San Francisco is a seaside city, and for much of its history a major port. The wind driven clipper ships were the first to sail into the West Coast port. Since the clipper ships depended on the vagaries of the wind, they often arrived in San Francisco with little or no notice and gangs of men to unload them had to be recruited and organized quickly. Shore side criers would shout out, “men along the shore” to attract working men. That phrase gave rise to the term “longshoremen.”

Kenneth Starr devotes a chapter in Endangered Dreams, the volume in his histories of California devoted to the Depression, called “Bayonets on the Embarcadero” to the San Francisco Waterfront and General Strike of 1934 which was a defining moment in the history of West Coast longshoremen. There is a very little shipping in San Francisco today except for a few ocean liners. Most of the real freight work has moved across the Bay to Oakland. But in 1934 the Port of San Francisco was a much different place. As Starr recounts, there were eighty-two docks stretching along the northern Embarcadero and the southeastern waterfront that could handle up to 250 vessels every working day.

At the turn of the Twentieth Century the longshoremen had organized themselves into the effective Riggers and Stevedores Union. But in 1914 the employers formed the Waterfront Employers Union that broke strikes in 1914 and 1919 and formed a house union, the Longshoremen’s Association and Bay District, that dominated the Port. This house union had no ties to the most important longshoremen’s union, the International Longshoremen’s Union headquartered in New York.

The Longshoremen’s Association became known as the Blue Book Union after the blue book that the members had to carry on their persons to get work. The Waterfront Employers Union was especially adamant in opposing a hiring hall for the members of the Association. Longshoreman’s work,as Dr. Starr notes, was seasonal in the sense that the seasons were the length of time that it took to unload a particular ship which could extend anywhere from a few hours to two or three days. Whoever controlled the supply of labor controlled the waterfront.

The mechanism that the Employers Union used to control the labor supply was the shape up administered by the straw boss, one of a group of independent contractors. Every day before six in the morning the employers informed the straw bosses of their hiring needs for the day. The straw bosses would go to the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street where the men seeking work would gather around them in a horseshoe. The straw boss would announce the jobs that he was filling that day and then start selecting the men to do the job. Any man who wanted to be selected had to have a Blue Book and be willing to provide the straw boss with some sort of kickback or be willing to stand the straw boss a round of drinks in a saloon.

The longshoremen organized themselves into hierarchies. Some specialized in shipboard work others in work on shore. They used this specialization as a tool in getting work. One commentator has noted that these skill divisions and specialization often mirrored ethnic and racial divisions. In Halifax, Nova Scotia African-Nova Scotian longshoremen handled the most arduous and poorly paid cargoes.

The shape up was degrading and stacked against the men seeking work. There were roughly four thousand men seeking such work and at the most fifteen hundred jobs available on an average day. Even if a man were selected it was hard to make a living wage. He might work up to twenty-four to thirty-six hours on a given shift or as little as two hours. The going wage rate was eighty-five cents per hour and the average weekly wage of a longshoreman in Los Angeles’ port of San Pedro was $ 10.45.

The workers who sought to unionize and those who led them wanted to register all the longshoremen and to implement a hiring hall. If they could do this then the union could restrict the number of men certified to work and assign them to work in a strict rotation. All of the eligible longshoremen would get an equal opportunity to fill all of the available jobs. An Australian immigrant appeared on the scene who would play a key role in this effort, Alfred Renton Bridges, renamed “Harry” by American sailors.

The ILWU history website notes that Harry was born in Melbourne, Australia on July 28, 1901 where his father was in the real estate business. His father sent a thirteen year old Harry out to collect rent from poor tenants, an experience that Harry later related had a great effect on him. He said no one with any sensitivity could help but be affected by the task of collecting rent from people of meager means. Although his father was a conservative, Harry had two uncles who took an active interest in the Australian Labor Party, and their views shaped Harry’s political views.

