At the forefront of radical labor stood the maritime workers. In no other industry was the spirit of class consciousness and internationalism so high. Throughout the 1930s, merchant seamen and longshoremen fought as ardently for political issues as they did for better working conditions. They refused to load scrap iron for imperial Japan or cargo intended for Mussolini’s war against Ethiopia; they boarded German ships to tear down the hated swastika. While the Communist Party was a major force along the waterfront, the maritime workers didn’t need the CP to tell them about the class struggle. Their radicalism was the outgrowth of a brutal legacy that had informed a half century of unionism.
For centuries the seaman was regarded by law and custom as something less than human, more a chattel slave or pack animal. As late as 1897, the Supreme Court denied seamen the protection of the Thirteenth Amendment, banning involuntary servitude; the Court ruled that they were “deficient in that full and intelligent responsibility for their acts which is accredited to ordinary adults.”
“I’d rather be in hell without claws than on a Yankee clipper with the mates down on me” ran the old sailing adage, and it held a hard and bitter truth. Workers at sea suffered under a killing discipline. Flogging was routine for the most minor of infractions, with sentences of six or seven hundred lashes not uncommon. Seamen died with alarming regularity at the hands of their officers, many under conditions that elsewhere would have warranted a murder charge. But the archaic traditions of the sea, backed by the law ashore, allowed sadistic officers to vent their demons without hesitation. One mate’s fury left a seaman with “a piece bitten from his left palm, a mouthful of flesh bitten from his left arm, and his nostril torn away as far as the bridge of his nose.”
While flogging was outlawed in 1850, the practice continued for decades. Only the solidarity of determined unionism halted the cruelties that plagued sailors well into this century. Living conditions were primitive beyond belief. Sailors’ quarters, described by one reformer as “too large for a coffin, too small for a grave,” were typically airless, vermin-ridden holes, overcrowded, badly lit, and suffocating. Rations were considered “stuff seagulls wouldn’t eat,” and “more fit for pigs than humans.” Safety conditions remained deplorable, and many a crew was lost for the want of them. But safety cost money and cut into the owner’s profit.
Conditions for longshoremen were hardly better. Selected like cattle off the streets in “shape-ups,” workers by the thousands waited around the clock to beg the gang boss for a job. The lucky few kicked back 10 percent of their wages for the opportunity. The work was dangerous and the pace deadly. Shifts ran without rest for twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Those who dropped from exhaustion or were injured or killed on the job could easily be replaced. The pay was $10.45 a week.
Out of these deplorable circumstances grew the most militantly democratic and volatile forces in the labor struggles of the 1930s, and the reaction against them was equally volatile. No other group of workers faced a more murderous opposition. In the bitter East Coast strikes of 1936 and 1937, it was not uncommon to find a picket on some lonely pier with his skull crushed by a baseball bat. Twenty-seven insurgent sailors were murdered. Strikers retaliated. Joe Stack, a charter member of the National Maritime Union, recalled their desperation: “We used to take these scabs down to the railroad tracks, put their legs across the track and jump on them. That way, they couldn’t go on the ships for two or three months, We did things that the average person would think was crazy. Well, we were crazy. We were starving to death. We were fighting for our lives. It was guerrilla war.” The turmoil swept both coasts and the Gulf states, but the unions that resulted put an end to centuries of abuse and degradation.
Out of this struggle emerged one of America’s great labor leaders, the admirable Harry Bridges.1 A native Australian, Bridges left home at fifteen for a life at sea. In 1920, he came ashore for good in San Francisco. By 1934, he was at the reins of an insurgent labor movement that would become the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), a proud union that transformed the lives of Pacific workers from San Pedro to Ketchikan and Hawaii. Undaunted by adversity (and he faced plenty, including a number of assassination attempts), Bridges was rigorously honest and dedicated to the welfare of the working class. Although he always denied membership in the Party, Bridges was an outspoken Marxist who at times worked closely with the CP. Many in the ILWU were Communists, but for Harry the interests of his beloved union came before politics.
It was this unapologetic radicalism that marked Bridges and the ILWU for destruction. Bridges himself was hounded for more than twenty years by the FBI and the Justice Department. In 1936 and again in 1939 he was tried as a secret Red; both times the charges were dismissed. In 1940, Congress passed a bill specifically marking him for deportation (it failed in the Senate). That same year, and once more in 1945, he was again arrested as a Red. The Supreme Court attempted to call the campaign to a halt in 1945: “The record in this case will stand forever as a monument to man’s intolerance to man,” wrote Justice Frank Murphy. “Seldom if ever in the history of this nation has there been such a concentrated and relentless crusade to deport an individual because he dared to exercise the freedom . . . guaranteed to him by the Constitution.” But in 1951, Bridges was jailed again for criticizing the Korean War, and in 1955 he was tried in a civil suit calling for his deportation.
