A reminder during the great waterfront battles of the 1930s of San Francisco’s militant working class traditions of the preceding generations.

‘San Francisco—The Storm Center’ from Labor Action (San Francisco). Vol. 1 No. 2. December 5, 1936.

Militant Traditions Survive in Insurgent Labor Movement

Since the waterfront strike of 1934, the eyes of militant labor throughout the nation have turned toward California and toward San Francisco in particular. For San Francisco is the center of the organized labor movement in а state which for years–because of its criminal syndicalism laws, its vigilantes, its hounding of agricultural labor and its continued prosecution of Mooney and Billings has been considered a symbol of reaction and injustice. Since 1934 that city has emerged as the scene of an aggressive labor struggle that has rocked the entire country. Many who are not acquainted with San Francisco’s labor history and others who ignore that history or try to falsify it to serve their own ends, attempt to explain this situation as a miracle accomplished by a single leader or by some single group with a particular social and political philosophy.

The heroic battle of the San Francisco Maritime and other workers since 1934 for a decent standard of life and work is not rendered less heroic because it has its roots in a long tradition of militant struggle. Wave after wave of labor militancy, some- times beaten down, sometimes di- verted into “safe” channels by reactionary leadership, sometimes sweeping on and resulting in definite gains for the workers, have swept through the San Francisco labor movement throughout its history. As early as 1850, during the days of the gold rush, the seamen went on strike in San Francisco. In 1877 occurred the famous Sand-Lot Riots in which the workers, incensed by the use of Chinese coolie labor during a period of unemployment and mass misery, were led–or rather misled–into taking out their resentment on the exploited Chinese rather than on the bosses. The ’80s and ’90s were packed with labor struggles. A large contingent of San Francisco unemployed joined Coxey’s Army in the march on Washington during the 1893-98 depression. But it was not until the early 1900’s that organized labor became a powerful factor in the city’s industrial life.

Teamsters’ Strike Of 1905

In the year 1905 came the great Teamster’s Strike, portrayed by Jack London in The Valley of the Moon. During this strike, Phelan, “reform mayor” placed city policemen on the trucks to protect scab drivers. Daily battles took place between union men, scabs and police throughout the city. The actions of the city authorities turned the attention of the workers to political action. Upon this resentment and its manipulation by a few crooked demagogues, there was built up the “Union Labor Party”–a political machine run by the labor leaders, in collusion with public utility interests, racketeers and gamblers, over which labor had no control whatever and which held the city in its grip for the next five years.

In the years immediately following the earthquake and fire of 1906, organized labor built up its economic strength in San Francisco to a point never equaled before or since in the history of trade unions. Among the organized trades, San Francisco was 100 per cent closed shop and in the building trades particularly, wages soared. The Union Labor Party had to render some service to the organized workers during. this period, though when the rush of immediate reconstruction with the resultant shortage of labor was over, it was to sell out even the building trades workers again and again. The hard-boiled labor politicians who dominated both the Building Trades Council (whose president became mayor of the city) and the Labor Council as well as the Union Labor Party–built up fortunes during their days in office by developing the sell-out game into a fine art.

In Reactionary Group

As labor leaders they made no attempt to organize the unorganized and by special agreement with the utility interests from which they accepted huge bribes, the utility employes in particular, were left strictly alone in their repeated attempts to organize themselves. Finally Fremont Older, who later fought for the freedom of Mooney and Billings, instituted the famous graft prosecutions which ended the political careers of some of the labor Czars. Unfortunately many of them still kept a strangle-hold on their unions. Much of the energy of the labor militants in the next few years had to be expended in fighting, not only the encroachments of the bosses but these enemies of the working class within. By 1920, the strength and solidarity of the trade union movement in San Francisco was only a memory.

