the employers (whose views were effectively mirrored in Eliel's account) refused to credit the simpler, and less calculated, more basic responses of the strikers. His appraisal, too, ignored the enormous content of sheer emotion-anger, protest, sympathy-that welled up in that march, in its numbers and its awesome silence. Nevertheless, he grasped the stunning impact of what he called "one of the strangest and most dramatic spectacles that had ever moved along Market Street."

Its dramatic qualities moved the entire community without regard to individual points of view as to the justice and righteousness of the strikers' cause. It created a temporary but tremendous wave of sympathy for the workers. . . . It provided the impetus that made events which followed as inevitable as though the human beings involved in the subsequent drama had been moved by vast physical forces over which they had no control. As the last marcher broke ranks, the certainty of a general strike, which up to this time had appeared to many to be the visionary dream of a small group of the most radical workers, became for the first time a practical and realizable objective.