View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
The General Strike Committee announced that nineteen restaurants would remain open Monday -- some 3,600 seats for a city of 700,000. Union permits would allow suppliers to provide food to them. At the same time, it said, it was planning a special police force intended to prevent violence and cooperate with regular police. Permits would be issued to continue milk and bread deliveries. Bridges proposed the committee establish food distribution depots throughout the city. Strikers would prevent profiteering, regulate distribution, and prevent hardship. "If the people can't get food, the maritime workers and longshoremen will lose the strike," Bridges said. At the same time, he warned attempts to run picket lines with nonunion food trucks would "create disorder and violence." "If the trucks try to move, the men will try to stop them-I can tell you that." In the East Bay, Charlie Real, head of the teamsters, said trucks operating with union permits would furnish supplies to East Bay Commission houses; the public would be expected to obtain their supplies at these distribution points. Mayors of Bay Area cities in a joint declaration announced that their people must be fed; if the strikers did not make arrangements to do so, they would.
That weekend, too, the secretary, whom Roosevelt had left in charge of the problem, was summoned to Secretary of State (and "acting president") Cordell Hull's office. She found him huddled with Attorney General Homer S. Cummings over a stack of law books. In their opinion -- based on a thirty-year-old article by an elderly gentleman [P. Tecumseh Sherman] who had once been Commissioner of Labor Statistics in the State of New York -- the situation in San Francisco was legally a general strike and called for drastic action under both federal and state law. Perkins protested. A general strike, she argued, was "a strike of a large body of workers planned and coordinated in advance to force the government to take a position on some matter of interest to them." She said Hull and Cummings both thought the National Guard and the U.S. Army should be used to put down the "general strike." She told them the situation was in no way "alarming," that the likelihood was remote that it would go beyond a brief strike of delivery and transportation services, and that it seemed "unwise to begin the Roosevelt administration by shooting it out with working people who were only exercising their rights, under our Constitution and law, to organize and demand collective bargaining." She insisted, in any case, before anything is done, the president must be consulted. From the Houston, the president thanked her for her "estimate of the situation." He suggested an offer of arbitration in his name; he also, confidentially and diplomatically, Perkins thought, suggested consulting with Hull and Cummings as to "our authority to maintain food supply and traffic in the affected areas." The president's formula blithely ignored the several boobytraps that had already brought down several other arbitration proposals. Whatever the reason, the secretary noted, the offer was not made.
That evening, Mayor Rossi summoned Lapham and Phleger to his office. He had issued a second proclamation of emergency, assuming a broad array of municipal powers. As Lapham remembered the conversation, the mayor was hoping there was some way it could be settled, even at the last moment, perhaps by conceding the hiring hall. " 'Do you realize what you're asking, Mr. Mayor?,' Phleger responded. 'You're the mayor of this town. A general strike is against the city government and all government. It would be a disgrace in the face of a general strike if we conceded anything.' Rossi in effect shrugged, 'All right, whatever you think.' "
Vandeleur and Kidwell issued an eleventh hour statement, drafted by Henry Melnikow and Ray McClung, a newspaperman and associate, and approved only hours before by the General Strike Committee, defending labor's actions and arguing that the strike was called "purely for the enforcement of trade union policy." The employers were "dead wrong" in trying to portray the general strike as the culmination of communist and radical upheaval, Melnikow said. The statement ran in one edition of the News, in none of the other papers. "The newspaper and the powers that be in San Francisco did not want the world to know that this was an economic strike ... not a political revolution," Melnikow commented. 22 In a letter to the mayor, Vandeleur and Kidwell for the General Strike Committee declared that labor had no intent to paralyze production or distribution or overthrow government. It is simply defending itself "from an anti-labor crusade ... an un-American attack on principles of organization and collective bargaining." The men who helped to build the city and to develop the high standards of the labor movement "are now prepared to make further sacrifices to preserve these standards." They are acting out of "loyalty to their principles as working men."
i mean por que no los dos
THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT for the New York Times arrived at San Francisco's diminutive airport, Mills Field, at 5:15 Monday morning (July 16). He and his fellow passengers had been warned there would be no transportation from the airport into the city, so they hitched rides with friends meeting two of the passengers. On the way in, through deserted streets and empty streetcar tracks, they saw two bakery wagons bearing permits from the General Strike Committee to deliver bread to hospitals. Gas stations displayed signs: "No Gas, Due to the Strike." They drove past National Guardsmen on duty at bridges and terminals. At the hotel, they were asked to be "conservative" in their use of towels since their laundry service had been discontinued until the strike was settled. The hotel's restaurants were closed and so were most others, except nineteen exempted by the General Strike Committee; by 8:00 A.M, long lines already waited at those. Some hotels, their restaurants closed to the public, issued identification cards to insure that no one but guests was served.
