ON MAY 9, 1934, SAN FRANCISCO LONGSHOREMEN got tired of waiting. They had waited patiently for negotiations to produce an acceptable agreement. They had postponed striking when President Roosevelt asked them to, even though they had voted for a coast-wide walkout by an overwhelming 6,616 to 699. They had waited for a government-appointed mediation board to come up with a reasonable resolution to their differences with the waterfront employers.

Since they had been waiting for fifteen years, they figured they could wait a few months longer. But when all their other options failed, twelve thousand longshoremen from every major port along the West Coast walked off their jobs.

This was the beginning of an eighty-three-day struggle. By the time it was over forty thousand maritime workers had joined in a remarkable display of solidarity and courage. Several workers had been killed and hundreds injured. Close to a thousand workers, supporters, and innocent bystanders had been arrested. But shipping had been brought to a complete standstill along the California, Oregon, and Washington coasts. Most astonishingly, San Francisco workers staged a four-day general strike, shutting down the entire city, to protest employer and government-sponsored violence against working people. As a result industrial unionism took root in California and the entire West Coast.

An organization called the “Longshoremen’s Association of San Francisco and the Bay Area” issued little blue books to longshoremen. To get work on the docks, you had to belong to the “blue book union.” (The books were blue to distinguish them from the red books issued by the old ILA Riggers and Stevedores union.) The trouble was, the so-called Longshoremen’s Association wasn’t a union at all. Created by gang bosses during the 1919 strike and run by the employers, it existed to prevent the formation of a real union.

Harry Bridges attended one meeting. He reflected, “It became obvious to me that it was a company controlled union and a racket.” Bridges, born in Australia in 1901 to a Catholic family, went to sea at fifteen and was shipwrecked twice. His exposure to sailors’ conditions and a general strike in Australia during World War I began his union education.

In San Francisco, a handful of waterfront Communists, a few ex-Wobblies, and fed-up rank and file longshoremen—including Bridges—had been producing an occasional mimeographed newsletter. The Waterfront Worker enjoyed a wide readership among the frustrated dockworkers because the ideas in its pages resonated with their experience. It urged longshoremen to create a militant industrial union that would not only stand up for them but act in solidarity with other maritime workers too.

The publication also insisted on democratic unionism, arguing that rank and file workers should debate policy and vote on all major decisions. The Waterfront Worker helped focus the attention of the ILA’s new rank and file members on a few key demands: sharing the available work equitably through a union-controlled hiring hall, a dollar an hour wage, coast-wide bargaining, and a six-hour day and thirty-hour work week.

In April the San Francisco ILA membership suspended its president, Lee Holman, for dragging his feet in preparations for the strike. Holman had asked national ILA president Joe Ryan to cancel all union meetings on the coast in hopes of stopping the strike. Instead, the members dumped Holman. In his place they created a new leadership structure: a fifty-member strike committee, chaired by Harry Bridges. On May 9 the longshoremen in San Francisco, and in every port on the coast, walked off their jobs. The war-like tone for the strike was set that first day when one hundred police officers on motorcycles and horses rode into a crowd of two hundred picketers, indiscriminately clubbing and arresting the men.

By the middle of May the ranks of the striking longshoremen were swelled by the addition of all the seafaring unions, each of which, inspired by the longshoremen’s action, struck for its own demands. But for the first time in decades, it wasn’t a case of “every union for itself.” Quickly the unions formed joint strike committees in each port, and the longshoremen and the sailors agreed that no one would go back to work unless every union was granted its demands. In another key demonstration of solidarity, the Teamsters unions—first in San Francisco, then in Oakland, Los Angeles, and Seattle—voted to boycott the waterfront: drivers refused to transport goods to or from the struck companies on the docks.

But this was just the beginning of the employers’ assault and the strikers’ response. In San Francisco a thousand or more strikers would gather daily on the Embarcadero, the street running the length of the docks, and march quietly behind the American flag and union banners. On May 28 hundreds of police suddenly and without warning attacked the marchers with clubs, tear gas, and finally bullets, shooting one striker in the back.

One of the police captains presiding over the attack justified his actions on the grounds that the strikers were “led by Communists.” His lieutenant vowed that “If the strikers come back for more, you’ll find some of them in the morgue after the next time.” Both of these men were later dismissed from the force in disgrace for corruption. But for the time being their comments were widely and approvingly reprinted in the newspapers.

National ILA president Joe Ryan flew out from New York and quickly signed an agreement with the employers. The expensively dressed Ryan, a close friend of business leaders and government officials in the East Coast, didn’t have a clue about the desires of West Coast longshoremen. They had been developing a perspective of solidarity with the other maritime unions, best summed up in the old Wobbly slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” They had also created a democratic coast-wide union structure with rank and file representatives elected from all the docks.

Ryan didn’t care about workers in other unions, and even less for union democracy. Accustomed to running his New York local and the national ILA as he pleased—often enforcing his will with gangs of hired criminals—Ryan viewed rank and file participation in union policies as “communistic.” (Twenty years later Ryan went to prison for using the union treasury as his personal bank account.)