Harry had no interest in a business career and spent his spare time on the docks speaking to foreign sailors and watching the boats enter and leave the harbor. He convinced his father to let him go to sea, and in 1920 he sailed on the South Sea barkentine Ysbel for America.( Photo above shows a young Harry and his mandolin aboard ship) He had his first labor confrontation on the voyage when he and several other of the sailors objected to working on Easter Monday, an Australian holiday. When the Ysbel entered the San Francisco Harbor he left the vessel, paid the head tax of eight dollars, and took a job on an American vessel.

He sailed up and down the West Coast and the Gulf for two years and walked a picket line in a New Orleans maritime strike. The New Orleans police arrested him he alleged for no other reason than he was picket. After a stint on a quartermaster on a government ship chasing he rum runners, he retired from the sea to become a longshoreman as a winch operator and rigger on a steel handling gang in San Francisco in 1922. He tried to defy the company union that ran the docks but found that unless he paid his dues he could not gain employment.

The Employers Union used the “speedup” on the docks. Gangs of longshoremen were forced to compete against each other to see who could load the most cargo in a given time. The strain on the equipment and the men and the inattention to safety resulted in horrific accidents. Employers place spies in the men’s midst to ferret out militants and played workers against each other to prevent the men from uniting.

The National Industrial Recovery Act of the New Deal encouraged ILA organizers to return to San Francisco and the other West Coast ports to again attempt to establish the ILA as a bargaining agent. Some longshoremen joined surreptitiously and others openly and in September 1933 the ILA granted a charter to Local 38-79 in San Francisco and set up a Pacific Coast District. Bridges was a member of a group of longshoremen called the Albion Group after their meeting place. Bridges joined the ILA local. He and other members of the Albion Group made up a majority of the executive board and held two of the three business agent positions.

The next month the Matson line fired four men who wore ILA buttons on the job, and Bridges helped organize a five day strike to force Matson to rehire the men which the shipping line did in response to the labor pressure. The Blue Book Union went in to decline and the ILA Union emerged the survivor. The ILA and the Employees Union held a group of mediation sessions on proposals to increase wages and to improve conditions.

The ILA pressed the Roosevelt Administration to develop a Shipping Code under the National Recovery Act which set up a struggle between the ILA and the Employers Union to gain as many advantages as possible to be embodied in the new Code. As each sides suspicions of the other rose the ILA had a meeting in May 1934 in which the fifteen hundred members present voted for a strike. On May 9, 1934 the longshoremen of Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, San Pedro,and San Francisco went out on strike and several other unions and associations joined them.

The Employers Union organized to meet the strike by opening a recruiting office which had a heavy police guard. The Employers Union housed the strikebreakers on two ships the Diana Dollar and the Wilhelmina anchored off the Embarcadero so that the strikebreakers would not have to cross the picket lines. The teamsters refused to haul cargo to and from the docks but the Belt Line railroad continued service the Embarcadero until the strikers sat down on the tracks. (Center photo shows Belt Line locomotive near Pier 43) The Industrial Association of San Francisco with advertising help from McCann Erickson took over from the Employers Union.

The National head of the ILA, John Ryan, arrived in San Francisco and began negotiating without seeking the approval of the Strike Committee chaired by Bridges. In four days Ryan announced a settlement. The union would not get a closed shop, but employers could recognize the ILA as bargaining agent. Bridges characterized the proposed settlement as a sellout and the membership rejected the proposal by a vote of 2,404 to 88. Ryan and his Assistant Secretary McGrady began to characterize the strike as being Communist controlled. The Western Worker had distributed 4000 copies of an edition on the watefront arguing against the settlement. The White House reacted to the allegation through Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins who asked the Office of Immigration and Naturalization to investigate Bridges’ immigration status.

An inspector for the office working with the Crime Prevention Detail of the San Francisco Police Detail cleared Bridges of any Communist association, but he did accept Communist participation in the strike.Sam Darcy,Communist Party chief on the West Coast met with the strike committee and provided them with advice. Union lawyer Leo Gallagher returned to San Francisco on May 19th from Berlin where he had been defending a young Communist accused of setting fire to the Reich stag. He met with a delegation of the striking workers and exhorted them not to accept a settlement.