Streets usually crowded with streetcars, taxis, and private automobiles were now crowded with pedestrians. Thousands walked to office or shop, often using the middle of the empty streets. Bicyclists were frequent; a few made their commute on roller skates. Many carried brown paper bag lunches or working-class lunchboxes. Others paused to pick up a candy bar or two to carry them through a lunchless day -- "probably more milk chocolate sold here today than at any comparable period in history," the Times noted. Department stores were open; their managers met later in the day and decided they would remain open, but customer traffic was light. Barber shops were closed; cigar stores, running low on supplies, were limiting smokers to one pack at a time. In the nineteen open restaurants -- in a city of some three thousand eating and drinking places-hungry customers lined up behind the lucky ones who had seats and lines straggling from their doors, not without some jostling, lost tempers, even, the Times guessed, violence. Fresh supplies were hauled in -- under strike committee permits -- but not until late in the day did the lines slack off. The General Strike Committee quickly authorized an additional thirty-one restaurants to open for business Tuesday.
Paul Smith, writing as the Chronicle's financial editor, found business activity "slowly throbbing like a waning pulse to an almost lifeless standstill." Business leaders rushed plans for emergency operations, markets were dull. Elevator operators and janitors"unorganized and intimidated" was Smith's gratuitous comment- responded to the general strike call. Some businessmen munched canned sardines, hunks of cheese, and stale buns "on polished mahogany desks, over which fortunes in currency have passed and repassed," the Chronicle said. Many went without. An ILA committee urged liquor stores and bars to close for the duration of the strike. (A newspaper report said a Mission street beer tavern had boarded up its smashed windows and posted a sign saying "Done by mistake-union place.") The six hundred-strong Chinese Laundry Workers Union came out on strike. Non-organized teamsters and truck drivers in Marin County joined the walkout and were waiting to be organized. Employees of Liggett and Myers, a major cigarette distributor, sent a delegation to the Labor Temple looking for a union organizer.
Movie houses closed down, legitimate theaters and night clubs were dark. Radio stations broadcast without interruption, except where union musicians were required. The San Francisco Seals called off their customary night games in favor of daylight baseball. Crews halted work on both the San Francisco-Oakland and Golden Gate bridges, not yet spanning the Bay. At the Commercial Club "leading citizens," under the direction of the president of the Pacific National Bank, ran the dining room, their wives in the kitchen. The Joint Marine Strike Committee's bulletin listed what, because of the general strike, "you can't do: go to the movies, call a taxicab, get your trousers pressed, buy gasoline, eat in a hotel dining room, get a shave or haircut, buy fresh vegetables, have your automobile repaired, board a boat for Tahiti or even Los Angeles, move your household goods, get your shirt washed, go to a night club." Beyond the obvious services that directly and immediately affected consumers, much of the business and industrial life of the city slowed or came to a standstill. Factories and shops were shut down - often because their employees spontaneously joined the strike. Little moved except "by permission of the General Strike Committee." Some businesses continued operations, but customers were scarce.
Employees of the city's major streetcar line, the privately owned Market Street Railway, had walked out at 2:00 A.M. Sunday for their own demands rather than in sympathy with the general strike. Carmen on the Municipal Railway met, then without the formality of a vote, simply failed to show up for work. As city employees with civil service status and pensions, they faced a special problem. Edward Vandeleur, who headed the Muni carmen's local as well as the San Francisco Labor Council, had tried to keep the cars in the barns without strike action. Vandeleur had appealed to Utilities Manager Edward G. Cahill to withdraw service because of the intimidation and violence that threatened the men if they took out the cars. Cahill refused.
