From The Occupy Oakland General Assembly- GENERAL STRIKE & MASS DAY OF ACTION – NOVEMBER 2

by Bruce Paul

GENERAL STRIKE & MASS DAY OF ACTION – NOVEMBER 2

October 28, 2011 in general strike

Liberate Oakland, Shut Down the 1%

GENERAL STRIKE & MASS DAY OF ACTION
Wednesday November 2, 2011

Below is the proposal passed by the Occupy Oakland General Assembly on Wednesday October 26, 2011 in reclaimed Oscar Grant Plaza. 1607 people voted. 1484 voted in favor of the resolution, 77 abstained and 46 voted against it, passing the proposal at 96.9%. The General Assembly operates on a modified consensus process that passes proposals with 90% in favor and with abstaining votes removed from the final count.

PROPOSAL:

We as fellow occupiers of Oscar Grant Plaza propose that on Wednesday November 2, 2011, we liberate Oakland and shut down the 1%.

We propose a city wide general strike and we propose we invite all students to walk out of school. Instead of workers going to work and students going to school, the people will converge on downtown Oakland to shut down the city.

All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them.

While we are calling for a general strike, we are also calling for much more. People who organize out of their neighborhoods, schools, community organizations, affinity groups, workplaces and families are encouraged to self organize in a way that allows them to participate in shutting down the city in whatever manner they are comfortable with and capable of.

The whole world is watching Oakland. Let’s show them what is possible.

The Strike Coordinating Council will begin meeting everyday at 5pm in Oscar Grant Plaza before the daily General Assembly at 7pm. All strike participants are invited. Stay tuned for much more information and see you next Wednesday.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- All Labor Must Defend ILWU Local 10 (California)!-Union Attacked for Solidarity with Public Workers

Workers Vanguard No. 979
29 April 2011

Union Attacked for Solidarity with Public Workers

All Labor Must Defend ILWU Local 10!

Reliance on the Democrats: Recipe for Defeat

In their call for nationwide protests on April 4, the AFL-CIO tops said the day would be one of “rising up to support workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and other states.” But the only genuine labor action was taken by members of Bay Area Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), who overwhelmingly stayed away from work that day. The port of Oakland was shut down for 24 hours.

Now the shipping companies represented by the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) are gunning for the union with a lawsuit against Local 10 and its president, Richard Mead, demanding that the ILWU foot the bill for “damages sustained” by the PMA as a result of the port shutdown. Although no price is named, in a similar suit East Coast shipping companies are demanding that the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) pay $5 million for a two-day shutdown of the ports in New York and New Jersey last September in response to a union-busting attack on ILA jobs. According to the head of the PMA, the employers also want the courts to enforce an injunction against further work stoppages.

Local 10 longshore workers stood up against the assault on public workers unions. Now all of labor must stand up for Local 10! Stop the PMA’s union-busting attack!

That Local 10 members gave up a day’s pay in solidarity with embattled public workers unions is a real statement of the deeply felt anger and desire to fight at the base of the unions. This was also witnessed in the tens of thousands of workers who mobilized in protest outside the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, this winter. But the labor misleaders have done their level best to contain any militancy and redirect it back into support for the Democratic Party. This was the intended purpose of the April 4 “We Are One” rallies, as was baldly stated a week later by AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in a speech to the National Women’s Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. Declaring that “the energy of working people is infectious and their solidarity and commitment are inspiring,” Trumka advised that “if Democrats are to take back the House in 2012, and to hold on to the White House and the Senate, it will be because they succeed in riding this wave.”

The price of the bureaucrats’ subordination of the unions to the political fortunes of the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans represents the interests of the capitalist class enemy, can be counted in busted unions, millions of unemployed and the living hell that is life for the ghetto and barrio poor and countless others who have been written off by a system based on the exploitation of labor. So beholden are the labor bureaucrats to the capitalist order that even the notion that there is a working class in this country has been deep-sixed, reflected in the pitch at the April 4 protests to “reclaim the middle class.” By the same token, the union misleaders were desperate to avoid the remotest hint of working-class struggle against the one-sided class war by the capitalist exploiters and their state.

At the “We Are One” rallies in Oakland and San Francisco, called by the Alameda and SF Labor Councils, the organizers would not even allow a speaker from ILWU Local 10, the only union whose members took any kind of actual labor action! There was no such censorship of a representative of the strikebreaking cops. One of the few speakers at the opening rally for the thousands-strong SF protest was the president of the Police Officers Association of San Francisco, who used the occasion to declare: “I am a member of labor just like you are.” Far from being “union brothers,” the cops are the armed thugs of the capitalist state whose job is to smash labor struggle. This would readily be seen if there were any real fight against the union-busting assault on public workers, just as it was seen when the SF police killed two workers in the 1934 longshore strike. The “bloody Thursday” assault by the cops was the spark for the citywide general strike that laid the basis for founding the ILWU.

The only speaker who even mentioned that Local 10 members had not worked on April 4 was the secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, Stephanie Bloomingdale. But this was not to promote any such action by others, much less to address the crying need to mobilize the power of labor in strike action to fight the assault on public workers unions. On the contrary. Bloomingdale hailed the Wisconsin judge who put a temporary stay on the implementation of the state’s union-busting bill for not letting Republican governor Scott Walker “get away” with it. But Walker did get away with it, as did the Ohio legislature, which passed an even more draconian anti-union law in the immediate aftermath.

In response to the PMA’s lawsuit against Local 10, the San Francisco Labor Council passed a resolution calling for a “mass mobilization of all Bay Area Labor Councils and the California AFL-CIO” on April 25 at PMA headquarters. But the Labor Council officials did little to nothing to mobilize their membership for this protest, which drew about 150 people. Fine words will not stop the union-busters!

The capitalist rulers have been winning the war against labor because the power of the working class has been shackled by the class-collaborationist policies of the trade-union leadership. Labor’s weapons are inherent in its collective organization—strike action, mass pickets, plant occupations, hot-cargoing of scab goods, etc. The capitalists’ arsenal is the state—the courts, cops and military. The 1934 SF general strike, and mass strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis the same year, were pitched battles between workers and cops and other strikebreakers. All of them were led by reds. The 1934 Minneapolis strikes, which forged the Teamsters as a powerful industrial union, were led by supporters of the Trotskyist Communist League of America. James P. Cannon, the founding leader of American Trotskyism, underlined the political program that lay behind this victory:

“The modern labor movement must be politically directed because it is confronted by the government at every turn. Our people were prepared for that since they were political people, inspired by political conceptions. The policy of the class struggle guided our comrades; they couldn’t be deceived and outmaneuvered, as so many strike leaders of that period were, by this mechanism of sabotage and destruction known as the National Labor Board and all its auxiliary setups. They put no reliance whatever in Roosevelt’s Labor Board; they weren’t fooled by any idea that Roosevelt, the liberal ‘friend of labor’ president, was going to help the truck drivers in Minneapolis.…

“Our people didn’t believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity.”

—James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (1944)

If the unions are to wage the battles necessary for their own defense and in the interests of all the oppressed, they must be mobilized in opposition to the capitalist state and independently of all of the political parties of the class enemy—Democrats, Republicans and Greens. That means a political struggle to get rid of the sellouts sitting on top of the unions who strangle the workers’ fighting spirit. It is in the crucible of the class struggle that a new leadership of the unions can be forged. This is not simply a matter of militancy but, as Cannon pointed out, a question of political program. What is needed is a leadership that will arm the workers with an understanding both of their social power and their historic interests to free all of humanity from the exploitation, all-sided misery and war inherent to a system based on production for profit. Forging such a leadership is in turn an integral part of the fight for a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose aim is no less than doing away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery through socialist revolution.

“Progressive” Labor Tops: Different Talk, Same Walk

In an interview on KPFA radio the day after the April 4 protests, ILWU Local 10 executive board member Clarence Thomas said that “one of the reasons” no Local 10 member was allowed to speak “is because the Democratic Party is not in favor of workers taking independent action.” True enough. But when asked if he was opposed to the unions continuing to pour millions into backing the Democrats and funding Obama’s re-election campaign, Thomas responded that the unions should support only those Democrats who would be “accountable” to the working class. In short, behind all the seemingly radical rhetoric that has historically been a trademark of the “progressive” labor tops in Local 10 is the same old shell game of peddling the Democrats as a party that can be made to serve the interests of the working class and the oppressed if, in Thomas’ words, their feet are “held to the fire.”

Last year, the Local 10 leadership pulled out all the stops to mobilize the ranks for the election of Democrat Jean Quan as mayor of Oakland. Boosted as a “friend of labor,” Quan was the headline speaker at the Oakland April 4 rally. Denouncing Wisconsin governor Walker for stripping public workers unions of the right to bargain for their members, Quan contrasted the good offices of her administration, declaring: “We will have layoffs but they will come as part of collective bargaining.” It would be hard to find a more chemically pure expression of the role played by the Democratic Party. The Republicans revel in taking out the knife to slaughter the unions. The Democrats hand the knife to the union bureaucrats to slash the wages and benefits of their members in the name of “preserving collective bargaining.”

That’s exactly what the union leaders following the Democrats, who had already agreed to such givebacks, were willing to do in Wisconsin. In California, the bureaucrats promote Democratic governor Jerry Brown, who has axed millions from social programs for the poor, as a man they can do business with.

But Quan’s appeal for the unions to sacrifice more jobs did not go down well with much of the crowd at the Oakland rally. She was drowned out in a chorus of booing, a response aptly described by one reporter as reflecting “a schism between the labor leaders who invited Quan to headline their rally and rank-and-file workers impatient with years of government cut-backs” (Bay Citizen, 4 April). It is precisely such burgeoning anger that the labor tops are working overtime to head off.

