Girl of My Dreams (35 page)

She was performing for the very ovation she now received. I preferred her no-nonsense granddaughter, which was why I was suddenly so jealous of Yeatsman as he disappeared out of the auditorium with Comfort and her grandmother. But Mrs. O'Hollie had neatly caught the sentiments of the Dreamland crowd, many of whom had been brought up on Communion wafers with the certain promises and threats of an afterlife.

In contrast, the overgrown pixie with the hook nose who now took the stage had neither an air of elegance nor an aura of destiny about him. Looking haggard, he wore a dark cardigan sweater over an open-collared shirt. “I'm Harry Bridges of the Strike Committee, International Longshoreman's Association Local 38–79,” he said prosaically. All the others had been opening acts; though he was only beginning to be well-known, Bridges was the main event. Lean and a little bent even in his early thirties, he was a former Australian seaman who jumped ship in San Francisco to become a longshoreman. Bridges had taken over the strike strategy when the union leadership had essentially backed away from the men on the picket lines. Applause for Bridges was enthusiastic but stopped quickly when he began to speak again without even holding up his hand. “Bridges represents labor,” Quin said, “but he's all business.”

“Dollar an hour for us longshoremen,” Bridges said in his Down Under accent, “dollar and a half when we work over thirty hours a week, a hiring hall we control and no more company union. Goodbye to the straw bosses and their wretched kickbacks. We don't think that'll bring down the republic. We're the refuse and the rejects, we dockmen and seamen, let's see them refuse and reject these entirely reasonable demands.”

Dreamland was silent, attentive.

“To those of you who may be tempted either by empty cupboards or the owners' paltry offers,” Bridges resumed, “I tell you this. You can separate a dog from its leash but not from its hunger. Now we've slipped the leash, but until we find enough to feed our families we have to keep hunting and barking.”

“That's it, Harry,” a few shouted as Bridges warmed to his task.

“The history of maritime labor in San Francisco is a tale of heroism and injustice,” he said. “We've been beaten, shanghaied, drugged, shot, stabbed, kicked, swindled, and exploited. We're controlled by men who brag they want our blood spilled. This afternoon the owner of the American Hawaiian Steamship Company said, ‘We can cure this best by bloodshed. We have to have bloodshed to stop the strike.' What's our answer?” Bridges was cascaded by boos and curses.

“Our relationship with men like that,” Bridges spoke calmly into the microphone, “is not one of employer and employee, is it? It's one of master and slave. You know it, they know it. The Embarcadero itself is known as a slave market. Yet you've heard the gentleman from Washington say don't strike. That's the
Labor
Department which is supposed to look out for our interests, and
they're
saying put your tails between your legs and go back on those docks so you can be treated like scum, go back on those ships where you're nothing but deck slime. Do you want to go back under those conditions?”

A chorus of nos boomed through Dreamland.

“Our president, Mr. Roosevelt, offers us hope, then he snatches it away. It's all right to organize, his people tell us, but don't you dare strike. It's all right to chew but you're not allowed to have teeth. Well, strike we have and strike we must.”

Bridges was interrupted by chants of “Strike, strike, strike!”

“Now then, Mr. Ryan,” Bridges said looking down at the national union's leader who was still sitting in front after being booed off the stage, “you call your sweetheart deal with the shipowners a gentleman's agreement. But Mr. Ryan, why didn't you consult the Strike Committee or the membership at large before making an agreement in our names, finding out what we all think”—and Bridges swept his hand over the hall—“instead of signing an agreement over all our heads?”

Now Joe Ryan shouted up from the auditorium, “You're acting for the Bolsheviks! You don't want the strike settled!”

“Oh,” Bridges said, “well then, may I ask everyone here, are the Communists leading this strike, are they telling you what to do?”

Nos again rocketed around the auditorium.

“Who's leading this strike anyway?” Bridges lofted his words.

“We are! The longshoremen! The seamen! The teamsters!” The cries came from every corner of Dreamland. “We are! We are!”

Joe Ryan, trying to hold on to some semblance of his leadership, shouted up one more time. “All right, men! I didn't know there was so much unity.”

