ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS

ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS with texts on the Oakland General Strike:

• Central Labor Council of AFL, Alameda County. Papers.

• Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University, San Francisco.

• CIO History Vertical Files. International Longshoreman and Warehouseman’s Union Anne Rand Memorial Library, San Francisco.

• Labor Studies Library. Laney College, Oakland.

• Oakland History Vertical Files. Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library, Oakland.

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS with coverage of the strike:

• Berkeley Gazette

• East Bay Labor Journal

• Life

• Newsweek

• San Francisco Chronicle

• San Francisco Examiner

ORAL HISTORIES

ORAL HISTORIES with accounts of the strike:

• Ash, Robert. 1976. “Alameda Country Central Labor Council during the Warren Years,” an oral history conducted 1976 by Miriam Stein and Amelia Fry, in Labor Leaders View the Warren Era, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

UNPUBLISHED SOURCES

UNPUBLISHED SOURCES

 

• Boyden, Richard P. 1988. "The San Francisco Machinists from Depression to Cold War, 1930-1950." Ph.D. thesis. University of California, Berkeley.

• Douma, Frank. 1951. “The Oakland General Strike.” Master’s thesis. University of California, Berkeley.

• Jay, Richard E. 1953. "A Case Study in Retail Unionism: The Retail Clerks in the San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda County)." Ph.D. thesis. University of California, Berkeley.

• Robinson, Robert M. 1951. "A History of the Teamsters in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850-1950." Ph.D. thesis. University of California, Berkeley.

• Rhomberg, Chris. 1997. “Class Formation and Collective Action: The Oakland General Strike, 1946.” Master’s thesis. University of California,
  Berkeley.

• Visnick, Benjamin. 1983. “Behind the 1946 Oakland General Strike.”

PUBLISHED SOURCES with reference to the Oakland General Strike

PUBLISHED SOURCES that explicitly mention the (1934 or) 1946 Oakland General Strike:

 

• Bagwell, Beth. 1982. Oakland: The Story of a City. Oakland: Oakland Heritage Alliance.

• Brecher, Jeremy. 1997. Strike! Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.

• Carlsson, Chris. 1998. “The Progress Club: 1934 and Class
  Memory,” in Brook, James; Carlsson, Chris; and Peters, Nancy J.,
  editors, pp. 67-87. Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics,
  Culture. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

• Glass, Fred. 1996. “We Called It a Work Holiday: The Oakland General Strike of 1946.” Labor’s Heritage 8, no. 2 (Fall): 4-25.

• Harrington, Michael. 1962. The Retail Clerks. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

• Johnson, Marilynn. 1993. The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the
  East Bay in World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• _____. 1995. “Mobilizing the Homefront: Labor and Politics in
  Oakland, 1941-1951.” In Working People of California, edited by D.
  Cornford, pp. 344-368. Berkley: University of California Press.

• Krich, John. 1979. Bump City: Winners and Losers in Oakland. Berkeley: City Miner Books.

• Lannon, Albert Vetere. 2000. Fight or Be Slaves: A History of the
  Oakland-East Bay Labor Movement. Lantham, Md.: University Press of
  America.

• Lipsitz, George. 1994. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

• Mitford, Jessica. 1977 [orig. 1956]. A Fine Old Conflict. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

• Rhomberg, Chris. 2004. No There There: Race, Class, and Political
  Community in Oakland. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• Self, Robert O. 2003. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

• Swados, Harvey. 1970. Standing Fast. New York: Ballantine Books.

• Weir, Stan. 1975. “American Labor on the Defensive: A 1940s Odyssey,” Radical America 9, nos. 4-5 (July-Aug.) pp. 163-185.

• ______. 2004 [orig. 1996]. Class War Lessons: From Direct Action on
  the Job to the ’46 Oakland General Strike. Berkeley: IDP Editions.

• ______. 1973.“The Informal Work Group,” in Lynd, Staughton and Alice, eds., pp. 148-183. Rank and File. Boston: Beacon Press.

• _____. 1967. “Rank-And-File Rebellions Break Into the Open: The
  End of an Era,” in Lynd, Staughton, ed. American Labor Radicalism:
  Testimonies and Interpretations. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

• Wolman, Charles. 1975. “The Oakland General Strike of 1946.” Southern California Quarterly 57, no. 2: 147-179.

PUBLISHED SOURCES

PUBLISHED SOURCES with reference to Oakland/Bay Area or to class struggle during the period

 

• Boyden, Richard. 1995. “The San Francisco Machinists and the National War Labor Board.” In American Labor in the Era of World War II, edited by S. Miller and D. Cornford, pp. 105-119. Westport,
  Conn.: Praeger.

• Bradford, Amory. 1968. Oakland’s Not for Burning. New York: David McKay.

• Crouchett, Lawrence P., Bunch III, Lonnie G., and Winnacker, Martha Kendall. 1989. Visions Towards Tomorrow. Oakland: Northern CaliforniaCenter for Afro-American History and Life.

• Dolsen, James H. 1920. The Defense of a Revolutionist: By Himself. Oakland: Published by James H. Dolsen.

• Foner, Philip S., ed. 1964 [orig. 1947]. The Social Writings of Jack London. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press.

• Hinckle, Warren. 1966. “Metropoly: The Story of Oakland, California.” Ramparts 4, no.6 (February): 25-50.

• Jackson, Kenneth T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

• Kelley, Robin R. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.

• Lemke-Santagelo, Gretchen. 1996. Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East BayCommunity. Chapel Hill: University
  of North Carolina Press.

• Lotchin, Roger W. 2003. The BadCity in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles,Oakland, and San Diego. Bloomington:University of IndianaPress.

• Ma, Eve Armentrout with Jeong Huei Ma. 1982. The Chinese of Oakland: Unsung Builders. Ed. Forrest Gok. Oakland: Oakland Chinese History Research Committee.

• Minor, Woodruff. 2000. Pacific Gateway: An Illustrated History of the Port of Oakland. Oakland: Port of Oakland.
  

• Nagler, Richard with Ishmael Reed. 1995. Oakland Rhapsody: The Secrets of An American Downtown. Berkeley:North Atlantic Books.

• Preis, Art. 1972 [orig. 1964]. Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO. New York: Pathfinder Press.

• Praetzellis, Mary, ed. 1994. West Oakland: A Place to Start From. Research Design and Treatment Plan: Cypress I-880 Replacement Project, vol. 1: Historical Archaeology. Oakland: CALTRANS District 4.

• Rather, Lois. 1972. Oakland’s Image: A History of Oakland, California. Oakland: The Rather Press.

• Reed, Ishmael. 2003. Blues City: A Walk in Oakland. New York: Crown Journeys.

• Seidman, Joel. 1953. American Labor from Defense to Reconversion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Selvin, David. 1975. Sky Full of Storm. Rev. ed. San Francisco: California Historical Society.

• Walker, Dick and The Bay Area Study Group. 1990. “The Playground of US Capitalism?: The Political Economy of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s,” in Davis, Mike; Hiatt, Steven; Kennedy, Marie; Ruddick, Susan; and Sprinker, Michael, Editors, pp. 3-82 Fire in the Hearth: The Radical Politics of Place in America. London: Verso.

• Wang, William. 1997. “White Fright Over Oakland Redistricting.” In MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace, edited by Reed, Ishmael. New York: Viking.

• Wasserman, Abby, ed. 2000. The Spirit of Oakland: An Anthology. Carlsbad, California: Heritage Media.

• Weber, David. 1981. Oakland: Hub of the West. Tulsa: Continental Heritage Press.

• Wollenberg, Charles. 1985. Golden Gate Metropolis: Perspectives on Bay Area History. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies University of California, Berkeley.
  

• ______, Ed. Photographing the Second Gold Rush: Dorothea Lange and theBay Area at War, 1941-1945. Berkeley: Heyday Books.

 

Working Class History of Oakland

Oakland became the western terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869
and it brought rapid growth in population and led to the construction
of a large terminal at the foot of Seventh Street in West Oakland,
shown here in 1890, to handle waterbound cargo. City boosters hailed
Oakland as the "The Athens of the West."

 

The Great Upheaval Railroad Strike in 1877 spread to Oakland, where
there were solidarity actions against the railroads. Unfortunately
workers in San Francisco, led by racist Denis Kearney, attacked the
Chinese during this period. The repercussions of racism against Asians
continues to be a fatal weakness of the working class to this day.

In the late nineteenth century Oakland had extensive shipyards along
the Estuary, earning it the nickname "Glasgow of the West." This
picture shows the Hay & Wright Shipyards in Oakland in 1987. (The
wood beam in the picture is a single piece of wood, imported from a
Portland, OR lumber yard, that measures 24" x 24" x 94")

In the pre-bridge era trans-Bay travel necessitated ferry boats,
like this paddlewheeled boat at the Oakland City Wharf no. 2 in 1900.

 

[more coming soon: we've just begun; this project is "in progress."]

 

1. Class War Lessons

INTRODUCTION

By Staughton Lynd

The essay by Stan Weir that follows is the concluding essay in a book I edited called, "We Are All Leaders": The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996). The book is full of interesting stories of a time when there was no National Labor Relations Act, and no CIO, and workers had to turn for help to other workers in the same locality.

The way Stan came to be a part of this book is a story in itself. He would often telephone me long distance from California to tell me a new joke. But this time when he called he was upset. He had heard about the book, and he wanted to ask me: Why wasn't he a part of it?

Stan wasn't a part of the book—as I initially imagined it—because the contributors I had lined up were professional historians, most of them young and not yet published. But when thought about it I decided that Stan was right. I had always believed that history should be a matter of activists reflecting on their experience together and deciding how to do better the next time. Stan was such an activist. He wanted to reflect out loud on a critical chunk of his life as an organizer.

My wife Alice and I had previously recorded Stan's life story in a book called Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-class Organizers (still in print with Monthly Review Press). This would be different. This was going to be Stan himself taking the initiative, not sweeping broadly over several decades of his life, but as it were sending a mine shaft down into one particular experience.
I believe the story Stan tells in the pages that follow was precious to him because it was the closest he ever came to the self-governing workers' world in which he believed all his adult life. A ship at sea is a little community cut off from the rest of the world. On the S. S. Hanapepe, workers turned their ship into a floating classroom with older workers—the '34 men —systematically instructing younger ones. And of course, the ship could be such a forum for workers' self-activity only because of the collective direct action with which the crew had made manifest their collective power before going to sea.
The Oakland general strike of 1946 then became the closest thing in Stan's experience to a generalizing of what happened on the Hanapepe, to a local general strike of the entire Oakland, California working class.

I don't want to say much more about Stan, or about the process of editing his manuscript. What sticks most in memory is his telling me that he wrote this essay with tears streaming down his face.

In Latin America, when a comrade dies his friends and colleagues call his name and say of him, "Presente" — he is present.

So I say, "Stan Weir—presente."

- Staughton Lynd

Unions with Leaders Who Stay on the Job

(a.k.a. Class War Lessons)

By Stan Weir

It was noon, an hour and twenty minutes before the scheduled sailing time of the freighter SS Hanapepe, September 28, 1943. I went to the crowded mess room and took the seat left vacant for me. My arrival meant that all eleven members of the Deck Gang were present. We did not order lunch. The on-ship delegates or representatives of both the Marine Firemen, Oilers, Watertenders and Wipers union (MFOW&W) and the Marine Cooks and Stewards union (MC&S) looked at me, the delegate of the Deck Gang and the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP), and nodded.

I put on my white cap. With that signal we of the Deck Gang got up, walked to the gangway and down off the ship. In doing so, we all made eye-to-eye contact with the men of the Black Gang (Engine Department), and with all the messmen and cooks of the Stewards’ Department about to serve the crew members, who would for a time remain seated. The barely noticeable smile and nod from each of them, and from each of us in return, was a reaffirmation of the pledge we had all made, an unrehearsed and emotional admission of camaraderie.

Once on the dock we walked to an imaginary line parallel with the ship’s side and about fifty feet from it, just far enough away so that we wouldn’t have to look up at too sharp an angle during the exchange we were about to have with the ship’s officers. Facing the ship in a line, we waited, a bosun, a ship’s carpenter, six able bodied seamen (ABs), and three ordinary seamen.1 Each of the three sea watches was made up of two ABs and an ordinary.

With the exception of Blackie Soromengo, the bosun, and Chips Costello, the carpenter, we were a little jumpy. They were twenty years or more older than the rest of us and veterans of the 1934 “Big Strike” that had stopped West Coast marine cargo movement for eighty-three days and had won recognition for all maritime unions on the West Coast.2 But the term ’34 man meant much more than strike veteran; it identified a member of what had been a very real movement that became clearly visible three years before the 1934 strike. These men did not wear buttons for identification, but a mark of honor was on them all. The instruction they gave to the younger men who entered the industry during the war revealed what they had learned: the power and hilarity of overcoming long years of submission and their terror of losing hold of that power. The strength and the anxiety of the ‘34 men were with us that day on the dock.

The bosun and carpenter well understood that we wanted to be able to tell others our own stories of direct action. We were anxious to establish our generation’s reputation in the union and the industry. But they also knew the seriousness of what we were doing and the weaknesses as well as strengths of our eagerness. They gave us room and seldom used their authority to showcase themselves. We were forging an open alliance between the two generations standing there together on the dock.

The Background
The war and the shortage of seamen had given us “young men” our first union jobs and full-time work. We had never before been able to stand up and fight back openly. Such terms as direct action or job action were new to our vocabularies.

In the fall of 1943 the only unemployed were people between jobs or en route to military induction centers. Mobilization for total war production was increasingly a part of daily routine. Movie theaters, markets, and cafes in industrial areas were open around the clock. Workers in factories and shipyards were being pinned with “E for Efficiency” buttons after breaking all production records in competition with themselves. The young men of their families were the main source of both draft and volunteer recruitment for the armed forces. At the same time employers receiving “costs plus ten per cent profit” from government defense contracts were using advertising agency forms of patriotism to eliminate the protective work rules won by employees in the decade before the war.

Because of the unconditional no-strike pledge union leaders had declared and negotiated in union contracts, strikers were commonly dealt with as if their needs were unworthy of respect. The Roosevelt administration had early on hired scores of lawyers and professors to arbitrate all labor conflicts. Yet more strikers would go on strike in 1943 than during any year in the 1930s.3 A big contradiction in what has been called “the good war”—though never mentioned in the media—was that during the so-called war for democracy neither employers nor union officials showed concern for the democratic rights of working people in the United States.

During the first year of the war there were still enough old-timers among West Coast seamen for them to pass on to new seamen the need to enforce both the formal and informal work rules won in the 1930s. In 1943 the number of U.S. merchant ships tripled. At the same time the mortality rate among merchant seamen in the war was proportionately higher than in any of the armed services.4 Veterans of the 1930s maritime strikes came to be vastly outnumbered by new shipmates not long parted from high school and part-time jobs. In an attempt to overcome their disadvantage the older men sometimes sought to instruct by more formal methods than the usual bull sessions. Teaching their history of conflict with both the shipowners and official union leaders came easily; they had lived it. But most of all, the instructors sought to teach by involvement with their younger shipmates in job actions.

On the Dock
The appearance on deck of the chief mate interrupted my thoughts.5 He stood above the main deck, where the men of the Engine Room, Stewards’ Department, and Navy Armed Guard who manned the ship’s guns were gathering. He was big, lean, and in his fifties. After a harrumph he yelled to the bosun, “Why is your gang on the dock?” He continued before the bosun could answer: “I want the appropriate helmsman from the 12 to 4 watch to come to the flying bridge at one o’clock sharp and stand by ready to take the wheel the moment the pilot comes aboard. And bosun, you and the men off watch must be standing by at the same time ready to haul up and make fast the gangway, then send three men to the bow and three to the stern to slack off, and then haul in the mooring lines when the longshore linesmen on the dock let them go. There will be steam in the windlasses.”

“The appropriate helmsman”? “There will be steam”? Had they gotten this guy from central casting? We were all choking back laughter, yet none of us moved. The bosun broke the silence: “You’ve got it wrong, Mate. You’ve been going to sea long enough to know better. When you see us out here like this you have to deal with our elected delegate, Red, who is standing right here. Until you do that anything you want to discuss must wait.”

(A delegate performs the same function that a shop steward does in union workplaces ashore. But because all ships have stewards’ departments whose members prepare and serve three meals and a light lunch a day, in addition to making the officers’ beds and cleaning their rooms, a second use of the term would create confusion.)

I took two steps toward the ship ready to speak. At the same time the mate turned and walked quickly into the midship house. The captain came out onto the wing of the bridge moments later. He glared down at us from beneath a navy officer’s hat with all the trimmings, “scrambled eggs” included, on the bill. “As master of this ship I order you to come aboard immediately and go to your assigned stations ready to work as directed.”

I heard grunts of anger behind me. Louder noises came from other members of the crew standing two decks below the captain, just out of his line of vision. His head jerked with the realization that almost the entire crew was witness. The audience had given me what I needed. “No, Captain, there are questions of health that have to be taken care of here and now.”

“Do you think you are running this ship?”

“Captain, do I have to explain to you what our roles are supposed to be as Deck delegate and captain? Your regular authority established for the operation of this ship is one thing. During any bargaining process it is suspended, and we are equals. If you are asking me to go over the history since crews like this one began to revive the unions ten years ago, then you will soon see the Black Gang out here on the dock, too. If there is any trouble after that, the room steward who makes your bed and the cooks and messmen who feed us will follow.”

The captain went white in the face, then recovered to ask, “All right, Weir, why aren’t you at your assigned duties instead of out here on this dock?”
He had quit stammering when using my name and so had taken a step toward admission that each of us was a representative. “A reminder, Captain. The delegates from all three departments came to you with complaints almost two weeks ago. You put us off then and three times more. The responsibility for the problem you now have is not ours. And, we are all on lunch hour.”

“Is this the bedbug thing again?”

“Only in part. Bedbugs have been found in several of the mattresses of the unlicensed personnel and the Navy Armed Guard. All of the mattresses are very old, soiled and lumpy. Remember that we live three men to a fo’c’sle in a space half the size of your room. Remember, too, that unlike those used by you who live topside, the mattresses were two feet wide, six feet long and two inches thick when they came aboard many trips ago. Now they are longer and thinner. They have to be replaced.”

“Have you appointed yourself delegate for all three departments and the navy men?”

“I can get two other delegates out here right now if you like.”
“But we’re about to sail.”

“You have a telephone that’s strung from the dock to your room. There are ships’ chandlers in the East Bay just like there are in San Francisco along the Embarcadero. You can get all the items we need from any one of them in less than an hour.”

With head tilted to one side and sugary voice, the captain went for what he probably thought was his biggest weapon: “There’s a war on, you know.”

