At 6:00 A.M., June 1, 1916, some 10,000 longshoremen up and down the Pacific Coast struck to enforce the new wage scale and working conditions established by the recently concluded convention of the ILA's Pacific Coast District. If employers resisted the demands, put up a fight, or sought a local settlement or local negotiations, the port unions were instructed to refer them to the district executive board. It alone was empowered to settle the strike.

This, the first coastwide strike of longshoremen, had been building almost from the turn of the century. Unionism had come early to the other Pacific Coast ports: Longshoremen in Portland formed a "Protective Union" in 1868. In the 1880s, Tacoma longshoremen organized a cooperative in an effort to restrict the labor force and limit the competition for jobs. In the last years of the old century, San Pedro began developing a spacious inner harbor and, soon after, longshoremen in San Pedro organized a union. In 1901 Seattle longshoremen joined the ILA. Local unions in the dozen or more ports in Oregon and Washington in 1908 formed the Longshoremen's Union of the Pacific in an unsuccessful effort to rescue a desperate strike. In 1909, recuperating from its disastrous loss, the coastwide union became District 38 of the ILA, with a sweeping grant of autonomy that played a key role in the strike twenty-five years later. Of the twenty-six unions on the coast, only the Riggers' and Stevedores' in San Francisco held out. Finally, in 1914, it, too, affiliated.

Alex Walthers, an old-time longshoreman who spoke at the funeral services for the victims of Bloody Thursday in 1934, recalled the 1919 longshoremen's strike. "I took part in the 1919 strike, and we were holding out very well, and then our strike committee prevailed upon the membership to make an additional demand. That is to demand that the union be given representation on the employer board. Trying to get union men on their board. That helped to break us up," 9 he said. Twenty-one years later, Thomas Plant remembered, horror underlying his words, two of the demands made in 1919: "25 percent stock ownership in each of the steamship companies, together with a number of seats on the boards of directors."

These startling demands emerged from a background of turbulence that marked the end of both World War I and the wartime truce between workers and their employers. Talk of nationalization flourished, with the railroads and coal mines prime candidates. Attacks on radicals, real and imagined, spread. Prices climbed, unrest mounted, strikes broke out. Union-open shop feuds stilled by wartime conditions were revived.

In mid-December, a group of foremen organized the Harmony Club, sometimes called the "Bosses' Club," ostensibly to encourage a brotherly feeling and end rivalry among themselves. From it, came a new union, shorn of its "radical element" and called the Longshoremen's Association of San Francisco and the Bay District. The Waterfront Employers Union promptly entered into a fiveyear closed-shop contract. No man, the shipowners announced, could work without the blue dues book of the new union. For fourteen years, the Blue Book union dominated the San Francisco docks and the lives of the longshoremen. Paul Eliel, the Industrial Association's industrial relations director, thought it was "probably in- spired by the employers," but was neither "company-dominated" nor "completely independent." 13 To Plant twenty years later, "It so happened that a large number of the longshoremen had gotten sick and tired of their radical leadership and it was overthrown." He added, "I think we can refer to the fourteen years that followed as fourteen years of peace." 14

To most longshoremen, however, the Blue Book union was an
unqualified company union, employer-dominated, employer-
controlled. The Harmony Club had been formed under the em-
ployers' prodding, they said. Its president had "collaborated with
the employers to set up a company union." The employers had
provided headquarters for the new organization, the Wateifront
Worker reported later. In the end, two unarguable results emerged:
The Riggers' and Stevedores' of the ILA were smashed; the Blue
Book union dominated the waterfront.

The voluble Captain Dollar told the National Association of
Manufacturers: "Up to the time of the strike San Francisco had
been known as the tightest 'closed shop' city in the world. When
the last rumble of the dock strike had died away, the labor aspects
in San Francisco had undergone a complete change. It became
known as the most wide 'open shop' community in America. How
shipping men brought this about has lots of thrills." 16

In 1921, shipowners served demands on their ship crews for a 15 to 25 percent cut in pay, the elimination of overtime, and a return to the two-watch system (an increase in weekly hours from 56 to 84). The wartime Shipping Board, still operating a major portion of the nation's merchant marine, backed their demands. When the board and the operators unilaterally imposed a wage cut, six unions of licensed and unlicensed seamen struck. The operators retaliated by declaring an open shop on their ships. War-trained sailors, jobless workers, and strikers drifting back to their jobs broke the strike and it was called off in mid-summer. Andy Furuseth, the Sailors' Union chief who had seen his union membership crumble from 115,000 in 1919 to 16,000 in 1923, commented: "We have lost many battles before and this is only one more battle lost. . . . We can and shall win again, if you can see the way and have the courage to walk it."

Thus, in the half-decade following the war, the shipowners and waterfront employers swept the docks and ships clear of unions, taking total, unilateral control of employee relations and job conditions. In the decade or more ahead, they exercised that dominance through employment systems stripped of employee input, pressed by unending mechanization, and driven by an insatiable demand for production and profit. From these years, the employers reaped the "terrible anger" that honed the issues, the tactics, and the goals that would surface explosively in the summer of 1934.