At the same time, calls for a “general strike” have been coming from left-talking bureaucrats like Ken Riley, president of ILA Local 1422 in Charleston, South Carolina. Heading into an “Emergency Labor Meeting” held in Cleveland on March 4-5, which was called to “explore together what we can do to mount a more militant and robust fight-back campaign to defend the interests of working people,” Riley said, “I don’t see any other way than a general workers strike.” But there was no call for any such action coming out of this meeting, which drew some 100 of the more radical-sounding and even “socialist” labor fakers and their hangers-on. Rather, the best they could choke out was that labor “must go to the streets,” meekly adding that “where possible” the participants would promote “industrial actions” on April 4.

Evidently, they did not find it “possible.” Instead, the April 4 protests are being portrayed as helping build “momentum” toward a general strike. This is simply to provide some militant-sounding cover for a program these labor fakers share in common with the top AFL-CIO officialdom: reliance on the capitalist state. The “perspectives” approved by those attending the Cleveland meeting advise: “There is plenty of money available without demanding givebacks from public employees, but this requires changing our nation’s priorities to raise taxes on the rich, redirect war dollars to meet human needs, and more—all demands that we must place on the federal government.” Far from building momentum for any kind of real labor action, much less a general strike, such appeals serve merely to dissipate and divert the workers’ anger into the illusion that the government can be pressured into serving their needs.

A central chant at both the SF and Oakland rallies was “tax the rich!” The banks, corporations and other capitalist enterprises are sitting on mountains of cash, the ill-gotten gains of a system based on the exploitation of labor for the profits of the few. But the working class is not going to get its hands on this money by appeals to the federal government, whose purpose is not to “meet human needs” but to defend and increase the profitability of American imperialism.

Capitalist governments might temporarily increase tax rates for the rich to meet the needs of the ruling class as a whole, such as gearing up for war or bailing out their economies at times of crisis. And in the face of class or other social struggle, the rulers may shell out some money to buy social peace. But once such peace is purchased, the benefits gained through struggle come under attack, and all the more so in times of economic crisis like today. What they take out of the hides of the working class and oppressed at home they invest in waging war against the workers and oppressed abroad to expand their spheres of exploitation and their domination around the globe. These “priorities” cannot and will not change short of getting rid of the profit system in which they are rooted.

For the workers to reclaim the wealth that is the product of their labor, they have to break the power of the bourgeoisie and its state. That means fighting for a workers government that will expropriate the expropriators and put the wealth of this society to serving the needs of society under a planned socialist economy.

Bureaucrats Feeling the Heat

It’s not just left-talking labor bureaucrats who are mouthing the words “general strike.” In his column in the March issue of the ILWU’s Dispatcher, the union’s International president, Robert McEllrath, wrote: “Holding a rally is usually the first thing we think of. It’s good to feel pumped-up for a few hours or even a few days, but they’re soon over and then people ask: ‘now what do we do?’ If the answer is, ‘hold more rallies,’ then maybe we need to think harder, because our goal has to be about winning public support, and if rallies don’t help us accomplish that goal, maybe we need to be doing other things such as a general strike across the United States with support from all unions and labor.” This is an extraordinary, indeed unheard-of, statement coming from an official in the upper echelons of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, for whom the very mention of working-class struggle is to be avoided like the plague. While it lacks credibility, it is a measure of the desperation of at least some of the union misleaders as they feel heat from the ranks.

The industrial unions have been ravaged, with the rate of unionization in the private sector now below 7 percent. Public workers are now the majority of union members in the country, and the laws being brought down against them challenge their survival. Asking “Will we be able to win over workers—many who once belonged to unions—but have since seen their pay, benefits, and job security go down?” McEllrath argues: “The stakes in this fight couldn’t be higher, as it may determine whether the labor movement continues to shrink or survives long enough to organize and grow in the future.”

While the ILWU holds real social power in its hands, the union itself is an increasingly isolated bastion of labor organization in a sea of unorganized workers on the docks and the inland warehouses. The union leadership has done little to nothing to organize these workers.

Standing amid the wreckage that their sellout policies have produced over the past 30 years and more, McEllrath is expressing the bureaucrats’ concern for their own survival, which is, after all, dependent on having dues-paying members. To preserve their status, it is possible that they could be moved to take some kind of strike action. But that would not change their fundamental loyalty to the capitalist system, particularly as represented by the Democratic Party, which includes the labor officials among its key components. Following his musing over a general strike, McEllrath makes clear its purpose, arguing that “if we want more politicians to stand with us, then we’ll need to rally a lot more troops to our side.”

For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!

The April 4 protests were called in conjunction with the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, who was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was supporting a strike by black sanitation workers. The photos of these black workers with picket signs reading “I Am a Man” are a searing statement of the integral link between the struggles for labor rights and black rights. But while much was made at the protests of King’s dedication to labor’s cause, the truth is that King was a spokesman for reliance on the capitalist government, seeing the courts and the Democratic Party as the vehicles for legal reform of the racist status quo.

The myth that black people could achieve equality within the confines of racist American capitalism was ripped apart when the civil rights movement “came North.” Here the forcible segregation of blacks in the ghettos was not a matter of a legal code but was and is rooted in the very foundation of capitalist rule in America. When the black masses in the Northern ghettos entered the struggle—fighting for real equality, for jobs, for decent housing and schools—the role of King and others in the liberal leadership of the civil rights movement was one of fearful containment. Thus, King supported the troops sent in to brutally suppress ghetto upheavals in the 1960s.

With the deindustrialization of large swaths of the U.S., the ghetto poor who once supplied a “reserve army of labor” to be employed when the bosses needed them have been written off as a “surplus population” by the capitalist rulers, their labor and very lives no longer seen as necessary for the production of profit. But black workers remain a militant backbone of organized labor—from the ILWU to the public workers unions—and are critical to linking the power of the working class to the simmering anger of the ghettos. If the unions are to fight for their very existence, they must take up the defense of the ghetto and barrio poor by fighting for jobs, quality housing, education, health care and more, and must as well defend the rights of immigrants, an increasingly important component of the working class. Organizing the unorganized is a life-and-death question for labor everywhere. Crucially it means a fight to break the open shop South, directly posing the need for labor to combat anti-black racism and anti-immigrant bigotry.

Many workers no longer buy the lie peddled by the trade-union bureaucracy and its “socialist” water boys that the election of Barack Obama would bring “change” they could “believe in.” The massive protests in Wisconsin inspired many to believe that finally there might be some fightback against the war on their unions, their families and their livelihoods. The leaden hands of the labor bureaucracy are trying to drown any such impulse. It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a real explosive potential here. But to transform that potential into some successful class struggle poses the question of leadership. The labor misleaders must be ousted and replaced with workers’ leaders who will link the fight to defend the unions to building a multiracial revolutionary workers party. This is the necessary instrument to lead the struggle to free the working class and the oppressed from the chains of exploitation, poverty and imperialist war.

From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The First Trickle Of Labor Support For A General Strike- A Resolution From The Letter Carriers Union Branch 214-San Francisco

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the San Francisco General Strike of 1934 as background for this post.

Markin comment:

As I mentioned in today's other posting concerning the proposal for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions I am placing material in this space of others, individuals and organizations, who are committed to that same general proposition. That this trickling of support that has started comes out of San Francisco (although not from the well-known militant dockerworkers' unions yet), a historic area of labor militancy is telling. Forward!

Resolution of Letter Carriers Union Branch 214
Adopted unanimously March 2, 2011 in San Francisco, California

Support the Initiative for a General Strike in Wisconsin – and Prepare for Nationally-Coordinated Solidarity Job Actions

Whereas, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s Koch brothers-funded and Wall Street-inspired attempt to destroy Wisconsin’s public workers’ unions is the highly strategic opening battle in a war to destroy both the public and private sector of the U.S. labor movement; and

Whereas, resistance that the workers and students have mounted to the union-busting attack has in a short time breathed new life into the workers' movement in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and across the country; and

Whereas, there must be no illusions about the determination of the
forces committed to crushing labor that are behind Gov. Walker, and
much more must be done if Wisconsin workers and all workers are to
prevail in this most critical battle facing working people in generations; and

Whereas, Gov. Scott Walker and the billionaires behind him must know in no uncertain terms that if they persist in their outrageous efforts to destroy the labor movement, that they will bring upon themselves the kind of massive, popular uprising of workers' power that this country hasn’t seen since the 1930s; and

Whereas, if the people of Egypt were ready to put their very lives on the line in their fight for freedom, then certainly the labor movement in the U.S. must be ready to demonstrate that it is prepared to put it all on the line in defense of the very elementary right of workers to have a union, and in defense of the right of the labor movement to survive; and

Whereas, the South Central Federation of Labor of Wisconsin (AFL-CIO) voted on Feb. 21, 2011 to “endorse a general strike” if the union busting bill is passed by the Wisconsin legislature and signed into law. The motion ordered that strike preparations begin immediately, asking the Education Committee to “immediately begin educating affiliates and members on the organization and function of a general strike.”

Therefore be it Resolved, that Golden Gate Branch 214 of the Letter Carriers Union calls upon organized labor everywhere and at every level to officially support the initiative of Wisconsin's South Central Federation of Labor to endorse a general strike if the union busting bill is passed; and

Be it further Resolved, that we call on organized labor to commit all
concrete solidarity support necessary to ensure the success of a general strike; and

Be it further Resolved, that we call on organized labor to approve, and prepare to initiate nationally-coordinated job actions in solidarity with a general strike in Wisconsin; and

Be it finally Resolved, that this resolution be submitted to Bay Area labor councils, California State Association of Letter Carriers, the NALC, and California Labor Federation, with which we are affiliated, for concurrence and action.

