Paralysis on the Pacific

If you had walked down Market Street in San Francisco last Monday morning you would have had the uncanny impression that it was still Sunday. Even municipal streetcars, the last to halt, were in the barns, their operators at home, afraid to take them out. There were no taxicabs in sight. There were few automobiles; filling stations had closed Saturday. Many business offices were deserted, and those who went to work arrived on foot. In the whole city only 19 "accredited"' restaurants were open. Their seating capacity was 3,600. In San Francisco live 600,000 men, women and children.

In grocery store windows were tattered signs: SOLD OUT. Two days before, butchers had hung up their bloody aprons to go home for the weekend. They did not return to take them down. If they had, there would have been no meat for them to chop. Milk and bread wagons made infrequent deliveries. A private family in San Francisco stood a good chance of going hungry if it had not laid in plenty of supplies. Once in a while a doctor's car went by, with its card authorizing its owner to buy gas at a few "accredited" depots. Visitors had left the city in droves, for the ferries were still running if you could get to them. The few that remained in hotels were assured food while it lasted. The electric supply, telegraph and telephone services were still functioning. The city could talk to itself and to the world, and when night fell there was still light.

Industrial paralysis had struck San Francisco and the eastern side of the bay. Across from San Francisco lies big, busy Oakland and to the north Berkeley, and Richmond. South of Oakland is Alameda. In that area live 1,200,000 people, most of whom lacked transportation or a food supply.

Little by little the paralysis crept up the surrounding valleys. In the San Joaquin Valley, 400 workers quit their vineyards. In the Salinas Valley, truck garden for San Francisco, produce was moved east and south, seeking other markets. Throughout the entire area roads were crowded with hundreds, perhaps thousands of refugees from the afflicted zone, mostly women and children being sent to the country where food could be had. By mid-afternoon of the first day it was estimated that 100,000 people had left town in 24 hours. A typical refugee was a steamship executive who moved his family out to a ranch near Carmel, set up his office there, secretary and all. "Protective isolation," he explained.

In the very centre of the paralyzed region, in his office at San Francisco's City Hall, sat Mayor Angelo Rossi. The clock on his desk ticked up to 8:01 a. m. That was the zero hour for organized labor to begin the nation's biggest general strike since 1919. For months the U. S. had been hearing talk of such a wholesale walkout. "Wolf!" cried the country when the Detroit automobile tool & die strike faded. "Wolf!" it cried when a Minneapolis truckmen's strike went no farther. "Wolf!" it cried when a general strike failed to materialize in Toledo. "Wolf!" it cried at the threat of a bloody steel strike.

Now in San Francisco the country had a wolf indeed. Into Mayor Rossi's office hurried five other Bay city mayors. Sixty thousand of their 1,200,000 citizens had laid down their tools, left their jobs. Like New York's Mayor LaGuardia, conscientious Mayor Rossi is of Italian parentage. Born in Volcano, Calif, in 1878, he got his start in life ten years later by delivering flowers in San Francisco, rose to be president of big Pelicano Rossi Floral Co. He got his start in politics in 1914 when the late "Sunny Jim" Rolph, then Mayor of San Francisco, appointed him to the city's Playground Commission. When Mayor Rolph got to be Governor in 1930 he appointed Florist Rossi to the mayoralty. Mayor Rossi survived by a narrow margin an election in 1931 in which the city charter was changed, making him a "strong mayor." Last week he needed all the power at his command.

Over the radio and by proclamation he addressed his city and the nation. "The unions in this strike have no grievances," said he. "Many of them have contracts with their employers which this strike will violate. . . . Those who seek to prolong this strike for their own selfish ends or to overthrow the government here in San Francisco or even the Government of the United States will be dealt with by every force of law and order. ....* I feel that we are confronted by the most serious situation which has beset us since the disaster of 1906. I therefore proclaim to all the people of San Francisco, irrespective of party or industrial affiliation, that an emergency exists in our city . . . and that I will avail myself of ... the laws of our State, to the end that the results of this industrial conflict may fall as lightly as possible on all our people. We must realize that our government is bigger and greater than any organization or association which may be one of its component parts."

Mayor Rossi thereupon swore in 500 more police, called for 2,000 more militiamen. By Monday the entire National Guard of California was under arms, and 5,000 guardsmen were in San Francisco.

The line between the white-collar class and the no-collar class began to appear. Under the Mayor's auspices, a "citizens' committee" of 500 was organized to check famine and disorder. The newspapers, frightened by bomb threats, took an unequivocal stand. "The radicals," editorialized the Chronicle, "have seized control by intimidation. What they want is revolution. . . . Are the sane, sober workingmen of San Francisco to permit these Communists to use them for their purpose of wreckage, a wreckage bound to carry the union down with it?"

But the soldiers no longer controlled San Francisco, nor the police, nor Mayor Rossi, nor the citizens, nor the newspapers. The man who had a half-Nelson on San Francisco was an Australian Communist named Harry Bridges. Chairman of the joint committee of maritime workers and chairman of the strike committee, he had organized the bloody, nine-week-old longshoremen's strike which had finally detonated the general strike. Organizing his own body of strike police, Chairman Bridges declared against violence, prepared to set up a food distribution system from central markets whither householders might go afoot. "If the people can't get food," he said, "the maritime workers and longshoremen will lose the strike."

