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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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