Resolution adopted unanimously 03/02/2011 in San Francisco, California, by the membership meeting of Golden Gate Branch 214 of the National Association of Letter Carriers, representing some 2,300 Postal Service letter carriers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

###


Madison Area AFL CIO Votes to Prepare For General Strike

By Mike Elk, Feb. 22, 2011

This evening in a press release from IBEW Local 2304 President Dave Pokilinski, I received word that the 45,000 member Southern Central Federation of Labor, the local chapter of the AFL-CIO for the Madison and Southern Central Wisconsin area, has voted to make preparations for a general strike.

The press release reads as follows:

Around 10:50PM Wisconsin Time on February 21st the South Central Federation of Labor endorsed the following motions:

Motion 1: The SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day [Governor Scott] Walker signs his “budget repair bill”, and requests the Education Committee immediately begin educating affiliates and members on the organization and function of a general strike.

Motion 2: The SCFL goes on record as opposing all provisions contained in Walker’s “budget repair bill”, including but not limited to, curtailed bargaining rights and reduced wages, benefits, pensions, funding for public education, changes to medical assistance programs, and politicization of state government agencies.

*Labor's Untold Story Told- The Holt Labor Library

Click on title to link to the Holt Labor Library website. This is a good starting source for many of the subjects and personalities that I have introduced this month as part of my "Labor's Untold Story" series.

*Labor's Untold Story- Honor The 75th Anniversary Of The Great San Francisco General Strike

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Newsreel Footage Of the San Francisco General Strike. This Is A Repost Of A June 2009 Entry On This Important Action That Made San Francisco For Long Time One Of The Great Labor Centers Of America.

Commentary

This year marks the 75th Anniversary of three great labor struggles that ended in victory in heart of the Great Depression(the 1930s version of what we, at least partially, confront today); the great General Strike in San Francisco that was led by the dockers and sailor unions and brought victory on the key issue of the union hiring hall (since then greatly emasculated); the great Minneapolis Teamster strikes that led to the unionization of truck drivers and allied workers in that labor-hating town and later to the organizing of over-the-road drivers that created one of the strongest (if corrupt) unions in North America; and, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike whose key component was leadership by the unemployed workers. Does all of this sound familiar? Yes and no. Yes, to labor militants who, looking to a way out of the impasse of the condition of today's quiescent labor movement, have studied these labor actions. No, to the vast majority of workers who are either not organized or are clueless about their history. In either case, though, these actions provide a thread to how we must struggle in the future. Although 75 years seems like a long time ago the issues posed then have not gone away. Far from it. Study this labor history now to be ready to struggle when we get our openings.

********************

The following is presented for informational purposes only. The political and factual points are those of the authors. I will present other material on these actions at a later date.

San Francisco and the General Strike
By Paul S. Taylor and Norman Leon Gold

What really happened in San Francisco's general strike? What were the issues? What do they mean to labor, employers, the community? What of the vigilantes and their violent anti-Red campaign? Two Californians here give the story down to date


Survey Graphic, September, 1934 (Vol. 23, No. 9), p. 405.


SIXTY-FIVE thousand trade unionists during four July days staged on the shores of San Francisco Bay the second and most widespread general strike in United States history. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth they carried out an extended maneuver which surprised, bewildered, gratified, or terrified and maddened the average citizen. To most Americans there is something reign about a general strike, and a bit ominous—like the "dole," storm-troopers, socialists, communists, fascists, and a lot of other things that used to seem farther away than they do now. But to many on the Pacific Coast, experience has made the general strike at least real, however differently they may interpret it—as a splendid demonstration of the strength and "solidarity of labor," a victory for the "real leaders of labor," a "sell-out" by labor "fakirs," a "strikers' Dictatorship," or an "insurrection."

The San Francisco general strike of 1934 was in no sense a "sport." It is but the latest of a long line of conflicts between employers and employed in that area, many of them, like the general strike, centering about the waterfront, and focusing on the degree of control over employment to be exercised by employers or by union. For power flows from job control. Beginning in the late eighties, the shipowners' association established a hiring-hall as a device for breaking union power. The sailors struck, proposed joint control, were refused, and then beaten. In 1934 the longshoremen demanded substitution of union-control for employer-control of hiring halls. The employers proposed joint control, here refused, and the issue finally went to arbitration. The general strike was but a climax to the 1934 phase of this perennial struggle for power.

Waterfronts the world over provide dramatic examples of the local accumulation—characteristic of many industries-of over-supplies of under-employed workers. We lack neither knowledge nor example of how to "decasualize" this waterfront labor. Indeed, Seattle employers have taken the lead among American ports in achieving regularization, and the other ports of the Pacific Coast, except San Francisco, have more or less followed suit. But in San Francisco the "good employer," while maintaining his individual labor relations on a fairly advanced plane, allowed general employment practices in his industry to lag behind those long recognized by experts in industrial relations as intelligent and beneficial. The philosophy of the agent who for years has managed waterfront labor there is suggested by his characterization of marine workers as "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and by his statement some years ago that "Really, what we are trying to do is to put the spirit of Jesus Christ in these men," a profession promptly balanced with: "Of course, you've got to put the fear of God in them, too." Under this regime, the well-known abuses of an overcrowded labor market flourished: under-employment, low earnings for many, long and fruitless waits at the docks, petty graft as the price of jobs. These were the conditions, against a background of protracted unemployment and insecurity, of anxious hope stimulated by the rights of collective bargaining under the National Industrial Recovery Act, of a left-ward surge toward more aggressive labor activity both within and without the trade unions, from which the waterfront strike, and ultimately the general strike, developed.

THE first rumble of impending conflict on the waterfront was heard in October 1933 when 400 longshoremen struck against the Matson Navigation Company, claiming discriminatory discharge of members of the newly formed International Longshoremen's Association (ILA.) The company refused to recognize the ILA, but after mediation, reinstated the men. This act sounded the death-knell of a curious organization, the "Blue Book" union, or Longshoremen's Association of San Francisco. Fourteen years earlier the Blue Book union had arisen during a strike from a schism within the ILA; organized by the gang bosses as a right-wing dual union, the employers promptly accorded it recognition and a "union shop" agreement which consigned the original ILA to a lingering death. Strangely, the Blue Book union later was welcomed into the San Francisco Labor Council in 1929 as a "transformed" company union, but ejection followed in 1931 when it was ascertained that the "transformation" was not complete. It lingered on, then in its turn went down to defeat before the rising ILA of 1933 and 1934.

By March 1934 the longshoremen were ready for aggressive action. Slack employment, instead of deterring action, only made more acute the grievance voiced by the numerous unemployed and underemployed unionists that favored gangs received too large a share of the work. Both sides were in a fighting mood, the men following militant leaders, the employers confident of victory, and willing to put up with the possible loss of two or three million dollars as not an exorbitant price for crushing the new union. Negotiations proceeded, both sides yielding a bit, but neither conceding enough to avert a strike. The men asked an increase of wages from 85 cents to $1 an hour, and $1.50 an hour for overtime, a coastwide agreement, and union control of the hiring-hall. The last demand was crucial and the issue was clearly joined: the men called it the foundation of their union; the employers declared that it meant union dictation—an infringement on the "right to select employee," and discrimination against competent and faithful non-unionists. Curiously but significantly, the ILA now was seeking a "union shop," which it had protested the preceding October when employers gave force to their "union shop" agreement with the Blue Book union and discharged some ILA men. The employers, similarly, were now resisting a "union shop," when previously they had only too eagerly granted one. How much depends on the kind of union!

Negotiation for a shift in power is peculiarly difficult. Dissatisfied, the men called a strike for March 23, halted it upon request of President Roosevelt, but mediation failing, called it again for May 9. The fight was on in San Francisco and in other ports of the Pacific Coast. Along the three and one-half miles of San Francisco's Embarcadero the corrugated steel doors remained shut. Gates, topped with barbed wire, were closed and boarded. Pickets strolled up and down, passing knots of police, accosting and warning those who looked as though they might take jobs.

THE companies advertised for strike-breakers, and recruited several hundred. These were given steady work at the same hourly rates which the strikers refused, plus $1.50 a day, which was in excess of the cost of board and lodging aboard two ships fitted out for the purpose. Some people inquire incredulously how any man can break strike. Perhaps the answer is not difficult: apart from the few who do it for principle or for love of adventure, they act under the spur of necessity. Many a striker and strikebreaker had this in common: each, with his family, was on relief. Said a college premedical student who worked as a strikebreaker: "I'd rather have salt on my torn body, but God, I have to be a doctor!" His earnings of $150 enable him to return to college. Union pickets sought to deter the strikebreakers with the threats and physical violence often characteristic of American strikes. By July 9, 266 injured persons had been reported by the police; of these 63 percent were strikebreakers and 10 percent were police.