At this Ryan was called every insulting name in the vocabularies of several languages. “No backroom sweetheart deal,” Bridges said. “Any agreement anyone makes in your name comes back to you, not to Joe Ryan, not to me, not to the Strike Committee, but to you, the rank and file and sinew and muscle of the unions. We'll go back, all right, we'll go back when you tell us and vote to accept an agreement, not a half-minute before. I make a motion that the salaried union officials be severed from the negotiations and you put the strike settlement in the hands of the Strike Committee, which will consult you—or I'm not standing here in front of you—always and on every detail before agreeing to anything.” Several dozen longshoremen and seamen seconded the motion. “All in favor,” Bridges said, “Say aye!” He was drowned in ayes.

In the morning Quin had me on the docks early. Some of the pickets were wearing their Sunday best, suits and ties and fedoras, as they marched along the Embarcadero. Others, the younger ones, wore striped jerseys and T-shirts. Mounted police separated the pickets from the piers across the street. A number of strikers hoisted signs: FULL RECOGNITION was block-printed on one, with others urging SUPPORT THE ILA, DON'T SCAB, LONGSHOREMEN AND SEAMEN STAND TOGETHER. The festive mood was sustained for the time being, with Army veterans singing “Mademoiselle from Armentières.” The rhythm suited the march as it had all those years before in France. I didn't see Harry Bridges, but he could have been anywhere on the Embarcadero.
Hinky, dinky, parley-voo
bounced off brick walls across from the docks.

When a work crew of strikebreakers was herded onto one of the docks, a striker in a jersey yelled, “Let's stop them!” Policemen reined their horses closer to the marchers. The younger pickets looked ready for anything, but an older fellow in a dark suit and bowler yelled back, “No! If they don't start nothin' we won't either.” The work crew was allowed to pass, not without glaring and grumbling, strikers and strikebreakers swearing at each other. Mounted police looked menacing, but I wasn't sure how effective they'd be if the pickets managed to get between the horses and the docks. The sentiment percolating through the strikers' ranks was they'd missed doing something brave and declarative when they let the strikebreakers through to the dock. “Closing this port,” one of the younger pickets shouted, “means closing the port! I say let's block the docks!” An older man answered, “Mates, the time has come. We block the docks.” Then the yell went up, “BLOCK THE DOCKS!”

Surely there must have been plans for this, but what it looked like was spontaneous energy bursting into a strategy, rippling through the striking longshoremen like a single blow to a line of balls that causes all the others to vibrate. Very quickly, columns of picketers all along the Embarcadero were shouting for the docks to be closed off. The chant became a roar. “BLOCK THE DOCKS! BLOCK THE DOCKS!”

As if this were a signal, which it may well have been, hundreds more strikers poured out of side streets, especially from Mission Street in the direction of union headquarters, onto the Embarcadero. The police themselves were now reinforced by squad cars and paddy wagons that dumped out scores, maybe hundreds, of police on foot, most carrying billy clubs. The Embarcadero became a turbulent sea of human agitation.

Mike Quin pulled out a camera and began taking pictures. “Quite a party, isn't it?” he said. I was too frightened to say anything except, “Do you think we're safe?” To which Quin replied, “Don't worry, Skinny, you're not on one side or the other, are you? Stay on your fence and enjoy the fun.” I didn't feel like I was on the fence.

A policeman climbed on top of a squad car with a bullhorn. “Clear the lanes to the docks!” he yelled to both pickets and police. “This is private property, you strikers know that. We can allow a peaceful march, but there will be no disruption of private property!”

A picket yelled, “Protecting the big guys like always, eh, Captain?”

The police captain answered through his bullhorn. “We're protecting private property, same as if your home is broken into and you want us catching the burglar.”

This brought derisive laughter from the strikers. They yelled back that the cops would never come to their homes anyway, only to the nabobs on Nob Hill.