A “fuck yoohoo” delivered slowly in a near-singing voice wafted aloft from the main deck gallery. Then, short, hard, and square-built Chips, who had been on two ships sunk by U-boats in the Caribbean, broke in, “The ship you are standing on is your first since you took an office job with this company when the war started.”

The blows to the captain’s credibility showed on his face. But even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t afford to let his cheap shot go with only two responses. A document citing the articles of war was attached to the ship’s articles we had signed two days earlier. We had discussed what to do if this came up.

“Yes, Captain, we know, and because of the war there is the War Shipping Administration [WSA] which pays this company and others for all costs connected with operating ships for the war effort. Your company has one of the many ‘costs plus ten percent profit’ contracts. You know, having worked in the office, that for every dollar your outfit spends on food and the other needs of the crew it gets back at least a dollar and a dime. If you have outfitted this ship as it should be, and have reported to the WSA as required, why is it that we lack so many needed food and sanitation items?”

The captain took too long to respond. Laughter exploded from the gathering on the main deck and ceased momentarily only when the identifiable, rough voice of Matt, the lanky and multitattooed deck engineer from Gulfport, Mississippi, drawled, “Okaaay, it’s time for all of us y’alls to go out on the dock!”

“No, tell him that won’t be necessary, uh, will it Red?”

Red? Was he giving in, using my nickname to bait me, or just out of control? Could it be that our ship’s accounts at some ship supply house would show we had full stores of good grade food aboard? The fink probably had a deal going to supplement his salary. “No, it won’t be necessary as long as you get the things I’m ready to list.”

“You want more than mattresses?”

“Yes. Get fresh milk and good coffee aboard. Fresh vegetables besides cabbage.” The purser had appeared at the captain’s side and was making a list. “Add plenty of citrus fruit and fresh meat besides mutton to the list.” He looked at the captain, got a nod, and went back to writing.

“Good, is that it?”

“No. You are aware that the showers need simple repairs. It is hard to get more than a trickle out of them. A lizard could piss a bigger stream than they put out now. This means we have to stand in line in the passageways waiting turns. Get four new shower heads, some good bar soap, a strong lye soap, five cases of Clorox in gallons, and two five-gallon cans of kerosene.”

“What’s the kerosene for?”

There was a chorus of guffaws from the main deck. “Is he going to tell us he’s never had a dose of crabs?”

I said, “If you haven’t got them up on your deck yet, you will during the trip if we don’t get kerosene aboard. We bought some kerosene with our own money the first thing when we came aboard. We washed down all the toilets. There’s no guarantee we got all the eggs. They may make a comeback. Just in case, order six dozen of the small jars of McKesson’s A200 Pyrinate, at least one for every man. The chandlers will have it. It comes in jars, just like Vicks.”
“Is that it?”

“Yes, except for a matter that can’t be fixed by a purchase. It has to do only with the Deck Gang. We would have taken it up with the chief mate directly, but he didn’t stay long enough for me to mention it. He is to stop watching us like some kind of gumshoe when we’re working on deck. We think you will understand that it can slow down the work.”

“I understand. I will take the matter up with the chief mate, and the purser will order the items you have listed. And so, while he’s doing that, you can all come back aboard and go to work.”

I hadn’t expected that he would again try to get us to refuse a direct order to go to work, even though it was lunchtime. I was out of patience, afraid my anger would show if I had to offer still another explanation for our refusal to go aboard. I moved back into the line of men behind me. Several of them began to talk to me out of the sides of their mouths at once. They wanted to bring it all to a halt, right then.

I looked at the bosun and Chips, who hadn’t spoken. They smiled. We all turned as a group and walked toward the Dock Cafe just outside the piershed on the Embarcadero. All its windows had a view of the dock road.
The captain was yelling. We continued on our way until we heard him wail, “Where are you going now?”

The bosun didn’t turn his head but bumped my shoulder with his: “You mind if I take this one?” I deferred to him without any show of my touch of resentment. As bosun, he was officially in charge of all work assignments for the entire Deck Gang when the ship was in port. We all stopped. The bosun and I turned around together, and he yelled back at the still figure on the ship’s bridge, “It still isn’t one o’clock, Gilchrist, our lunch hour isn’t over. We’re going to the cafe for a decent cup of coffee. And remember, there’s nothing to do until a ship chandler’s truck arrives.” The bosun and I did another turnaround and rejoined the gang. The open piershed door just ahead drew us.

At the Dock Café
Once inside, our attention turned to the problems ahead. The captain had suffered a defeat, but official power was still on his side.

The three ordinaries had volunteered to run ahead and grab the cafe’s big table for us. As first trippers, they felt the isolation of the noninitiated and were dependent on each other for support. If we all got to make this trip together, they would by natural process develop a new identity. Each of them would live in an eight-by-ten-foot room, which by tradition was still called a “fo’c’sle” (forecastle), with two ABs. Four hours on and eight hours off, eight to twelve, twelve to four, and four to eight, seven days a week, they would come to know the ship’s routine. They would learn from us who to wake up for the next watch, when it was their turn to make coffee, and how to stand lookout and steer the ship. Days on deck, the bosun and Chips would lead the instruction about lines, knots and splices, chipping rust and red leading.

We already liked the ordinaries. Berto’s father had come to Oakland from Portugal via the Hawaiian Islands, as the bosun had. Anthony and Bruno were from San Francisco’s Italian neighborhood in North Beach. They were physically bigger than their fathers, who were commercial fishermen, but also were thickset from “helping out on the boat.” Hard work didn’t bother them.
By the time we arrived at the entrance of the cafe they had eleven chairs and cups of coffee at the table. We paused just inside the door. They were so involved in replay and laughter about what we had all just done together that they didn’t notice our arrival.

“Did you see the look on the captain’s face when someone sang, ‘Fuck yoohoo’? He had a good voice, for god’s sake.”

“Yeah, but the best was when the captain went dirty. It was like he was singing it, ‘There’s a war on....’ What shit!”

“But Jesus, we just walked off and left him, and he wails, ‘Where are you going?’ Just like he was a little kid.”

It was contagious. They were acting out what we felt. They went silent as soon as they heard our laughter. Together and still standing, we reached for our coffees and all drank at once.

The bosun did not sit down with the rest of us until he took a hard look all around the cafe. “Good job out there today. Good job. But remember, you didn’t do it, not alone you didn’t. We were the guys who got to do the grandstanding. What we did was a hell of a lot easier than what those men back aboard the ship are having to live through right now. Always keep in mind that in actions like this the Deck Gang gets the spotlight because our jobs are out on deck. At sailing time, we are the ones who have direct contact with the longshoremen, the tugboatmen, and that special bunch of older longshoremen called linesmen. They let go the mooring lines of ships that are about to sail, take them off the bollards on the dock. Deckhands like us then haul the lines aboard using the power windlasses. They do the reverse operation when ships arrive at the dock, take ships’ lines from us deckhands and put the eye splices of the lines over the bollards.”

Blackie Soromengo was no longer speaking to us as bosun. All the detailed instruction on tying up and letting go of the lines was for the benefit of the ordinaries. The rest of us already knew what he had just gone over. He wanted to show them respect, to pull them into the group, show them they were needed, here and now, in this action. But then he leaned further over the table to signal that he was about to address us all.

“See the two old-timers at the bar? They happen to be the linesmen for our ship. They came onto the dock a little after eleven. I know the short one. When they saw us walk out onto the dock all in a line, they got out of sight. Here, they will not look at us. The same from us, to them, for the time being. They will go out on the dock and stand by fore and aft only if they see us go aboard. But, when that rust bucket that we just left gets out into the stream with us on it, we will take off our hats both to them and the gentlemen on the tugs. And if you ever see any of them ashore, you pay for the drinks.

“You see, the men in the other departments of the crew don’t get to do these kinds of things very often. This is one of the commonest kinds of direct action. Their work can only be performed inside the ship. We are all on deck at sailing times. To ask that the oiler fireman and watertenders shut down the ship’s engine, when they are down below with two engineer officers at sailing time, is asking a lot. And think what its like to sail down below in hundred-degree heat spending a third of your life getting your air through a windscoop and not able to look out at the ocean.

“It’s harder yet for the people in the Stewards’ Department. They are the cooks, bakers, waiters, and janitors for the rest of us, the lowest paid and the takers of the most crap. In ’34 they were some of the hardest fighters we had. Now it’s headed back toward the way it was before. When the officers are around, too often it’s shut up and make no eye contact. Or worse, make a smile. Notice anything different about them? See any people on the deck or in the engine room whose ancestors came from Africa or Asia? No, only in that part of a ship’s crew that does what too many of us think of as menial labor.”

Like many southerners, Chips had good timing. He interrupted the bosun without it being a discourtesy. “Okay, there are a couple of things we have to get out of the way right now. Okay? All of you on that side of the table can see a half-mile of dock road in either direction. About forty minutes to an hour from now a truck from a ship chandler’s may come into sight. Talk all you want, but keep your eyes on that road starting now! Whenever it comes, we want to stop it here before it gets down the dock in sight of the ship. Got it?

“That brings up another thing.” Chips’s wiry frame was an advantage. You could tell what he had to say was serious by the veins pumping at the sides of his neck. “The first time you’re in on something like this, your asshole can get awful goddamned tight. Relax just a little. They need to get that ship there away from the dock and out to sea, soon! To fire us now they’d have to hire a whole ’nother crew. The time for them to make their move against us will most probably be at the end of the trip We’ll get boarded by a couple of men dressed in U.S. Coast Guard uniforms, not regular military servicemen, more like FBI men in costume. They’ll go to the captain and ask if he had any ‘troublemakers’ this trip. All he has to do is mention the names of the men he wants to hurt. Then the shipowner will hold all the money you made this trip, and the boys in blue will hold up your seaman’s papers until you’ve gone to a military-style hearing up in some fucking federal building. If you screw up and give ’em the opportunity, they will really go after you, but if we are all real careful and look out for each other, they will cite only a couple of us that they think are leaders. Probably there won’t be any charges mentioned. It’ll just be that a couple of gold braids will hint around for about half an hour that you are probably some kind of communist. Their favorite question is ‘Do you ever let your union activity go beyond union activity?’ They’ll finally let you go. You can usually cut the visit short by demanding the charges, again and again. Remember, even if you ask the union to represent you, there won’t anyone come. That means that those of us who are not cited stay in town to make sure nothing worse happens to the guys they think are the leaders. In fact, we’ll reserve a table in the federal building cafeteria. Anyone who doesn’t show is a fuckup or has shit in his blood.”

Seeing Chips was finished, Blackie looked into each of our faces. “There will be plenty of time for us to go over this later. I agree with Chips that the captain probably won’t make his move against us now. It seems we have the captain at some kind of disadvantage, like Chips and I suspected we could when we first came aboard and did our own private inspection. Not one of us can afford to make a mistake. No coming aboard drunk, ever, not this trip. Work hard, work good, and mind what you say when you’re standing wheel watch at night with only the mate on your watch up there to talk with. If the captain can get something on only two or three of us, he will give them to the ‘three letter boys.’ With hostages they will seek revenge against all of us for what we did today.
“We are going to clean up this ship and its gear, make it truly shipshape. We will lead careful lives for ourselves and all those in it with us. Red here and his partner, Big John from the Bronx, sailed with Chips and me early last year. Young Finns Waino and Paavo, I knew your fathers, Finn Waino and Finn Walter from the Finnish Brotherhood Hall in Berkeley. There were two halls, yours was the one just a little up the hill east of San Pablo Avenue, the one that had the IWW and some Trotskys, right? They let me flop there several nights during the 1935 tanker strike. We were helping out up in Richmond. I sailed with both of them on the lumber schooners. Walter was in the Centralia strike, a man who read everything he could get his hands on.”

Blackie spoke in the same way to Nils and Carl, who he said were “from stump ranches somewhere around Coos Bay,” and to the three ordinaries. “Berto, from our talk on deck the other day I know your folks are Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, the same as me, and that we all came to the States about the same time. Anthony and Bruno, you were both altar boys at Peter and Paul Cathedral across from Washington Square in North Beach. The definition of sin when out at sea is complicated. You may find some nonbelievers among us, yet I’m sure they try to live by what amounts to the Golden Rule. I know your dad and mom, Bruno, they have that fine old-style Italian grocery and deli with the Ensalada Tea on the window in big enameled letters. It’s across from the bakery that’s in the basement on Grant Avenue at Green Street. That reminds me, let’s eat our sandwiches.”

Someone at the bar said “amen,” and the laughter returned.

Only days ago we had had our election for Deck Gang delegate, and the bosun was for the moment so caught up in what we were doing that he had lost sight of what we were trying to accomplish in the long run. Besides, there was a little matter of pride. I was elected Deck delegate, I felt sure, because the gang knew that by electing me they were getting two people, me plus Big John. We already had a modest reputation. On a ship where a chief mate had ordered the Deck Gang to break out the cargo booms in a rough sea just before coming into the San Francisco harbor, we shut off all the steam on deck, and no gear got rigged until the ship was tied up at the dock. When we signed off, the captain turned us in to the Coast Guard. The matter never came up at a union meeting, but word had gotten around. The bosun and Chips had to realize that while they were our mentors and the thirties established their identity, the war period was creating ours. Because we were doing the same work and represented each other’s hopes, we had to treat each other as allies.

Nils raised his hand. “Blackie, only you and Chips have done any of the talking. This is a meeting. Every one has to have a chance to speak.”

Nils looked straight at me. I had become the chairman. The instant I nodded in his direction, he began to speak: “Suppose no truck shows, then what? We can’t just play this by ear.”

Blackie opened his mouth to speak and would have done so, but I waved him off. Finn Waino took the floor.

“We need for one of us to keep an eye on the ship in case something goes wrong there. For an instance, if something happens, we might need all hands again. Blackie, you said you knew one of these linesmen. Could you get him to scout the ship for us?”

All eyes moved to Blackie. He got up without a word, went to the bar, ordered a beer and spoke to the linesman. The man listened to Blackie without looking at him, then got up and left the cafe.

Blackie returned to his table without his beer to announce, “It’s a risk for him, but he’ll do it carefully and be back in a few minutes.

I took the floor. “Let’s assume that the captain gets one or two suits and ties down here. We can’t go over the whole thing right now, but we have to have the beginnings of a plan. If authority comes, in suits or uniforms, as delegate I have to talk to them. I need witnesses with me. I move that Big John, Blackie, and Chips be the ones. Again, if authority comes, they will probably drive right to the gangway and try to go directly to the captain. He should not get first crack at them. We should stop them here in the shed. The other seven of you go out the little door behind the bar and right down the apron of the dock. Once you’re aboard, get all hands on deck. Then we...”

“Yeah, but Red, wait a minute. You, me, and Blackie and Chips should come aboard at the same time as the rest. Every time we make an appearance out there we should do everything to make them see us as a group.” It was Big John. Somewhere in his New York upbringing he had developed a sixth sense about the powers of a crowd, even a small one.

All heads were nodding, and smiles were beginning to return.

“Okay, instead of talking, you want a full show of strength to be what speaks most for our case?”

“Right!” was sung in chorus.

“Good. Then let’s go on. John, anything else?”

“Yeah. Remember, if a ship chandler’s truck arrives, we stop it right here and see what it has aboard. That leaves one more thing to consider. What if it turns out that somehow they pull a power play, and it looks like it’s going to be what Cade the Night Cook and Baker calls our ‘natural asses’?”

We were under time pressure. I didn’t wait for an answer. “It will then be up to all of you who can to round up as many men as you can from all three unions. Marine Cooks, Marine Firemen, and the Sailors’ Union.” I was looking at Blackie and Chips. “The more ’34 men the better. Get them to the Alaska Fishermen’s Building and march them through the offices of the officials of all three unions. Make them know that if they don’t save whoever’s arse is at stake, the news will spread to the memberships of every port on the coast.”
“Red, that’s a big job.”

“That’s right, and it can be done with you and Chips in action.”

Blackie raised his hand to say, “We’ll do everything we can, everything.”

Paavo put up his hand. “We know you and Chips will do all you can, Blackie, but don’t forget the ordinaries. Enough of this shit from the union that you have to be a full book member of the union before it can protect you.”

Bert, Bruno, and Anthony were again laughing with this show of respect from what they felt were two older generations.

“Wait a minute, Red! In that case you don’t want Blackie and Chips with you out there. They should stay back in case they have to cop a sneak off the dock to organize a delegation that will pack our great leaders’ offices. And another thing. You’re right, there should be four men to speak for us, but it ought to be you and the delegates from the other two departments on the ship, not just the Deck Gang.”

Waino’s hand went up, and he spoke without knowing if Paavo had finished. “Hey partner, we are all forgetting about what John said. It would be a hell of a lot more effective if any suits or uniforms that come aboard get surrounded by the whole crew, then one by one, five or ten of us tell them, no rough stuff, how we feel.”

“The power of an intelligent crowd!”

I didn’t get to see who made the remark and did not recognize the voice.

“Red.” It was Carl, and he was laughing. “The crowd can handle it!”

Blackie was laughing quietly to himself. I looked around. No sign of anyone who wanted to speak. Carl had his arms wrapped around his head in mock submission. Several short guffaws broke the tension, and I took the opening. “Hey Carl, short haul, what you did just now is not easy for me to take. But you’re not only saving me some sweat down the line, you’re doing a favor for an idea that can make life easier for us all.”

There were no laughs. Every face in the house was straight, and still no one wanted the floor.

We all rose from our chairs. Carl came to the bar with John and me. We bought preassembled roast beef sandwiches. I took one and laid it by my place at the table, then headed for the restroom.

Anthony came in while I was drying my hands and followed me back out into the cafe. “Red, wait up. Let’s stand over here for a minute. Listen, how come you guys didn’t even mention getting someone from the union out here to do something about all this?”

“That’s what we are forced to try to avoid, Anthony.”

“But you pay dues.”

“I know. But if we got a patrolman [business agent] out here from the union hall, he would have to tell us that if we took any kind of direct action we would be violating the contract, that we would have to hang on and make the best of it till we got to Honolulu or back here at the end of the trip. Keep in mind the bosun and Chips picked this ship in the first place because it’s in East Oakland at a seldom-used dock.”

“You mean you guys had this all...?”

“Don’t say it. See you in a few minutes.”

“No, wait, who are these guys, the bosun and Chips?”

“Two of the men who actually rebuilt the Sailors’ Union in ‘32 and ’33 before the Big Strike, two of them anyway. They were both organizing hit-and-run job actions whenever they could, particularly when guys who had been quiet for years began to dare to speak. Hey, we’ll be talking more about this. Right now we’re under the gun. Let me go eat my sandwich.”

“No, Red, one more thing, how could Chips know that the captain had taken an office job in the company office as soon as the war started?”