The strike spread first on the side of labor. Partly in sympathy with the longshoremen, but principally to resume actively its long-clouded leadership of the men of its crafts, the International Seamen's Union struck on May 16. The unions of licensed officers followed, May 19 and 21. Meanwhile the truck drivers (under the anachronistic name of the Teamsters' Union) decided that after May 13 they would no longer haul from the docks "hot cargo," i.e., cargo unloaded by strikebreakers. They continued to haul freight from the warehouses, however, if the employers could move it that far. This the employers did by way of the state owned Belt Line Railroad, which operates from the piers to the warehouses. Strikebreakers loaded the cars on the piers, warehousemen unloaded them. To stop this traffic, the longshoremen proceeded to organize the warehousemen into a union to refuse to handle "hot cargo." On June 14 the Teamsters' Union refused to haul "hot freight" anywhere The tactics were effective. The railroads, connected with the piers by the Belt Line over which freight moved to the hinterland and along the coast, gained heavily at the expense of the shipowners, but freight movement from the waterfront to the city was at a standstill. The docks choked with cargo, vessels could not unload, more merchant ships lay at anchor in the Bay than at any time since '49 when sailors deserted en masse to join the rush to the gold fields.

THE widening base of support on the side of labor was countered on the side of capital. On May 20 the president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce rallied to the support of the waterfront employers, declaring, "It is now my duty to warn every business man in this community, that the welfare of business and industry and of the entire public is at stake in the outcome of this crisis." Three weeks later, the Industrial Association, organized in 1921 during a crisis in the building trades, standing for the open shop under the name of the American Plan, and representing the leading industrial, financial, and business interests of the city (including the shipowners) accepted the invitation of the Chamber of Commerce to "open the port." A corporation was formed; it acquired trucks, a warehouse, the fastest speed boat on the Bay, assembled men to drive trucks and work longshore, and took contracts to move freight. With the announcement that, "We are, therefore, commencing operations to restore the streets of San Francisco to its citizens, confident that the Police Department will afford full protection for the full use thereof by unarmed drivers," the Industrial Association began to haul cargo July 3. The strikebreaking drivers were evidently of the adventurous type; in the words of an Association official, "We've got a fine bunch of boys to drive those trucks. They are falling all over themselves to get the jobs."

The movement of cargo from waterfront to warehouse was little more than a gesture, for effective picketing still prevented movement beyond. But everybody—longshoremen and teamsters, shipowners and Industrial Association, public authorities and the public—accepted it as a test of power. The mayor promised the Industrial Association "adequate police protection during these operations which, of course, is their right" and asked "the people of San Francisco to absent themselves from the vicinity wherein the movement of merchandise is to be conducted." But neither spectators nor pickets would remain away. Cargo moved from waterfront to warehouse, some trucks were dumped and burned, missiles were thrown, clubs wielded, and officers and men injured. On July 5, "lines of battle, as clear cut as any formed on the Western Front, were drawn along San Francisco's waterfront."

The pickets faced the police; this is significant. String pickets usually confront first the strikebreakers or guards hired by the employers. Indeed, in times past San Francisco employers have even boldly proclaimed their readiness directly to meet force with force. In an earlier longshore strike a noted shipowner said: "As long as we continue hauling our men to the receiving hospital . . . we are never going to get anywhere, and I propose, that tomorrow morning, starting in when they compel us to send one ambulance to the receiving hospital, we send two of theirs." But in the strike of 1934 different tactics were employed: "We didn't do as in the old days when we went out and got a lot of ugly-faced toughs." Instead, the maintenance of physical order was left to the police, so that when pickets were beaten it was the police who did it rather than hired thugs. The gain in public sympathy to the employers from such an alignment is obvious. Financially, it also offers advantages to them; as the San Francisco employers pointed out to those in San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles:

The item of guards, cost and boarding, amounting to about $100,000 [in San Pedro], is one which we think should be borne by the city. Here [in San Francisco] the police in ample numbers are supplied without cost, and the only guards employed are those needed on the housing ships. Each company has extra guards or watchmen, the cost being borne by the individual line.

On July 5, then, hundreds of police and some thousands of pickets faced each other. The trucks of the Industrial Association began to move. The pickets were forced back, back, in an extended maneuver covering many blocks. Thousands of commuters from the East Bay jammed the viaduct and the sidewalks; clerks crowded to the windows of office buildings. As police drove strikers and sightseers up Rincon Hill, the pickets hurled bricks, and the police, at the cry of "Let 'em have it," threw tear-gas grenades. Here and there clubbing occurred as men and police clashed. Before the ILA hall fighting was more vicious. Inspectors of police, surrounded by angry strikers seeking to overturn their car, fired. Two men were killed. Police, horses, strikers, and spectators were wounded.

THE men called it "bloody Thursday," and spoke of the "battle of Rincon Hill." They staged a funeral parade down Market Street that contrasted strangely in its awesome quiet and simplicity with the gay banners above, hung in welcome to the convention of Knights Templar. At street intersections the police stepped aside, and like other spectators bared their heads. The funeral made a stirring emotional appeal to the strikers; the public was curious and impressed.

The Governor declared a state of riot. Strike leaders had refused to allow "hot cargo" to move over the State Belt Line "without molestation," so he accepted "the defi of the strikers," and ordered out the National Guard to preserve order and "protect state property." Under the guns of the troops, "hot freight" continued to move from waterfront to warehouse. If the troops allowed traffic to move, their presence aided the employers; if they did not, they would have aided the men by establishing completely effective picketing. We are accustomed to follow the first practice. (The Governor of Minnesota, however, has introduced a notable exception to American procedure by permitting movement only of trucks engaged in essential services or those whose Owners have reached an agreement with the men approved by federal officials.) So the strikers were out-maneuvered, until to the on-looker the waterfront conflict was made to appear a battle of employee striking not against their employers but against the police and beyond them against the public itself. A less obvious effect was to suggest to the strikers that the government was not impartial, but against them. Communists were not slow to point this out to the men, ignoring, of course, government feeding of needy strikers' families and other helpful services.

TROOPS occupied the waterfront-sentries with steel helmets and gleaming bayonets, machine-gun nests, and motorized roving patrols. Admission to the occupied area was by pass. Guards moved about in the ferry building and forbade commuters to loiter on the viaduct. A pier watchman who obeyed too slowly the sentry's command to halt was bayoneted in the groin; a 19-year-old strikebreaker who inadvertently came within the 50-foot deadline in his speedboat, and an amateur photographer taking movies of guardsmen were shot.

Conceding the futility of trying to stand up against the militia, the strikers' leaders sought other weapons to checkmate the waterfront employers who were now actively aided by the highest financial and industrial leaders of the city. To the strikers, confident and more impassioned than ever, the situation seemed clear: the employers had finally used their last resource—their own strength first, then the police, the Industrial Association, and the militia; now the men must win reinforcements for the final test of power.

From the waterfront through the ranks of organized labor and to the public went the appeal for support of a general strike. it was urged as the:

first and only possible defense-step against the aggression of anti-union employers under the banner of the San Francisco Industrial Association....
When the Industrial Association entered the waterfront controversy, as a third party, as a strikebreaking agency supported by guns and police clubs, labor trouble in the San Francisco Bay Region ceased to be just a dispute between certain labor unions and certain employers over questions relating to their specific industries.

It took on the direct and obvious form of organized warfare on the part of employers federated in the Industrial Association against all labor organizations and the principle of collective bargaining—progressive, unified, massed attack which unless repelled was certain to engulf and eventually destroy more and more labor groups.

Realizatin of this fact has caused the strikes of workers, affiliated in AFofL organizations in industries which at a glance seem to have slight unity of interest with the waterfront unions originally involved in the disturbance. But the campaign of the Industrial Association, with its anti-labor program and leadership, is in reality an attack on all labor organizations, all members of organized labor who seek to retain their legal rights of unified activities.

The right of labor to such organization and collective bargaining has been fought by certain groups of employers ever since America became an industrial nation. It is a right which received a powerful stimulus from President Roosevelt and the New Deal; a right affirmed in clear words in the National Industrial Recovery Act; under which the NRA operates.

It is a right legally granted labor which has been denied in San Francisco.


The sympathy of a large section of the general public was swinging to the side of labor. Even professional and business men said, "I hope they beat the Industrial Association," and "I'm for the longshoremen." The overwhelming show of force was too much, and American spirit was moved to side with the under dog. Besides, the verbatim publication of hearings before the National Longshoremen's Board now gave the public its first opportunity to read and compare adequate statements by all parties to the dispute.

One of the significant aspects of the entire situation was e relation between aggressive strike leaders of the longshoremen, and the more conservative leaders of unions throughout the city. In the ILA, the conservative leaders had already been repudiated one by one. The conservative local president had been deposed; thereafter he sought to weaken the strike by organizing a new union, and announcing that conservative longshoremen were ready to return to work, and that more would do so except for insufficient slice protection and the spell cast over them by communist leadership. And when the international president, Joseph P. Ryan, came out from the East and, together with Pacific Coast union executives, negotiated an agreement with the employers, the members denied the authority of officials to take a binding agreement without referendum, and voted it down. Under Harry Bridges, sincere, militant man of the ranks, whose eleven years on San Francisco's waterfront have not effaced his nasal-cockney Australian accent, a Joint Marine Strike Committee was organized to take over negotiations. The employers called the rejection of the "Ryan agreement" a "repudiation," but clearly the men never had been bound by it, for Ryan negotiated it with neither authority nor sufficient knowledge of the temper the men and their local leaders.

As the cry for a general strike sounded, the gulf between the aroused members of the ILA and the Teamsters, on the one hand and the conservative leaders of the San Francisco labor movement and their followers on the other, became increasingly apparent. Indeed, the course of the general strike itself was determined by this conflict. On July 6, the day after troops occupied the waterfront, the Labor Council appointed a strike strategy committee of seven to "investigate." But if the business agents at the Labor Temple were calm and cautious, the rank and file of a number of unions were eager for action. "Bloody Thursday" and the ensuing funeral had dramatized the struggle to all labor. The Teamsters voted 1220 to 271 for a complete walkout in San Francisco; said Michael Casey, their "responsible," conservative officer:

I warned them that it was strictly against the rules of the brotherhood and that they will undoubtedly lose all strike benefits . . . but nothing on earth could have prevented that vote. In all my thirty years of leading these men, I have never seen them so worked up, so determined to walk out.

