Eugene Gordon looks at the racial and labor politics on the Boston waterfront during the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union coal-boat strike.

‘War on the Waterfront’ by Eugene Gordon from the New Masses. Vol. 10 No. 10. March 6, 1934.

BOSTON. Before the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union entered Boston, the psychology of this town’s waterfront was similar to that of a worker who had been driven to panhandling. The A.F. of L.’s International Longshoreman’s Association, the only union on the waterfront, had organized some of the whites; a larger number, however, both whites and blacks, did not know what unionization meant. While the general plight of the organized group was unhealthy, that of the other men was wretched. Neither group had much self-respect left in it, although the organized workers looked with some contempt upon the unorganized “scum.” The unorganized were mostly Negroes. The few whites among them did not get on very well with the blacks. The reason was that an artificial but effective barrier had been built up between these Negro unemployed workers and their white fellow-sufferers. They barely tolerated each other; sometimes their intolerance flared into the open. This is the way it was brought about. When a ship came in at one of the unorganized wharves the unemployed non-union workers would rush fiercely upon the straw boss. They were like starving dogs at the sound of the dinner gong, each knowing that there were enough scraps left to reach just a few of them. The straw-boss, arrogant, a petty tyrant of the meanest stripe, would order the men into line and, standing back dramatically, would look them over. All this time their excitement at the prospect of failing to get work would whip the men almost to frenzy. The job paid only 67 cents an hour and time and a half for overtime, but, hell!…The boss would strut down the line, while the men begged him with their eyes. He would stop here, and pick out a Negro; would stop there, and pick out another. And the whites would swear under their breaths. Sometimes they would swear aloud, and sometimes fighting between them and the blacks could not be averted.

Then the Boston newspapers flew streamer headlines proclaiming the “race riot” on the waterfront. The straw-boss’ scheme had worked successfully. He would perhaps receive an extra dollar from his boss for a damned good job. For this elaborate show of “preference” for Negro unorganized longshoremen was a cunningly calculated scheme. A class-conscious white worker explained: “They give the colored fellows the preference so they can keep them and the white fellows separated. If they can keep us at one another’s throat all the time, they know there won’t be any chance of our coming together and cooperating. You see, they expect all us white fellows to be organized, sooner or later; then, if we should happen to strike, the company could use the colored fellows as allies. You see, all this is just their way of manufacturing scabs out of the colored fellows.” Entering Boston for the first time last July, the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union immediately attacked the problem which I.L.A. officials and their ship-owning bosses had aggravated. Building up a militant union here has been hard; it still is. At first ignored with sneering contempt by the I.L.A. aristocrats, the M.W.I.U. today is driving them to distraction. But this distraction is evincing itself not so much in the wringing of pudgy A.F. of L. paws as in desperate acts of violence against individual members of the M.W.I.U. When first noticed by the I.L.A., the M.W.I.U. organizer was frequently threatened by rank-and-file I.L.A. members. On one or two occasions he was mauled around and told to keep off the docks. He and his comrades knew that these men were following orders of their leaders, these leaders in turn being direct links with the steamship owners and officials. So the M.W.I.U. continued to issue leaflets that exposed the role of I.L.A. officials. Rank and filers in that union read the leaflets; reading, they began to think.

What is the situation today? Well, let the M.W.I.U. organizer absent himself from the waterfront for one day, and rank and filers of the A.F. of L. union will demand aggrievedly to know where he has been so long. They do not say it in so many words, but they unmistakably imply their resentment at being neglected by “you reds.” The situation, then, has developed into one in which officials instead of rank and filers have to do the companies’ dirty work. Whispering, “Reds! Up and at ’em!”, the ship owners could once sit back and gloat while the workers sailed into the militant organizers. Today the bosses have to do the job, aided by the Boston police.

Leading the present coal-boat strike in Boston, the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union has encountered hostility on two determined fronts. Since the crews were pulled off the first boats more than two weeks ago, officials both of the International Seamen’s Union and the International Longshoremen’s Association, A.F. of L. affiliates of the American Steamship Owners Association (all allied with the coal boat owners), have fought desperately to kill the militant organization. This combination represents one of the hostile fronts. The other one is the newspapers.

Here is a strike situation in which at present 13 coal boats are partially or completely at the mercy of their determined crews. It means that little or no coal is being delivered in Boston; it means that a coal shortage is staring the city in the face during the severest winter in the records. Yet no newspaper mentions the strike. Questioned about their silence, the city editors and the labor reporters retort irritably that there is no such thing; that there is a so-called union “that hasn’t even got a telephone,” a bunch that’s affiliated with the I.W.W.’s, making “extravagant demands on the ship owners;” but “nobody’s paying any attention to them.” No; nobody’s paying any attention to them; that is, nobody but the ship owners, the seamen (who are filling the M.W.I.U. headquarters to overflowing every day), the police who have mounted machine-guns on the ships to keep the strike committees off, members of the John Reed Club, the National Student League, and the Young Communist League (who are helping to keep up the strikers’ morale with entertainment and food). No; aside from these, nobody’s paying any attention to the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union-except the newspapers. For, let there be no question about it, the newspapers are alertly on the job. What they are doing now is deliberately and consciously suppressing that part of the news which they fear to print, lest it cause panic.

Why, they ask themselves, should we publish the fact that only a few tons of coal are available during the worst winter some of us have ever seen? Why, it might cause discontent, and criticism of the government. In other words, the newspapers are doing their part under the code they have recently signed. Their part is to suppress any news that might “inflame the public mind”; such news, for instance, as that of the three seamen whom everybody on the waterfront knew to be missing from the Glen White except Boston’s city editors.

In the meantime the strike goes on. Nobody can tell how long it will last. By the time this article appears it may be over; again, it may have spread. At present, there are thirteen coal boats tied up in and around Boston harbor. Boston is the focal point, both because most of the seamen live here and because the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union, despite its youth, is strongest here.

The strike is aimed in general against the shipowners’ code; specifically, it is aimed at all the abuses aristocrats of the International Seamen’s Union and the coal-boat owners have crammed down the seamen’s throats since these workers can remember: coal trimming, which is the job of longshoremen ; insufficient and rotten food (literally rotten, at times); refusal to recognize the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union; starvation pay; blacklists; refusal to agree to central shipping bureaus controlled by seamen and longshoremen; withholding of pay (on some of the richest lines) for as long as six months at a time!

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1934/v10n10-mar-06-1934-NM.pdf