Instead, a special, early morning, two-hour meeting of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) (in the home of a sick member) instructed Cahill to resume operations immediately and to forfeit the civil service status and pensions of employees who failed to return to work. The General Strike Committee proposed the cars, on returning to service, carry a sign saying they were operated by the committee's permission. The PUC refused. The committee yielded, sending the Muni carmen back to work with its thanks "for their sympathy and assistance."' It was the first of the committee's efforts-expanding food supplies, providing gas, opening additional restaurants-to cushion the impact of the general walkout on the public (or, some militants said, to liquidate the general strike).
An estimated 15,000 building tradesmen in the East Bay had laid down their tools; now they were joined by some 2 7,000 workers affiliated with Central Labor Council local unions. The East Bay's street car system and the Key System ferries halted operations; commuters who flocked to the still-operating Southern Pacific (SP) lines to get to San Francisco were angered when the SP refused to honor the Key System's commute tickets. Employers were especially upset, J. Paul St. Sure recalled, when the Key System's employees' strike resolution called for the employees "and the workers of the community to take over the transportation system for working people." St. Sure said he and several businessmen, "frightened" by the prospect of "an actual class struggle," had asked Governor Merriam to send the National Guard into Oakland. 2
San Francisco's troubles provided an abundance of grist for the mills of the pundits and editorial writers, who turned out virtually instant volumes of exegesis and explanation, counsel and condemnation. In the main, they ignored the view of the general strike as basically a sympathetic protest. Rather they clung to the image of a political strike with serious revolutionary intent. To columnist Walter Lippmann the general strike, "a political weapon," could succeed only if it paralyzed the whole life of the community. The leaders of the San Francisco strike appear unwilling, he thought, to make it really general. That they are unwilling to starve the public only means they will incur all the disadvantages of angering the public without achieving its only possible success-that is, replacing the government. The unwillingness of these "ordinary American trade unionists" to use it as it can only be used insures its increasing ineffectiveness and ultimate defeat. 5
THE MORNING OF the second day of the general strike in San Francisco --Tuesday, July 17 -- found National Guardsmen, armed with rifles and a machine gun, manning a barricade at Jackson and Drumm streets, targeting the traffic in the first block of Jackson Street at number 65 where the Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) had its office. Word of possible trouble had barely reached the MWIU office when a gang of men crashed through the front door. Some wore police badges; some were in plain clothes. An eyewitness recognized one as "Captain Malloy," presumably the same man soon identified in newspaper reports as the police officer who led the "posse" in several of the daylong series of "Police raids on Radical Meeting places." The raiders smashed typewriters on the floor; demolished desks; grabbed piles of stationery, receipt books, or whatever objects lay within reach; and looted the seamen's baggage room. The Examiner said the posse captured an "arsenal" of razors, axes, knives, and clubs, along with piles of "inflammatory literature." At the point of guns, men who were threatened by blackjacks and cursed -- "you red son of bitches," "get the dirty bastards" -- were held in a back room until the patrol wagon arrived. Nearly a hundred, under National Guard guns, were loaded in the wagon and taken to Harbor police station.
The next morning's Chronicle found the day's work hilarious. "REDS TURN BLACK AND BLUE,'' read a cutline under one of its photographs of the destruction. "This was a communists' meeting-place, a neighborhood where the radicals dropped in for a cozy chat about the impending revolution. It came sooner than they expected when angry unionists swept down on the place." Another caption read: "First step of beating the swords of San Francisco's strife into plowshares takes the form of beating Communists' furniture into matchsticks. "PARALYSIS OF THE JOINTS,'' said another. "There's a checkerboard on the floor and it's the Communists' next move. There was a piano in the room and they laughed when a husky teamster sat down to it-with an ax. The rendition was presented with tympanic accompaniment of fists on the persons of radicals who, today, are even more inflamed."
The anti-red hysteria, typified in the day's carefully orchestrated raids, was not confined, either in timing, violence, or geogra- phy, to San Francisco. Vigilantes, police, and private armies had been active in agricultural strikes that had flashed across California's fields earlier in the year. In Brawley, gatherings of migratory workers were attacked, a meeting hall was wrecked, furniture was destroyed, and the building flooded. Hundreds were arrested. An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, A. L. Wirin, was kidnapped and beaten, his automobile driven over an enbankment. In many areas law enforcement officers were jumpy over the threat of new agricultural strikes. Meetings and demonstrations in the Los Angeles area were frequent targets of "red squads."