Meanwhile, Harry Bridges was rising fast as a leader, due to his fearlessness, grasp of strategy, and a brilliantly direct speaking style. He was elected to chair the coast-wide Joint Marine Strike Committee of all ten unions. He later explained to a government-appointed mediation board the reasons why the longshoremen rejected Ryan’s agreement. “If we do not control the halls the unions can and will be destroyed by discrimination and blacklisting, and the men who took part in this strike would be driven out of the industry. We can’t permit a fink hall.” Emphasizing the solidarity of the different groups of workers, he added, “We don’t intend to repeat our former mistake of one group settling without the other. The maritime workers will go back to work only when all of their controversies are settled.”

Ryan’s peevish last words, before he returned to the East Coast: “Bridges does not want this strike settled. My firm belief is that he is acting for the communists.”

Ships were tied up in the harbors. Huge stacks of merchandise lay piled on ships and in dock warehouses. Employers were losing millions of dollars every day. Leaders of the Industrial Association decided they would move the goods themselves. Well, not exactly themselves, but with the help of an army of strikebreakers they had hired.

They knew they could count on the cooperation of the police. Thanks to the generosity of the Industrial Association, the police were well stocked with the latest antiriot gear. A rivalry developed between salesmen representing two tear gas manufacturers. To scientifically determine which product was best, the police obligingly allowed the salesmen to come along to the picket lines to try their wares on real live longshoremen.

One particularly enthusiastic salesman, Joseph Roush, was rewarded by the police for his services; they named him a “special officer” of the department. Roush described to his boss in a letter the reason why: “I might mention that during one of the riots, I shot a long-range projectile into the group, a shell hitting one man and causing a fracture of the skull, from which he has since died. As he was a Communist, I have had no feeling in the matter and I am sorry that I did not get more.” (The twenty-six-year-old longshoreman Roush hit, James Engle, was not a Communist nor did he die. He recovered from his injury and continued on strike.)

The San Francisco newspapers were more reliable friends of the Industrial Association. Throughout the eighty-three-day strike the four dailies alternated between misleading reports that the strike was “over” and lurid descriptions of a desperate city teetering on the edge of revolution. In late June, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article on “American Legion Week.” It began, “San Francisco trains its guns on communism this week.” The head of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce pronounced that the strike “is not a conflict between employer and employee—between capital and labor—it is a conflict which is rapidly spreading between American principles and un-American radicalism. . . . There can be no hope for industrial peace until communistic agitators are removed as the official spokesmen of labor.”

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.

Two men died July 5 on the street near the ILA hall. One was Howard Sperry, a longshoreman, ILA member, and World War I veteran. The other was Nick Bordoise, a Marine Cooks’ union member and a Communist. He had been recovering from an operation when the strike broke out and left his bed to volunteer in the kitchen set up to prepare meals for the strikers. The morning after their deaths strikers made a sidewalk memorial on the spot where Sperry died. A square of flowers surrounded large words drawn in chalk. On two sides was written “Police murder.” In the center it read “Two ILA men killed” and, below that, “shot in the back.”

On July 9, beginning near the waterfront at the ILA hall on Steuart Street where services were held for Sperry, a huge funeral parade moved up Market Street. Conservative estimates placed the number of marchers at 25,000. No police were present; the marchers had asked to provide security for the event themselves, and the mayor, perhaps shocked at Bloody Thursday’s horrible outcome, agreed. The coffins were placed on trucks, with more trucks carrying flowers behind those. Harry Bridges rode in one open car with Tom Mooney’s mother, and Bordoise’s widow with Sam Darcy in another. Darcy was a Communist Party leader and an editor of Waterfront Worker. A union band played a slow Beethoven funeral march. The flow of people, silent except for the music and the sound of shuffling feet, moved forward beneath the hot summer sun, row upon solemn row, for two miles. Mike Quin reported that there was

not one smile in the endless blocks of marching men. Crowds on the sidewalk, for the most part, stood with heads erect and hats removed. Others watched the procession with fear and alarm. Here and there well-dressed businessmen from Montgomery Street stood amazed and impressed, but with their hats still on their heads. Sharp voices shot out of the line of march: “Take off your hat!” The tone of voice was extraordinary. The reaction was immediate. With quick, nervous gestures, the businessmen obeyed.

The relatively conservative officials of the San Francisco Labor Council confronted a dilemma. Opposed to a general strike, they knew they would have to put the question to a vote of all the member unions of the council.

There had only been a handful of general strikes in U.S. history, the last in Seattle in 1919. A general strike occurs when all workers in a city or region simultaneously stop work. Usually this is done to protest a government or employer action or policy felt to be against the common interest of workers. An extraordinary event, it takes a rare combination of circumstances to bring it about: a high degree of cooperation in a labor movement, widespread anger among working people, union leaders willing to stick their necks out and call for it to happen, and a spark or symbolic incident that crystallizes people’s willingness to act. All of these elements were in place in San Francisco in July 1934.

