When all that was, is again. Michael Gold on the violence-baiting of Portland’s unions and left by fascists, imagining a Communist threat, and leading to the state enacting genuine violence.

‘Fascism and Communism in Portland’ by Michael Gold from The Daily Worker. Vol. 12 No. 35. February 9, 1935.

LET us recall what happened in Portland, Oregon, during the recent marine strike. The longshoremen had gone out, and the bosses feared that all the waterfront unions would join them, in support of the general strike in San Francisco.

So one day, on the waterfront, there took place one of those little massacres that are becoming more frequent in America. Each seems like an accident, and the bourgeois papers call them “riots,” and forget all about them a day after they have happened. But when one casts a total of all of these massacres, they assume the proportions of a national movement. Over sixty strikers were killed last year; there must have been hundreds of assaults on labor; it was like a war, a war for fascism in America.

In Portland that day the cops, led in person by the Chief, drew up in a flat car alongside a picket line on the waterfront. Guns barked; the brave cops had fired into the ranks of the defenseless pickets. Four of them fell; and there followed a wave of protest from all the labor unions.

It looked like a general strike in Portland as the result of this little massacre. But the New Dealers were ready; General Johnson gave the signal, and then raids and terror began. Union headquarters were raided by a gang of hoodlums masquerading as “patriotic” longshoremen. They were followed by the cops, who arrested the wounded victims of the raid. At the Workers’ Bookshop 33 people were arrested. Then followed raids on unemployed centres through the city, and on the homes of workers. The Chamber of Commerce was having a grand time at their lynching party.

The men of commerce and profiteering had organized their own fascist army, of course. It was called by the euphonious title of the “Citizen’s Emergency League,” as if longshoremen, sailors and workers are not citizens faced with an emergency, and as if the American flag belonged to the profiteers, and not to the people who work.

This gang of phony citizens, many of them petty gangsters and racketeers, of course (the dregs of the slums always is recruited first in these fascist Storm Troops the world over) was led by a “Colonel” William Aird, reserve army officer and payroll patriot. The Chamber of Commerce gave him directives and cash for his dirty work. Every day his voice boomed over the radio, calling for violence against the strikers.

A call for violence, an open conspiracy to organize violence against the workers. And the city and state government, the bourgeois democracy under which we live, lifted not a finger to arrest these criminals. Indeed, it encouraged them.

Who Commits Violence?

IT IS IN events such as this one that we can see illustrated the process by which bourgeois democracy evolves into fascism. How often have the liberals and capitalist-minded among Socialist leaders advanced the Hearstian theory that it is Communism and the threat of working class violence that brings on fascism.

But study such a typical situation as that in Portland, repeated in San Francisco, Hillsboro, Illinois, and dozens of other places. It is the capitalists who commit all the violence, who openly arm their thugs for naked war, who use the radio and newspapers to preach violence, who establish the complete atmosphere of fascism, under the protection of the democratic capitalist state.

Does anyone believe the Communist Party actually ran the Portland or San Francisco strikes? It would be a fine thing if this had been true, showing that the American workers were at last learning to be true to their own class interests. But, unfortunately, it was not true. These happened to be strikes led by the orthodox unions. The cry of Communism was only a red herring across the trail, put there by the fascist-like Chamber of Commerce.

In Portland, their armed Storm Troops raided a Communist meeting. Eight uniformed and armed cops accompanied them. Some two hundred men, women and children had gathered peacefully to protest against the raids and shooting of striking workers. The thugs broke in and indulged in the usual bloody orgy. Then they arrested a group of workers, and had them tried for “criminal syndicalism,” charged them with advocating the overthrow “of the government by force and violence.”

Under the Wings of the Blue Eagle

THIS is the background of the trials of Dirk De Jonge, Edward Denny and the other workers in Portland. But it is not only Communists and organizers of the unemployed who are being persecuted and framed up.

Twenty-eight members of the longshoreman’s union, which is affiliated to the A.F. of L., were also arrested and charged with murder. A company union scab had been killed during a fight between these rats and the members of the real union. Investigation showed that Karl Grammer, a scab, had actually fired the shot. Public opinion forced the District Attorney to arrest him, and he confessed to the crime. But he was released, and the charge against the union men was changed to rioting!

So it goes, the march of fascism in this country. Capitalist violence grows, under the warm wings of the Blue Eagle. Unless we fight criminal syndicalist laws, and form a united front to defend workers like Dirk De Jonge, and the other Portland cases; the Sacramento cases; every other case where fascism is working in a legal mask. This is where our battle lies today.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n035-Nat-feb-09-1935-DW-LOC.pdf