Union after union voted to strike or (about half of them) to abide by the decision of the General Strike Committee formed by appointment of President Vandeleur of the Labor Council as the labor directorate of the strike. In vain their leaders urged arbitration and warned against a general strike. "All right, boys, I'm with you," said one, and later he told a friend, "It was an avalanche. I saw it coming, so I ran ahead before it crushed me."

The employers agreed now to arbitrate all issues with the longshoremen, and to bargain (but not to arbitrate) with elected representatives of the seafaring crafts. The longshoremen remained adamant; they would not arbitrate "control of the hiring-hall," and they would not settle unless the seafaring crafts were guaranteed a satisfactory settlement. And now the men were marching out. On July 12 the truck drivers ceased work; gasoline trucks could make no deliveries and taxis were driven back to their garages. Butchers, ship boilermakers, machinists, welders, and laundry workers followed. The building-trades, cleaners, cooks and waiters, barbers, auto mechanics, cleaners and dyers, streetcar men, and many others waited only the call of the General Strike Committee. In the East Bay similar stands were taken by excited unionists.

The National Longshoremen's Board worked furiously for a settlement. The striking teamsters allowed only emergency trucks to operate in the city. Fire trucks, police cars, hospital services, scavengers were unmolested; other essential-service trucks required union permits. A ring of teamsters' pickets began to turn back food trucks bound for the Bay cities. Still people were asking: "Is there going to be a general strike?" Vandeleur as head of the General Strike Committee replied: "Do you fellows have to see a haystack before you can see which way the straws are blowing?"

Grocery stores were jammed. As the contagion spread, more and more people rushed to the stores to stock up. In the more affluent districts vegetables soon were "picked over" and gaps appeared on grocers' shelves. Canned goods sold rapidly, but stocks were large. With meat no longer obtainable, an inspired advertisement announced "X-brand tuna, an ideal meat substitute . . . can be served in countless ways." In the poorer districts trade was brisk, but slower than elsewhere; there were no funds for large purchases. The Knights Templar terminated their convention and left the city while teamsters would still haul their baggage.

By Saturday night, July 14, a general strike seemed inevitable. Said Michael Casey: "Logic has all gone out of the window! This thing is being ruled now by passion and hatred." But now the leaders were well ahead of the prodding followers, and they guided the action. The general strike was timed for 8 o'clock Monday morning in San Francisco, and Tuesday in the East Bay. But the militant unionists were not in control. Harry Bridges was defeated for the vice-presidency of the meeting formed by delegates from every union in San Francisco, and he was smothered as the only maritime representative on the appointed General Strike Committee of twenty-five.

Monday morning no streetcars ran. The streets were filled with pedestrians. Autos were left at home to conserve gasoline. A holiday mood was in the air. Two thousand more soldiers entered the city; armored tanks appeared on the waterfront. There was practically no violence. Long lines of people waited their turn for meals before nineteen restaurants officially opened by the strike committee.

But already the strike, which was general but never complete, was being checked. From within, the strike leaders decided the first day that the municipal carmen should return. The next day food trucks were given free passage by the pickets. More restaurants were opened by union permit, then all restaurants. Soon the embargo on gasoline trucks was lifted, and finally on July 19, the general strike was called off at the close of its fourth day. The General Strike Committee urged arbitration of all issues by all unions and employers party to the original dispute, and the National Longshoremen's Board announced a closely similar position.

FROM without, press and public officials were declaring the general strike a labor "dictatorship" and "insurrection," a strike against the public. "Strike bred in Moscow AFL avers," "Citizens open food, gas sales in spite of unions; Bridges admits defeat of plot to starve city into surrender," declared the headlines. Said Mayor Rossi "In the presence of a general strike nothing can be accomplished. That strike must be ended." Oil trucks were operated under armed guard; union "permits" were indignantly refused, by interests which, only a few years earlier had supported the Industrial Association's "permit" system which compelled the "open shop" in the building trades. But now they said, "Are we going to recognize another government or our own?" Guardsmen stripped the permit signs from cars which entered the occupied zone, and some, over-zealous, even took union badges from the strikers. "Imagine permits!" said an oil man, "I see red every time I see one those signs. What a fizzle! What have they gained? Nothing but the hatred of the public. I like what General Johnson said; nothing but civil war, insurrection... general strike!" The sympathy of the public was turning away from the strikers as their inconvenience grew. "They were trying to set up another city government of their own. They found that our sympathy was gone when we couldn't get our carrots," said a professional man. "The longshoremen should have endured almost anything rather than let people go hungry and cause anything like a general strike"; "Working people can't be trusted," said middle-class housewives. Many rank and file unionists, too, like a Key Route conductor were

glad that it ended the way it did. It might have been worse. If it had lasted longer the company would have ordered us back to work and then we would have been called "scabs" or we'd have lost a year's pension rights. A general strike? That's socialistic. The AFofL don't believe in that. We had nothing to do with the making of it, yet we were brought into it. We lost three days' wages and are paying for it yet.
Such men, and those who genuinely doubted the tactical wisdom of a general strike of indefinite duration, were the support of the conservative leaders


The Mayor "officially" announced the end of the general strike, saying, "I congratulate the real leaders of organized labor on their decision. San Francisco has stamped out without bargains or compromise any attempt to import into its life the very real danger of revolt."

The maritime strike went on to its conclusion. The fate of the longshoremen's strike hung on the teamsters whose position was strategic. What would they do? Delay, refusal to admit Bridges to the Teamsters' Hall, then the vote. The teamsters would go back to work "unconditionally." The last prop was pulled, and the longshoremen reluctantly, if overwhelmingly, voted to return to work. The strike was over.

The newspapers brought pressure on the employers to arbitrate with all crafts. They accepted, and the role of the national government as mediator at last became that of arbitrator.

To the employers, forestalling a victorious general strike meant victory for themselves. In 1893 San Francisco employers after a series of crushing victories over labor had exulted:

The Manufacturers' and Employers' Association can look with complacency upon its work during the last two years. One after another the unions have been taught a salutary lesson until out of the horde of unions only one or two are left of any strength. This association has taken hold of the shipowners' struggle and it is only a question of time when the Sailors' Union will have gone the way of the rest. It is of most vital importance that this good work should go on. Trade unionism among workmen is like tares in the field of wheat. The word and the act should be placed among the things prohibited by law.

One of the leading capitalists of San Francisco, according to a quotation appearing in a New York paper, evidently thought in 1934 very much in the terms of the victory of '93:

This strike is the best thing that ever happened to San Francisco. It's costing us money, certainly. We have lost millions on the waterfront in the last few months. But it's a good investment, a marvelous investment. It's solving the labor problem for years to come, perhaps forever.
Mark my words. When this nonsense is out of the way and the 'men have been driven back to their jobs, we won't have to worry about them any more. They'll have learned their lesson. Not only do I believe we'll never have another general strike but I don't think we'll have a strike of any kind in San Francisco during this generation. Labor is licked.


IN order to mobilize support for the employers, it was declared early in the strike that the longshoremen were "led by a radical and communistic group . . . whose objective is to create civil disturbance, not only in the waterfront trades, but in all other trades." As the strike proceeded, and especially when the general strike was declared, the press and public officials broke into a torrential attack upon "reds" and "subversive influences" among the strikers. Even the conservative Ryan, whose agreement was upset by Bridges and his followers, supported the employers in the charge that "the Communist Party, led by Harry Bridges, is in control of the San Francisco situation," although a local committee of conservative labor leaders denied that Bridges and his committeemen were "reds." The Communists, indeed, were active in San Francisco, as they are elsewhere; they followed a twofold policy: to "bore from within" the conservative trade unions; to form a "dual" union, the Marine Workers' Industrial Union. The first tactic met with considerable success, the second with comparatively little. They advertised widely their asserted influence in San Francisco. Whether Bridges is or is not a Communist is extremely difficult to prove; certainly neither the maritime strike nor the general strike were basically "communist strikes." The central issue of the longshoremen's strike was an old one; the position of the parties was not greatly different than in numerous earlier conflicts stretching back a half century. In 1893 the agent of the employers called the striking Sailors' Union of Andrew Furuseth an "anarchistic society." In 1934 the presence of Communists on the scene, and such influence as they exerted on men and on tactics, were seized upon to defeat aggressive, but essentially orthodox unions and unionists.

NOT only was this accomplished, but creating an hysteria the like of which California had not witnessed since the war, employers and industrial leaders, the press, and officials fostered thereby an attack against "reds" which has spread over the Bay region and beyond. Labor was importuned to "run subversive influences from its ranks like rats," and some union laborers did physically attack Communists, although not in most of the cases where it was attributed to them. Police and vigilantes raided communist "lairs," and arrested "reds," characterized by the approving press as "alley spawn." Vigilante committees were rapidly organized; business men, professors, and other staid citizens armed with pick handles and other weapons patrolled cities of the East Bay while more halls were raided and bricks with warnings attached were thrown through windows of homes. A protecting picket line was thrown around fashionable Piedmont; a librarian was ordered by resolution to submit for destruction a list of books "praising the virtues and advantages of Communism." A student editor urged that "student vigilantes must quell student radicals," opening his editorial with Voltaire's famous statement: "I may disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it." The tactical theory of the vigilantes was explained by a member: "If you shoot the reds, then they become heroes, but they don't like it so well if you work them over with pick handles."

