Ryan had gone to work in New York as a longshoreman in 1912. He worked his way up in the union movement to become ILA president, then president of the Central Labor Council of New York City. When he landed in San Francisco in 1934, he stepped into a waterfront world almost totally unlike the one from which he hailed. Accustomed to "painted neckties, pinstriped and elegantly tailored double-breasted suits, flashy diamond rings," as historian Irving Bernstein pictured him, Ryan ran the New York waterfront at a "rather spectacular level of corruption." Annual dinners or campaigns against Communists on the waterfront provided funds for his plushy style. On the docks, he fully accepted the shape-up, reportedly cutting in local union officials on the job rackets and kickbacks and cooperating with gangsters moving in to control waterfront jobs. When a civic committee concluded that the water- front provided a lucrative field for racketeers and that the shape-up was responsible for evil waterfront conditions, one voice-Ryan'sobjected that it was unfair to the waterfront employers. Strikes in the east, shipowner lawyer Phleger commented, "were usually settled between Joe Ryan and the representatives of the steamship companies and ... rumor was that Ryan was susceptible to being influenced by payments to him." It did not help matters that the Pacific Coast District, by an agreement of twenty-five years' standing, had virtually complete autonomy over its own affairs. Neither the international union nor Ryan had had any substantial part, let alone control, in the district's long and turbulent history. Nor, in the light of his commitment to the pierhead shape-up, did Ryan understand the West Coast concern with their own hiring halls. His foot-in-the-mouth declaration on his arrival was not the first, nor the worst, in a continuing series of misadventures. 20