“Were you ever in one of those cheap waterfront hotel rooms where most of the old-timers stay between trips? When they were our ages, they never made enough to have a home and a marriage. Most of those rooms are lit by a single light bulb hanging down from the ceiling with no shade on it. The dinginess drives the renters down to the lobbies, where they exchange stories, particularly about the ships they just came off of. Now we eat.”

Anthony agreed. I got my sandwich and moved to one of the small tables. Others were doing the same. Paavo walked down the aisle behind me and stopped to press hard on my shoulder, then kept going. He came back a couple of minutes later and sat down across from me to say that Shorty the linesman had come back. The ship had looked peaceful. He couldn’t get too close, but half of the Black Gang were sitting out on Number 4 Hatch shooting the breeze with two messmen and the deck engineer.

It was ten minutes to one. A half-hour to go before we were all supposed to be back aboard and working. Waino saw me look at my watch.

“Red, fuck it, don’t try to carry it all. We all got into this with our eyes open. Take it all too seriously and you lose your sense of humor.”

“I didn’t know it was showing on me that much. But yes, we’ve got a lot riding on this one. If we lose this one, the ordinaries may never get another ship.”
“We’ll find a way. Don’t try to take all the responsibility; it’s not good for any of us, them included.”

We both smiled and waved each other free. I was beginning to understand that my overconcern got in the way of full participation in our decision-making process.

“Hey, all hands out here, now!” It was Paavo, who had just come through the cafe door yelling. “Yeah, all of you, a chandler’s truck is coming, now. Arise and shine!”

We Win a Battle
I went out the door with the others at a full run. The back doors of the truck were already open. The driver was reading to Bruno the list of items to be delivered. Nils and Carl had not been able to wait. They were opening cases and yelling out the contents to anyone who might be listening. “Good,” came the announcement from Nils. “They got All-Bran and Wheaties instead of Grapenuts, and it’s all here: milk, vegetables, coffee, the kerosene, ahah, A200 Pyrinate, tested on the inmates at San Quentin before release for public consumption. We owe those guys, and it’s no laughing matter.”

Then I noticed Big John. He was grabbing whomever he could get his hands on, then throwing them into the truck. It was the adrenalin of the small crowd. He was smiling, without trying to hide the legacy of a lifetime without going to a dentist. His excitement was catching, and his leadership was easy to accept. After he had thrown four or five of the gang aboard the truck, he made known his plan: “Don’t ever turn down a free ride in a Trojan horse!”

The rest of us jumped in. John yelled, “Now!” The driver started his truck and took off. When he made the turn out of the shed onto the apron of the dock, we all fell over one another. Upon arrival at the gangway he hit the brakes hard, and we were on the floor again. We came to a full stop, and he made no move to get out, just sat there looking straight ahead and cracking up.

The crew on the ship had seen us coming. About a dozen of them surrounded the truck. By the time they opened the doors, John had us jump down, to the skin of the dock, all with bright new blue-and-white-striped mattresses over our heads, half hanging down our fronts and half down our backs. Cheers went up!
We didn’t talk, not then. The members of our greeting committee each took a piece of the truck’s cargo and ran up the gangway single file. The cargo was all aboard after two more trips down and up the gangway. The driver got the chief steward’s signature, looked up to give us a quick wink, and drove away.

The tug’s whistle blew. It was John’s turn at the helm. The rest of us split up to go to the bow and stern. It was time for us to slack off the lines so that the linesmen on the dock could take our mooring lines off the bollards. Paav stretched his arm out to show me his wristwatch; it was almost one-thirty.

I looked up at the inshore wing of the flying bridge from where I was standing on the stern. The captain caught my look, then smiled and waved as if returning a greeting initiated by me. I looked away, wondering what it must do to those among us who have jobs demanding that they wrong those they supervise or govern, all the while knowing that when they go home to their mates and children, they cannot let them see their full identities.

Paavo motioned me over to the rail. The linesmen had just dropped our lines into the water. We waved our appreciation to them with our hands close to our chests and our backs to the bridge. The third mate saw it all in a glance but looked the other way. We hauled in the lines by windlass and flaked them out neatly on deck by hand so that they would dry without “assholes” (tight kinks).
The tugmen and their boat pulled us away from the dock. Once we were out into the estuary between Oakland and Alameda, the tug whistle blew. Anthony went to the offshore side and let go of the tugboat’s line. It was his first opportunity to display his new skill in action. He did not look at us, but he was smiling. I let the warmth of the moment register as I positioned myself beside him at the rail. Anthony yelled at the two men on the tug’s stern as it moved toward the open bay. When they looked up, we took off our white canvas “stetsons,” faking sweaty foreheads to deliver our respects. They made no eye contact as they hand-signaled that what they had done was nothing special.

An hour later we ducked under the Golden Gate Bridge and out into view of the Farallon (“Far and Alone”) Islands. Our connection with official life ashore was all but severed. We were no longer full citizens of the United States. By signing the ship’s articles when the man from the shipping commissioner’s office came aboard, we had lost much of the protection of the U.S. Constitution. We were now, and until we returned to the port of voyage termination in the States, governed by the nation’s special maritime laws as interpreted by the smiling man whose name was on the framed master’s license that hung in the wheelhouse. This was more than compensated for by our certainty that on this trip there was little likelihood of any friction among the unlicensed crew. In a matter of days we had begun to learn the need to respect each other across the long-established boundaries that divide seamen of each ship into three parts: those who prepare and serve the food and maintain the living quarters; those who keep the ship’s engine, electricity, and water supply running; and those who steer the ship, rig its gear, and keep its decks fit for sea.

Classroom Aboard Ship
At no point during the entire trip to the Southwest Pacific and Australia did the captain or any other deck or engine room officer mention our “walk-off.” We had demonstrated that we saw ourselves as an independent decision-making unit on all matters of safety and working and living conditions. Not one of the captain’s pretended attempts at a conciliation with us met with success. We were polite to him in a way that kept the official reality of our relationship with him out in the open.

Unposted but almost regularly scheduled gatherings took place during the entire voyage. There was informal instruction in ship safety, seamanship, and union history and organization (both official and unofficial), sometimes in the presence of two or three Navy Armed Guardsmen, all out on deck as weather permitted. At no time did the presence of an officer create an interruption. The enthusiasm, especially among the young first trippers, was noticeable. They had seen that we were introducing them to more than a unionism by which they could protect themselves on the job. We were also passing on a life-style in which they could carry themselves with more dignity and power.

The sense of self-improvement was not limited to the new seamen. The interdependence of the three departments demonstrated during the walk-off brought different rewards to each of the age-based groups in the crew. Cade, the night cook and baker from one of the sea islands off the coast of Georgia, and Londos, the four-to-eight oiler who had come from Greece as a young man, were ‘34 strike men like the bosun and Chips. They all rediscovered each other and became one of the tightest social groups on the ship. It was a small-scale reenactment of the formation in 1934 of the Maritime Federation of the Pacific, when the MFOW&W, the MC&S, and the SUP led all the offshore maritime unions on the coast in the preformation of an industrial union.

The oiler, night cook and baker, bosun, and Chips the carpenter determined the subjects they thought would be most valuable to all crew members younger than they and discussed their choices informally with the rest of us. Each of them then began meeting the men in his department two or three at a time for instruction and discussion.

John, Anthony, and I met with the bosun and Chips as a watch. We were in their room for a little over two hours. The bosun began by going over what he considered the three primary rules of conduct.

“Learn your trade. Work good and work hard. Particularly when lifting or carrying at sea, give one hand to the ship but keep one for yourself.
“I’ve already told you the following things, I think, but I want to go through them now systematically. Never, but never, walk away from a beef. For example, do not pay off from a ship in the middle of a fight with an officer or captain. If you do, you leave it for the next crew that comes aboard. It will catch them off guard, as a surprise, and they will be at a double disadvantage because topside will know the history of the beef and they won’t.

“But worst of all, if you walk away, you contribute to the breakdown of solidarity where it counts most, among the people on the job. They see that you didn’t look out for them, and that makes it easier for them to do the same to others. The big breakdown in morale began when we let our leader Harry Lundeberg negotiate contracts that gave our port patrolmen or business agents control over grievance settlements. If this task gets left to people who don’t do the same work we do, it’s not going to get done right, if at all. If on each ship, each trip we solve our beefs by ourselves, solidarity, our primary weapon, remains within reach.

“The next and last reminder of standard rules for now is that when a trip begins to get old, and the night wheel watches up there on the bridge get long and lonely, keep a distance between yourself and the mate on watch. Be thrifty with your words, stories, and the content of the ideas that you express. You and that man are each witness to the other’s boredom and sense of aloneness. That is not the stuff of brotherhood or comradeship, even though you both belong to unions. No matter how decent or well-meaning that other also needy man may be, he will almost certainly do what he has to do to keep his job. Part of that job is to supervise or keep watch on you. It is not unusual to learn, often too late, that the biggest advantage the ruler of the ship has in getting at those he looks upon as troublemakers is from information obtained by officers who got it earlier from helmsmen on their watch who unburdened themselves of shipboard or personal problems. Those guilty of this stoolpigeonry are often reluctant betrayers.

“One more thing. You too have a responsibility in all this. Don’t go putting out on the open table any of the personal-private things you were told in confidence by a ship’s officer. If you do, you lose your ability to be indignant at injustice.

’Nuff said.”

Passing on the Lessons of the 1934 Strike
“The importance of the strikes of the 1930s, including the seamen’s strikes, has been exaggerated,” Blackie went on.

“All through the 1920s we were held down. The lack of dignity we experienced on the job, plus the pitiful wages that denied us homes or families, kept us from achieving what we were capable of. At first we blamed it on each other. We talked worse about those laboring alongside us than about anyone else.
“Later we recognized that it was the condition of our industry. In the early twenties the government was giving away or taking ships out of service. Our small merchant marine was shrinking and our jobs along with it. We lived with that idea for several years.

“Then came the 1929 crash of the stock market. We were already on the bottom when it hit. The thing about the Big Depression that followed was that no matter what direction you looked, there was a failure of leadership of all the nation’s institutions. That went for the people who headed our unions as well as those in political parties and the government. We began to notice that the main message from our union leaders was that ’nothing can be done, the entire government is on the employers’ side, all we can do is go along and hope that by causing no trouble some concessions will be thrown our way.’ Somehow we believed them.

“We’d had Wobblies with us in maritime since 1905. A few old ones are still around. They’re members of the Industrial Workers of the World. They were the only bold and independent idea bunch among us. There weren’t many Communists around in the late 1920s. They looked pretty good for a while. Yet, neither group was enough to make a big difference. No noticeable change began to take place in us until the depression showed that none of the nation’s established political leaders had any ideas on how to stop the suffering.
“You went to coffee with the regular guys who had been close-mouthed for as long as anyone could remember, and they were complaining about why the leaders ‘don’t do this and never do that.’ By 1932 we could feel just from the change in attitudes of our own people that something big was happening. Regular guys were becoming more radical than the radicals, talking about the need for a different kind of union. In the early spring of 1934 you didn’t need inside dopesters to know that there was going to be a big strike. It was only then that the radicals began to see the size of their audiences increase significantly. We gave them the chance to grow. And we made them listen, for a while.

“When the longshoremen went on strike that spring, they knew that it was going to be easier for them to pull off a strike than it was for us seamen, because they were ashore all the time and had better communication with each other. Still, they knew we were going to be out there with them, that it was as much our battle as theirs.

“A problem for us was that our seamen’s unions were affiliated with the International Seamen’s Union, or ISU. The main leader of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific at that time, Andrew Furuseth, was also an official in the ISU. He had a good reputation, had lobbied in Washington, D.C., for years, and had gotten new laws replacing those that made seamen an outright part of the ship’s property while you were signed on. It’s still partly that way, but believe me, it’s a lot better now than it was then. Anyway, the national union officials of the ISU refused to let us go on strike with the longshoremen, and Furuseth agreed with them. That meant we had to take things directly into our own hands.

“We formed ‘meet and greet committees’ without the union’s consent. Ships, mainly steam schooners from the lumber ports up north, would come into San Francisco and San Pedro and be boarded by committees. The crews would then pack up and go down their gangways with the members of their boarding parties. Let me tell you it was like some special holiday, even though times were tough. Some guys would hear about it and form a committee of their own.
“The union lost control and had no way of stopping us. Harry Lundeberg is now head of our union, but around that time he sailed as an unlicensed or ‘waivered’ third mate on the steam schooner James Griffiths. I went to San Pedro for a couple of weeks, and the next thing I heard he was a leading meeter and greeter. Charlie Gates, who was an SUP patrolman in Frisco not so long ago, was on a committee, too.

“Within a couple of weeks the California ports were full of tied-up ships without crews. Ships stopped loading lumber up north and were paying off crews. We were all out on strike. It was one of the best times to be alive; we were getting back at them for all the insults we’d taken to our minds and our bodies through hard work, long hours, bad food, loss of sleep, and filthy fo’c’sles, in addition to spoken and sometimes physical abuse.”

At this point the bosun paused, as if he planned to stop for discussion. This is what we had wanted until he got onto the subject of the “meet and greet committees.” Now Big John broke our silence: “No, no, keep on going as long as you’re into describing this action, for god’s sake; discussion later.”
“Good, I understand. It was our strike. The entire power structure felt threatened, maybe not by revolution like the newspapers were saying, at least not at first. But then in addition to the police and scabs they brought out the National Guard, Legionnaires with tear gas guns, and armed vigilantes. Strikers were getting shot.

“You hear most about the two who were killed in San Francisco on ‘Bloody Thursday,’ July 5, 1934. Four days later there was a funeral procession up Market Street from the corner of Mission and Spear, where the guys were shot I was affected more by that than by any other single day of the strike.

“The official strike leaders had little to do with organizing it. We were the ones who planned everything. Guys were doing things to make the march work right, and no one assigned them. I met a lot of people in the formation area who didn’t have jobs or union cards. During the entire procession none of the thousands of marchers said a word. I didn’t know whether to growl or cry. All the way up Market Street total silence divided a major American city.

“The waterfront strike in San Francisco became general five days after the funeral. Nobody really called it that I can remember. It was just that working people all over town were out joining us. There was a machine shop on the Embarcadero near Mission Street. A SUP sailor got shot out on the sidewalk in front of its door. He was saved because some machinist ran out and pulled him inside by his legs. I’ve always believed that the machinists in that shop were among the people who joined us.

“It was in those weeks that men and boys shining shoes and selling papers on the corner formed their own unions and stopped work. One of them is a good member of the SUP today. His name is Bill.

“When our strike in San Francisco became general, strange as it may hit you at first, in part it hurt us. By the wonderful act of joining us, the uptown working class of people unknowingly gave their union officials—and there was nothing bold about most of them—the chance to take control of the entire strike, including the maritime part of it. That we needed to build an alternative organization to the city’s AFL Central Labor Council, in addition to all the other things we were doing, never occurred to us.

“The general strike ended on July 19, and it was fast downhill from there. Harry Bridges, the longshoremen’s leader, began making speeches about how tired his rank and file was getting. We couldn’t see why he was doing this. There were some among the longshoremen we talked to everyday who you could tell were ready to go back to work, but they were a minority. But who knows? The guys I was picketing with thought Bridges made the guys feel they’d lost their leader. Within days the longshoremen voted to go back to work and arbitrate all unsettled issues.

“We seamen didn’t like what the vote meant, but we went back to work with them. We didn’t want to see our unions go back to doing things separately again. The ISU officials had been against us striking from the start, and we did it anyway. Then after Bridges’s speeches and the longshore vote they got a second wind, and Andrew Furuseth, who had done so many good things as a leader of the Sailors, was acting like a regular ISU stiff. Our strike ended on July 31.

“The longshoremen wound up getting joint fifty-fifty control over hiring along with the employers, union recognition, better wages, and more. By comparison we seamen wound up with no contract, but with direct action control over hiring.”

After 1934
“Take it easy, I’ve only got one more part to finish, and you’ll have the whole 1934 to 1936 panorama before you. This is the vital piece of the failure we are a living part of today. It’s all but impossible to discuss this bit by bit. Indulge me. This is the first time I’ve ever presented it this way, the way Chips and I and others have had to live with it. I have to get it all out.”

I looked at Anthony and then at John. They looked like they felt as bad as Chips looked sitting there in his silence. I broke in on the bosun: “I have a suggestion. If either of you don’t feel right about it, let’s forget it and go on like we have. How would it be if Chips did the last part of the story?” Anthony and John nodded agreement. The bosun’s face fell, and he looked at his partner for the first time during the session. Chips cut him off before he got a chance to speak to my suggestion.

“No, no, it’s already arranged that I’ll cover this same history for the other two watches tomorrow. You’re just about finished, partner, and we have to get this hunk of it completed now. Okay you guys?”

I looked at John and Anthony again. They shrugged that it was all right with them, and the bosun continued.

“Forgive me, partner....Like I said, the longshoremen got an arbitration award from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Longshoremen’s Board. It gave them full recognition on the Coast as the exclusive bargaining representative for all members of the longshoremen’s union, improved grievance arid collective bargaining procedures, joint control of hiring. For this they gave up their fight against labor-saving devices like the jitney or power-pulled, four-wheel carts. There was more to it, but that’s it in a nutshell for now.

“The problem for seamen was that compared to the longshoremen the seamen were getting only the salt that comes from sweat. There were no more fink books, and we had our own halls in the Alaska Fishermen’s Building between Clay and Commercial streets, 150 feet from the Embarcadero. We felt we could make it so that those halls were the only places the employers could get crews. If they tried anything else, we’d shut their halls and throw scab crews off any ship they boarded. And that’s what we did, even though it took us about two more years.

“The government and the shipowners were smart. By offering the longshoremen official recognition, they began to cause a split between us. By comparison, Harry Lundeberg looked great in that period. For us to get anything like the longshoremen got, we were going to have to continue our fight, and the only way we could do that was to go outside the channels created by the government bureaucrats and the law itself. Lundeberg accepted that reality and was willing to lead the way we wanted him to, until after we won. (Then we went to living in the new channels the shipowners and government had dug for us.)
“We seamen were different from longshoremen, even though there were many ex-seamen among them. Compared to them, few of us had homes and families to care for. More important, we weren’t involved in regular politics, but we were radical in the kind of politics that grows out of the job. We live where we work, on one ship at a time out at sea. We brought the kind of politics ashore that you learn in dealing with the people topside. Up to the time of the strike we’d been taking it without the power to fight back openly and under full steam. Somewhere along the line in the years before the Big Strike we decided we weren’t going to live like that anymore. Shit! We surprised a lot of people; some of them didn’t even know we could read.