Other radical mariners were imprisoned and their unions destroyed. Hugh Bryson served three years under Taft-Hartley, with his interracial Marine Cooks and Stewards harried out of existence. Ferdinand Smith, a black leader of the National Maritime Union, was expelled to his native Jamaica, as his once-proud union took a hard turn to the right under the Red-baiting Joe Curran. The Masters, Mates and Pilots and the Marine Engineers Union were both decimated. The Marine Firemen, Oilers and Watertenders Union joined the NMU in actively purging Communists and their supporters. Only the ILWU, under the inspired leadership of Bridges, survived the onslaught with its membership and values intact.
The bureaucratic machinery that ensured the destruction of the radicals was installed in July 1950, when the Secretary of Labor and Secretary of Commerce met in Washington with maritime employers and right-wing waterfront unions. The subject under discussion was a plan to break Communist influence on the waterfront and demolish the ILWU and the Marine Cooks and Stewards, both previously expelled from the CIO for heresy. It was decided that the Coast Guard should manage the purge, served by the files of the FBI and Naval Intelligence, with the anti-Communist unions supplying the muscle to run the Reds off the docks and ships. A month later, Congress passed the Magnuson Act, which provided for the political screening of all seamen and waterfront men.
In December, the Coast Guard began the Port Security Program. Those suspected of “being under the influence of a foreign government” were denied clearance. They were entitled to appeal the ruling before a review board, many members of which were the very same employers the unionists had battled through the 1930s. Before this kangaroo court, the accused were not entitled to know the evidence against them. Instead, they were interrogated extensively on every aspect of their political and private lives. For these veterans of union battles and thirty-six-hour workdays, of shipwrecks and German U-boat attacks, to be taxed with “the wife’s” lack of church attendance must have seemed utterly insane. But the narrow bigots of the screening boards were intent on enforcing a rigid social and political conformity.
Marine workers were quizzed on the newspapers they read, the meetings they had attended, the politics of their siblings and cousins. One steward was blacklisted for having twice rented his basement for a fund-raising function by the Progressive Party, even though he did not attend himself. Another sailor was denied clearance because he had signed a petition supporting Henry Wallace (although he finally voted for Truman). Worst of all, it was discovered that he had donated money on behalf of blacklisted seamen.
For years, the blacklisted were pursued from job to job by the FBI and other security agencies. In most cases it took only a word to the boss before the now unveiled “subversive” would be fired. In self-defense, the hunted changed their names and moved to more remote areas, only to repeat the process once the agents tracked them down again. This policy of harassment continued as late as 1964.
Roughly 800,000 maritime workers were screened under the Magnuson Act. Nearly four thousand of these were denied clearance and blacklisted.
Bailey first went to sea in 1929. By 1931, he was a leading activist in the fight to organize the Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU). In 1935, during an anti-Nazi protest, he and five other seamen stormed the German liner Bremen, flagship of the German merchant fleet, as it lay docked in New York Harbor. Urged on by fifteen hundred wildly cheering demonstrators, Bailey and fellow seaman Adrian Duffy ran a gauntlet of German sailors to tear the Nazi flag from its mast. Known as the Bremen Six, the left-wing seamen touched off an international incident. Bailey later fought with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War and sailed aboard Liberty ships during World War Two. In 1951, he was screened out of the Marine Firemen, Oilers and Watertenders Union (MFOW) as a security risk and blacklisted on the waterfront. In 1955, he found safe harbor with the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU).
My problems started when the Magnuson Act became law and the Coast Guard carried it out—it became known as the Screening Act. The shipowners and the Coast Guard and the McCarthyites was putting heat on the Left and on the unions. A deal was made that the Coast Guard would issue a new set of passes if the right-wing Unions would name all the lefties they had in the Union. See, the union says, “We can’t expel this guy, the membership would go overboard, they’d throw us the hell out. He’s a popular guy. He’s been twenty years in this union. You’re crazy! We couldn’t get away with it.”
So the Coast Guard said, “All right, we’ll set up our commission and we’ll take it out of your hands, so all you got to say is, ‘Look, we can’t help it. It’s the Coast Guard. We can’t buck ’em. It’s the whole government.’ ” And they guaranteed that these lefties wouldn’t get any passes to keep going to sea. Of course, it was ideal at that time, because of the Korean War and all the sabotage scare talk.
