[ Harry Bridges, the Pacific longshoremen’s leader is too large
for life and almost too large as a biographical subject. Left
historian Paul Buhle reviews the recent biography by Bob Cherney.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE TOO-LARGE-FOR LIFE HARRY BRIDGES  
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Paul Buhle
March 10, 2023
Portside
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_ Harry Bridges, the Pacific longshoremen’s leader is too large for
life and almost too large as a biographical subject. Left historian
Paul Buhle reviews the recent biography by Bob Cherney. _

Harry Bridges addressing Civic Center Labor Day Rally, 1947, photo
credit: ILWU Local 142

 

Bob Cherney, veteran labor historian at San Francisco State, close to
his subject, fell seriously ill a decade ago but happily recovered;
through the process, this book has been more than twenty years in the
making. His subject, notorious for smoking cigarettes madly and
through some parts of his life also drinking heavily, had become a
legend long before his passing.

Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend
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By Robert W. Charney
University of Illinois; 478 pages $55.00
Clothbound:  $55.00;  E-book:  $19.95
January 10, 2023
ISBN:  978-0-252-04474-8  and  978-0-252-05379-5

University of Illinois
Who else in labor, apart from outright gangsters and the more numerous
corrupt bigshots, had successfully evaded prosecution by US
administrations and the FBI for generations?  Whose faithful
dominians could shut down a port in hours? Or propel the Hawaiian
labor movement from weakness to strength? The list of plaudits is
long, and safe to say, was bitterly resented by AFL chiefs until
Harry’s dying days.

It’s a fine saga, never before told fully or with such a sense for
the subject.  Alfred Renton  Bridges, born at the turn of the
twentieth century to an upper middle class family in a suburb of
Melbourne, had every good reason to take the easy path upward, but the
sharp rise of the Australian Labour Party offered the world something
new: the world’s first governing social democratic party, urging
nationalization of monopolies (also urging racist policies on
non-white immigrants). An avid reader seeking adventure, Harry took to
the seas. Experiencing the brutality normalized by the sea trade, he
joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1921 in New Orleans.
Traveling to San Francisco the next year and applying for US
citizenship (he lied about his age, providing grounds later on to
deport him), he was ready for action.

The degradations of portside workers were notorious, the corruption of
craft union officials legendary. Worst of all was the “Blue Book,”
 San Francisco’s variant of the “American Plan” of the 1920s to
break unions or render them toothless. Longshoremen lived in a world
of casual and often brutal, dangerous labor, each day uncertain. Like
some of the other labor radicals around him, Bridges joined the
“red” Marine Workers International Union in 1932 and became one of
the editors of the Waterfront Worker, which circulated within the
conservative International Longshoremen’s Association. Early on, and
definitely influenced by Communist national policies, Bridges and
other activists pressed the issue of racial equality, an important
step in a marine industry where race lines had been and often
continued to be crucial.

The longshore strike that became the San Francisco General Strike of
1934 reset calculations on all sides. Conservative labor leaders,
opposing the strike, stood discredited. Communists, well placed,
self-sacrificing and effective, emerged triumphant but (unlike
European communists) unwilling to make their own influence public. The
Roosevelt administration wanted no outright class warfare and the Bay
Area’s maritime businessmen’s leadership ultimately agreed to
terms. Harry Bridged emerged triumphant.

Bridges’ influence and that of the newly-organized ILWU spread
rapidly, and this despite bitter opposition from AFL conservatives,
including East Coast longshore officials and the Seamens Union of the
Pacific  (known best for its occasional militancy and its determined
exclusion of non-whites). Bridges rose with the CIO and the CIO in
California rose with him.

Charney, spending months in the Moscow archives, seems to have
determined that Bridges used the CP far more effectively than the
reverse, in a relationship quietly accepted on all sides (of the
Russian-oriented Left). The US Party leadership had no choice, and if
other leftwing union leaders became “submarines” by dropping the
party membership, Harry wisely had nothing to drop. This became
crucial in the first major phase of legal efforts to deport him, from
the later 1930s until US entry into War in December, 1941.

Trotskyists most especially would rage at Bridges for enforcing a
no-strike pledge during the War, and would have a point (if they
needed one) in the ILWU’s  seeming indifference to the AFL-led
Oakland General Strike in 1945. Bridges shrewdly declined to oppose
the Marshall Plan and gave only tepid support to Henry Wallace in the
1948 Progressive Party campaign. He was removed from the Northern
California office of the CIO, and of course the ILWU was purged from
the CIO a half-decade before the merger of the two federations.
Efforts by teamsters and others to raid the ILWU mostly failed, and
meanwhile expansion into further fish factories (up the coast from
California) and creation of unions in Hawaii, made Bridges almost a
Cold War winner.

Aging and stress got to him.  He was smoking like a chimney, as they
used to say, taking barbiturates to calm his nerves during the 1960s,
and after a failed first marriage and amidst a happier second one, had
four children to support. Like Bridges himself, his faithful following
was aging, and the “B men” working within the ships claimed they
faced super-exploitation without ILWU support. Stan Weir, an old
friend of the reviewer and an adamant Trotskyist in the lead of the
struggle, was in part carrying out an old vendetta. But in truth,
Bridges had definitely worked out a relationship with Pacific Maritime
Association, foreshadowing the later acceptance of containerization in
return for good wages and retirements for those who remained on the
job. From 1970 to 1982, he actually served on the San Francisco Port
Commission, where many of the crucial business decisions were hammered
out.

The Right and the Center made one more big effort to get rid of Harry.
The House Committee on UnAmerican Activities hilariously charged that
Berkeley’s political cadre, from local anti-racist demonstrations at
hotels to the Free Speech Movement, operated as puppets of Bridges.
Attorney-General Robert Kennedy attempted to oust Bridges’
leadership by legal maneuvers, and successfully hurt Bridges’
prestige indirectly, thanks to John Kennedy’s support within the Bay
Area Black community during the 1960 election and after.

And yet Bridges pressed on and on, helping to rally antiwar activists
within the public and the labor movement, while militantly in support
of civil rights. By 1970, Bridges had created a modus vivendi with the
popular San Francisco mayor, Joseph Alioto. After Bridges retired
officially in 1977, members of the ILWU felt more comfortable placing
him in the history of the union.  He passed in 1990, the flags at
City Hall went to half-mast, the LWU shut down the ports for part of a
day, and dignitaries by the dozens paid homage to him. The labor
movement would not see his like again.

_[PAUL BUHLE is a sometime labor historian who has become a
nonfiction, historical comics maven. His latest is a graphic
adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, drawn by
Paul Peart-Smith
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