“Yes, back then Lundeberg had the guts and ability to do what was necessary according to the time, no matter the risks. Just like us. Christ, he didn’t even get his citizen papers until ‘34. Again, it was his willingness to lead the way we wanted him to lead that brought us the real excitement.

“As reports of the locations of ships with scab crews came in, guys taking their turns as dispatchers sent groups of us to the sites. We went up gangways with professional scabs waiting for us on the top landing. We weren’t tough guys. We were young, and we knew what we were doing was right.

“The ISU officials went crazy. They wanted to stop us as much as the shipowners did. Nothing we did was official until we won. We got rid of the ISU piecards [paid union officials]. Old Furuseth got voted down and, with tears running down his cheeks, left the meeting and our hall forever. We were glad to see him go because we knew it was necessary. Lundeberg became holder of the SUP'S top office, secretary-treasurer.

"No presidents in our union. The two or three unions on the West Coast before ours had some radical ideas, and then came the Industrial Workers of the World. The two of us paid dues to them until 1936.

"During the almost two years that we were fighting for our own hiring halls by job actions the Maritime Federation of the Pacific was being formed. Bridges and Lundeberg worked good together at first. It was going to be one big industrial union for us on this coast. But at the same time that we were throwing scabs off ships and stopping the ships, Bridges was beginning to discipline his guys if they did the same as us. In my opinion this is the main thing that brought bad blood between him and Lundeberg and broke up the federation.

"We got our 100 percent control over our own hiring halls put into writing in the contracts that ended the 1936 strike. At no time during the fight did the leadership of the longshoremen get in with us and go for 100 percent control their hiring. They got that indirectly in ’39, I think it was, when they won the right to elect their own job dispatchers. But still, you go into their hall right now and you'll see employer suits come in and look over the dispatchers' shoulders from time to time. Those Waterfront Employers' Association people wouldn't dare to come up the stairs in our hall. It's all ours.

"And I don't blame the regular working longshoremen. Study their situation long enough and you can understand the fix they're in. They have many of the same problems regular shoreside people have to contend with. They don't eat in cafes and live in cheap hotels. A lot of them sit down to meals with their families. Besides, the situation in our seamen's unions is just as bad, for a reason that is the same as in their unions and is the hardest to change: our unions are all led by bureaucrats.

"Now maybe you can see why we emphasize direct action. We know it's what you need in order to keep the new bureaucrats from taking the unions to their offices."

We'd listened all we could. At this point we didn't want to do anything but get off to ourselves and sort out for ourselves what the bosun had told us. We thanked him and Chips, set up a time for our next meeting, and left to go wash up for lunch, feeling somewhat guilty about Chips not getting to speak.

Talking It Over
The next morning John and I were both awake early. He noticed that Anthony was hard asleep and motioned that we get up and out of the fo’c’sle without any talk. The eight-to-twelve watchman with last relief below had just done his duty and made a fresh urn of coffee. I drew two cups and handed one to John. He didn’t want to sit in the messroom. I followed him out of the midship house. We sat, drank, and smoked. I waited for whatever it was that he obviously wanted to talk about.

“You know what the bosun said yesterday about the separation between us and officers?” He waited for my nod and went on. “I think that’s why Joseph Conrad’s books are usually centered on the life going on inside his characters. I’ve read only five of his books. But I didn’t get the feeling that there were a couple or three dozen people present on his ships. As I recall, most all of them were officers, and they were loners.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“I had never thought about it before last night. England being a country with colonies, the officers in British ships probably never got to sail in the fo’c’sle. They went to an officers’ school, and then when they got assigned to a ship, the unlicensed crews were from their colonies. Maybe it’s the separation. The bosun’s right, but what limited lives are led by both sides! On our ships the officers are at least from where we’re from in most cases, and they’re some kind of company, even if we can’t afford to get too familiar with them. There’s a sadness to all this. Red. Do you think I’m right about Conrad?”

“I’ve only read three books by him, but yes, I don’t remember anything about crew life. There was none of the life like on our ships, but maybe ours were more like theirs before real unions were organized. He was a genius in ways. I could feel the thick heat of the flat summer Red Sea in Lord Jim, and the feeling has stayed with me. He didn’t pull me back to read much more of his writing, though.”

“The same with me and also about his description of the Red Sea. To think of the labor of the ship’s screw trying to cut its way through that hot salt soup almost brings a sweat. Do you think he was saying that the alienation of life aboard ship caused a strange unhappiness that carried over into all his experiences?”

“That could be. It didn’t hit me then. I’d have to go back and read him again to say, and I’d probably read him differently now than I did on my first ship.”
“Yeah, that’s right. But listen, do you think we’ve got a chance to accomplish what these ’34 men have set out for us?”

“I don’t know, but I like trying.”

“Me too, Red. Don’t get me wrong, life’s been more interesting since we sailed with Bosun and Chips last year. But listen to me better. No matter what we try to do, we can only do it if the opportunities that make it possible have already developed. There would have to be more opportunities than there are right now.”

“You’re probably right, but there may be some big changes at the end of the war.”

“But that’s only a hope.”

“Right, but should you and I be doing something else?”

“No, but still you’re not listening. I could do much, much more, if I thought our chances of winning were really good. I think what we’re doing is right, and I don’t think it’s dumb. I’m talking about something entirely different, like I told you. People like us right here on this ship and on all the others, for example, can do big things to make life better, but to get into doing it full ahead, they have to see with their own eyes and no one else’s, growing evidence that there is a chance to win.”

“But what if things just get worse and worse and all we can see ahead is still fewer chances?”

“Good point. But that means we have to find better ways to talk to the people around us. What can we say to people that will make them feel better about themselves? Every buck they make is an honest one, yet they don’t give themselves any credit.”

“But every time the strike men talk to us you can see that the experiences they had gave them more self-respect than the people they were before the strikes.”
“Yeah, but that’s just what I’m talking about. Look how long it took them. What are the chances that another period of change for the good will arrive when the war is over?”

“Are you asking me?”

“No.”

“Then we had better get something to eat before we go on watch. You and Anthony are on deck with the bosun, I’ve got first wheel?”

“Right.”

John and I didn’t talk anymore to each other about the bosun and Chips’s presentation for about five days. We were too busy talking with the men of the other two watches who had heard the same lecture we did. Then there were the men of the Black Gang, including the deck engineer, who had had their class with Londos, the oiler, and the Stewards’ Department had sat down with the baker for a couple of hours.

We were trying to learn how different or alike our responses were to the ideas put before us, regardless of the departments we worked in. We lived on one ship but in three departments, which we had till then looked upon as separate units. Now we had all gotten essentially the same history lesson on nearly the same day. All at once we involved ourselves in individual and group discussions that crossed departmental lines. We had broken into open discovery of ourselves as a group and as individuals.

Up to that time we had been so focused on the accomplishments of the older generation that we could not see ourselves in our new world of work; we were invisible in its history. Then that all changed. The older men had given us their history not only to use as weaponry but also to show us that the world we had recently entered belonged to both the generations represented on board.
By the time we began the run for home from Brisbane, our last Australian port, the normal routine of shipboard social life had reestablished itself. There was a change from the first part of the trip: the constant interchange of members in the self-selected social groups of the unlicensed crew members. This was visible in the combinations that went ashore while in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane.

One night in Melbourne John, Anthony, and I of the twelve-to-four watch all returned to the ship separately but at about the same time. Anthony had bought himself a bottle of whiskey. He had it stuck in his belt still unopened. We shared it with him. Soon we were comparing impressions of the still-new mix of members of the deck, engine, and steward departments. We had each overheard conversations comparing the three departments, which was the best to sail in and the different relationships with officers in each.

The second meeting of what turned out to be a series of three classes led to leaving our student status behind. The instructors did a lot of listening. I talked with the bosun about it later when he had just come from a get-together with the baker and Londos, the oiler. They had been a little hurt when we briefly took the classes away from them after the first session. At first they had not understood, but then the baker had pulled them aside to talk about “the need for autonomy in us all.” The bosun ended by saying, “I think the baker’s been to college,” and broke out laughing.

Coming Home
Two days out of San Francisco I was working on deck close to where Matt, the deck engineer, was repairing the cylinder of a steam winch.

“Red, the young guys in that Deck Gang of yours are suffering from the worst case of ‘channel fever’ I’ve ever seen.”

He was talking about the extremely painful need of every crew member to get ashore near the end of a voyage. We all had it, regardless of department or age. I already knew from talks with Anthony and then Bruno and Bert that they couldn’t wait to get back among their families and close friends to reveal what they felt were their new strengths and selves. They were expressing feelings shared by all of us, including the men who had spent lifetimes making sea voyages. Each homecoming to families or friends in some way provided another chance at a better life.

The Farallons were now at our stern. We went under the Golden Gate Bridge and just after lunch came into sight of one of the main landmarks for Bay navigation, the Campanile on the University of California in Berkeley. By three o’clock we were moored north of the Ferry Building on the southside of Embarcadero Pier 23. The longshore linesmen who had helped us tie up were walking down the pier away from us, still wondering why we had given them such a big greeting. As soon as the cargo gear was rigged, we all went ashore, cleaned up for eating at such places as Tadich’s Grill or the Tivoli, New Joe’s, and Big Ben’s Fish Grotto in nearby North Beach.

We were all back aboard two days later at two o’clock sharp. A strange silence came over us. It was more than just the knowledge that we would soon be visited by a Coast Guard team and then have to say our “so longs.” We were no longer interdependent on a ship at sea. Many of us would see each other again in the union hiring hall, and some of us might again sail together so we would have the witnesses that help preserve memory.

Yet we were breaking up a winning combination. In some ways it would have been better if we had all stayed with the ship and for a while longer remained a steady crew. But seamen’s jobs were plentiful during the war. Until the war once seamen got jobs, many of them made homes aboard particular ships to obtain security. This often required demeaning concessions to shipboard authorities. The seamen who avoided this trap felt revulsion for the victims, although they understood why it occurred. In times of full employment, to “homestead” brought ridicule and isolation.

The opportunity to demonstrate our collective independence from the shipowners and their officers was irresistible. It meant that they had to go to the trouble of getting another crew and developing working relationships with all of its members. It also meant that for a time we would be ashore free of their authority.

Two Coast Guard petty officers walked down the dock and up our gangway an hour before payoff time. We were all at the rail, expressionless, but stared at them until they disappeared into the officers’ dining room. Their refusal to glance in our direction indicated their discomfort. Fifteen minutes later they went down the gangway and to their government car under the same tension. An hour later the shipping commissioner had us sign off the ship’s articles. All hands were then paid off in full. For reasons we would never really know the captain had not reported our work stoppage, and the chief mate had not disputed payment of a single hour of the overtime hours we had worked. The two of them stood side by side to say their goodbyes to us with toothy smiles.
Less than three minutes after we left the Officers’ Dining Salon we made our “suitcase parade” down the gangway and along the dock to the Pier 23 Inn on the Embarcadero. There was no longer any reason to have a meeting of the group we had formed in case any of us were cited by the Coast Guard. There were no ships at the adjoining piers, and longshore gangs had not yet been assigned to the Hanapepe. The entire barroom was ours. We had decided beforehand that we would not order any drinks until after the three speeches we had decided upon were ended. The bosun went first.

“Remember that the job ahead is to make it possible for us union members who are working seamen to protect ourselves from both the shipowners and the union officials. We have to have unions, but not like we’ve got now. That can’t be done if the only place where we can go to participate in the power life of the union is the local union meeting. The union halls are on their turf. Up on these ships is where we have the foundation for authority over them. If we establish that, then we can take our power to the meetings with us. Even better if we choose the place to meet, like at a central pier. Our goal has to be to win respect. The goal of our officials has become to win respectability, uptown.”
Londos was next. I introduced him as Oiler—of bearings on “three legged” engines.6

“I was a seaman for the old country. We held a meeting of the crew. They accused us of mutiny. I had to leave my country and family.”

I introduced the night cook and baker as Gabriel Cade, as he had requested.
“On this ship we have eliminated a corruption, at least for a time. I am proud to be part of that, but it is not enough. The kind of contracts that are being signed have built a different kind of union that can’t be ours. By design it eliminates our control.”

It was time to wrap it all up. We all began drinking to one another, this time with fairly good whiskey instead of coffee from Oakland’s Dock Cafe. The thoughtful frowns after Cade’s speech were gone.

Minutes later I was standing between Bruno and Bert facing out into the large room. I could see Big John and the baker toasting three of the seven Navy Armed Guard sailors who had come in. They hadn’t felt free to talk with us since we had entered home port. Now they took the chance because we no longer had any official attachment to the Hanapepe. There was a group around Londos listening, at that point, to one of the wipers. It was beginning to get dark outside and booze was becoming a substitute for food as the discussion groups got smaller. The bosun and the baker had moved to one side, and the baker was calling the bosun “Hector.”

Someone noticed that the street lights had come on. The fast drinking ceased. Personal goodbyes were in progress. Big John was filling a third taxicab with our guys and their gear. The bosun was with him telling a group that no ship ever came into port cleaner or more shipshape. Minutes later Chips got the bosun into a booth and pushed John and me in with him. Then Anthony arrived to reprimand us.

“Hey, you guys have been saying goodbyes with only a ‘so long’ and that’s it. How do you know if you’ll ever see any of us again?”

“It all stays with you longer when you don’t talk it out, Anthony.”

Anthony took about three steps back and with Bruno and Bert said “so long,” and they left.

Chips opened our discussion. “Blackie and I aren’t going to get another ship for a while, maybe three months or so. We have a woman friend who is a doctor in East Los Angeles. She runs a small clinic. We’re going to let her give us a 90,000-mile checkup. We’ll do some repairs on her place and use it as a ‘snug harbor’ for a while.”

“Chips, you know we have to get a ship within a month.”

“Yeah, John. So when you guys get back from your next trip, check the Toscani or the Galileo Hotel in North Beach.”

“When you talked us into taking that ship, you told us you were building something for the long-term. We may not be able to get a couple of ’34 men to crew with us.”

“Then do it by yourselves whatever way you can, but do it, long-term.”
“How much longer have we got?”

“Who can say, Red? There may come a time when the smart thing to do will be to lay low for a while to prepare for the next chance. You’ll know if it comes to that. For maybe another year it will be possible to pull off these kinds of actions, longer if the breaks come our way. You’ll do it differently than when we’re with you. Maybe you’ll find better ways. But listen, before we all pile out of here there’s something else “

“What?”

“Cape Verde Islands. I saw both of you go a little pop-eyed when I mentioned my home. It means that I’m Portuguese by culture, but by blood I’m part African. Ten years ago when we were building new unions on the waterfronts up and down this coast, the regular guys got more open-minded on a lot of things. Like so many others, I didn’t grab the opportunity of that time. I suppose many of the men I sailed and walked picket lines with figured I was a Mexican because of my straight hair. I let it slide. My name isn’t Soromengo, it’s Soromenho—Portuguese, not Spanish.

“That’s enough about that. Another thing: The piecards took the hiring hall away from us by putting goons like ‘Johnny Loudmouth’ in control of job dispatching. His specialty is to intimidate the guys up in age. It’s a way of destroying memory. We don’t write our history. Those guys are it.

“Notice that more and more the union leaves the job when the patrolman goes down the gangway, if indeed it came aboard with him. At union meetings our job is to sit and listen. But as long as we take control like we did on this one, even if only briefly on one ship in twenty, we keep them from having it all. The word’s out that Lundeberg is beginning to hang out with Republicans, for god’s sake. Enough, we have to get out of here. Be careful. Red, be careful, John.”
“Hold it, Chips, you too, Bosun, John and I are going to tell you a couple of things that have been on our minds. When John and I first came into the SUP, it was like getting a new look at what our lives could be. Before the war neither of us were ever able to talk back to a boss without getting fired. We both still carry this around with us. We can see the strength that comes from job action, but it’s hard to give up on Lundeberg completely. And it’s the same for some of the longshoremen who are critical of Bridges.”

“That’s right.” John was chuckling to cover his tension. “Me and Red didn’t ourselves live those times before the war. We’ve lived them through you. Since we first got into the union is the best job security we’ve ever known. Maybe when the war is over, guys like Lundeberg will get better again.”

Chips was pulling on Blackie’s coat so hard that he slid him out of the booth and on to his feet. “All right, both of you, test what I’m saying goodbye to you with. Bureaucrats can never undo what’s happened to them. They can’t go back to being who they were. The reason bureaucracies get built is to avoid making the good fight. This changes everything about them. You don’t have the same job protection now as when you first joined, and you now have full membership books in the union, not trip cards or probationary books. What do you think it means that the union doesn’t provide representation when its members get called in by the Coast Guard? The Coast Guard’s supposed to protect us from subversives, saboteurs. Bullshit! Actually, they’re the government’s trial run at a labor police force. The National Maritime Union has given them an office right in the headquarters’ union hall in New York, and there’s no campaign against them by the leadership of our West Coast unions. Double bullshit!”

Chips Costello and Hector Soromenho looked at us and saw that finally we were ready to break it up, too. They came toward John and me with good smiles. We all knew we couldn’t do any more by talking. We shook hands, and they were out the door. We waited long enough for them to get a cab and then went out to get one for ourselves.

The Oakland General Strike
John and I missed the support and ideas that were ever present when Chips and the bosun were close at hand. At the same time we were glad for our independence from them.

Never again did we get so good a chance at winning as the one they found for us by preliminary exploration of several ships and then the discovery of the Hanapepe. Nevertheless, John and I helped to seed changes that improved the lives of crews, ourselves among them, on several more ships. These modest victories became harder to achieve as the war got older.

We never did get into more than what at the time seemed only a little trouble. Only when John and I were not sailing partners did I wind up appearing at Coast Guard tribunals. There was the time I was temporarily taken off my ship by Scotland Yard and British Naval Intelligence just before the ship went through the locks at Liverpool. Another time came when our crew on a coffee ship mustered to be silently stared at by twelve Americans in civilian clothes while at anchor on the Panama City side of the Panama Canal. But charges were never pressed against anyone in the crews. Nor were my seaman’s papers or the papers of any of my crew mates ever confiscated.

A little over a year after we left the Hanapepe, Chips wrote us that the bosun had died of cancer. He said our letters had given them big kicks, made them proud. Chips was at home in Azusa, California, and said his seagoing toolbox had gotten a lot heavier. He had a new ’34 partner. Henry Woods, a Native American from Sutter’s Mill. Chips did not write again, and there were no return addresses on the two letters he sent us.

In late 1945 John and I began sailing up and down the coast on the steam schooners that brought lumber from the Northwest to build the new cities that came with the Gold Rush. On our first trip to Coos Bay, Oregon, the Empire Mill quit sending out wood. We deckhands were the longshoremen. The mate ordered all hands to chip rust and paint the ship’s side because there was no lumber. We all went to Empire’s one bar and stayed there for three hours until the mate apologized and canceled his “request.” John and I did not lead the action. We were greenhorns on the schooners.