A yellow schoolbus pulled up to a pier about a hundred yards from where Quin and I stood. He said we ought to move closer, and we trotted along the sidewalk. At that moment a few dozen more mounted police cantered down Folsom Street onto the Embarcadero. A squadron of bruisers, young bruisers, came off the bus and made for the docks. “It's the football team again,” Quin said, “come over from the U of Cal to scab.” It looked like there were about fifty of them. A striker shouted to them they should have brought their shoulder pads and helmets. A wedge of policemen formed to run interference for the football players as they tried to get onto a pier. Strikers closed in, enveloping the wedge, and more policemen hemmed in the strikers.

The captain balancing on the roof of the squad car bullhorned for the strikers to disperse immediately. The strikers yelled back they were going nowhere until the football players headed back to their classrooms. Concentric circles had now formed: the football team surrounded by police who were surrounded by strikers who were surrounded by mounted police who had an entire circle of pickets around them. “You want a moving picture, Skinny?” Quin said. “Wouldn't Busby Berkeley like to see this from overhead?”

The only direction the strikers would let the rich boys—as they called the players—go was toward their bus. “This is your final warning!” the captain shouted. Some players looked longingly toward their schoolbus; others were ready to fight. A striker yelled, “Don't send a boy to do a man's work!”

The football players were impatient, or panicked, or both. The dance began, but it was more a
danse macabre
than anything Busby Berkeley staged. The players stampeded through the police circle formed to protect them and rushed toward the dock, but no one was running interference for them anymore. A few broken field runners actually did make it past the pickets, but the longshoremen stopped most of them and were shoving them toward their bus. Players and strikers got into fist fights, and I saw teeth spat out, pounded eyes that were going to turn purple, bloodied noses. The battle cry was from all three sides because the police were now engaged as well as the strikers and football players. The shouts back and forth, the billy clubs and fists, reminded me of clanging swords and cannon balls in sequences pitting pirates against merchant sailors, with the British Navy steaming in to enforce order along the Spanish Main.

When most of the football players had been terrified back onto their bus, the mounted police charged the strikers with tear gas canisters. Similar skirmishes were going on up and down the Embaracadero as police, strikers, and strikebreakers all joined in small battles. To get away from the fumes, Quin and I retreated up Mission Street with handkerchiefs over our faces. The occasion became legible when I stopped seeing it as a movie scene and began to be very scared. Hundreds of strikers were all around Quin and me, but those coming behind us up Mission, running to get away from the tear gas, were less scared than mad. New pickets appeared from union headquarters at the corner of Mission and Steuart, many wielding broom handles while a few had baseball bats.

In the midst of this melee, Nick Bordoise, the union's cook, was handing out sandwiches to strikers as they came off the Embarcadero, like a waterboy at a football game, running onto the field during a time-out. Nick had slung a huge sack over his shoulder and was hauling out sandwiches to give passing strikers as they came up Mission Street. His calmness made it easier for a policeman to arrest him. “What for?” this incongruous Gunga Din asked. “Aiding an illegal strike,” the policeman said, and jerked Nick toward a squad car. Fortunately for the Greek cook with his immigration problems, the policeman was distracted by a violent attack across the street, and Bordoise ran to the safety of the union headquarters.

The police were hurling tear gas canisters as they advanced up Mission Street. Strikers with broom handles and bats stood in front of the rest of us. They hit the canisters back at the police as though they were batting baseballs. This had an immediate effect since most of the police were not wearing gas masks. A cheer went up from the strikers as they saw policemen choking on their own poison. Yet the police kept coming.

Several blocks up the hill from the Embarcadero, the strikers made a stand at a vacant lot, an abandoned construction site filled with loose bricks. The captain with the bullhorn, now on foot, apparently identified with Teddy Roosevelt and began yelling, “Charge!” at his men. The police were met with a shower of bricks. One hit the bullhorn and temporarily silenced the police captain, but he was quickly up again yelling, “Use your weapons!” Most of the police didn't seem to like this order because they fired into the air, but at the sound of gunfire I was scared again and talked Quin into coming inside a Chinese dry cleaners. An obliging proprietor named Wun Chew allowed us to go upstairs where his family lived. We watched the action while Wun Chew's wife and children stared at us, then giggled.