The year 1934 was marked across the country with protest against the suffering, the degradation, and the oppression of the Great Depression. Millions of workers clutched at hopes raised by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Some million and a half workers gave up nineteen million days of work in the nationwide industrial battle. Almost half of the disputes were fought mainly over the simple right to organize and bargain collectively. For two months, in San Francisco and along the entire Pacific Coast, the longshoremen and the seamen had been locked in one struggle in this nationwide battle.

And now, this somber procession bore the coffins of two men killed in a battle with police on July 5-the day imprinted as Bloody Thursday in the legends of San Francisco's storied waterfront. The first truck, escorted by a veterans' honor guard, carried the flagdraped casket of Howard S. Sperry, a longshoreman; the second, decorated by a simple spray of flowers, the casket of Nick Counderakis, a cook, known in the Communist Party as Nick Bordoise. They were followed by trucks banked high with flowers, a string of funeral cars carrying the mourning families, the lone band droning a death march, and a dozen men carrying a giant American flag.

On they came, a dark surge of humanity, under a cloudless blue sky. Their dark clothes and grim silence were in stark contrast to the bright flags and pennants under which the brass bands and black uniforms, shining swords and white plumes of the Knights of Pythias had paraded the day before. On they came, in an unending stream, rank after roughly formed rank: strikers, sympathizers, supporters, the Women's Auxiliary of the ILA, and wives and children.

No one agreed on the number. Ten thousand, fifteen thousand, were frequently used counts. "At least 15,000," said the San Francisco Chronicle, but still "uncountable." "Fifty thousand is more like the correct figure," remembered Henry Schmidt, a longshoreman and a strike leader. 2 Whatever the number, more thousands rounded the Steuart Street corner, making their way between silent ranks of onlookers lining the sidewalks on Market Street for blocks. No talk. No strike signs. No banners. No police.

The police report called it a "general riot." Two inspectors, the police report said, found themselves surrounded by a mob, shouting "kill them!" Strikers showered the officers with rocks and bricks and threatened to overturn their car. "Feeling that their lives were in danger, the officers fired two shots from a shotgun and several shots from their revolvers at the men who were attempting to overturn the car," the report said. "The two men who were struck with the bullets from the inspectors' guns later died." Strike leader Harry Bridges told the coroner's inquest that, emerging from the strike kitchen a block away, he had seen no bricks being thrown until after the shots were fired. A second witness saw no bricks thrown, either. He testified that, in response to threats to overturn the car, the officer had shouted, "If any of you sons-of-bitches want to start something, come on."

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.

A week later, the general strike was a reality. By that astonishing day, the strike was no longer a surprise but its dimensions as well as its substance, especially in the light of the newspapers' doomsday predictions, amazed the watching Western world. Workers by the thousands, in San Francisco and the East Bay, union and nonunion, left their jobs. Hundreds of businesses, factories, and ware- houses closed, many when their employees failed to show up, some out of sympathy, some from uncertainty and fear. Public services halted, then slowly, piecemeal, resumed. The newspapers had warned of hunger and riot but there was neither. By the end of the fourth day, it was over.

But the general strike opened the way, finally, after eighty-two bitter days, to end the longshoremen's and the maritime workers' strikes. They ended under an agreement to arbitrate the issues in dispute; the resulting changes encompassed more than the revised wage scales and changed working conditions handed down by the arbiters. The real settlement, as it turned out, produced radical, fundamental, and permanent changes in the economic relations between employer and employee in the then-massive and powerful Pacific Coast maritime industry. The settlement raised the curtain on a vigorous and aggressive drive by longshoremen and seamen to take charge of their jobs. The movement went beyond the blackand-white of new contracts to exert decisive control over the distri- bution of jobs, the pace of the work, the conditions on the job, safety-the very job control that employers had exercised unilaterally, without consultation or conscience. The settlement also pro- duced a long-desired but short-lived coastwide federation of maritime workers.