The farmers of California have been organizing vigilante groups and prodding officials to action for months. In the wake of the general strike came the opportunity to arrest communist leaders of farm strikes on charges of vagrancy and criminal syndicalism under cover of hysteria, for the criminal syndicalism laws work most effectively when fear is abroad. A warning scaffold appeared in rural Hayward where fruit pickers had struck in sympathy with the longshoremen.

The most significant aspect of the general strike, perhaps, is the fact that officials, business men, and other conservative citizens have been so effectively agitated, that they are convinced of the immediate necessity, and of the suitability of storm-troop tactics to "save America," and "democratic government, including civil liberties such as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and trial by jury." Few audible voices have been raised in protest-the victims first, of course, then a judge, and later a couple of editors;—for the harvests seem less prone to interruption, industries less exposed to "demoralization" when strike leaders are in jail.

*Honor The 75th Anniversary Of The Great San Francisco General Strike

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Newsreel Footage Of the San Francisco General Strike.

Commentary

This year marks the 75th Anniversary of three great labor struggles that ended in victory in heart of the Great Depression(the 1930s version of what we, at least partially, confront today); the great General Strike in San Francisco that was led by the dockers and sailor unions and brought victory on the key issue of the union hiring hall (since then greatly emasculated); the great Minneapolis Teamster strikes that led to the unionization of truck drivers and allied workers in that labor-hating town and later to the organizing of over-the-road drivers that created one of the strongest (if corrupt) unions in North America; and, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike whose key component was leadership by the unemployed workers. Does all of this sound familiar? Yes and no. Yes, to labor militants who, looking to a way out of the impasse of the condition of today's quiescent labor movement, have studied these labor actions. No, to the vast majority of workers who are either not organized or are clueless about their history. In either case, though, these actions provide a thread to how we must struggle in the future. Although 75 years seems like a long time ago the issues posed then have not gone away. Far from it. Study this labor history now to be ready to struggle when we get our openings.

********************

The following is presented for informational purposes only. The political and factual points are those of the authors. I will present other material on these actions at a later date.

San Francisco and the General Strike
By Paul S. Taylor and Norman Leon Gold

What really happened in San Francisco's general strike? What were the issues? What do they mean to labor, employers, the community? What of the vigilantes and their violent anti-Red campaign? Two Californians here give the story down to date


Survey Graphic, September, 1934 (Vol. 23, No. 9), p. 405.


SIXTY-FIVE thousand trade unionists during four July days staged on the shores of San Francisco Bay the second and most widespread general strike in United States history. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth they carried out an extended maneuver which surprised, bewildered, gratified, or terrified and maddened the average citizen. To most Americans there is something reign about a general strike, and a bit ominous—like the "dole," storm-troopers, socialists, communists, fascists, and a lot of other things that used to seem farther away than they do now. But to many on the Pacific Coast, experience has made the general strike at least real, however differently they may interpret it—as a splendid demonstration of the strength and "solidarity of labor," a victory for the "real leaders of labor," a "sell-out" by labor "fakirs," a "strikers' Dictatorship," or an "insurrection."

The San Francisco general strike of 1934 was in no sense a "sport." It is but the latest of a long line of conflicts between employers and employed in that area, many of them, like the general strike, centering about the waterfront, and focusing on the degree of control over employment to be exercised by employers or by union. For power flows from job control. Beginning in the late eighties, the shipowners' association established a hiring-hall as a device for breaking union power. The sailors struck, proposed joint control, were refused, and then beaten. In 1934 the longshoremen demanded substitution of union-control for employer-control of hiring halls. The employers proposed joint control, here refused, and the issue finally went to arbitration. The general strike was but a climax to the 1934 phase of this perennial struggle for power.

Waterfronts the world over provide dramatic examples of the local accumulation—characteristic of many industries-of over-supplies of under-employed workers. We lack neither knowledge nor example of how to "decasualize" this waterfront labor. Indeed, Seattle employers have taken the lead among American ports in achieving regularization, and the other ports of the Pacific Coast, except San Francisco, have more or less followed suit. But in San Francisco the "good employer," while maintaining his individual labor relations on a fairly advanced plane, allowed general employment practices in his industry to lag behind those long recognized by experts in industrial relations as intelligent and beneficial. The philosophy of the agent who for years has managed waterfront labor there is suggested by his characterization of marine workers as "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and by his statement some years ago that "Really, what we are trying to do is to put the spirit of Jesus Christ in these men," a profession promptly balanced with: "Of course, you've got to put the fear of God in them, too." Under this regime, the well-known abuses of an overcrowded labor market flourished: under-employment, low earnings for many, long and fruitless waits at the docks, petty graft as the price of jobs. These were the conditions, against a background of protracted unemployment and insecurity, of anxious hope stimulated by the rights of collective bargaining under the National Industrial Recovery Act, of a left-ward surge toward more aggressive labor activity both within and without the trade unions, from which the waterfront strike, and ultimately the general strike, developed.

THE first rumble of impending conflict on the waterfront was heard in October 1933 when 400 longshoremen struck against the Matson Navigation Company, claiming discriminatory discharge of members of the newly formed International Longshoremen's Association (ILA.) The company refused to recognize the ILA, but after mediation, reinstated the men. This act sounded the death-knell of a curious organization, the "Blue Book" union, or Longshoremen's Association of San Francisco. Fourteen years earlier the Blue Book union had arisen during a strike from a schism within the ILA; organized by the gang bosses as a right-wing dual union, the employers promptly accorded it recognition and a "union shop" agreement which consigned the original ILA to a lingering death. Strangely, the Blue Book union later was welcomed into the San Francisco Labor Council in 1929 as a "transformed" company union, but ejection followed in 1931 when it was ascertained that the "transformation" was not complete. It lingered on, then in its turn went down to defeat before the rising ILA of 1933 and 1934.

By March 1934 the longshoremen were ready for aggressive action. Slack employment, instead of deterring action, only made more acute the grievance voiced by the numerous unemployed and underemployed unionists that favored gangs received too large a share of the work. Both sides were in a fighting mood, the men following militant leaders, the employers confident of victory, and willing to put up with the possible loss of two or three million dollars as not an exorbitant price for crushing the new union. Negotiations proceeded, both sides yielding a bit, but neither conceding enough to avert a strike. The men asked an increase of wages from 85 cents to $1 an hour, and $1.50 an hour for overtime, a coastwide agreement, and union control of the hiring-hall. The last demand was crucial and the issue was clearly joined: the men called it the foundation of their union; the employers declared that it meant union dictation—an infringement on the "right to select employee," and discrimination against competent and faithful non-unionists. Curiously but significantly, the ILA now was seeking a "union shop," which it had protested the preceding October when employers gave force to their "union shop" agreement with the Blue Book union and discharged some ILA men. The employers, similarly, were now resisting a "union shop," when previously they had only too eagerly granted one. How much depends on the kind of union!

Negotiation for a shift in power is peculiarly difficult. Dissatisfied, the men called a strike for March 23, halted it upon request of President Roosevelt, but mediation failing, called it again for May 9. The fight was on in San Francisco and in other ports of the Pacific Coast. Along the three and one-half miles of San Francisco's Embarcadero the corrugated steel doors remained shut. Gates, topped with barbed wire, were closed and boarded. Pickets strolled up and down, passing knots of police, accosting and warning those who looked as though they might take jobs.

THE companies advertised for strike-breakers, and recruited several hundred. These were given steady work at the same hourly rates which the strikers refused, plus $1.50 a day, which was in excess of the cost of board and lodging aboard two ships fitted out for the purpose. Some people inquire incredulously how any man can break strike. Perhaps the answer is not difficult: apart from the few who do it for principle or for love of adventure, they act under the spur of necessity. Many a striker and strikebreaker had this in common: each, with his family, was on relief. Said a college premedical student who worked as a strikebreaker: "I'd rather have salt on my torn body, but God, I have to be a doctor!" His earnings of $150 enable him to return to college. Union pickets sought to deter the strikebreakers with the threats and physical violence often characteristic of American strikes. By July 9, 266 injured persons had been reported by the police; of these 63 percent were strikebreakers and 10 percent were police.

The strike spread first on the side of labor. Partly in sympathy with the longshoremen, but principally to resume actively its long-clouded leadership of the men of its crafts, the International Seamen's Union struck on May 16. The unions of licensed officers followed, May 19 and 21. Meanwhile the truck drivers (under the anachronistic name of the Teamsters' Union) decided that after May 13 they would no longer haul from the docks "hot cargo," i.e., cargo unloaded by strikebreakers. They continued to haul freight from the warehouses, however, if the employers could move it that far. This the employers did by way of the state owned Belt Line Railroad, which operates from the piers to the warehouses. Strikebreakers loaded the cars on the piers, warehousemen unloaded them. To stop this traffic, the longshoremen proceeded to organize the warehousemen into a union to refuse to handle "hot cargo." On June 14 the Teamsters' Union refused to haul "hot freight" anywhere The tactics were effective. The railroads, connected with the piers by the Belt Line over which freight moved to the hinterland and along the coast, gained heavily at the expense of the shipowners, but freight movement from the waterfront to the city was at a standstill. The docks choked with cargo, vessels could not unload, more merchant ships lay at anchor in the Bay than at any time since '49 when sailors deserted en masse to join the rush to the gold fields.