Council president Ed Vandeleur warned union representatives that a general strike was against AFL rules and unions’ charters could be revoked if they voted to join one. At a mass meeting on July 14, five representatives from each union in the council heard Mike Casey, militant hero of the 1901 waterfront strike, argue against a general strike, despite his own Teamster local’s previous vote to support it. But the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of a general strike, to begin the following Monday. Most of the council officers finally voted for the resolution, because they understood if they opposed it they would simply be ignored by their own members. They then appointed themselves to head the General Strike Committee.

In fact, the San Francisco General Strike was already getting underway. Several unions, including the Teamsters, had stopped work. Store shelves had been stripped by anxious consumers. Gas stations were closed and streetcars had mostly ceased running. By the official deadline of Monday, July 16, few workers remained on the job. Workshops and factories were quiet. Large picket lines on highways outside the city turned deliveries away. Just nineteen restaurants in the downtown area and medical facilities throughout the city were allowed to stay open. The city was shut down.

For the four days of the general strike, headlines insisted that the city was running out of food and gas, and that strikers allowed only themselves to receive food; that the strike was “bred in Moscow”; and Communists were fomenting an insurrection, using the strikers as their pawns. One paper reported the frightening news that an army of Communists was marching on San Francisco. That none of these reports were true did not worry the publishers, who considered it their civic duty to support the Industrial Association.

The National Guard and police, operating in cooperation with the Industrial Association, staged a series of raids on suspected radical gathering places. When the Marine Workers Industrial Union hall was raided by police dressed up as “unionists,” the papers dutifully reported that “Unionists Smash Radical Hangouts in Purging Move.” The San Francisco raids stimulated a mini-Red Scare, with imitators in cities across California, especially in the Central Valley.

The police and mayor vowed they were cleaning alien communists out of San Francisco. Besides wrecking several offices, police arrested hundreds of people on a variety of charges. Of these twelve turned out to be deportable aliens; three were Communists. The rest were released after varying stays behind bars.

Each day of the general strike the labor council’s strike committee allowed more places of business to open and services to be restored. On the fourth day, by a close vote and over the angry objections of the maritime unions, the strike committee called off the general strike.

The sailors knew that without the longshoremen they had no choice but to return to work. Old Andrew Furuseth, however, had the last word. As a final gesture of defiance against the waterfront employers, he proposed a symbolic action: “We are going to build a fire. Alongside that fire we will have a can of petroleum and each man who has got a fink hall book will come along there and he will dip it into that petroleum and throw it on the fire.”

The day before returning to work a huge crowd of SUP members, with Furuseth looking on, made a bonfire on the docks and burnt their “fink books.”

Bill Rutter recalled that on the first day after the strike, his gang of longshoremen decided they would only take fifteen sacks of barley per sling load, instead of the usual twenty. They informed the bosses of their decision, much as construction trade workers had done in San Francisco a quarter century before them. When twenty sacks came down anyway, “The guys all went and got their coats and were standing there waiting to pull out.” The bosses changed their minds; fifteen was OK with them, after all. Incidents such as this were repeated the length of the coast until work rules were understood to be a matter of discussion, not dictation.

The new sense of solidarity extended beyond work rules. On docks and ships, the workers refused to labor alongside men who had scabbed during the strike. The employers, reluctant to fire the loyal strikebreakers, nevertheless had to give in when confronted with “quickie” strikes and picket lines put up by the maritime workers that were honored, in turn, by teamsters and other workers.

An enlarged sense of comradeship grew from the strike. The San Francisco ILA—an officially racist union until but recently—put a gang boss on “trial” for “slandering colored brothers.” When maritime workers responded to employer provocations two years later with another coast-wide strike, fifteen black longshoremen served on the local strike committee. Within a few years a third of the local membership was African American.

On October 12, the federal arbitrators unveiled their decision. The longshoremen were granted nearly everything they wanted: a thirty-hour week, six-hour day, coast-wide bargaining, and ninety-five cents per hour (they had asked for one dollar). On the critical issue of the hiring hall, the arbitrators imposed a hall jointly administered and funded; but they gave control over naming the job dispatcher to the union. Since the dispatcher determined who worked where, the union in effect ran the hiring hall.

The sailors had to wait until early 1935 to receive their decision, and they didn’t like what they got. The arbitration board ruled that hiring would remain in the hands of the shipowners. But for months the sailors had already enforced hiring of union men on West Coast shipping by a simple act: whenever a nonunion sailor was brought on board they stopped work until he was escorted off again. Now they weren’t about to let a government pronouncement prevent them from maintaining a union shop.

The shipowners were furious, but there was little they could do against the united sailors. It was as if the eighty-three-day strike had been a school in industrial warfare for the seamen. They were disciplined and effective. Besides breaking down the resistance of the owners, the sailors’ direct action tactics also finished off the old SUP officers. Furuseth, ailing for years, died in 1938, but he and the men around him had been left behind by the events of 1934. In their place rose a new generation of young leaders headed by Harry Lundeberg, who understood the power of instantaneous rank and file action and felt free to utilize it whenever and wherever necessary.