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That
Commie-Rat, Alien Harry Bridges -- Today a S.F. Hero By Warren Hinckle When
clubs were trumps on the waterfront, the cops bashed heads and smiled
about it like circus fakers. The bashees were strikers who asked for
porridge in their bowls. The blood-specked cobblestones of the
Embarcadero were littered with the beat-up bodies. This led to a General
Strike that shut down the town. The leader of the General Strike was
Harry Bridges -- a Red, an alien and a troublemaker. What a
difference 67 years makes. Harry Bridges, the troublemaker who organized
the historic 1934 General Strike in San Francisco, was celebrated
Saturday as an iconic hero. A plaza in front of the Ferry Building was
dedicated in his name by Mayor Willie Brown. And the cops who used to
beat up longshoremen escorted ILWU members, in their rank-and-file
uniform of white caps, hickory work shorts and black jeans, in a
memorial march down the Embarcadero, The
white-caps were back on the waterfront in honor of the 100th anniversary
of Bridges' Red, alien, troublemaking birth. There
haven't been that many white-caps together on the waterfront in quite a
while. The cargo business went to Oakland long ago, and Local 2
representing waiters and tourist industry workers has more members on
the waterfront than Bridges' old Local 10 of the ILWU. But the
spirit of labor-militancy-past walked the waterfront Saturday as those
several hundred white-hats marched from the Ferry Building, its proud
tower mugged in a retrofit shroud, to Fisherman's Wharf. Marchers were
reading copies of the former Communist Party paper, the People' World --
not exactly a hot newsstand checkout item in San Francisco anymore --
and recalling the grand old days of class struggle when the town had
both bite and backbone. It was a time of class warfare in San Francisco
with citizen vigilantes and scab strike breakers and Red-scare
blood-lust headlines in the city's daily newspapers. What
was recalled along the march was Bridges' seminal role as perhaps the
first San Francisco internationalist. He presciently in 1936 led the
ILWU in refusing to load scrap iron aboard ships going to Japan. He was
one of the first union leaders to speak out against the Vietnam War,
which led to a tumultous beef with the old guard AFL-CIO cold warriors
who supported the war. Willie
Brown touched on Bridges' universalist viewpoint when he recalled how
Bridges led the way to integrate the once- lily-white maritime unions.
But there was more history beneath the facts: The shipowners in 1934
when the maritime workers asked for a decent day's wage and working
conditions looked to blacks, who they previously would not deign to
hire, as strike breakers. Bridges,
with the wisdom of the radical, went to the black churches in the
Western Addition and the Bayview and prayed with the congregations not
to join the ranks of the strike breakers. He promised them that if the
strike were successful blacks would be welcomed as full brothers in the
ILWU and in waterfront jobs. They
heard his plea, and Bridges kept his promise. The
ILWU of Harry Bridges was not even arguably the most progressive labor
and social institution in the United States during the Cold War years. He was
Red-baited to hell's outer regions for his now liberal efforts. U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy described the relentless efforts of
shipowners and McCarthyite '50s opinion mongers to deport
Australian-born Bridges as "Un-American" as "a monument
of man's intolerance to man." This historical box score was evened a bit Saturday with the return of the white-caps marching on the Embarcadero -- without stepping in their own blood and with cops on bicycles protecting them from traffic instead of beating them on the head. |
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