Monday's violence was sporadic, minor--a few bricks heaved, a few trucks upset, some creosote bombs tossed through windows in Oakland. By nightfall Harry Bridges was easing his grip. On order of the Public Utilities Commission municipal streetcars began running again, with the strike committee's full assent. Picket lines made no move to stop police-guarded food trucks coming in from nearby farms. The strike committee announced full resumption of bakery, milk and ice deliveries. Citizens heard that the committee was planning to let all restaurants open next morning. But all liquor sales were banned "during the emergency."

Infection from San Francisco's general strike spread far and fast. It leaped up the Pacific Coast to Portland where a general walkout was tentatively called for Wednesday. Portlanders got a foretaste of San Francisco's plight when its waterfront strike dammed fuel oil and gasoline supplies to a trickle. Buildings began stocking cordwood in their basements. Seattle kept an anxious eye on San Francisco. Fuel oil supplies were so low that in hotels and apartment houses hot water was curtailed. Many a filling station hung out the NO GAS sign. One ferry was converted to burn wood. But nonunion laborers continued to load cargoes, and Seattle had hopes that the conservative wing of its unionists would avert a complete walkout.

Running East, the strike virus spread panic in Minneapolis when 6,000 drivers climbed down off their trucks and began agitating a city-wide strike. Leaping the Mississippi River the infection struck Wisconsin, where 2,000 plumbing fixture workers in the model factory town of Kohler paraded with flags and pictures of President Roosevelt, demanded more pay, shorter hours, union recognition. Swinging South, strike trouble enveloped Houston, Tex., when a stevedore strike cost the lives of three Negroes.

Government. Thoroughly out of temper, NRAdministrator Johnson appeared at Portland, told the Pacific Advertising Clubs' convention: "It is not good business--it is not good Americanism, it is merely madness to say that any set of our people cannot sit down around a table without violence or bloodshed. Strikes are a necessary evil, but, like wars, they never got anything for anybody--unless it was bloodshed and black eyes." Thankfully the General added: "Strikes are happily no longer NRA babies."

Just whose baby the San Francisco strike was now, nobody could say. New York's Senator Wagner flew out to Portland as a "special adviser." Lloyd Garrison, chairman of the new National Labor Relations Board, sent the Board's chief examiner, P. A. Donoghue, to San Francisco. The Labor Department ordered a conciliator up from Dallas. But the Federal Government showed reluctance to embroil itself further. At her Washington desk sat Madam Secretary of Labor Perkins, mum.

Far out on the Pacific aboard the Houston President Roosevelt heard of what was going on. He, too, was mum. Meantime Robert H. Hinckley, special representative of the Relief Administration, bobbed up unexpectedly in San Francisco, briskly announced: "Nobody is going to suffer from lack of food in San Francisco. The U. S. Government will see to that. At present we are canvassing the situation and are awaiting results. . . . If a dire situation develops, we will do something and do it quick."

Evolution. In the early stages of the longshoremen's strike there was just one big issue between employers and unions: Who should control the "hiring halls?" No insignificant issue was this to unions or employers because longshoremen are frequently hired and laid off. Therefore whichever side makes up the waiting lists of men next in order for rehiring can, by playing favorites, virtually force upon the waterfront 1) closed shop, 2) non-union labor.

But no adequate issue was this for the strike that San Francisco had last week. Other marine unions--seamen, pilots, cooks and stewards--jumped into the fray with demands of their own for pay, hours, union recognition. Hot-headed strike leaders welcomed alliance with open arms, for it gave them an opportunity to shake a bigger stick. When Joseph P. Ryan, national president of the International Longshoremen's Association, tried to negotiate a settlement on the basis of non-partisan control of the hiring halls, Leader Bridges and his embattled followers turned down the agreement because it did not provide for their allies. Their determination to win unconditional victory upon all fronts blocked all subsequent attempts at settlement. It led President Ryan to join with employers in accusing Leader Bridges of deliberately fomenting industrial warfare for Communistic purposes.

Thus embittered strikers and embittered employers both determined to fight to a finish. Powerless were Archbishop Hanna and his board appointed by the President. They could "find facts," offer to arbitrate but force no sort of peace. NRA likewise had no power. Said General Johnson in Portland: "The seat of the trouble out here is the fact that, due to cross currents, the shipping industry has no code. . . ."

To break the strike, employers fortnight ago "opened the waterfront" by moving freight under guard. The strikers heaved bricks, police used gas and guns, and 48 hours later National Guardsmen marched in. Thenceforward the struggle ceased to be between strikers and employers but became a struggle between strikers and the State. The marine workers appealed to their fellow unions for a general strike, and San Francisco's militant unions jumped to take sides. Some groups, reluctant to join, were intimidated. Aggressive strike leaders had, however, a potent cause, an issue to arouse emotion: should Labor impose its will or should it knuckle down? San Francisco Labor chose its course, to make the public and back of the public the State and back of the State the employers bow to its power. When the State in the person of Mayor Rossi in San Francisco, of Governor Merriam in Sacramento and, remote in the Pacific, of President Roosevelt, took up the challenge, the stage was set for social war.

*The "law and order" slogan during the Boston police strike of 1919 started Governor Calvin Coolidge to power and the Presidency.

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