Beginning around 1909, the I.W.W. fought their labor battles up and down the Pacific Coast, making great organizational inroads, not only in the Northwest lumber camps and the California agricultural fields, but also among the maritime, workers, particularly in San Francisco. In those years, the Socialist Party was also growing rapidly among the militant, class conscious workers. Even the anarchists gained a foothold in the San Francisco labor movement and strangely enough, some of their most active labor men–instinctive radicals without any genuine labor philosophy—were “playing ball” with the corrupt building trades leaders. The McNamara confession, engineered by Lincoln Steffens, ended a definite phase of labor militancy, not only on the Pacific Coast, but throughout the nation. For the next five or six years, labor was intent on regaining its respectability and Los Angeles was expanding as the great open shop center of the West.

Tom Mooney Framed

Just before America entered the World War, San Francisco’s “civic peace” was shattered by the longshoremen. It was during the strike that followed that the late Captain Dollar made the famous remark that “the only way to end a strike is to send ambulance loads of pickets to the hospital.” While the longshoremen were out, the culinary unions and the musicians also struck. Mooney tried to organize the street-railway employes and was framed, together with Billings, on the charge of bombing the Preparedness Day parade. The strikes were lost and Mooney was convicted. The million dollar fund, raised by the Chamber of Commerce to break the waterfront strike and to finance the Mooney “investigations,” marked the beginning of complete employer solidarity on the Pacific Coast.

In the wave of strikes and lockouts that marked the close of the war period, the maritime workers struck again, but in the absence of any solidarity among the waterfront unions, they were completely crushed. By 1920, even the powerful Building Trades Council had become an impotent shadow. The labor “progressives” of 1910 and 1912, became the labor conservatives of the 1920’s, running the Labor Council, with an iron hand–although militant opposition was practically non-existent–lunching with representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, resurrecting the “Union Labor Party” label every two years for the purpose of endorsing their candidacies for office. In name, at least, San Francisco was still “a strong labor town.” In actuality, the closed shop was a myth. The unions existed on sufferance because they were no longer a menace to the employers. The labor militants either bided their time or dropped by the wayside, discouraged.

New Generation Of Militants

The wave of organization and hope which followed the N.R.A. aroused both the old and a new generation of militants to action. It was on the water-front where the militant tradition had been strongest, that the first successful battle against the old leadership was staged. The maritime strike of 1934, regalvanized the labor movement of the entire west. San Francisco labor had come back! On July 16th, it startled the nation by a General Strike.

This is merely the barest outline of San Francisco’s labor past. Thousands of clean-fighting workers have contributed to that record–men and women of every conceivable shade of working-class political and social opinion. There is a tendency today among many who are ignorant of that record to believe that “labor militancy” was born in San Francisco two years ago. The Communist Party, for example, and many of its newly converted “fellow-travelers” who know only what they are told, would have us believe that it was actually born in Party headquarters, with Sam Darcy acting as mid-wife. As a result, they greet every manifestation of militancy on the waterfront that does not accord with the Party line with a sneering reference to “Wobbly tactics,” or dub every labor militant who disagrees with that line a “Wobbly.”

Those who have assimilated the great lessons of the World War and the Russian revolution can understand the incompleteness and falsity of some of the basic theories of the I.W.W., which account for its downfall. But at the same time the young generation of labor militants must be taught to respect the tradition of the old I.W.W. It included in its ranks some of the most fearless and honest fighters the labor movement in this country has known, and many of its principles and tactics have contributed immeasurably to the modern struggles of American labor.

Honor Great Tradition

Every militants worker in the United States owes to the Wobblies a debt of gratitude for the fearless struggles they conducted in the textile centers of the East, the lumber and harvest and mining regions of the West, and along the waterfront of the entire nation. The Wobbly tradition, like that of the trade union militants, is part of labors priceless heritage.

It will never be the policy of Labor Action, nor of revolutionary Socialists generally, to sneer at those who conducted the struggles of the past–in San Francisco or elsewhere–no matter what their social philosophy; nor to heap slander on those honest and aggressive working-class leaders who do not see eye to eye with us on every question.

The resurgence of San Francisco labor in the past two years is built upon the best militant traditions of the past. Labor Action honors all groups and individuals who contributed to those traditions, it is determined to build upon them; not to ignore them nor tear them down.