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."