The year before in 1933 had been the worst year in the Depression and the peak year of Communist led agricultural strikes. The crusading young District Attorney of Alameda County who would later play a key role in national history as the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Earl Warren, had argued for a coordinated attack by law enforcement officials against Communist provocateurs, a call which was ardently endorsed by San Francisco Police Chief William Quinn. The day before the longshoremen went out on strike he organized an anti-strike force of 182 patrolmen, seventeen mounted policemen, and five radio cars. The police and longshoremen clashed on the 9th, the 10th,and the 12th and on the 13th Quinn ordered a supply of tear gas.

Each day since the 9th, the longshoremen had paraded down the Embarcadero a thousand strong behind the American flag even though picketing had been illegal in San Francisco since the Strike of 1919. However, on the 28th as Ryan was signing the settlement agreement a detachment of mounted and foot patrol officers charged a line of longshoremen crossing the Embarcadero at Pier 18. The longshoremen resisted with clubs, bricks, and cobblestones and pulled some policemen from their horses.

The maratime strike continued into June gaining strength.Ryan and Dave Beck, the head of the Seattle Teamsters, feared the type of left-wing industrial union advocated by Harry Bridges. They favored the elite vertical unions of the AFL. To them the idea of a single coastwide union representing every aspect of the maritime industry was a Communist notion. They entered into negotiations with the Industrial Association with the central strategy of portraying the strike committee as being Communist led. By late June 1934 positions on the Right and Left were hardening. The Port of San Francisco had been closed since May 9 with a cost to businesses of close to a million dollars a day. Using the publicity skills of McCann Erickson the Industrial Association had portrayed itself as the guardian of law and order and the Strike Committee as the representative of the Red Menace. The Governor of California and former Mayor of San Francisco, “Sunny Jim” Rolph had announced that he was ready to send in troops if the Port could not be opened peacefully.

On July 3rd five thousand longshoremen gathered in front of Pier 38 opposed by seven hundred police in formation. A line of railroad boxcars sealed off the south side of the Embarcadero. At noon the steel doors of Pier 38 lifted and five trucks accompanied by eight police patrol cars exited and Police Captain Thomas Hockerton with his revolver in hand standing on the running board of the lead patrol car yelled,”The Port is open!” The caravan headed down the Embarcadero to a warehouse on King Street where strikebreakers unloaded the cargo of birdseed, coffee, and automobile tires. The caravan returned to Pier 38 two more times.

At about one thirty the inevitable happened, labor pickets and police clashed. The police laid down a barrage of tear gas and mounted officer and officers on foot wearing gas masks attacked the crowd with clubs. The longshoremen threw bricks, cobblestones, and railroad spikes and responded with their fists. The police responded with gunfire at Second and Townsend wounding two people including a bank teller. The day’s only fatality, Argonne Riley, was a strange one. He had come ashore from the Diana Dollar to drink, only to be beaten by several men and dumped in a gutter. The police hauled him from the gutter and booked him into the drunk tank. He complained of head pains, and the  police took him to Harbor Emergency Hospital where he died nine minutes after his arrival from a fractured skull.

The next day was the Fourth of July. The cast of characters had changed slightly. Sunny Jim Rolph had died of heart failure on June 2,1934. His successor was Lieutenant Governor Frank Merriman, a native of the Midwest. He was especially perturbed by the refusal of the Joint Strike Committee to allow the Belt Line to move freight . He ordered Major General Seth Howard, the adjutant general of California, to mobilize the California National Guard for deployment into San Francisco if the longshoremen again blocked the Belt Line. (Merriman and Howard are shown in the picture on the right) The Industrial Association ran a full page ad in the newspapers announcing that the Port was open for business and Mayor Rossi announced to a mass rally that the strike was being run by Communists. The stage was set for what would become known in West Coast labor history as Bloody Thursday.