It was the end of the schooners’ long lives. War surplus LST boats with a single 300-foot open hatch forward of the superstructure on the stern allowed stowage by bundles instead of by the piece, the first step toward automation on the West Coast.

John went home after a schooner run to Central America for a load of rare wood. The talk we had before he left revealed we both wanted to quit going to sea for a while. The main reason? The restrictions that life at sea put on our social lives. We were each beginning our serious search for a wife.

I moved from an apartment in San Francisco’s North Beach to a duplex near the Southern Pacific tracks in West Berkeley and got a job at the Chevrolet assembly plant in East Oakland. During my first months working there I used public transportation. A bus and a streetcar took me to downtown Oakland, where I would transfer to the Oakland bus that would drop me in front of the plant at 73rd Avenue and Foothill Boulevard.

Morale in this industrial area of the city was high during the strike wave in spring 1946. Then it became clear that Walter Reuther, vice president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), had not been serious about his “GM Program,” with its slogans of “wage increases and no price increases” and “open the corporation’s books and prove you can’t afford to pay us a decent wage.” Life in the plant became boring as well as hard. I had become an assembly line spray painter and active in Local 76, UAW. We had to get to work at least half an hour before the line started at 7:12 A.M., earlier if we wanted to get the pushcart man with his donuts and coffee.

One Monday morning I arrived downtown on the streetcar, and our motorman and conductor got off. They were standing in the still-dark street talking to other car men, local bus drivers, the drivers of big trucks, and San Francisco Bridge trainmen. I got down off the streetcar with several other passengers to figure out what was happening.

It was unbelievable. The Oakland police had been escorting scabs and merchandise into Oakland for delivery at Kahns and Hastings, the two department stores where retail clerks had been on strike for many weeks. The union drivers of streetcars, buses, and trucks refused to watch two strikes being broken. By stranding thousands of work-bound people in the heart of the city, they had called the Oakland general strike. It was December 2,1946. No officials had announced or were leading it. It was just that we were all unable to get to work.

Our block began to organize within the next hour. The same was happening in other blocks we could see across Telegraph Avenue. Bars could stay open if they served only beer and turned up their jukeboxes. The prescription counters inside drugstores were open. Hamburger stands and coffee shops would remain open, but large restaurants were encouraged to close. Dancing in the streets started slowly because there were more men than women standing around. It was in full swing a short while later as women convinced the men that they knew how to dance.

By nine o’clock there were still no union leaders in sight. We were laughing about a comment from somewhere in the crowd on the sidewalk: “If some of you don’t get serious, some of them are going to come and get us.” I called Harry Lundeberg from a pay phone and told him what was happening. Within an hour a carload of Hawaiian SUP members found me said “Hello Red Weir,” and gave me a paper bag with several hundred large buttons that read “SIU-SUP Brotherhood of the Sea.” They drove off laughing. I knew only one of them and never saw any of them again. The buttons were gone in minutes, used on hats as decorations and as badges of authority when downtown was cordoned off before noon. Anyone could leave town, but an active union card was needed to get in.

Later in the day I saw a Chevy worker called “Cousin Bill,” an ex-SUP friend. He said he was going to sleep downtown and had already found a place. I told Bill I would go to work the next morning because our plant would probably be shut down, and a lot of us could then come back downtown. At 7:12 A.M. I was spray painting hoods and fenders again. No committeeman came near our department or, I later found out, any other. Nor did our Local 76 president make contact with the plant.

I was back in downtown Oakland by 5:00 P.M. Word was out that the officials of several unions planned to put out a strike call and that there might be a mass meeting that night at the Oakland Auditorium. Laughter spread with receipt of the news. No one had yet seen any of the official leaders. Their absence no longer created uneasiness. At the same time everyone was planning to attend the meeting.

Some of us bought tacos from a street vendor that we ate as we walked toward the meeting. We arrived to find the Oakland Auditorium surrounded by thousands of strikers. All the seats inside had been filled for over an hour. A public address system piped the speeches being made out to the crowd surrounding the auditorium.

All but one of the speakers had trouble addressing the audience. Harry Lundeberg alone spoke with the anger and boldness befitting a general strike. He called the city councilmen “super finks,” who had ordered the use of the city police as “scab herders.” In a heavy Norwegian accent he said they had been “taking lessons from Stalin and Hitler.” Lundeberg ended by promising that the three ships at the army base would not get crews to sail them while the strike was on. (He didn’t mention that longshoremen in the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union had walked off those ships the night before only to find that their union immediately sent new gangs to replace them.)

But none of the officials, including Lundeberg, had any plan of action that would use the power of the general strike to improve the conditions of employment of the people represented in the audience or to win the long strike of the women at the Kahns and Hastings department stores.

The mass meeting was adjourned, and the strikers left without instructions for protecting themselves and their occupation of Oakland’s core area. The radio commentator Gabriel Heater had said twenty-four hours earlier, “Well, Oakland’s a ghost town tonight.” We knew that all official authority wanted us to quit the downtown area. If union officers had honestly offered to lead us, they would have lost their bit of sovereignty in their “working relationship with the employers.” But they knew that if they did not lead us, they would lose our respect. Because of their dilemma, they did not tell us either to leave or to stay.

Ideas about what to do passed among us. The process was at work during the walk back to our midtown blocks. Some would spend the night, and others would relieve them the following morning on Wednesday, the third day of the strike.

Puzzlement was the condition of the people downtown on Wednesday. The number of strikers was down. There was nothing real to do. The fun of Monday was gone. The 300 bus and streetcar men wearing their Eisenhower jackets as work uniforms who had marched on city hall in close-order drill, demanding to speak with the mayor, were still present but as individuals.7

Somewhere the union officials were meeting with the employers and city government. Representatives from several blocks regularly went to Kahns and Hastings department stores throughout the day to talk with the striking retail clerks. The clerks were still being told that they had to be patient.
Late Thursday morning a sound truck hired by the AFL Central Labor Council of Oakland drove up and down our blocks telling everyone to go back to work. “The strike is officially over,” it blared. We heard that Oakland’s city council and mayor had agreed that there would be no more scab herding by the Oakland police. There was an agreement to arbitrate the differences in the retail clerks’ long strike.

I got to Kahns early that evening. The picket line was still going. Demonstrators, many truck drivers among them, continued to march with the betrayed women. I was told that many of the women wept at the morning’s announcement. I listened to one woman while she sat on a folding chair to put on clean sweat socks and air her white tennis shoes. She told a handful of us nonclerks that if the unions’ leaders couldn’t get a good contract for them with a general strike, then what they had gotten to end the strike wasn’t any good either. There were almost a dozen clerks, standing nearby, who nodded their heads before she finished.

The woman with the white tennis shoes was right. She, her friends, and all the other retail clerks of Local 1265 had to stay out another five months, until May 13, 1947. Even then they did not win but went back out of exhaustion and demoralization. The contract negotiated for them had a grievance procedure so weak that it was useless. The AFL officials of Oakland, Alameda County, and the entire Bay Area were embarrassed by their failure in the retail clerks’ strike.
Looking back, I must also note that at no point during the strike did any of us downtown Oakland strikers—radical politicals included—climb up on a parked car and express the ideas that were already kicking around among us: “We can lead this strike ourselves.” “Let’s send out a dozen committees from one block to the other blocks to say this out in the open.” “Our leadership will be the representative committees from every central downtown block.” “Their meetings will be out in the open for all of us to see and hear, and clap or boo, as we agree or disagree in reaction to their ideas.”

Eighteen years later, students at the University of California at Berkeley embraced versions of these ideas adapted to their time and circumstances. Mario Savio, who became the best-known of the student leaders, was part of the crowd that held captive a police car containing a student under arrest, Jack Weinberg. When Savio jumped up onto the car’s roof and called for a strike organization independent of absent student body officers, the free speech movement was born. It spread to campuses across the nation and remains an inspiration for initiatives from below.

The shame of the CIO unions was just as great. Not long after the general strike I was an elected delegate from UAW Local 76 to the state CIO convention in Santa Cruz. On the last day of the gathering I took the floor and identified myself by name and local union, explaining that the Chevrolet-Fisher Body units of my local represented the largest single group of industrial workers in the East Bay, over 3,000 persons. There was also a Ford assembly plant in Richmond, an International Harvester plant in Emeryville, and many more, none of them over a half-hour drive from downtown Oakland.

 

I asked, “Where were you during the Oakland general strike?” There was a quick silence. Chairperson Dick Linden recognized Paul Schlipf, secretary of the state CIO and director of its Political Action Committee. Schlipf, who was a delegate from the Fisher Body section of Local 76, answered, “It wasn’t a general strike. We weren’t in it.” Dave Jenkins, the majority whip, gave the signal, and there was applause. Linden hit the podium with his gavel to close discussion and go to the next matter on the agenda.

The union bureaucracies have put a good deal of effort into writing about the Oakland general strike. Time has been on their side. The rank and file of their unions do not often write books. Students and professors have difficulty finding rank-and-file participants in the strike and tend to rely on union officials and people to whom the officials direct them.

Paul Schlipf himself has written about the strike.8 He stresses the Oakland Voters’ League formed by the AFL and CIO in the immediate post-strike period. He states correctly that four out of five labor candidates of the League were elected to the nine-member Oakland City Council. What he does not say is that the successful candidates were no more bold or effective in community politics than the union officials who selected them had been as strike leaders and collective bargainers.

Union officials seek to hide the evidence of the intelligence, organizational skills, and solidarity shown by regular hourly working people in the Oakland general strike. The officials of business unions find it necessary to believe that their members are meek at heart and incapable of thinking through anything other than simple problems. This belief justifies union representatives when they lie to and manipulate the members who pay their bills.

One of the most bitter aspects of this mythmaking is to be found in the claim that the Oakland general strike began not on December 2,1946, the Monday morning when all transportation halted without instruction from union officials, but on December 3. In 1991 the Labor Studies Program of Laney College in Oakland held a celebration of the 1946 Oakland general strike. A proclamation by Oakland’s Mayor Elihu M. Harris on that occasion declared that the strike took place “from December 3 to 5,1946” and was “called by the American Federation of Labor Central Labor Council,” with support from other organizations, including the CIO.

Unions with Leaders Who Stay on the Job
I phoned Big John a few weeks after the Oakland general strike ended. He was thinking of moving to Florida for a job painting bridges. No one I ever knew was better working high in the air. I told him some of my thoughts about the strike, and the discussion that followed took us back to the SS Hanapepe. We recalled that the bosun, Chips, and the baker blamed union officials themselves for becoming bureaucrats. But now, because of what we were seeing on jobs ashore, John and I were starting to blame the vertical form of union structure the AFL and CIO introduced. Rank-and-file workers like us were electing union officials who were then taken out of the workplace and put in offices where they had little contact with us. They were more often around employers, government bureaucrats, and lawyers. John told me it was the same or worse in the building trades.

 

Big John is now dead. I never got to tell him what I learned from the historian Lorin Lee Cary: that in 1936 General Motors rank and filers wanted to build a semiautonomous stewards’ council and then got pressured out of it by Adolph Germer, John L. Lewis’s lieutenant in the UAW.9 The papers Germer left to the Wisconsin State Historical Society show that the new CIO leaders fought all rank-and-file attempts to build new industrial unions on a horizontal rather than the old vertical model, in which local unions had to go to top officials for permission even on many routine matters.

John and I knew differently. We experienced it on the SS Hanapepe in 1943 and on several more ships during the next three years. I experienced it again in the Oakland general strike; again in 1982, when I attended the Sixth Congress of the rebel European Harbor Workers in Aarhus Denmark, and encountered the Spanish longshoremen’s new union, La Coordmadora;10 and yet again in the formation of rank-and-file “coordinations” during the Air France strike of 1993 by union and nonunion workers acting together.11 There can be unions run by regular working people on the job. There have to be.

There have to be unions with leaders who stay on the job because the scandal of the Oakland general strike has been repeated too many times. Union members use their power to develop a victory over employers, but union officials refuse to accept or act on the victory. Instead, they give away what was never theirs. Once in office full-time, officials are no longer a living part of the industry.

There have to be unions run by hourly-paid people on the job because Hector Soromenho and Chips Costello were right in believing that union bureaucrats cannot go back. Top union officers build cliques among their members and keep themselves in office by means of favors. They give concessions to employers and get help from the corporations in return. They build first-name relationships with politicians. All bridges are thus burned. Any attempt at reform by the head of a bureaucratic union organization would be seen as a betrayal by his or her supporters inside and outside the union.

The isolated individuals at the top of union bureaucracies are attracted by the kind of personal peace to be bought by making deals. The deals are made in places where union members cannot go.

My own difficulty in accepting what the bosun said about union bureaucracy spotlights the problem. I and others had the advantage of a special education from older peers. Yet when I was stranded in downtown Oakland as the general strike began, my first thought was to get it an official leader. I phoned Harry Lundeberg and asked him to become involved. It may be that I was not the first one to call him, but excuses are beside the point. I made the call, risking possible injury to the strike, because I feared that “leaderless workers” downtown that early morning might be unable to handle the strike by themselves. Experience proved otherwise. It is true that Lundeberg was the only leader with a ready rhetoric and the courage to use it standing before a crowd. But the result of his appearance was to leave the audience with the impression that at least there was someone among the officials capable of leading.

It was while watching the behavior of leaders of the California State CIO at the Santa Cruz convention shortly after the Oakland general strike that I found myself wanting to go to a phone and arrange a reunion of the crew of the SS Hanapepe at Pier 23 Inn. Blackie and Chips had explained why bureaucrats can’t possibly clean up their bureaucracies. Unfortunately I had been unable to learn the lesson from them. A return to classrooms aboard ship would do no good. There was no point in hearing the instruction again. I had to learn this most important of the lessons Blackie and Chips taught us from my own experience.

END NOTES

 

1 Bosun is a commonly used contraction of boatswain. On West Coast ships of the common 4,000- to 10,000-ton class before the containerization (automation) of the 1970s, the bosun supervised all maintenance and repair work done on the main deck and above, with the exception of work on the cargo winches, which was done by a nonlicenced crew member called a deck engineer. After the Big Strike of 1934 the bosuns no longer had full supervisory powers buy instead were “first among equals” because they then got their jobs out of hiring halls owned and controlled by the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP).

 

2 A ship’s carpenter is seldom referred to by any other name than “Chips.” Other than carpentry, his duties were to care for and operate the anchor windlass and to take the soundings in the ballast tanks. On liberty ships and other standard freight ships, the chips and the bosun shared the same room, or fo’c’sle. Neither of these men stood watches as the regular seamen did. They were often the older men of the Deck Gang.

Able bodied seamen (ABs) in the 1930s and the 1940s carried either a blue AB certificate that required one year of seatime or a green certificate requiring three years of seatime. Additional certification of efficiency in the handling of lifeboats was also required.

Ordinary seamen, called “ordinaries,” are seamen who have less than the required seatime needed to get AB papers. With the ABs they stand sea watches for eight hours, four hours at a time twice in every twenty-four hour period on one of the three watches; eight to twelve, twelve to four, and four to eight, A.M. and P.M. From the ABs and the bosun, the ordinaries learn deck duties, ship routine, how to steer a ship, and how to stand lookout. Those hands not at the wheel during daylight watches work on deck with the bosun. Ordinary seaman is an official rating listed on seamen’s paper, like the others mentioned here.

3 Almost 2 million (1,981,279) workers struck in 1943. In 1942, the first full year of the war, 2.8 percent of the nation’s labor force became strikers. In 1945 the figure climbed to 12.2 percent. “Work Stoppages Caused by Labor Management Disputes in 1945,” Monthly Labor Review (May 1945), 720, cited
in Martin Glaberman, Wartime Strikes (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1980), 36.

4 “The hazards of sailing the merchant fleet were not so great in 1944 as in former years, because of better protection afforded convoys. The 1944 losses in personnel [brought] the total number to 725 killed, 4592 missing and 581prisoners of war. Despite the lower rate of losses and a greater number of men, the ratio of casualties was 1 in 33, a rate proportionately higher than the armed services.” Vice Admiral Howard L. Vickery, vice chairman, U.S. Maritime Commission, “The Merchant Marine in the War in 1944,” Proceedings of the American Merchant Marine Conference, vol. 1 (New York: U.S. Propeller Club,
1945), 18-20.

5 The chief mate is the mate from four to eight A.M. and in the P.M. The chief mate is the executive officer right behind the captain and oversees the deck crew’s work.

6 Reciprocating steam engines with three pistons.

7 For more on the march to city hall and the general strike, see Stan Weir,“The Informal Work Group,” in Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers, ed. Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd (Boston: Beacon,1973), 193-94.

8 Paul Schlipf, “Building the UAW and the CIO in Oakland: An Activist Remembers, 1933-1950,” New Labor Review, no. 5 (Spring 1983), 139-40.

9 Lorin Lee Cary, “Institutionalized Conservatism in the Early C.I.O.: Adolph Germer, a Case Study,” Labor History 13 (Fall 1972), 493, 495. According to Sidney Fine, it was suggested just before the UAW convention in April-May 1936 “that delegates from the GM plants should caucus and consider the establishment of a GM council, made up of representatives of the various GM locals, to present a united front to the organization.” Fine concurs that it was on Germer’s advice that GM delegates at the convention took no action on a resolution calling for the formation of a GM council. Sidney Fine, Sitdown: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937 (Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 1969), 92, citing Germer Diary, April 28,1936.

10 See Stan Weir, “Rank and File Networks: A Way to Fight Concessions, Labor Notes 48 (January 27, 1983), 13; Stan Weir, “Spanish Waterfront Workers Are Building a New Type of Union,” Labor Notes 77 (July 1985), 5; Stan Weir, “Introduction to La Coordinadora,” Radical America 22 (January-February 1988), 53-55; and Don Fitz, “La Coordinadora: A Union without Bureaucrats,” in Within the Shell of the Old, ed. Don Fitz and David Roediger (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990), 88-96. La Coordinadora operates out of a building a few blocks from the Barcelona hiring hall. It has 8,000 members, representing 80 percent of the nation’s longshoreworkers. Local delegados and national officers work on the docks and make the same pay as other longshoreworkers. There are only two full-time union staff people, who are
not officers, have no other function than answering letters, and receive longshoreworkers’ wages. Decisions are made by periodic assemblies, which can be attended by any member and at which any member can vote. Each local union is autonomous. “The only way a national port strike can occur is for each autonomous union to recognize that a threat to another port is a threat to itself.” Fitz, “La Coordinadora,” 93-94.

