San Francisco has a preeminent place in the history of the
labor movement. Men and women who fought
– literally – for the right to form unions and bargain with management
collectively overcame the combined forces of capital and the state in this
city. Their story is long and rich and
powerful. And after posting my thoughts
yesterday, I found my mind dwelling on them throughout my shift, through the afternoon
and evening and on into the night.
I knew that I wanted to spend the few minutes I have her
today to tell you about one moment in that history. I knew that I wanted to tell you about Howard
Sperry and Nick Bordoise. When I took my
dinner break, I looked up the events I am about to relate in order to get the
details right. I saw that what happened
took place on the fifth day of July, which was also yesterday’s date. Those men were on my mind constantly
throughout what was the eightieth anniversary of their deaths.
Up until the development of containerized shipping, the
cargo on board every ship that docked in every port had to be off-loaded by
individual men picking up and carrying each item (crates, barrels, furniture,
etc.) off the ship and onto the dock.
The sailors operated the ship itself, but all cargo was handled by men
who worked along the shore. These men
came to be called ’long shore men.
I know that you have not had time to read the novels I
mentioned in my last post, but I hope that by the time you read my next post
you will have purchased at least one of them – or checked it out of the
library. You cannot understand life in
the industrialized world without understanding the position of working people vis a vis their employers. Steinbeck’s novels will teach you that truth –
and they will enrich your heart and advance your understanding of the nobility of
the human spirit.
In the early 1930s, unemployment in the United States
reached 25%. One out of every four
people you passed on the street had no income, no way to pay rent, to buy food,
or to pay for any of the other necessities of life. As a result, employers could and did cut
wages lower and lower and lower. Many
did not pay their workers enough to live on, and in addition drove them
relentlessly to work harder.
You and I cannot imagine what it was to live through those
times. We find the tensions between the
haves and the have-nots today bad enough, but they pale in comparison to the
hostility that grew steadily on both sides during the Great Depression. By 1933 the coal miners, then the sailors,
then the longshore men began spontaneously to organize themselves into unions
to demand better wages and better working conditions from their employers. As for the employers, they had the police and
military force of the government, their own private armies of “security”
companies such as Pinkertons, and squads of vigilantes on their side. Tense stand-offs boiled over into violence on
many occasions, one of which was “Bloody Thursday” on San Francisco’s Embarcadero.
Since early May, every port on the west coast of the United
States had been shut down by strikers.
Not a single piece of fruit, not a vegetable, and no manufactured
products of any kind was shipped out of Seattle, Portland, Everett, Los
Angeles, Long Beach, San Pedro, Oakland, San Francisco or any other port. The police attacked strikers with tear gas,
special vomiting gas, and finally with guns.
On July 5, 1934, Howard Sperry was shot by a policeman at Steuart and
Mission Streets. He later died of his
wounds. About the same time and only a
short distance away, in front of a kitchen the strikers had set up to feed
their men, Nick Bordoise, an out of work cook who was helping out as a
volunteer, was also shot and killed.
Two days later, on Saturday the 7th, two plain
wooden coffins containing the bodies of Howard and Nick were loaded on wagons
and drawn by horses at a solemn pace from the Ferry Building up Market Street
to Valencia. Forty Thousand people –
union men, the families of the dead, and many who joined spontaneously as the
procession made its way up the great thoroughfare – marched in uniform rows,
eight abreast, in silence. The street
was lined by as many as a hundred thousand more who took off their hats, bowed
their heads, and mourned the fallen workers.
Not a single word was spoken. Not one of those thousands and thousands of
people broke the silence. All one heard
was the slow, steady clopping of the horses hooves and the sound of the wagon
wheels on the pavement for the entire length of the procession, over two and a
half miles.
Within a few more days, the entire city of San Francisco was
closed down by a general strike. Not
only the workers trying to win recognition of their unions but even small
business owners, Mom and Pop stores, put signs of support in their windows and
remained closed. Shortly thereafter,
having closed the west coast for 83 days, the longshoremen won the right to
manage the operations of the ports themselves.
Such is the power for people who are together.
No comments:
Post a Comment