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From International Socialism (1st series), No.72, October 1974, pp.29-30.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labour in the US
Charles P. Larrowe
Merlin Press, £3.
RELENTLESS determination laced with courage, in the face of a ruthless and often brutal enemy has been a recurrent feature of the labour movement in the United States. So has a blatant and often breathtaking collaboration with that same enemy. These contradictory elements have frequently been shared by the same leader. In some respects Harry Bridges, a founder and for nearly forty years the leader of the West Coast longshoreman’s union, is typical of the phenomena. An Australian, he spent his youth at sea, settling in San Francisco in 1922 as a dockworker. In the 1920’s he was engaged in a number of courageous, but largely unsuccessful attempts to bust the Company Union. He flirted briefly with the ‘Wobblies’ before settling into a close association with the American Communist Party. In the early thirties he helped to build a vigorous rank and file movement on the waterside, with its own widely read paper, The Waterside Worker.
The 1920’s was a period of employer ascendancy, strongly supported by the forces of the state. As the depression deepened, union organisation became increasingly precarious. Then, in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to the Presidency, and as part of his attempt to win the conservative leadership of the American Federation of Labour (AF of L), he introduced legislation which gave a degree of Government backing to the unionisation of American industry. This policy was greeted with predictable hostility by the major employers’ organisations and the result was a tremendous wave of strikes and sit-ins.
Confrontation reached an early peak in 1934 with three major and decisive battles. Auto workers at Toledo, Ohio, and truck drivers (teamsters), in Minneapolis struck for recognition and negotiating rights. Despite the murderous attacks of armed strike breakers, hired by the bosses, the police and National Guardsmen, and vicious press witch hunts, the workers won most of their demands. The third battle in that year was on the west coast. Longshoremen struck against the company union and its ‘cattle market’ hiring system and for agreements taking in the whole coast. It was this strike which brought Harry Bridges into prominence. He showed tremendous organising skill and a rock like determination in the face of employer and state reaction. He would not be intimidated, though they tried very hard, and he could not be bought off though they tried hard to. Despite the murder of two dockers, the lies of the press and the treachery of Joe Ryan, the national longshoremen’s leader, the dockers won through, and were at least able to establish union hiring halls.
The battles of 1934 had the effect of exposing the leaders of the AF of L as spineless collaborators determined to defend their craft status and strongly resistant to the development of industrial unionism. The new general unions were expelled and they formed their own national body, the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) in 1936. Harry Bridges took the new and militant International Longshoreman’s Union (ILWU) into the CIO, which by 1938 had nearly four million members.
By the mid-thirties he was a nationally known figure, hero-worshipped by his members and vilified by employers and press. Three times in 12 years he was hauled before judicial enquiries aimed at having him deported. Hundreds of fraudulent witnesses were used against him including a number of former trusted comrades. Twice he was convicted for alleged, but never proven, membership of a subversive organisation, and was saved only by eleventh hour decisions of the Supreme Court.
Unlike so many trade union leaders Bridges has shown no interest in personal aggrandisement, has not run his union like a Chicago mob and has lived a modest existence. He maintained the loyalty of the membership even during the hysterical Macarthyite period – which said something for his integrity. However, he has an achilles heel, his consistent alignment with the Stalinists. During the war he threw himself – and his members – enthusiastically into the war effort, signing and maintaining a no strike agreement. He also used the machine bureaucratically against critics, especially from the left and demonstrated a very unsympathetic attitude to the campus rebellions of the late sixties. However, certainly his worst ‘crime’ was his pioneering of a Devlin style productivity bargain on the West Coast in the late fifties, which resulted in the depletion of the dock labour force at a time of rising unemployment.
Comrades interested in following up the American trade union issues of the period will not get a great deal of help from this book. The author shines in his retelling of the judicial procedures, but he certainly does not live up to his subtitle.
Bridges’ attitudes to the big issues are touched on in only a cursory manner and we are left in ignorance. Perhaps it is not too surprising since Larrowe tells us in the foreword that the subject himself, though alive and kicking, would give him no help at all in writing the book!
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Last updated: 13.3.2008