11 David Bucah, “France Grass Roots Shake the Union Tree,” Financial Times (London), October 30, 1993, 3.

2. Informal Work Groups

Informal Work Groups

 

Introduction by Staughton Lynd

 

During more than twenty years as an industrial worker, unionist, and organizer among seamen, auto workers, teamsters and construction workers, Stan Weir became impressed by the importance of informal work groups. The informal or primary work group is:

<<that team which works together daily in face-to-face communication with one another, placed by technology and pushed into socialization by the needs of production. It is literally a family at work torn by hate and love, conflict and common interest. It disciplines its members most commonly by social isolation and ridicule, it has a naturally selected leadership, makes decisions in the immediate work area, and can affect the flow of production.>>

Searching industrial relations libraries, Weir found much literature on primary work groups but only one study that was partisan to workers (Loren Baritz, Servants of Power), and he learned for the first time of the Hawthorne experiments. Weir sees the informal work group as the only organizational form opposed to formal bureaucracies which cannot be captured by them.

This account does not present the cumulative life experience of Stan Weir, being highly condensed and ending in 1956. In the late 1950s, Weir went back into maritime as a San Francisco Bay Area longshoreman. Together with a thousand others hired in 1959, he was part of a new class of registered longshoremen called B-men. B-men paid a special form of dues but were not permitted membership in the union and were allowed only the work that was left over after the union members or A-men took the work that they wanted. As one of the elected leaders of the B-men, Weir became involved in a sharp and protracted dispute with the leadership of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) headed by the union's president, Harry Bridges.

After four years of agitation and after a large number of A-men had retired, the union and the employers decided to take the 1959 B-men into what almost amounted to full membership. All were investigated and all were promoted but a group of eighty-two which contained those who had taken the lead in criticizing Bridges' policies affecting the B-men. The eighty-two, Weir among them, were fired after a secret trial which was opposed by the local union. Accusations against them involved late payment of dues for which they had paid fines, and chiseling in accepting work assignments out of turn. Ten years later a number of those who were deregistered were still attempting to get a hearing and reinstatement to their jobs via the courts.

Stan Weir is at present an instructor at the University of Illinois. He has written several influential essays based on his experience, including "USA—the Labor Revolt," first published in the International Socialist Journal (Rome, Italy), April and June 1967 (reprinted in American Society, Inc., Maurice Zeitlin, ed., 1970, and in American Labor Radicalism, Staughton Lynd, ed., 1973); and "Class Forces in the 1970's," Radical America, May-June 1972. His articles on longshore have appeared in New Politics. There are substantial similarities in the life events of Stan Weir and Harvey Swados' fictional character Joe Link in Standing Fast.

[The above was written by Staughton Lynd as an introduction to the following article in the book he edited called Rank and File: Personal Histories of Working-Class Organizers (Beacon Press, 1973)]

 

The Informal Work Group

By Stan Weir

 

The whole early part of my life was dominated by the idea that solutions to all that's wrong lie in individual morality. But my life experience, like that of most people, sent me messages which constantly contradicted this idea. I came to have a different idea, that you had to have a cause that was bigger than you because that was the only real freedom—living at one with a total society rather than just for oneself. It's impossible to know precisely where one gets that idea, but I came to know that the corruption of individual humans is the result of corrupt and outdated institutions.

My grandmother was a scrubwoman in office buildings in downtown Los Angeles. My mother quit high school in the tenth grade and became an apprentice dressmaker at fifty cents a week. She met my father when she was working at the Post Office. A year later they married and I was born a year after that, in 1921, the year that women got the vote.

I didn't know my father. That marriage lasted five months after my birth. Both my great grandfather and grandfather died in the early '20s. That left me with a family that was female-dominated. My uncle was an important member of our household but due to the Depression, his unemployment and resulting alcoholism, he was constantly held up as an example of what not to be. My block in East Los Angeles was made up of close and long-time neighbors. They worked hard. They were poor, generous, warm and at the same time petty and suspicious of anyone not like themselves; that is, not of English, Scotch, Irish, or German stock. Most of all they wanted the happiness they felt could come from obtaining "a steady job." When two Armenian families moved in at the bottom of the block there was a temporary but noticeable resistance. Real socialization and integration did not materialize. In 1944, a freeway cut through and made the separation of the lower part of the block permanent.

All through school there were not more than three teachers who related to me on my own terms—really only one, a young Armenian substitute teacher. I was to give one of the speeches at the graduation ceremony from junior high school. My speech was called, "Our Flag, the Star Spangled Banner." In rehearsal, I walked up onto the stage to give the speech in a very sloppy manner. The teacher in charge of the ceremony had a fit of anger and in front of everybody told me off and said, "If ever I see you walk up there like that again, that's the end. You're not going to give the speech."

One of the big tough ball players on the team that I played second base on came to me at noontime and said, "Mr. Dingilian was talking about you. He said you did that because you didn't want to lose touch with us regular guys."

In the first year of high school I completely stopped attempting to participate in official school activities that were connected with the administrative establishment. I began to see that they were part of a system of favoritism and I was one of the beneficiaries of that system. However, I was opposing it individually, without organization, not effectively. I can remember I cut school one day, left the school grounds in my '29 Model A Ford with five others. We drove to the beach and spent a great day body surfing. The next morning I had to face up to the fact that I had been seen ditching. I walked in to get my demerits with everyone else and I was told by the registrar to report immediately to the vice principal's office. The vice principal explained to me that he couldn't give me, one of the leaders in the school, demerits like anyone else. That was impossible. "Just watch your step and don't get caught like that again. Get back in class." That had a great deal to do with opening my eyes.

Out of 323 seniors graduating in February 1940, the same man (who thought he was doing us a great favor) invited the five boys who were known to be going on to college to his house for dinner. He explained to us how to get a commission in the Armed Forces when the U. S. finally got into the war. He told how he had gotten a commission in the Army as a young man in World War I and how we could do the same, that we should not get caught being privates in the Army. He told us how to work the angles through Congressmen.

It was very oppressive for us to know that the war was going on in Europe. I think this is one of the reasons why we threw ourselves into the "swing era" so hard. That was a big part of my life. Dancing and listening to the swingbands, and the security of the group that was doing it, was a way of putting behind the thought of that oncoming war. We all knew one another and all the males wore suits that were at least slightly zoot.

I always thought in grammar school that it would be different in junior high—we'd start learning the truth. In junior high I thought it would be in high school. And in high school I thought it would be in college. I went to Los Angeles Junior College in February1940, and it appeared to me that that was finally going to be so. I had a professor of English named Richard Lillard. He was a liberal from the John Dewey tradition and he provided an analysis of society and the world around us that made sense to me. It was
liberating and I listened hard to every word he spoke. But toward the end of the semester I asked him, "This is all fine but where does one go to put into practice these ideas?"

The following semester I went to UCLA. I was in the Westgard Co-op. It was a co-op eating group. I was introduced to it by a friend of mine I had gone to high school with named John Slevin. He was a Molokan, a member of a fundamentalist Christian pacifist sect from the Ukraine near Armenia. His pacifism hadn't had a great effect on me until the war got very close. Then it became apparent that he was going to be a conscientious objector. He was in conscientious objector camps for four years and he led a strike as a CO. That made him a felon and for life he has literally been blackballed out
of any career because of it—and he is a great human. I didn't finish my third semester at college. I could see no point in it. I had had a philosophy course in which the professor effectively tore down what he called the metaphysical temple and philosophically destroyed any basis for my belief in God, and I went with Professor Piatt every step of the way. But he had nothing to supplant it with. At this point I was developing a lot of cynicism about the world around me. I was despairing about ever finding a way to pursue a good life.

I seriously considered being a CO myself and I went and talked to Richard Lillard about it. He said, "Well, there's just one thing about being a conscientious objector. With your particular bent, your personality, it seems to me that you would like to live the social experience of your generation. And if you become a CO you won't, not directly." I wanted to find a way to do that without at the same time becoming a victim of the discipline in the Armed Services. It appeared to me that while the risk to life was greater on merchant ships during the war, if I became a merchant seaman I could then get the best of both worlds.

I became an apprentice seaman in the Merchant Marine. I was then accepted as a U. S. Merchant Marine cadet and midshipman in the Naval Reserve, went into training, and went out on a merchant ship as a deck cadet. Living with the officers topside, I saw that this was an aristocracy. The contempt that the officers had for the men in the foc'sle (forecastle) was a fact of life. The first day on that ship I appeared on the boat deck with my midshipman's uniform on. The deckhands looked up at me and I saw in their faces that look of pity for the worthlessness of the contribution that anyone could make who would be wearing such an outfit. To them, that uniform symbolized useless activity.

They knew something about the ability they had to make that ship go from port to port with or possibly even without officers. They were a highly conscious group of men from the strikes of the '30s, an experience which was still fresh in their minds. They were involved, even on that ship, in job actions from time to time. Several among them were ex-IWWs; they believed in direct action.

Within three months, I was working on deck with them as a seaman, wearing the same clothes they were wearing which I got out of the slop chest. They saw that I was interested. They went out of their way to teach me all of the skills, the wire and line (rope) splices, the knots and hitches, and to make a deck sailor out of me. They wanted to win me away from the "topside" for good. So they started telling me the history of the strikes to win the hiring hall; the fights to destroy the "fink hall" and the "fink book," which had been parts of the government-employer controlled hiring system. Prior to 1934 on the West Coast, when you got off a ship, if the skipper wrote anything other than "VG," very good, in your continuous discharge or fink book, then you were marked and couldn't get another American ship. Carrying the continuous discharge book meant you carried your own blackball in your pocket.

So they pumped all this history into me. And then they would quiz me. "What happened on such-and-such a date?" "What's Bloody Thursday?" "What were the big demands?" "What was the 1934 award?" "Why were we able to win victories before getting a collective bargaining contract?" "Who's Lunchbox?" (That was Harry Lundeberg, the secretary-treasurer of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific.) "What's a Lunchbox Stetson?" (That was the sailors' name for the traditional white cap of the West Coast maritime workers.)

On that ship I had finally found a cause and a vehicle for pursuing it. These guys were involved, day to day, in establishing dignity for themselves and thousands of others, and policing all the things that they had done to obtain that dignity. I saw the boatswain tell the chief mate on that ship, "Get off the deck while we're working. Come and see me before 8:00 in the morning and tell me what to do. Come out here after we quit at 5:00 in the evening and find out what we didn't do right, if you think so, and tell me what's wrong. But don't come and stand on this deck while we're at work, Get off the deck and back on the bridge where you belong." I was very impressed with that power. He got away with it. I was amazed he could do that. I knew I wanted to be able to do that too. And I did! The time came when I sailed boatswain and I told the mate, "Get off this deck. Don't stand around us and watch us or else there's going to be no work going on while you're here. Hold everything, fellows!"

When I left that ship I had learned the loophole in Naval Reserve law on how to resign as a midshipman without any penalty, just to get out. So I did that and I went immediately to San Pedro and reported to the port agent at the Sailors Union of the Pacific hall. (We didn't have "presidents" in the Sailors Union—it was a syndicalist tradition—they were "agents.") I went with a letter from the boatswain saying, "This here is to introduce Red Weir. He wants to come up through the forecastle like a regular and he knows the work. Give him a trip card." So 1 was in the foc'sle as opposed to the "topside" where the officers bunked.

Within a year's time I became a person who was usually elected the deck delegate on any ship that I would hire onto. They don't have union stewards on deck crews because the word "steward" means the person who is head of the food department. So you have "delegates" from the deck gang, black or engine room gang, and steward department. I was extremely and youthfully militant against the officers on every ship, to protect the gains of 1934 to 1937, like I'd been taught on my first ship by that gang of strike men and ex-Wobblies. When the food was not good or the mattresses were bad, and the ship got ready to sail, I several times had the crew standing on the docks and saying, "Until those mattresses come aboard . . ."

We were being trampled on because of the no-strike pledge. We were losing the gains of the 1930s because of the war, and that in particular kept me in political opposition to the war throughout the war. World War II was being used by employers to wipe out the gains made by labor a few years earlier and the democratic gains previously won by the general citizenry. When I finally became political it was through the only socialist organization that maintained political opposition to World War II. This was the Workers Party, later renamed the Independent Socialist League, whose leading personality was Max Shachtman.

One day, still early in the war, I came out on the deck of a Moore-McCormack ship on which I was deck delegate and I spotted a small broad man walking down the dock under a seabag that almost hid him from view. We were short one skilled deck hand [AB] and I figured that had to be him, the last man to fill out the crew so that we could sail. He came up the gangplank and I asked him, was he the AB from the hall? He said yes. I introduced myself, learned his name, showed him where to stow his gear and took him forward and introduced him to the whole gang by name. That kind of impressed him because he was a Jew and there weren’t many Jews sailing, on deck in particular, and he had expected a little harder time. We rapidly became close friends. Within two weeks after we left port, he was the authority on almost all subjects in arguments on almost any question.

This man, who introduced me to socialism, was a visionary and had created in his mind a vision of a better society. He was a developed intellectual. He knew music, art and literature and a lot about natural sciences, and he was able to apply all those things to a vision of a better society. That was very attractive to me and many of the men on that ship.

When we got to Australia, he visited one of the famous rank-and-file organizers of the Australian labor movement. From that old man, who was retired, he got a number of copies of The New International, The Fourth International, The Militant, and Labor Action. He told me to read them, see what I thought. So I read them. I wasn't tremendously impressed with any of them, but there were some good things in them I thought. Trotsky was raising the whole question of democratic ideas and the necessity of democracy, which I was very much interested in. But the Russian experiment did not seem important to me at that time.

It was in the Sailors Union and while going to sea that society at least in part began to become understandable to me. Marxism facilitated that. The term “cause," instead of just being an emotional and simplistic thing where you got an identifiable enemy figure in "the boss," became part of a whole world view. I could see that the great contribution of Marx was that he was paying attention to what people were doing rather than trying to impose a Utopia upon them. He had analyzed the French Revolutions, the communes and the forms that people themselves had produced and was trying to systematize it in some democratic way so that they would have some control of their own destiny. Being a militant delegate began to take on new meanings.

I began to understand that the reason why merchant seamen were often in the forefront of militant labor activity or revolutionary activity throughout the world was because, as citizens of a ship after it left the dock, they were really citizens of a molecular state, a total state in which the captain is the dictator. There is the middle class—licensed officers. And then there's the "lower class," the unlicensed seamen. It's a reflection of a class society. Once one can make an analysis of a small state like a ship, one can transmit that analysis to the larger state without even fully realizing it. There's a carry-over. At first I thought that merchant seamen were militant because they traveled and read a lot. But later I was to see that the informal social groups that develop on a ship at sea are in the main created by the formal and official division of labor which operates the ship; that is, the informal and formal work groups are identical so that the social and technological powers of the seamen are merged, thus revealing to them the importance of their role and enlarging the consciousness of their strength.

One of my deepest concerns when I first met a Marxian socialist was the whole question of violence and terrorism, sabotage, all those things I'd read about that radicals are supposed to be "guilty" of. The answers given me were that there is nothing radical or revolutionary about terrorism or any kind of super-militancy. It's essentially a reformist activity in its attempt to change society without changing institutions, merely by removing a person or group of people or terrorizing people through violent methods. Someone who is revolutionary, in the literal sense of the term, is someone who is for changing society's institutions. Socialism, if it's good, is finally for everyone's benefit. A way of saving the souls (if I can use the term) of all, including those who are managers or owners of the forces of production, is to create a society in which no one ever has to make that terrible decision to exploit others.

The question then came up to me immediately, well then why aren't we pacifists? It was explained to me that we cannot be pacifists because at a certain point that is irresponsibility. One has to be prepared, if attacked, to fight to defend oneself, and maintain the right to meet, to talk, to picket, whatever, and carry one's rights as a citizen to full conclusion. But if one ever has to do that, one should be as thrifty as possible, for not only do you want to not take a life but you want to create as few bitter enemies as possible. Those in power always have more arms than you. Those who work, who operate society, make it move, whether they dig coal or write poetry or keep books or file bills, have to be the answer to that brute force. Because that brute force can't stand up finally' against the threat of the withdrawal of labor and economic and political power by those who, “from below” so to speak, operate and make the society function in all its ways.

In late '43 or early '44, the Sailors Union of the Pacific, in conjunction with the Seafarers International Union, decided to organize the tankers belonging to Standard Oil of California. [The Seafarers International Union was an industrial union founded by the Sailors Union of the Pacific which was a craft union. The SUP then became an affiliate of the SIU.] The only men who could get hired by Standard with any ease were those that looked young enough not to have had union experience. I was easily hired and I went out to Point Richmond, to the dockside refinery, to get on a ship. The practice was to hire seamen and let them work on the dock, servicing incoming ships, until they were assigned to a crew. I became a member of the relief gang and I was made assistant dock boatswain. That put me in a key position and I soon became head of the campaign on the job. I would assign rank-and-file SUP organizers so that they were not all concentrated on a few ships.

At a point midway in the campaign SUP men began to appear at work who were giving Jim Crow messages to the seamen we were trying to win over. Our opponent was the National Maritime Union (NMU). Their organizers were preoccupied with winning the war, Russia, and maintaining labor's no-strike pledge into the post-war period, rather than improving conditions for seamen in the here and now. We had been doing a good job by openly comparing our contracts with those of the NMU. I could prove to anyone who was white that we had the best union because we had the best contract. I hadn't thought through the whole racial issue but I could see that I couldn't give uncritical support to either [the sup or the NMU] and neither side would abide criticism of any kind.

The men coming out now from the Sailors Union were saying, "We got to get a white union in here." On that dock, the messmen in the cafeteria and the room stewards in the hotel were Filipinos who were bitterly anti-union because of the experience that they’d had in the original union organization campaigns years before when the union had rejected them as members. I grabbed one of the men who had made some Jim Crow statements and pulled him behind a shed and demanded to know, who sent him out? It turned out that he had been sent, not from the Sailors Union hall but from the SIU tanker office in Richmond, headed by Hal Banks, a man who was later to get into the news as a strikebreaker in Canada for the American SIU. He was open about his bigotry. Some among those he worked closely with said he boasted membership in the Ku Klux Klan and was often armed. I phoned the head of the SUP, Harry Lundeberg. He had been challenged about Banks before and to me, like to the others, he said, "Well, Red, the man's doing a good job for us over there and we have to overlook some of his faults you know.''

I immediately got myself shipped out on one of Standard's tankers. Two months later the NLRB representation election took place. I piled off the ship the same day. Eighty-five per cent voted for the SUP-SIU. Lundeberg signed a contract allowing Standard to hire forty-nine per cent non-union seamen, but by that time I had been sent to Canada as a special representative to the British Columbia Seamen's Union to clear up a bad situation created by the man heading it up.

