In response, the biggest wave of strikes in United States history washed across the country in 1945 and 1946. Workers struck mass production industries and shut down several cities with general strikes. In the East, these occurred in Hartford and Stamford, Connecticut; Camden, New Jersey; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Rochester, New York. Citywide general strikes are rare in the United States: never before (or since) had so many occurred in one year. The cluster in 1946 demonstrated the widespread anger of workers at their unmet expectations and also the high level of organizational competence unions had built over the preceding years.

Across the bay from San Francisco, twenty-eight stores belonged to the antiunion Retail Merchants Association (RMA). During the fall of 1946, the RMA’s refusal to recognize a union in two stores set off a chain of events that led to a general strike of more than 100,000 workers from 142 AFL unions throughout Alameda County. In the process Oakland city politics, long dominated by conservative, antiunion forces, began a difficult makeover process, pushed by unions and their allies in minority communities. Although the Oakland General Strike of 1946 did not immediately achieve all of its objectives, its long-term effect was to give Oakland working people a substantial voice in running their municipal affairs for the first time.

Aligned with the RMA were the Oakland City Council and the powerful Oakland Tribune newspaper, headed by its wealthy antilabor owner, Joseph Knowland. The publisher, whose son was a U.S. senator, treated Oakland as his personal kingdom, in much the same way that Harrison Gray Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times, had done in that city in the early 1900s. The nine-member Oakland City Council had long been filled with Knowland allies. His control extended into all levels of Oakland city government. Knowland’s Tribune provided the RMA with one-sided news coverage of the dispute with its members’ employees. Utilizing an antiunion tactic spreading rapidly in the postwar era, Knowland’s editorials claimed that “Communists” were behind the strike.

Before daybreak on Sunday, December 1, escorted by hundreds of Oakland policemen, strikebreakers drove twelve truckloads of merchandise through seventy picketers stationed at six entrances to the stores. The drivers worked for the Veterans Trucking company, a Los Angeles firm established by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association for the express purpose of breaking strikes. Its drivers had traveled four hundred miles to Oakland at the invitation of the RMA. To make way for them, the police swept the union picket lines off the street, injuring peaceful picketers.

The union activists had received assurance from the Oakland police chief that they could legally park their cars in loading zones near the stores on the weekends and at night. Nevertheless, police towed away the strikers’ cars and those of their supporters as soon as the officers had removed the picket lines.

As daylight broke on Sunday morning, December 1, the small crowd of striking clerks and supporters regrouped, facing 250 police posted in front of the stores. The police roped off six square blocks surrounding the stores in the center of downtown and, at 7:30 A.M., herded the twelve trucks to Kahn’s and Hastings’ loading docks. The union leaders were disgusted that their own tax money was being used to protect strikebreakers. Chaudet later said he believed that the Oakland General Strike was born at that moment, in the bruises and indignant feelings of union leaders who had been lied to, physically assaulted, and found their own tax-supported police force used against them.

The next day, Tuesday, December 3, 1946, the city of Oakland came to a stop. Hundreds of buses and streetcars sat empty in their yards, resulting in massive traffic jams on the Bay Bridge. Remembering the furious antiunion propaganda produced by San Francisco newspapers during the 1934 General Strike, Oakland strike leaders made sure to halt the printing presses at Oakland’s three daily newspapers, including Knowland’s Tribune. Most places of businesses closed or were staffed with skeleton management crews. Only vital services, such as hospitals, stayed in operation. Strikers directed traffic.

When the first Key System streetcar rolled up to the police blockade early Sunday morning, police tried to move it through the gathering crowd. But the driver, Al Brown, an officer in the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192, learned from the strikers what had happened. He removed the controls from the streetcar and left his vehicle standing in the middle of the street. Next Brown convinced the drivers of the streetcars behind him to do the same. Bus drivers passing through the area also halted their vehicles and joined the picket lines, which by now swelled with union sympathizers. A police three-wheeler ran over one streetcar driver, Newton Selvidge. He had to be taken to the hospital.

Workers in many unions met all Monday. Sentiment clearly was in favor of a general strike. That evening, at an emergency meeting of five hundred union leaders, the labor council called for a county-wide “work holiday” to protest the police violence, support the Kahn’s and Hastings strikers, and demand that police never again escort strikebreakers. The council created a strike steering committee and set up subcommittees to deal with communication among strikers, coordinate food distribution to participants, and keep essential services going in the city.

Union members in 142 AFL unions received notice of the council’s decision by telephone, telegram, and radio reports. The word spread far beyond the retail and trade unions at the heart of the dispute. Musician Earl Watkins, working at a popular nightclub in east Oakland, Slim Jenkins’ Place, remembered receiving the word there from his union’s business agent that no one would be playing until the strike was over.

Whatever might have resulted either from the exercise of those emergency powers or the CIO’s entry into the strike will never be known. Late Wednesday night, Oakland city manager J.F. Hassler issued a verbal assurance to union leaders that the police would not in the future escort strikebreakers and would remain impartial in labor disputes. On the strength of that statement, Bob Ash and the other strike committee leaders called an end to the general strike Thursday morning, December 5, at 11 A.M.

Many union members were upset at the decision, figuring that if the CIO unions—representing 30,000 workers at the docks, in heavy industry, in warehouses, and at the public utilities—joined them, they would be invincible. But AFL leaders believed they had achieved the main goal of the general strike. In addition, they feared association with Communists in the CIO leadership and perhaps worried they might lose direction of the general strike to the militant CIO if it became involved. AFL leaders were also concerned at the possible effect of Beck’s back-to-work order on the crucial support of the Teamster drivers.

The Oakland General Strike had ended, but the Kahn’s and Hastings workers who started it all were still on strike. The immediate result of more than one hundred thousand workers taking to the streets was simply an agreement that the city would no longer allow its police to protect strikebreakers. Yet, almost immediately, police were again escorting strikebreakers through the picket lines at Kahn’s and Hastings. Although angry at this violation of the agreement, AFL union leaders were nonetheless not about to call another general strike. What they did do was quite effective, however, in its own way.

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.