THE widening base of support on the side of labor was countered on the side of capital. On May 20 the president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce rallied to the support of the waterfront employers, declaring, "It is now my duty to warn every business man in this community, that the welfare of business and industry and of the entire public is at stake in the outcome of this crisis." Three weeks later, the Industrial Association, organized in 1921 during a crisis in the building trades, standing for the open shop under the name of the American Plan, and representing the leading industrial, financial, and business interests of the city (including the shipowners) accepted the invitation of the Chamber of Commerce to "open the port." A corporation was formed; it acquired trucks, a warehouse, the fastest speed boat on the Bay, assembled men to drive trucks and work longshore, and took contracts to move freight. With the announcement that, "We are, therefore, commencing operations to restore the streets of San Francisco to its citizens, confident that the Police Department will afford full protection for the full use thereof by unarmed drivers," the Industrial Association began to haul cargo July 3. The strikebreaking drivers were evidently of the adventurous type; in the words of an Association official, "We've got a fine bunch of boys to drive those trucks. They are falling all over themselves to get the jobs."

The movement of cargo from waterfront to warehouse was little more than a gesture, for effective picketing still prevented movement beyond. But everybody—longshoremen and teamsters, shipowners and Industrial Association, public authorities and the public—accepted it as a test of power. The mayor promised the Industrial Association "adequate police protection during these operations which, of course, is their right" and asked "the people of San Francisco to absent themselves from the vicinity wherein the movement of merchandise is to be conducted." But neither spectators nor pickets would remain away. Cargo moved from waterfront to warehouse, some trucks were dumped and burned, missiles were thrown, clubs wielded, and officers and men injured. On July 5, "lines of battle, as clear cut as any formed on the Western Front, were drawn along San Francisco's waterfront."

The pickets faced the police; this is significant. String pickets usually confront first the strikebreakers or guards hired by the employers. Indeed, in times past San Francisco employers have even boldly proclaimed their readiness directly to meet force with force. In an earlier longshore strike a noted shipowner said: "As long as we continue hauling our men to the receiving hospital . . . we are never going to get anywhere, and I propose, that tomorrow morning, starting in when they compel us to send one ambulance to the receiving hospital, we send two of theirs." But in the strike of 1934 different tactics were employed: "We didn't do as in the old days when we went out and got a lot of ugly-faced toughs." Instead, the maintenance of physical order was left to the police, so that when pickets were beaten it was the police who did it rather than hired thugs. The gain in public sympathy to the employers from such an alignment is obvious. Financially, it also offers advantages to them; as the San Francisco employers pointed out to those in San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles:

The item of guards, cost and boarding, amounting to about $100,000 [in San Pedro], is one which we think should be borne by the city. Here [in San Francisco] the police in ample numbers are supplied without cost, and the only guards employed are those needed on the housing ships. Each company has extra guards or watchmen, the cost being borne by the individual line.

On July 5, then, hundreds of police and some thousands of pickets faced each other. The trucks of the Industrial Association began to move. The pickets were forced back, back, in an extended maneuver covering many blocks. Thousands of commuters from the East Bay jammed the viaduct and the sidewalks; clerks crowded to the windows of office buildings. As police drove strikers and sightseers up Rincon Hill, the pickets hurled bricks, and the police, at the cry of "Let 'em have it," threw tear-gas grenades. Here and there clubbing occurred as men and police clashed. Before the ILA hall fighting was more vicious. Inspectors of police, surrounded by angry strikers seeking to overturn their car, fired. Two men were killed. Police, horses, strikers, and spectators were wounded.

THE men called it "bloody Thursday," and spoke of the "battle of Rincon Hill." They staged a funeral parade down Market Street that contrasted strangely in its awesome quiet and simplicity with the gay banners above, hung in welcome to the convention of Knights Templar. At street intersections the police stepped aside, and like other spectators bared their heads. The funeral made a stirring emotional appeal to the strikers; the public was curious and impressed.

The Governor declared a state of riot. Strike leaders had refused to allow "hot cargo" to move over the State Belt Line "without molestation," so he accepted "the defi of the strikers," and ordered out the National Guard to preserve order and "protect state property." Under the guns of the troops, "hot freight" continued to move from waterfront to warehouse. If the troops allowed traffic to move, their presence aided the employers; if they did not, they would have aided the men by establishing completely effective picketing. We are accustomed to follow the first practice. (The Governor of Minnesota, however, has introduced a notable exception to American procedure by permitting movement only of trucks engaged in essential services or those whose Owners have reached an agreement with the men approved by federal officials.) So the strikers were out-maneuvered, until to the on-looker the waterfront conflict was made to appear a battle of employee striking not against their employers but against the police and beyond them against the public itself. A less obvious effect was to suggest to the strikers that the government was not impartial, but against them. Communists were not slow to point this out to the men, ignoring, of course, government feeding of needy strikers' families and other helpful services.

TROOPS occupied the waterfront-sentries with steel helmets and gleaming bayonets, machine-gun nests, and motorized roving patrols. Admission to the occupied area was by pass. Guards moved about in the ferry building and forbade commuters to loiter on the viaduct. A pier watchman who obeyed too slowly the sentry's command to halt was bayoneted in the groin; a 19-year-old strikebreaker who inadvertently came within the 50-foot deadline in his speedboat, and an amateur photographer taking movies of guardsmen were shot.

Conceding the futility of trying to stand up against the militia, the strikers' leaders sought other weapons to checkmate the waterfront employers who were now actively aided by the highest financial and industrial leaders of the city. To the strikers, confident and more impassioned than ever, the situation seemed clear: the employers had finally used their last resource—their own strength first, then the police, the Industrial Association, and the militia; now the men must win reinforcements for the final test of power.

From the waterfront through the ranks of organized labor and to the public went the appeal for support of a general strike. it was urged as the:

first and only possible defense-step against the aggression of anti-union employers under the banner of the San Francisco Industrial Association....
When the Industrial Association entered the waterfront controversy, as a third party, as a strikebreaking agency supported by guns and police clubs, labor trouble in the San Francisco Bay Region ceased to be just a dispute between certain labor unions and certain employers over questions relating to their specific industries.

It took on the direct and obvious form of organized warfare on the part of employers federated in the Industrial Association against all labor organizations and the principle of collective bargaining—progressive, unified, massed attack which unless repelled was certain to engulf and eventually destroy more and more labor groups.

Realizatin of this fact has caused the strikes of workers, affiliated in AFofL organizations in industries which at a glance seem to have slight unity of interest with the waterfront unions originally involved in the disturbance. But the campaign of the Industrial Association, with its anti-labor program and leadership, is in reality an attack on all labor organizations, all members of organized labor who seek to retain their legal rights of unified activities.

The right of labor to such organization and collective bargaining has been fought by certain groups of employers ever since America became an industrial nation. It is a right which received a powerful stimulus from President Roosevelt and the New Deal; a right affirmed in clear words in the National Industrial Recovery Act; under which the NRA operates.

It is a right legally granted labor which has been denied in San Francisco.


The sympathy of a large section of the general public was swinging to the side of labor. Even professional and business men said, "I hope they beat the Industrial Association," and "I'm for the longshoremen." The overwhelming show of force was too much, and American spirit was moved to side with the under dog. Besides, the verbatim publication of hearings before the National Longshoremen's Board now gave the public its first opportunity to read and compare adequate statements by all parties to the dispute.

One of the significant aspects of the entire situation was e relation between aggressive strike leaders of the longshoremen, and the more conservative leaders of unions throughout the city. In the ILA, the conservative leaders had already been repudiated one by one. The conservative local president had been deposed; thereafter he sought to weaken the strike by organizing a new union, and announcing that conservative longshoremen were ready to return to work, and that more would do so except for insufficient slice protection and the spell cast over them by communist leadership. And when the international president, Joseph P. Ryan, came out from the East and, together with Pacific Coast union executives, negotiated an agreement with the employers, the members denied the authority of officials to take a binding agreement without referendum, and voted it down. Under Harry Bridges, sincere, militant man of the ranks, whose eleven years on San Francisco's waterfront have not effaced his nasal-cockney Australian accent, a Joint Marine Strike Committee was organized to take over negotiations. The employers called the rejection of the "Ryan agreement" a "repudiation," but clearly the men never had been bound by it, for Ryan negotiated it with neither authority nor sufficient knowledge of the temper the men and their local leaders.

As the cry for a general strike sounded, the gulf between the aroused members of the ILA and the Teamsters, on the one hand and the conservative leaders of the San Francisco labor movement and their followers on the other, became increasingly apparent. Indeed, the course of the general strike itself was determined by this conflict. On July 6, the day after troops occupied the waterfront, the Labor Council appointed a strike strategy committee of seven to "investigate." But if the business agents at the Labor Temple were calm and cautious, the rank and file of a number of unions were eager for action. "Bloody Thursday" and the ensuing funeral had dramatized the struggle to all labor. The Teamsters voted 1220 to 271 for a complete walkout in San Francisco; said Michael Casey, their "responsible," conservative officer:

I warned them that it was strictly against the rules of the brotherhood and that they will undoubtedly lose all strike benefits . . . but nothing on earth could have prevented that vote. In all my thirty years of leading these men, I have never seen them so worked up, so determined to walk out.

Union after union voted to strike or (about half of them) to abide by the decision of the General Strike Committee formed by appointment of President Vandeleur of the Labor Council as the labor directorate of the strike. In vain their leaders urged arbitration and warned against a general strike. "All right, boys, I'm with you," said one, and later he told a friend, "It was an avalanche. I saw it coming, so I ran ahead before it crushed me."