I hit all the ships as they came in and organized the ranks to take control. After several months I learned that Lundeberg had armed the British Columbia union's president with a telegram stating I was a “Trotskyite," with the idea in mind that this could be used to keep me from cleaning house too thoroughly. I had learned a lesson about how control is maintained by bureaucracies. I stayed on until I had maximum insurance that the ranks could sustain an opposition. I returned to the states and got the first ship available to the East Coast.

I would no longer be a staff organizer for the Sailors Union, I could no longer see my official union as a viable instrument for qualitative social change. I was now a militant but without legitimization from the union. In 1945, when it appeared that the war was going to be over, the Coastwise Committee in the Sailors Union of the Pacific held a meeting and came up with a post-war program in which they said that, "This union does not checkerboard ships," in other words, ship blacks or accept blacks into the union, "because checkerboarding causes racial friction. But we are still a democratic union because the day the membership wants blacks in we will allow it."

I took the floor of the meeting and pointed out that the report of the Coastwise Committee "solved nothing,” that it was true that the unions that were in any way Communist-line did utilize blacks as political footballs by patronizing them and then using them, but that no member of the Sailors Union could tell that to a black man and be heard because blacks were allowed some kind of citizenship in CIO unions and not in the AFL unions on the waterfront, and were totally barred from the Sailors Union. And therefore the crisis continued for us as long as we were an all-white union. (We had minority groups in the Sailors Union with darker skins than many American blacks. To this day I believe the bar against American blacks is more political, in the small "p" sense of the word, than it is racial. Confrontation with guilt is feared.)

I was interrupted by the chairman who said, "What would you do, Brother Weir, if you were on the Coastwise Committee . . ." but he never finished his sentence because I believe he realized it would be opening up a discussion on the floor about the whole basis of racism to the ranks present. They had visibly shifted during even that brief exchange on the floor of the meeting. I think most people were seriously pondering the problem in that key meeting. But bureaucratically the discussion was avoided. One did not pursue questions after the gavel had come down. In those days it meant having to face up to violence and unless you had a caucus or organized muscle going you couldn't stand up to it. I had no caucus. Like all the other dissenters in those war days, I was very much an individual, isolated and alone in that union at that time.

I decided after the war was over that I no longer wanted to go to sea. I no longer was able to do what seamen do when they first start going to sea and that is to "ball it up" in foreign ports, carousing in bars and whorehouses, because finally one sees that the women are only there because of their abject poverty. As a man of twenty-five, and like most seamen, I had become divorced from mainstream shoreside society and I wanted a broader social life. I remember one night I was in Port Avila on a tanker and the moon came up over those California foothills in the east. It was New Year's Eve and I realized how many guys my age were ashore having a good time and here I was with my ass on a cold tank top watching nothing but the moon come up. So I got a ship, a Grace Line run, and paid off in New York. That was the last time I ever shipped offshore.

Part II

I went to the national office of the Workers Party and Max Shachtman asked me, "What are you going to do now. Red?" I said, "Well, I'm going to go to San Pedro and I'm going to spend three months on the beach in the sun on the sand and in the surf, see my friends, get a job longshoring, work three days a week and do what I want to do”

Shachtman said, "Red, we don't want to miss the boat in auto. A lot of important things are happening. You could do a lot of good in auto." That wasn't what I wanted to do but I realized that I would no longer have legitimization in the Party if I didn't do that. So I went back to the Bay Area, got myself a little apartment in West Berkeley, went out to Point Richmond to the Ford plant, and got hired on the assembly line.

It was chaotic. In those early days after the war they couldn't keep anyone working there. People'd hire in in the morning and quit by noon. Some of them never even got far enough down the line to report to the foreman when they saw what it was like. So every day you'd start off with almost the full complement of personnel and by noon you were already taking over half another man's job. The work was really oppressive. Those who worked any length of time on the Ford line called the place "the prison." I would come home every night battered by the violence of the work.

Every day at quitting time, at the five-minute whistle for clean-up, the men would all line up waiting for the second bell to ring, like at the line in a race. When the second bell would ring they would run, as fast as they could go, down the aisles to the time clocks. During the first few days I thought they were out of their minds. A week later, I was butting them out of line to get my place at the starting point too.

We were always in the hole on that line. One of my operations was to put two bronze screws into the frame of the car that would hold on the hydraulic brake linings or tubings that run to each wheel brake cylinder. One day I was so far, in the hole (the man next to me couldn't complete his task because his partner on the other side had put him in the hole) I couldn't reach my electric wrench. And so, not wanting the inspector to spot loose screws, I hit them all the way in with a ballpeen hammer and learned that they would stay in. No one would suspect. I had found a shortcut in the work. Those brake linings would stay on the frame of that car probably for several thousand miles without loosening. But I quit looking at Fords after that when they drove down the street past me because of my guilt and because I knew everyone in that plant was taking shortcuts; in some way.

One day they transferred me to another job. A man working near me lifted the motors off the motor line on a hoist and then lowered them into the chassis of the car. He couldn't lift the motors high enough into the air to clear the other men's heads if he was going to make the drop into the car at the right time, so he had to move them horizontally over the men's heads at about a five foot height. He had to yell constantly, all day long, "Watch your head…Heads up, heads up." The man was a nervous wreck. He would say after work, talking to himself, "Well, I only hit three men today. Why don't the dummies get out of my way? They know I have todo it this way to make it on the job."

But then came the day when one of the pneumatic air wrenches hit me on the side of the jaw, because of a faulty clutch, and knocked off half a tooth. I walked out. That was my last day at Ford's.

There I was without a job in auto. The very next morning I went and got a job at Chevrolet in East Oakland where I stayed for two years. Most of the people in that local were Portuguese-Americans from East Oakland. There was a great deal of Jim Crow amongst them because American society was constantly trying to put them in the position of the American blacks. Their way of avoiding that situation had been to say, "Look, we're not American blacks. We're American Portuguese. We have our own Latin culture and we're proud of that culture." So for both good and bad reasons, to express their own culture, they were Jim Crow. The East Oakland, California plant and the Atlanta, Georgia plant of Chevrolet were the last two all-white GM plants in the country.

I pushed a resolution on the floor of the union that we should go to management to bring blacks into the plant. There was opposition to it in the rank and file and the leadership of the shop unit (which was mostly from the then dominant section of the left) went along with those Jim Crow sentiments in order to maintain their hold on the leadership. But then they were in the position of being in violation of the United Automobile Workers constitution. That couldn't go on for too long and I realized that it would come up again.

When I was transferred to another department, everyone in that department was Jim Crow and they wanted me to be the shop steward. I had the choice of either rejecting them because they were Jim Crow or accepting them and dealing with a life situation as it came up. I chose the latter.

We won a lot of conditions in that shop. As a matter of fact, we had a sit-down strike in order to retain the right of having gloves supplied by management. We wore out three pair a week on that particular job. We won gloves in a grievance and then management began to renege on the supply of gloves. The men came to me and said, "We got to do something about this," and half of them were going to the time clock. I got them all back and said, "Look, any man who clocks out . . ." I didn't get to finish my sentence because someone else in that group of about forty men said, "We'll never get back in the plant again." And someone else said, "But if we stay here . . ." and someone else said, "Available to work when they supply the tools to work with, we'll be OK."

It was an outcrop of an idea I'd laid on them very early. They came to me saying, "Look at the holes in our gloves. They're reneging on the supply." I said to them, "Well, gloves are tools, aren't they?" and walked away. I learned that an efficient agitator is not one who talks and lectures a lot, but who simply throws out an idea and sees if that idea is workable and acceptable. We won that sit-down. We were opposed by the leadership of the local for doing that, and they tried to get us for it but we survived.

In all this I was learning from and being counseled by an old-time fighter who had led the sit-down strike at the Richmond Ford plant in the early '30s. His name was Luis Guido. He was one of the greatest men I have ever met—a true yet unsung hero. He would never take a union administrative job. For over thirty years as shop committeeman he fought the Ford and General Motors corporations to create a better life for himself and others. Who will ever record his name as a maker of history?

The second time the question of hiring blacks was going to come up, the men in my department said in effect, "We've got to forgive Red for his strange ideas," and "He needs help on this resolution." The speakers in favor of bringing blacks in were mainly Portuguese from my department and that won the rest of the Portuguese: “If you don't want to do it on a moral basis—the fact that everyone's got a right to eat and work—you damn sure better do it because if we have a strike they'll recruit scabs in West Oakland." It was only a matter of time after that that blacks were on the line and working everywhere in the plant.

I got married while I was working in auto. My wife came out of a West Virginia coal mining family and we had a lot of basic values in common from the first. In addition to developing a career and family, she found no insurmountable problems living a life whose routine was regularly broken by job crisis and economic insecurity.

It was in that period right after I met her that the Oakland general strike occurred. The Oakland general strike was called by no leader. It was unique, I think, in general strikes in this country. There was a strike of women who were the clerks at Kahn's and at Hastings' department stores and it had been going on for months. The Teamsters had begun to refuse to make deliveries to those department stores and the department stores needed commodities badly.

Not many people had cars right after the war and you took public transportation to work in the morning. You had to go downtown to the center of Oakland and then out in the direction of your work- place. So thousands and thousands of people traveled through the heart of town every morning on the way to work, on public transportation. Very early one morning, here were the policemen of Oakland herding in a string of trucks, operated by a scab trucking firm in Los Angeles, with supplies for these department stores. Some truck driver or some bus driver or street car conductor asked some policeman about the trucks (this is now part of the mythology) and the policeman told him, "This is a scab trucking firm coming in from L.A. to take stuff to Kahn's and Hastings'." Well, that truck driver, that bus driver, or that street car conductor, didn't get back on his vehicle. Truck drivers got off their trucks and that increased till those trucks and those buses and those street cars just piled up and thousands of people were stranded in town.

In a small way it was a holiday. The normal criteria for what was acceptable conduct disappeared. No one knew what to do and there were no leaders. No one called it. Pretty soon the strikers began forming into committees on the street comers. Certain shopkeepers were told to shut down and drug stores to stay open. Bars could stay open if they didn't serve hard liquor, and they had to put their juke boxes out on the sidewalk. People were literally dancing in the streets in anticipation of some kind of new day. Soon the strikers began to direct traffic and only let union people into town and keep out those who it was feared might be against the strike. It lasted fifty-four hours.

I'll never forget an incident in that strike. Some Army recruiting truck came in town through that mass of strikers and the lieutenant on that truck said over a P. A. system, "Why aren't you all out fightin' for your country instead of striking?" Most of the bus drivers still had their Eisenhower jackets with the hash marks on because they could use their Army uniform as part of their bus driver's uniform. And some big ex-top sergeant said, "Where do you think we got these?" With that he sang out, "Fall in!" and about a hundred men lined up and he put them through close order drill. Pretty soon there were several hundred going through this close order drill. They marched on City Hall and demanded to see the mayor. He wasn't in, of course.

It was that vision and the experiences in that strike that I experienced and which my wife saw, the vision in actual life of people determining their own destinies that sustains one and makes one stand fast for a long, long time. You don't have to so often go through all those doubts about, "Are the fundamental ideas of Marxism sound?" if you've been fortunate enough to have had those experiences. It's a matter of being advantaged or disadvantaged through your own life experience that sustains or drives one away from those basic ideas.

In 1951, my wife and I lived again in East Los Angeles, right near the high school where I had gone. I was in the Teamsters Union, freight handling. Some old friends of mine that I'd gone to school with and were from my neighborhood were officials in those unions. I was making a pretty good living. Then I began to realize I was getting a lot of work because the dispatchers were instructed by my friends to give me a lot of work. I went to them and I said, "Look, I want to shake square like anybody else." I immediately started getting only two days work a week. I quit and got a job driving a truck steady.

In that local, which was a local for industrial laundry wagon drivers, there was a terrible situation. The working conditions that had been built up by the membership of the local were slowly being sold each year, bit by bit, for nickel and dime wage increases.

Rebellion in that local developed, which I led, and I became chairman of the Negotiating Committee. The secretary of the local, it turned out, colluded with management and I was fired on a flimsy pretext that couldn't hold water. While I was awaiting the arbitration, the men in the local, through collections each week, paid my full wages. What we didn't realize was that even the arbitration had been rigged. Instead of utilizing the American Arbitration Association, they got an arbitrator who was an employers' representative in the culinary industry and I went down the drain.

At first the men were going to strike to protect my job. I was part of the reason why they didn't strike, because I was agreeing to go through the mechanics of the grievance procedure. I really participated in my own undoing, and of the men, because I was simply a symbol by which to break the back of militancy in the union. It was an extremely bitter experience for me. I learned that one does not always use official procedures in circumstances like that if one is going to survive.

This rebellion took place early in 1954, when no spotlight was on the labor movement on this question. I have an honorable withdrawal card from that union, however, because twenty members of that union walked into the secretary-treasurer's office and demanded, right then and there, that an honorable withdrawal card be given me. Their instincts told them that I would need it in the future.

I had at least a dozen jobs within the next year. I'd get a job and two or three days later the management would come to me and say, "We didn't know you were in trouble with the Teamsters Union. We have to let you go." I finally got a job as an apprentice grocery clerk for Safeway Stores. I made about $1800 that year. I had one child and my wife was pregnant. I needed and wanted a steady job.

I saw in the newspaper that they were hiring at the General Motors plant in all departments. They hired me immediately and I was spray-painting again, like I had been for a time at Chevrolet. This time, instead of going into industry in part for political reasons, it was just for a job. The McCarthy period had disintegrated my political movement considerably. The people were not interested in doing anything much but surviving. So there was no movement telling me what to do. I was "just a worker."

I began to discover the subculture in the factory and that I was working in an informal work group with a life of its own, its own informal leadership, discipline, and activity. A whole new world opened up to me. I began to see that to approach any situation like this with a whole set of preconceived slogans was way off the beam. One first had simply to learn what the subculture was so that one's actions were understandable to everyone else, and not to violate what had been created. Because if you couldn't understand the individuals and the groups that they formed, you certainly weren't going to understand anything else.

Then it occurred to me that, by and large, the radicals' conception of the masses was a metaphysical one, an average, which didn't exist except in our minds. Really, the mass was a conglomerate of millions of workers in their subcultures, and rarely were there issues which were real mass issues. One had to try to find common denominators but, even more than that, had to speak to the reality of the people's lives as individuals and in their groups and in the subcultures, in each place of work.

I made friends with the people around me the way you normally do. Most of them were Chicanos from my side of town. We soon had a ride group going. We were on swing shift and one night we'd go to the black community where part of our work group lived and have ribs and the next night we'd go up and have tamales, enchiladas, tacos or burritos, and the next night we'd go and have spaghetti—here and there to each one's house. One guy's mother'd make a big feed and my wife'd make a big feed and so on. We created our own social life, which you have to do on the swing shift, when you work from four in the afternoon until midnight. And the politics that I injected into that group? I didn't even have to try. It came in the natural course of life.

One night when one guy stole something fairly big (from the plant) I told him off. By stealing he was risking his job and he risked us losing a valuable member of our group. And that was irresponsible not only to his family, but to us who were his family-at-work. It was the most meaningful kind of politics that one could talk and be involved in. Because we were into that kind of politics we could very easily get into other kinds of politics. Just being me was being political. I was helping politicalize those around me without trying to design anything special for a mass.

In 1955, our plant struck against the contract the minute its conditions were announced and before a meeting could be called to ratify that agreement. I'll never forget. I was in the men's locker room on my break. One of my friends up the line came in on his break; he was livid with rage. He had heard the conditions of the contract announced on a news broadcast and he was saying, "Man, he must have really got us something!" I said, “I don't understand. What do you mean?" What he meant was that the settlement must be damn good, for Walter Reuther had sacrificed an opportunity in which the ranks were willing to give their full energies to a fight for working conditions, just to get that improvement in the economic package.

In 1956, I got laid off in a cutback of 1700 men because the boom in auto was over. And by the time they called me back on the basis of seniority I was already back in the Bay Area. But it was in that period, 1955 and 1956, probably the biggest auto years in the postwar period, that some of the insights into the future began to occur to me. I knew from my experience in auto at this point that the next outbreak would be about the nature of the work, the oppressive nature of life in the plants, about the humanization of working conditions.

Part III

Rank and file revolts today remain isolated and localized. They'll begin to develop to a new plateau once it's discovered how to create an organizational vehicle whereby they can merge and no longer be isolated. But that means a new form of organization, and if that new organization doesn't change existing institutions, particularly of unions and collective bargaining, it will re-bureaucratize rapidly. Rank-and-file movements are already having the experience of sending good rank and filers into the bureaucracy and losing them as fast as they send them in, because the institutions aren't being changed. And, if we don't find a way to avoid rapid bureaucratization, we'll merely create more cynicism.

The only organizational means that I know of that cannot be taken over by a union bureaucracy are the informal work groups in the workplaces. The greatest enemies the groups have are unemployment or any change in the technology that destroys the group's life continuity, internal relationships and group-culture. Industries that don't have these groups, like the teamsters who drive alone on a truck, are at a natural disadvantage. But if informal work groups are the only form of organization that can't be taken over by a bureaucracy, then anti-bureaucratic organizational vehicles have to be based in them. The only way I have been able to think of it is to obtain a ratio of stewards or committeemen representation of about l-to-15 or l-to-25. That would mean that every steward would be a working steward, working within the vision of, in direct contact with, these informal work groups—something like the way it used to be in Chrysler before 1955 when Reuther allowed that corporation to adopt GM patterns. In effect, the work day is a full day of meeting within each one of these groups. And if the representative gets out of line, he or she is on the job and can be disciplined by the threat of chill-treatment, ridicule, and worse. If stewards' committees at that representation level were to be pyramided into councils on an area level and finally into congresses on a national level, then the people involved in that pyramiding would still come under some kind of disciplinary hold of people on the job. If the American working class could get an appreciably shorter work week, which is technologically possible, then no matter to how high an office a person went he or she would still be working representatives. The representation time it would take would come out of leisure time as well as work time.

The labor movement in this country has never done a thing with the whole primary work group concept. And that's where the muscle of the workers is and where the union's strength should be. A work-place isn't a collection of individuals so much as a collection of informal groups. Until you recognize that, you're not really into utilizing the power of people in the workplace.

At no time in our society has there ever been a serious discussion of work. The workplace is where most of a human's waking hours are spent. For the first time we have to examine the total oppressiveness of the individual's life. Workers in large numbers can have a fairly good life economically. But the total life experience is a very oppressive one and this goes for all levels of the working class in this country. People seek new solutions to that oppressiveness each day of their lives rather than just in terms of the next union contract or the next strike, and that is not being spoken to, whether it be in terms of heavy industrial, white collar, or professional work. I recently quoted a humorous Big Bill Haywood story to a carpenter with the remark, "Nothing's too good for the workers.". He answered, "Yeah, until they get on the job."

