Harry Bridges - 6 April 1990

Last weekend, the mayor of San Francisco, Mr Art Agnos, ordered all flags on city buildings to be flown at half mast, in honour of an Australian, Harry Bridges, one of the most militant of America's labour leaders during the industrial union battles of the 1930s.

In San Francisco they were literal battles, during which, on a July day, two men were killed and over 100 wounded. Marshal law was declared and, at midnight, the National Guard moved in. The senior senator from California wired Washington, "Here is revolution".

It was not quite that, but it was the most violent side-effect of a general strike initiated by this same lanky, jug-eared, hatchet-faced Australian, then in his early 30s. And then, and for many years thereafter, to be held up by businessmen, farmers, editorial writers and all conservatives throughout the nation, as an arch Communist triumphant in our midst.

Harry Bridges died at 88 last weekend and Mayor Agnos, in proclaiming the flag lowering ceremony said, "Harry Bridges' death leaves a void that can never be filled. He was a legendary figure in the labour movement whose courage and devotion to principle will never be forgotten. All of San Francisco mourns this loss".

Well, I can only say that the lowering of the stars and stripes in San Francisco was a symbolic act as astonishing as the toppling of Lenin's statue in Bucharest. In Romania, the sainted revolutionary leader is, after 45 years, detested and overthrown. In San Francisco, the detested revolutionary is, after 55 years, mourned and sanctified.

Harry Bridges was born in 1901 in a suburb of Melbourne and was soon out of school and working as what in American is known as a store clerk and in England and Australia as a shop assistant. He might have been there for life if he had not, one day when he was 15, read in the papers an obituary on Jack London, the San Franciscan novelist who, in 40 short years, had been a sailor, a railroad bum, a convicted vagrant, a Klondike gold rusher, a war correspondent, a lone sailor across the Pacific in a ketch, a labour agitator and, for the last 20 years of his life, a Marxian socialist. Also, in 17 years, the author of 50 books.

There was a coincidence of history that, I don't think it's fanciful to say, would have attracted a young Melbourne lad, hot for adventure, to the San Franciscan novelist more than to any other. Only three years after gold was discovered on the American river in California, gold was discovered in the hills to the west of Melbourne, and the migrants came rushing in from many of the same places that, within two or three years, had quintupled the population of San Francisco – from Germany and Russia, and China and Switzerland and Liverpool and, always, the Cornish Jacks.

The life of the two cities were strikingly similar, both before and after the gold fever subsided. First, the bubbling stew of races and types, the air of adventure and opportunism, the boozy tall tales of foreign parts and then, when the gold had given out, an unwieldy population of stranded outlanders and for the employers a great pool of labour available at any price the employers cared to set.

Jack London had written about just such things in his native city and Harry Bridges had seen them all about him in his native city.

Reading about such a society by night and living it by day aggravated in a restless boy the itch to take off for foreign parts and see how the rest of the world lived. He was only 16 when he sailed off to work on first a freighter, then a tanker. He was twice shipwrecked. Once, he stayed afloat on a mandolin.

He roamed for just under three years and sailed into San Francisco in his 19th year on a three-masted barque making a port call. Young Harry Bridges gave the first sign of what he was to become by having a row with the skipper about the working conditions of the crew, and of seamen in general. He quit.

He mooched around San Francisco for a while, had no permanent job and drifted off to Mexico where he worked as a rigger in the oilfields. Pretty soon, though, he felt the itch for the sea again and he went aboard an American merchantman.

In 1921, a year after he'd arrived in San Francisco, he sailed into New Orleans in the middle of a dockers' strike. He immediately joined the picket line, was arrested and jailed overnight. The strike was broken. He thought that the national labour union, the American Federation of Labor, had let the workers down. He joined the new radical union, the grandly called Industrial Workers of the World and the famous, or infamous, "Wobblies".

Now, at that time, 1922, and for many more decades, longshoremen – stevedores – were hired according to an unchanging procedure. The "shape up" -– the men came shuffling to the docks an hour before sunrise. They lined up and some were chosen to work the ships and more went home and some stayed around all day.

For the rejected ones, there was only the labour they might pick up on a lucky day. There was a minimum wage but no union, no maximum working week. You might work six hours a day or 14. Harry Bridges decided to change all this but the shippers' agents and the dock foremen were well entrenched, and it took Bridges 11 years to dare to organise, in the pit of the Depression, his own longshoremen's local.

Within six weeks of the founding of what he called the International Longshoremen's Association, most of the dockers joined up. It was now that Harry Bridges became a figure of national fame – concern, at least.

Brushing aside the efforts of the parent union, he called a strike of his own local. All the way up the coast to Seattle, the ships lay at anchor. The ports were immobilised. And so, obviously, were the importers and their retail stores.

In July 1934, Bridges resolved to force open the port of San Francisco, with the help of police convoys. It worked for a day and a night. The next day, however, was 4 July and the strikers and the company men and the police paused to celebrate in a parade the Declaration of Independence, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The patriotic pause helped the strike breakers get thoroughly reorganised and on the morning of 5th, there was wholesale dumping of cargoes, overturning of trucks, looting, arson, charges against the police with stones, bricks. At last, guns. It was by that midnight that two men were killed and 100 wounded and the day became ever afterward known as "Bloody Thursday".

It was at that point, that very day, that Harry Bridges made a connection that was to dog him for most of his days. The Communist Party, which was livelier in those Depression days than at any time before or since, called for a general strike, and Bridges took the cry to his own union. The truckers joined in.

Two weeks later, San Francisco had its first, and last, general strike. And it was the headline news story around the nation. Bridges came to find his own ILA membership too timid and reorganised it as a radical, renamed union, through which, in time, he came to get what he'd always wanted, and more – an agreed working week, pensions, recognition of his union as the only bargaining agent and, in the '60s and '70s, agreements on mechanical loading and container prepackaging.

By that time, in the '70s, a new generation was calling him a "partner of the bosses". He, who throughout most of his life had been denounced, far and wide as a Communist. In the 1940s Congress had voted to deport him as an alien Communist – he was still an Australian. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in his favour.

At the time of his militancy, he frankly welcomed the Communists' help, he rarely, if ever, failed to follow the Communist line. "We are," he kept crying, "in a class struggle." At the same time, he said over and over, "I neither affirm nor deny that I am a Communist."

Now this was years before McCarthy, before the Second War and it was a time when, in a country where labour is not a political party, but a bargain basement where both political parties must trade. The Communists in the '30s pursued a covert strategy of infiltrating every sort of union under the guise of being liberal New Dealers. Many very ardent New Dealers didn't really believe there was such a thing as a Communist.

One such innocent was the liberal president of the Screen Actors' Guild, one Ronald Reagan, who was appalled to discover that Communists were running his union, using intimidation, blackmail, damaging homes, writing a speech he was to deliver to a committee of Congress. The result was a reaction of outrage and the birth of a new-born conservative.

Harry Bridges knew well enough who his allies were and he never minded much the national hue and cry against the Communist from Down Under. So 30 years later, when the radical dock workers called him "the bosses' partner", what happened? Nothing unnatural, really. The fellow travellers of the '30s turned into moderate Democrats, the militant student radicals of the' 60s, the notorious Chicago Seven, turned, mostly, into brokers and yuppies.

They used to say in the late '30s that a liberal was a socialist with a wife and two children. Harry Bridges, when he died, had a wife, four children, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Down the years, the New York Times said, "He had mellowed".

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