San Francisco General Strike

SAN FRANCISCO GENERAL STRIKE. The strike that took place in San Francisco on 16–19 July 1934 was an epic moment in the history of the American working class. Although authorized by the city’s conservative labor leadership, it was first and foremost an act of rank-and-file solidarity that galvanized more than 100,000 workers in San Francisco and Alameda counties in support of longshoremen and seamen who had struck the entire West Coast. Denounced by local politicians and the press as a Communist-led insurrection, it was accompanied by widespread police and vigilante violence and derided in some quarters as a major defeat for organized labor. But in its aftermath the marine workers won a great victory and the cause of unionism was dramatically enhanced.
The events in San Francisco were part of a larger wave of class conflict that crested in 1934. The year’s major strikes were characterized by raw class conflict pitting strikers and their supporters against police, national guardsmen, and, sometimes, vigilantes and “citizens’ armies.” Political parties of the Left played a major role in several of these upheaveals. The Communist Party was particularly active in the West Coast maritime strikes, placing its newspaper, legal apparatus, and human resources at the disposal of the strikers. But it would be easy to exaggerate the Party’s role. It was only one factor among many contributing to the extraordinary determination of the maritime strikers, whom one observed described as “redder than any Communist I ever saw.”

The general strike had its roots in the struggle of marine workers to rebuild unions such as the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, which had been crushed after World War I by the employers’ open-shop offensive. In the summer of 1933, responding in part to New Deal legislation that sanctioned the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining, San Francisco dockworkers enthusiastically welcomed the reappearance of the ILA. Led by an outspoken Australian named Harry Bridges, a number of veteran longshoremen with close ties to the Communist Party played a vital role in the union’s renaissance and won recognition as the bona fide leaders of the San Francisco local. When the ship owners refused to make any meaningful concessions to the ILA’s demand for union-controlled hiring halls and the closed shop, the longshoremen walked out on 9 May 1934. Reluctantly, the conservative leadership of the American Federation Labor’s seamen’s unions joined the strike. In another critical development, teamsters rejected their officials’ counsel and refused to handle scab cargo. Within a week every port on the West Coast except Los Angeles was shut down tight.

After nearly two months, San Francisco’s most powerful employers convinced the city administration that it was time to break the deadlock by force. On 3 July, and again on 5 July (“Bloody Thursday”), police attempted to escort truckloads of cargo through massive picket lines on the waterfront. In the face of the sadistic violence and superior firepower of their adversaries, the strikers displayed “insane courage.” With two men dead (both shot in the back by police) and downtown San Francisco transformed into a war zone, the governor of California called in the National Guard, and the picketers were driven from the waterfront. But then came the most dramatic moment in what had already been an extraordinary drama. Responding to the maritime unions’ call to honor the martyrs of Bloody Thursday, fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people turned out to participate in a massive funeral march. It was, said the San Francisco Chronicle, “a stupendous and reverent procession that astounded the city.” In its wake the clamor for a citywide walkout became deafening.

Initially, the conservative labor leadership opposed such a move but felt helpless in the face of rank-and-file pressure. At the crucial moment, however, they were able to seize control of a movement they could no longer suppress. When delegates to the San Francisco Labor Council voted overwhelmingly for a general strike, the council’s top officials simply appointed themselves to the strike strategy committee and then used their position to prevent the walkout from becoming an all-out war between labor and capital. After watching the strategy committee send street carmen back to work and allow all of the city’s restaurants to reopen, a marine union spokesman complained that “our general strike seems to be dissolving under our feet.... The conservatives, having all the voting power, seem to be attempting to force us back to work immediately.”

In this regard, the conservatives had plenty of help. Typographical workers voted not to join the strike, which allowed newspapers to continue publication. The press kept up a steady barrage of accusations that the strike was a Communist plot to starve the city into submission. Police and vigilantes launched a concerted campaign of terror aimed particularly at Communists and other “alien” elements. Homes, offices, and union halls were ransacked; hundreds were arrested on trumped-up charges. Fearing an imminent backlash against all of organized labor, the Labor Council leadership desperately sought to end the walkout. On the fourth day, delegates voted to terminate the general strike immediately.
For a moment it appeared that the supreme act of labor solidarity had given way to division and demoralization. The maritime strikers accepted arbitration and returned to work at the end of July; other unionists braced for a new open-shop offensive. But militant labor quickly regained its momentum, led again by the marine workers, who took the strike back to the job and turned the world of waterfront labor relations upside down. In October, a presidentially-appointed National Longshoremen’s Board met several of the dockworkers’ crucial demands, and the men continued to build on that foundation. The seamen won an equally impressive victory. And the example of the marine workers proved contagious. Indeed, it triggered a wave of organizing and ferment among a generation of workers on the West Coast.

In the final analysis, then, the general strike had a dual character. Forced upon the union leadership by an avalanche of class feeling at the grass roots, it was quickly reduced by Labor Council officials to a limited gesture of sympathy, designed more to minimize organized labor’s losses than to see the maritime strike through to victory. However, because of the marine workers’ stunning triumph, the general strike became a powerful symbol of the solidarity that fueled the forward march of labor in the 1930s.

Bernstein, Irving. Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.

Kimeldorf, Howard. Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Larrowe, Charles P. Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1972.

Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Quin, Mike. The Big Strike. Olema, Calif.: Olema Publishing Co., 1949.

Selvin, David F. A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.

“General Strike 1934” Photographic Collection. Calisphere Website. University of California. https://calisphere.org/search/?q=general+strike+1934