The combination of a long period of relative full employment and automation has to a considerable extent destroyed the old values and work ethic at all levels of our labor force. In their desperation to lift morale, eliminate sabotage and increase production, employers are doing dabbling experiments involving piddling amounts of worker control. The official labor leadership fails to grasp the opening this provides to win some real controls. Their piecemeal approach looks to earlier retirements rather than humanizing the work. For the rank and file, life is supposed to begin with pension qualification in the autumn of existence. The view "from below" is quite different and that is the only place where real force generates to bring satisfaction, dignity and creativity to the work process.

3. Stan Weir interview

THE OAKLAND GENERAL STRIKE

Interview with Stan Weir – November and December, 1990

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Pat McAuley: What I meant to ask was: a lot of these short, wildcat-type strikes, like the sit-down strike that you led, did these contribute to the General Strike that occurred in 1946 or 1947 in Oakland?

Stan Weir: Well, the General Strike was part of the ’46 strike wave. You can’t extract one from the other. There was a great deal of dammed up militancy. People who worked throughout the War had been taking all this crap from employers in the name of the War effort, that kind of phony patriotism, instead of real patriotism. It was time to catch up after the War, so there were wildcat strikes going on apace. As a matter of fact, there were more people out on strike in 1946 in the ’46 strike wave than any time before or since. It is the largest strike wave that ever occurred in the United States. That occurred as a last gasp of a labor force that was coming back, of a labor force that was still in place. That is, the G.I.’s were not all back yet, and the people who had spent this last four years together were still pretty much together, or they hadn’t been swamped by new workers coming in or guys returning from the Armed Forces. A lot of new technology and new mechanization had not yet been introduced.

The Oakland General Strike was, I think, in December. Mary got in my jeep and drove down with some of her girlfriends from campus to travel around the streets and look at it.

We in the CIO were not a part of it officially. That is, the State of California CIO was run by Percy Peers. They were for having the General Strike after the War – having a no-strike pledge almost permanently for nine years after the War. When the General Strike broke out, the three ships at the Oakland Army Base, the gangs all walked off ‘em and went out in the streets and went on strike. Bridges immediately sent gangs of politicals back to those ships and kept working. In order to participate in that general strike, we had to stay out of work, be on absenteeism.

McAuley: The Maritime workers were a big part of this, weren’t they?

Weir: Well, they were, partly because I found them. That is, I was still a member of the Sailors’ Union. I am downtown, in Oakland. I got off the streetcar. The strike had started. There was no bus to take me the rest of the way to East Oakland to my job.

I didn’t see any official leadership. There was not an official leader anywhere to be found. They’re all hiding. This is strictly rank and file. Downtown alone went on strike alone.

So, I (and it might not have been the best thing to do) phoned up the Sailors’ Union, got Lundeberg, and said, “Hey, there’s a strike over here and there’s no organization. We need a way of developing a network. Whatever you can do.” What he did was he sent about thirty Hawaiians with a bunch of SIU-SUP Brotherhood of the Sea buttons and (they) began distributing those as some kind of strike police badge.

At the Oakland General Strike meeting downtown in the Oakland Auditorium, Lundeberg was the only one to know what to say. It was all demagogy – “the Oakland City Council had tried to break the strike.” Going on that “the General Strike had taken lessons from Hitler and Stalin, and they were finks.” Anyway, he was the only one who talked radical like that, ‘cause he knew from the past, the recent past, although he had already sold out. I hadn’t yet absorbed that sellout, and that’s why I would call the union, get him, and tell him to get some forces over there.

McAuley: Did the strike die because of lack of strong leadership?

Weir: Yes. The leadership of the retail clerks’ and that of the Teamsters was very different. That is, finally the retail clerks’ leadership did show up. But they had all this strength. Remember, the General Strike was called in support of the workers at Kahn’s and Hastings department stores. Here, they had the town shut down. That leadership did not come up with an agreement that would protect the jobs of those people and settle their grievances. They went back to work with no protection and with no gains.

McAuley: But a lot of other workers were so ready to strike.

Weir: Yes!

McAuley: That they walked out in support of these retail clerks.

Weir: Yes. Absolutely. That accidental strike, the so-called accidental strike, without any leadership, with no one calling it, turned out to be an opportunity for people to vent their feelings about what had happened to them on the job during the War.

The leaders, the real leaders of that strike, were the Key system bus drivers, who were just back from after the War. They were still wearing the Eisenhower jackets, but now they had converted them to bus driver jackets. A lot of them still had their gold hatch marks, overseas marks, on their jackets. I remember, and I’ve told this a number of times, an Army recruiting truck came down the street during the General Strike.

Some young lieutenant in back of the truck says into the microphone over the loud P.A. system: “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves striking. You ought to be out fighting for your country.” It was so recently after the War, maybe he thought he could get away with that.

Some big guy said, “Where do you think we got these?” and pointed to his overseas marks. He said, “Fall in!” and about 50 to 75 guys fell in, in close order, and he started them in a close order drill, and more guys, and more guys. Pretty soon, we had a company, not a platoon but a company. Pretty soon, he had more than a company. I mean he had hundreds, in close order drill. What are you going to do with them now?

Marched on City Hall. Demanded to see the head of the City Council. No one would come out to talk to them. But they went to the seat of power in the city, the ones who had called on scab trucks from L.A. to come and be herded into those stores by Oakland police.

________

Pat McAuley: It is now December 5th (1990). I am in Stan Weir’s office of Singlejack Books, (in San Pedro), overlooking the harbor in Los Angeles.

Stan, when we last talked, we were talking about the General Strike in Oakland. Is there anything else about that General Strike that comes to your mind?

Stan Weir: The General Strike confirmed for me ideas that I had been having for some time. It seemed to me that wherever I looked, the membership of unions, and of political parties I belonged to, a political grouping I belonged to, the membership was ahead of the leadership. But I’m going to talk about unions now.

It seemed to me not only were the members of the unions I had been in, and was in, ahead of the official line on how to fight the employer and willingness to fight the employer, way ahead. They were way ahead when it came to the invention of democratic methods for furthering that fight. Those methods developed a societal set of attitudes on the part of these people.

The officialdom you mentioned, when I said that you couldn’t find a union official in downtown Oakland, and you asked me before we started here today, “Do you think that shocked the officials?” Well, it had to have shocked them half out of their senses. At that time, it was close after the War.

I, for example, at Cedar and San Pablo, got a bus to Ashby, got a trolley in downtown Oakland, then got a bus to East Oakland, where I was working in the East Oakland Chevrolet plant. When we got to downtown Oakland that morning, we rolled in somewhere between 6 and 7:30. A man came running over to our streetcar and talked briefly, just briefly, and fast, and hard, to our conductor and motorman on the streetcar. They got off and began to walk away. We yelled at them, “Hey! What’s this?!” He explained that Los Angeles scab-driven trucks with merchandise for the two department stores that were on strike, Kahn’s and Hastings department stores, that these trucks were being herded through the city, right now, by the Oakland police, and that’s why. And they disappeared.

So, we were all there downtown. We couldn’t get to work. Immediately, a carnival kind of attitude hit us.

McAuley: Did they think the trolley-

Weir: Right here. And the trucks the men were driving, they just left them right at that spot. They didn’t even pull them to the curb. Of course, they did it with a method. It had its own method. It’s another way of protesting.

Well, the first thing that hit us in this whole thing was we got a good excuse. We can’t get to work. And we’re here.

So, it was kind of a carnival. It wasn’t half an hour before we were going into bars and saying, “No hard liquor. Serve beer and wine, if you must, but mainly beer,” and “You can stay open only if you bring your jukebox out in front and turn it on loud.” And we were dancing at 7 o’clock in the morning. Men and women. And joking, and so on. (Laughing) Feeling like, you know, God, freedom. It was marvelous.

When you’re a factory hand, you get to sit down three minutes in a day, more than your lunchtime. You figure, like, it’s a great day if you beat ‘em out of three minutes! You know?

McAuley: Yeah.

Weir: When the line would break down, it would be like I would go into laughter almost immediately, and stay there. I’d laugh at anybody’s joke – and so would everybody else – if the line, the assembly line broke down at Chevrolet.

McAuley: The CIO wasn’t supporting this General Strike then.

Weir: No.

McAuley: Did the workers stay out?

Weir: Well, those who couldn’t get to work didn’t go to work. Yeah. But the CIO was led by the Communist Party at the time. And the Communist Party supported us. I think I’ve said that here on this tape. It was me at the State CIO Convention that year that got up and challenged Dick, the Chair of the Convention. He was from the Local 6 warehouse, IOWU. His dad owned a warehouse, and he struck against his father. That’s how he got started in unionism. (I’ve forgotten his last name.)

But I said, “Where was the CIO in the Oakland General Strike? We had to stay away from work in order to participate. What is this? Where is the solidarity?”

Paul Schlitt, the Secretary-Treasurer of the CIO, got up and said, “It wasn’t a general strike. We weren’t in it.” Well, that kind of double-think, using Orwell’s term, it was a transplantation of that kind of thinking into the situation in Oakland.

But here we were, and without any leadership. By noon that day, the carnival was kind of over. We think we can’t go on like this forever. They’ll come and get us. (Laughing) Somebody will come and get us, you know, and it won’t be good. So, I had made a phone call to the Sailors’ Union to see what kind of help I could get from the seamen who were ashore and not working. And I talked to Lundeberg.

Lundeberg spoke the next night, I believe it was, at the Oakland Auditorium in the General Strike meeting. He demagogically was militant and he gave people what they wanted to hear. He denounced the City fathers and the police as people who had been reading the writings of Stalin and Hitler. He knew that it was time to get mad. He wasn’t afraid, like the rest of the officials who were afraid to get up there and even sound off.

Without any leadership, we cordoned the town off. You could get out without a union card. You couldn’t get in without a union card.

There was a guy going down the street, a great big guy with a typewriter. People said, “Hey, where are you goin’ with the typewriter?,” and he began to run. They ran and they arrested him, in effect, until he explained that he wasn’t stealing the typewriter, that he didn’t believe in the strike and he was taking his work home ‘cause he might not be able to get to work the next day. They said, “Go. Get in your car and go.”

McAuley: So, was it the residents on these blocks?

Weir: No, this was downtown.

McAuley: Alright. Well, I meant the residents of the offices that form these informal authorities for these groups.

Weir: No, it was the people who got off the buses and the streetcars. It was the truck drivers. It was the people in their cars going to work. It wasn’t the residents so much. Although in West Oakland, which is close by, the blacks involved in this strike, some of them had just walked up from there, where they lived.

But people in the offices, many were non-union. Now, the OPEIU, the office workers and the union, and the retail clerks did participate in the strike, because it was for Kahn’s and Hastings department store workers. But, that I know of, there was no general outpour of office workers – just, boom, like that – who were non-union and suddenly got the word. We did have experiences like this. Non-union people would come out and they’d be going to go home and they didn’t know for how long. They were impressed at the order, the neatness. That is, we kept the streets clean. There was no littering.

Like I say, there were people who had cordoned, we had cordoned the city off, all the streets leading out of downtown Oakland. We had downtown, 10 square blocks. Maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was more like twenty blocks.

But there was a desire to really do the right thing by everybody, everybody who was on your side. There was no rousting anybody, or anybody stealing gas from other people’s cars, or breaking in. So far as we could tell, those fifty-four hours were crimeless downtown.

It’s like, in Albert Rhys Williams’ book, Through the Russian Revolution, He was a journalist and he went to Russia, because of the Russian Revolution, in February. He came back and wrote a book about what he saw. He was a good journalist.

He is walking up and down the streets of Leningrad. He sees people walking by shoe stores, for example, with broken panes, and no one is reaching inside and grabbing those shoes and running away with them. Already there was a sense of collective property. “That’s not ours just to steal. We will take care of it. We will divie that up, so to speak.”

Then, of course, I had read about Antonov Gouzenko in that book, the same book. There was open warfare between the Whites and the Reds. The Whites had captured the telephone building. I’ve forgotten whether it was Moscow or St. Petersburg, Leningrad. The Whites had captured Antonov Gouzenko, the head of the workers’ Red militia, and he’s imprisoned in the telephone building. People are shooting at one another and killing one another in this situation. The Reds are ringing and the cordon is all the way around the building. The Whites send out a Red Cross truck that they have captured, ostensibly with wounded. The Reds let the truck go through the line, the Red Cross truck, and get out around the corner, out of sight of the Whites. They grabbed the truck, and there were no wounded in it. The people inside confessed immediately that they were going for munitions. The Reds turned into a Trojan horse. They stuck highly armed people into that Red Cross truck and they went back in through a half an hour later. Zap! That was the end of that. The whites immediately surrendered.

“Where is Antonov Gouzenko? This is your neck unless you produce him.” They release him and Antonov Gouzenko is just standing there. The rest of the Reds move to kill or harm bodily all the Whites standing there who had imprisoned him.

He grabbed a gun away from someone and said, “The first one who puts a hand on any of these Whites that we’ve been fighting right now, I will shoot him.”

They said, “What? You’re going to shoot us? We’re on your side.”

He says, “I know. But you will damn the revolution by doing wrong. These people deserve a trial, like prisoners of war. You don’t represent the new (society) if you just (shoot them) because you said that they’d do it to us. Of course, they’d do it to us. But we don’t do it to them. We represent the new society.”

He had been on the streets the whole time as head of the workers’ militia. Albert Rhys Williams says that the people caught on immediately. Simply, Gouzenko was the first to become objective in this situation.

Then, the Reds led the Whites through the town, from the telephone building to the jail. Many of them were attacked and beat up by townspeople who were saying, “You got Whites?! Well, let’s get ‘em now! Let’s do ‘em in!” And the same Reds who would want to do ‘em in half an hour earlier.

They said, “No, we’re taking him. We’re going to try him.” Of course, a lot of Whites got out of jail real quick just by promising. The Reds were very lenient at that time.

But there was this morality, the feeling that ends and means have to always stick together. This is the working class itself, at the very bottom, insisting upon that, without any kind of long rationalizations about, “well, this is a special situation,” and all that malarkey. (They) just hung to it and stayed with it until the revolution itself had been starved out.

McAuley: So, in Oakland?

Weir: You could see that in Oakland. You could see the potential for that, right there in the streets.

McAuley: Mm hm. The spontaneous morality.

Weir: Yes.

McAuley: Do you think that the fact that people had just gone through the World War II experience, did that contribute in any way to this – this natural, but not always spontaneous, morality, but incredible order that took place?

Weir: I don’t know. I mean there’s no way of knowing the answer to that. I can only tell you what my feeling was. I think that there were people there who hadn’t really thought about a number of these things, that the General Strike posed for them in their minds. They approached the problem in their minds and they came up with these kinds of answers. Because the kinds of lives they lead doesn’t lead them to start moaning on the terrible people workers are; they’re lazy; they’re this or that and the other thing; or they don’t pay their rent on time; and all that. The people have nothing to gain by that. These people came up with brilliant ideas. Some of them had thought it through beforehand, in all probability. Trotsky speaks of this in The History of the Russian Revolution, that suddenly people’s minds are liberated. It staggers them. Suddenly they are free. Some of those who had been the most servile, the day before October or February, became the most bold. Zap! No one knows the exact process of the thinking of a crowd in that way.

McAuley: You saw this happen in Oakland?

Weir: In my experience, crowds of this kind, rather than being surly, lynch-mob types, or very close to that, just on the other side of the fence. No. My experience is that it is in the crowd that there is the most genius.

At the Chevrolet plant, when we had the sit-down strike, the same thing occurred. That is, I stopped people from walking out. When we all gathered together again on the loading docks of the East Oakland plant, I said, “If any of us clock out—“, but I didn’t finish my sentence. Someone said, “A lot of us will never get back in.” Someone else said, “But if we hang tough here, available for work, the moment they begin to live up (to) the contract and the grievance we’ve just won, then we’ll see.” No one even said, “We’ll survive.” I mean the sentence was never totally finished. Everybody understood immediately.

And that’s what we did. We stayed right there, visible, and available to work the moment that they quit reneging on the supply of gloves, which we wore out at three pair a week. It’s that same brilliance of people who have been released from the necessity to hide their feelings.

Who knows what anybody really believes when they’re working on the job for an employer? You ask them a million questions, they are always going to answer the same way. Whatever strengthens their position on the job. They are not going to weaken there. That is, if you’re an interviewer from somewhere. If you come as a psychologist or an academic and you come interviewing people on the job, even if you’re (saying), “Harry Bridges sent me down here to the waterfront, fellas, and he said it was o.k. that I talk to you fellas,” you think they’re going to tell them, “This guy’s really the score”? Never.

McAuley: Yeah, yeah. Well, Stan, I want to get back to your party, WP [Workers' Party], and they asked you to get inside of, you know, to get into the auto (industry) in order to support the Reuther caucus. What was so important about the (Walter) Reuther caucus? Who did they oppose?

Weir: Well, this fight shaped up with the Reuther caucus opposed to the R.G. Thomas and George Addes caucus. That was a coalition caucus, a coalition between the Phillip Murry-ites, the middle-of-the-road, conservative, CIO top leadership, which R.J. Thomas followed, and the supporters of the Communist Party point of view, their labor beliefs.

They had had the leadership of the union all the way through the War, and they had misled it terribly all the way through the War, giving up conditions that were hard-won in the strikes of the thirties. They were for going back to peace work. They were for National Labor conscription. They were for a no-strike pledge during and after the War. And so on.

Reuther, at least in the beginning, opposed them from the Left. Now, Reuther had taken over the rank and file caucus, which was built primarily by left-wing politicals during the War. That means mainly by Trotskyists, except it did not include the orthodox and largest group of the Trotskyists, the Socialist Workers’ Party people. They were in the R.J. Thomas and George Addes caucus 90% of the time. I think there was one brief interlude where they jumped over to Reuther for a moment, or at least differed with the Addes-Thomas people.

People who were opposed to the CP from the Left as rank and filers or as politicals made up the rank and file caucus. Reuther wouldn’t touch it. It meant job action during the War, and he didn’t want that connected with his own history, his own reputation. But the minute the War was over, or in Europe, he began making innuendo and then directly. He did take over the leadership for the rank and file caucus, and it became the Reuther caucus. Now, he needed these Leftists and these militants. They made him president of the union. They didn’t give him a majority on the executive board. At the next convention, he got a majority on the executive board.

Who did he need to get to get all that crowd? He needed the Catholics, for example, the ACTU, the Association of Catholic Trade Unions. They were the ones who were really red-baiting the hell out of the other side. And you can begin to see Reuther moving over into a red-baiting position in order to get a clean sweep.

End of Dictation