The employers agreed now to arbitrate all issues with the longshoremen, and to bargain (but not to arbitrate) with elected representatives of the seafaring crafts. The longshoremen remained adamant; they would not arbitrate "control of the hiring-hall," and they would not settle unless the seafaring crafts were guaranteed a satisfactory settlement. And now the men were marching out. On July 12 the truck drivers ceased work; gasoline trucks could make no deliveries and taxis were driven back to their garages. Butchers, ship boilermakers, machinists, welders, and laundry workers followed. The building-trades, cleaners, cooks and waiters, barbers, auto mechanics, cleaners and dyers, streetcar men, and many others waited only the call of the General Strike Committee. In the East Bay similar stands were taken by excited unionists.

The National Longshoremen's Board worked furiously for a settlement. The striking teamsters allowed only emergency trucks to operate in the city. Fire trucks, police cars, hospital services, scavengers were unmolested; other essential-service trucks required union permits. A ring of teamsters' pickets began to turn back food trucks bound for the Bay cities. Still people were asking: "Is there going to be a general strike?" Vandeleur as head of the General Strike Committee replied: "Do you fellows have to see a haystack before you can see which way the straws are blowing?"

Grocery stores were jammed. As the contagion spread, more and more people rushed to the stores to stock up. In the more affluent districts vegetables soon were "picked over" and gaps appeared on grocers' shelves. Canned goods sold rapidly, but stocks were large. With meat no longer obtainable, an inspired advertisement announced "X-brand tuna, an ideal meat substitute . . . can be served in countless ways." In the poorer districts trade was brisk, but slower than elsewhere; there were no funds for large purchases. The Knights Templar terminated their convention and left the city while teamsters would still haul their baggage.

By Saturday night, July 14, a general strike seemed inevitable. Said Michael Casey: "Logic has all gone out of the window! This thing is being ruled now by passion and hatred." But now the leaders were well ahead of the prodding followers, and they guided the action. The general strike was timed for 8 o'clock Monday morning in San Francisco, and Tuesday in the East Bay. But the militant unionists were not in control. Harry Bridges was defeated for the vice-presidency of the meeting formed by delegates from every union in San Francisco, and he was smothered as the only maritime representative on the appointed General Strike Committee of twenty-five.

Monday morning no streetcars ran. The streets were filled with pedestrians. Autos were left at home to conserve gasoline. A holiday mood was in the air. Two thousand more soldiers entered the city; armored tanks appeared on the waterfront. There was practically no violence. Long lines of people waited their turn for meals before nineteen restaurants officially opened by the strike committee.

But already the strike, which was general but never complete, was being checked. From within, the strike leaders decided the first day that the municipal carmen should return. The next day food trucks were given free passage by the pickets. More restaurants were opened by union permit, then all restaurants. Soon the embargo on gasoline trucks was lifted, and finally on July 19, the general strike was called off at the close of its fourth day. The General Strike Committee urged arbitration of all issues by all unions and employers party to the original dispute, and the National Longshoremen's Board announced a closely similar position.

FROM without, press and public officials were declaring the general strike a labor "dictatorship" and "insurrection," a strike against the public. "Strike bred in Moscow AFL avers," "Citizens open food, gas sales in spite of unions; Bridges admits defeat of plot to starve city into surrender," declared the headlines. Said Mayor Rossi "In the presence of a general strike nothing can be accomplished. That strike must be ended." Oil trucks were operated under armed guard; union "permits" were indignantly refused, by interests which, only a few years earlier had supported the Industrial Association's "permit" system which compelled the "open shop" in the building trades. But now they said, "Are we going to recognize another government or our own?" Guardsmen stripped the permit signs from cars which entered the occupied zone, and some, over-zealous, even took union badges from the strikers. "Imagine permits!" said an oil man, "I see red every time I see one those signs. What a fizzle! What have they gained? Nothing but the hatred of the public. I like what General Johnson said; nothing but civil war, insurrection... general strike!" The sympathy of the public was turning away from the strikers as their inconvenience grew. "They were trying to set up another city government of their own. They found that our sympathy was gone when we couldn't get our carrots," said a professional man. "The longshoremen should have endured almost anything rather than let people go hungry and cause anything like a general strike"; "Working people can't be trusted," said middle-class housewives. Many rank and file unionists, too, like a Key Route conductor were

glad that it ended the way it did. It might have been worse. If it had lasted longer the company would have ordered us back to work and then we would have been called "scabs" or we'd have lost a year's pension rights. A general strike? That's socialistic. The AFofL don't believe in that. We had nothing to do with the making of it, yet we were brought into it. We lost three days' wages and are paying for it yet.
Such men, and those who genuinely doubted the tactical wisdom of a general strike of indefinite duration, were the support of the conservative leaders


The Mayor "officially" announced the end of the general strike, saying, "I congratulate the real leaders of organized labor on their decision. San Francisco has stamped out without bargains or compromise any attempt to import into its life the very real danger of revolt."

The maritime strike went on to its conclusion. The fate of the longshoremen's strike hung on the teamsters whose position was strategic. What would they do? Delay, refusal to admit Bridges to the Teamsters' Hall, then the vote. The teamsters would go back to work "unconditionally." The last prop was pulled, and the longshoremen reluctantly, if overwhelmingly, voted to return to work. The strike was over.

The newspapers brought pressure on the employers to arbitrate with all crafts. They accepted, and the role of the national government as mediator at last became that of arbitrator.

To the employers, forestalling a victorious general strike meant victory for themselves. In 1893 San Francisco employers after a series of crushing victories over labor had exulted:

The Manufacturers' and Employers' Association can look with complacency upon its work during the last two years. One after another the unions have been taught a salutary lesson until out of the horde of unions only one or two are left of any strength. This association has taken hold of the shipowners' struggle and it is only a question of time when the Sailors' Union will have gone the way of the rest. It is of most vital importance that this good work should go on. Trade unionism among workmen is like tares in the field of wheat. The word and the act should be placed among the things prohibited by law.

One of the leading capitalists of San Francisco, according to a quotation appearing in a New York paper, evidently thought in 1934 very much in the terms of the victory of '93:

This strike is the best thing that ever happened to San Francisco. It's costing us money, certainly. We have lost millions on the waterfront in the last few months. But it's a good investment, a marvelous investment. It's solving the labor problem for years to come, perhaps forever.
Mark my words. When this nonsense is out of the way and the 'men have been driven back to their jobs, we won't have to worry about them any more. They'll have learned their lesson. Not only do I believe we'll never have another general strike but I don't think we'll have a strike of any kind in San Francisco during this generation. Labor is licked.


IN order to mobilize support for the employers, it was declared early in the strike that the longshoremen were "led by a radical and communistic group . . . whose objective is to create civil disturbance, not only in the waterfront trades, but in all other trades." As the strike proceeded, and especially when the general strike was declared, the press and public officials broke into a torrential attack upon "reds" and "subversive influences" among the strikers. Even the conservative Ryan, whose agreement was upset by Bridges and his followers, supported the employers in the charge that "the Communist Party, led by Harry Bridges, is in control of the San Francisco situation," although a local committee of conservative labor leaders denied that Bridges and his committeemen were "reds." The Communists, indeed, were active in San Francisco, as they are elsewhere; they followed a twofold policy: to "bore from within" the conservative trade unions; to form a "dual" union, the Marine Workers' Industrial Union. The first tactic met with considerable success, the second with comparatively little. They advertised widely their asserted influence in San Francisco. Whether Bridges is or is not a Communist is extremely difficult to prove; certainly neither the maritime strike nor the general strike were basically "communist strikes." The central issue of the longshoremen's strike was an old one; the position of the parties was not greatly different than in numerous earlier conflicts stretching back a half century. In 1893 the agent of the employers called the striking Sailors' Union of Andrew Furuseth an "anarchistic society." In 1934 the presence of Communists on the scene, and such influence as they exerted on men and on tactics, were seized upon to defeat aggressive, but essentially orthodox unions and unionists.

NOT only was this accomplished, but creating an hysteria the like of which California had not witnessed since the war, employers and industrial leaders, the press, and officials fostered thereby an attack against "reds" which has spread over the Bay region and beyond. Labor was importuned to "run subversive influences from its ranks like rats," and some union laborers did physically attack Communists, although not in most of the cases where it was attributed to them. Police and vigilantes raided communist "lairs," and arrested "reds," characterized by the approving press as "alley spawn." Vigilante committees were rapidly organized; business men, professors, and other staid citizens armed with pick handles and other weapons patrolled cities of the East Bay while more halls were raided and bricks with warnings attached were thrown through windows of homes. A protecting picket line was thrown around fashionable Piedmont; a librarian was ordered by resolution to submit for destruction a list of books "praising the virtues and advantages of Communism." A student editor urged that "student vigilantes must quell student radicals," opening his editorial with Voltaire's famous statement: "I may disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it." The tactical theory of the vigilantes was explained by a member: "If you shoot the reds, then they become heroes, but they don't like it so well if you work them over with pick handles."

The farmers of California have been organizing vigilante groups and prodding officials to action for months. In the wake of the general strike came the opportunity to arrest communist leaders of farm strikes on charges of vagrancy and criminal syndicalism under cover of hysteria, for the criminal syndicalism laws work most effectively when fear is abroad. A warning scaffold appeared in rural Hayward where fruit pickers had struck in sympathy with the longshoremen.

The most significant aspect of the general strike, perhaps, is the fact that officials, business men, and other conservative citizens have been so effectively agitated, that they are convinced of the immediate necessity, and of the suitability of storm-troop tactics to "save America," and "democratic government, including civil liberties such as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and trial by jury." Few audible voices have been raised in protest-the victims first, of course, then a judge, and later a couple of editors;—for the harvests seem less prone to interruption, industries less exposed to "demoralization" when strike leaders are in jail.