Dancing in the Rain
By Dick Meister
It was in the heart of
downtown Oakland, at 7 a.m. on a rainy December day a half-century ago.
Dozens of strikers, picket
signs held high, were gathered outside the Kahn's and Hastings department
stores on Broadway on that wet, chilly morning in 1946.
Suddenly, some 200 Oakland and Berkeley police, many in riot gear,
swept down the street. They roughly pushed aside pickets and pedestrians
alike as they cleared the street and the surrounding eight square blocks.
They set up machine guns across from Kahn's while tow trucks moved in to
snatch away any cars parked in the area.
Behind them came an armed
guard of 16 motorcycle police and five squad cars. The lead car carried
Oakland Chief Robert Tracy and the strikers' nemeses, Paul St. Sure, a
representative of the employers who fiercely opposed their demand for
union contracts, and Joseph R. Knowland, the virulently anti-labor
newspaper publisher who controlled the local political establishment.
That included the Oakland City Council, which had demanded that the
police move against strikers.
It looked like a parade to
Joe Chadet, then editor of the East Bay Labor Journal. He recalled that
Tracy, St. Sure and Knowland were "bowing to the populace. They were going to put the labor movement in its place.
The only thing missing was top hats and a brass band."
The trucks came last -
trucks carrying merchandise denied the stores during the month strikers
had been picketing. The Teamster Union truckers who normally made
deliveries would not cross the picket lines.
But now that the police had driven off the pickets, in came
non-union strikebreakers with the merchandise - 12 bulging truckloads of
it, just in time for the Christmas shopping rush.
Such attacks on the
attempts of working people to exercise basic constitutional rights were
common enough earlier in the century, during organized labor's formative
years. But this was 1946. Rarely did political and law enforcement officials so
blatantly side with management in its disputes with labor.
The reaction was swift and
as dramatic as any in the history of American unions. Labor officials feared that if they didn't forcefully
challenge the attack on the department store employees, other attacks, on
other workers, would follow. All unions were threatened, all unions had to
fight back.
Within two days, a general
strike all but shut down the whole of Alameda County.
It is much less remembered than the celebrated general strike waged
in San Francisco a dozen years earlier, but it was no less effective.
More than 130,000 union
members walked off their jobs to protest the anti-union actions of the
police and Oakland's city council, and thousands more honored their picket
lines. Official support was
voiced by community organizations throughout the county.
In Oakland, Piedmont,
Emeryville, Berkeley, Alameda, San Leandro and Hayward it was the same.
For nearly three days, beginning December 3, no buses ran, no
streetcars, no taxis. The Bay Bridge was jammed as never before.
Construction projects shut
down. The shipyards were
idle. Most gas stations were
closed, most grocery stores, hotels, restaurants and bars, most movie
theaters. Newspapers ceased
publication, even Knowland's Oakland Tribune.
Teamster pickets kept trucks carrying anything but food from
entering the county.
"It was more like
this country should be," declared Chadet.
"We were in control, we called the shots."
Only essential services
continued uninterrupted. Police
remained at work, of course, as did firemen.
Hospitals, pharmacies and schools operated more or less normally.
Gas, electric and telephone service was generally unchanged.
But that was it.
For most of the county's one million residents, life was far from
normal. Thousands rushed into
downtown Oakland to join in massive protests.
At any time during the strike you could find as many as 20,000
protestors crowded together in front of the two struck stores or in
Oakland's Civic Center, defying police, politicians and strikebreakers,
sometimes dancing in the rain to music piped over loudspeakers.
The strike was led by the
American Federation of Labor's Central Labor and Building Trades Councils,
but it was threats from the AFL's rival Congress of Industrial
Organizations that prompted a quick settlement on labor's terms.
CIO unions, which had
supported the strike by honoring AFL picket lines, threatened to call
their own walkouts that would have cut off gas and electricity in large
parts of Oakland.
That was not the only
reason, but it was a major reason for City Manager John Hassler to finally
agree that Oakland would "not in the future use the police department
to escort or guard professional strike breakers."
It took another five
months, but ultimately the department store employees won the union rights
they had sought.
In that same month, May of
1947, the labor forces got four members of a union-backed slate of five
candidates elected to the city council in place of anti-labor incumbents
backed by Joe Knowland.
The general strike of
1946, declared the East Ray Labor Journal, forged "a solid bloc of
militant and fighting labor unionists ... aware for the first time in many
years that only by solidarity and unity can we make ourselves felt."
Dick Meister, a freelance
columnist in San Francisco, has covered labor issues for four decades as a
newspaper and broadcast reporter, editor and commentator.
c 2000 Dick
Meister
|