Well, in our Firemen’s Union it was made for them, because all the officials there were right-wingers, and the Left in the union, through a number of mistakes through the years, most had made themselves known—“You’re goddam right I’m a Communist! Put my name on the rolls that I’m a Communist; I’m proud of it!” Left and right, guys were getting up who were Communists and who the officials didn’t even know were Communists—they were surprised at some of them. And here the secretary is writing them all down, fast as a son of a bitch. And of course I knew right away, I said, “Boy, somewhere along the line an awful mistake was made, and it came from the top.” I’m sure some FBI agents was in the right spot in the CP who was promulgating this type of program. We didn’t think right—like we didn’t think about Joe Stalin, we worshiped the bastard instead of thinking—and this is what we got. But be as it may, when the Korean War took place and the Coast Guard set in, that was where the Left started going downhill, and their influence on any of the maritime unions was completely negated. That’s when myself and maybe forty to fifty other guys in the Firemen’s Union was completely wiped out.
They set up a clearance board, which was actually a trial, and they said, “We want to know the following. . . . ” Well, there’s no way you can go before such a trial without sitting down and naming everybody, where you been, what you did, how long were you a member of that, and so on. Maybe one or two did, but on that score, I would say that ninety-eight percent of them just went down with the ship.
First of all, every one of the board was a right-winger. One represented the Firemen’s Union, there’s some guy in it from the MEBA,1 there’s another guy in it from some other outfit. But all staunch right-wingers—that guaranteed you’re not going to get back in, see? So anyhow, the Coast Guard set the hearing, and I decided it was a waste of time, that I was not going to go up there, have them say, “Show us good faith, name all the Communists in the union.” I’d tell them to go screw themselves, and they’d say, “Well, you haven’t got good faith, get out! You only proved to us that you’re a Red.”
After that, they put changes in the union constitution saying that any man screened by the Coast Guard, which was the same as being identified as a leftie or Communist, will not be allowed to become a member of the union. Then the union says, “Well, if you don’t have a pass, you can’t even come in the union hall.”
It was a wipeout. Our influence was completely destroyed. The unions came out clean, but they were the culprits. It was a simple case of the FBI saying, “Okay, let’s get rid of all them bastards. You supply the list and we’ll do the dirty work.” So it was perfect for the right-wing union officials, they’d say, “Now’s the chance to clean up our union, so we’ll have no opposition when we run for office. And in the meantime, all the rest of the guys who may become liberal will be so goddamn intimidated aboard ship, they’ll shut up.” And that’s what was happening. Guys on ships—some guys—“I don’t want to be the delegate, let somebody else be the delegate.” Because being delegate meant that they would have to stick their neck out a little bit to support the rank and file. And once they stuck their neck out, how far do you go before the line of demarcation is a leftie?
The saddest part was talking to the rank-and-filers who knew us, sailed with us for twenty years. Talking to some of them guys, you could see they felt bad. But they couldn’t do nothing, because they got told, “If you keep your mouth shut, you’ll get by. But if you’re going to start jumping up and yapping to save these known lefties, then we’re going after you too.” And that’s what happened. Some guys said, “Screw it! It’s a matter of principle.” And they got up and started talking—“Where is Bailey and all these other guys? Where are they? Why don’t the union defend them?” Then the next thing was “Sit down, Commie!” That was the beginning of them getting the business so everybody said, “Well, shit, we got a living to make. We got a home, we got wives, we got this and that. After all, them Commies can take it, they know how.” So this is what happened.
We maintained contact with rank-and-filers, and I know I’ve told many of them, “Take it easy, don’t get excited, don’t go bananas exposing yourself. Just let us know what’s happening in the union. Our day will come.” In the meantime, we go to the ACLU. They took a wishy-washy position on it. We went to some of our lawyers who deal with unions, who make their living from unions. They took wishy-washy positions too, figured if they got too out-front that they would start losing some of their clientele.
We were greatly discriminated against in that period. But just being out of the Firemen’s Union was not the thing. I had to survive. When I went for a job, I said, “Okay, I’m going to stick to the waterfront. They’re not going to get rid of me,” ’cause they know that if I went, say, to Idaho and picked potatoes, there’d be no problem, see? But I said, “Them sons of bitches ain’t driving me off the waterfront.” And so I got a job as a machinist. Instead of the name William J. Bailey, I put W. J. Bailey, or W. James Bailey. Okay, I show up for work, and so on—down working on some ship, doing something. Three or four days later, I was supposed to become a full-fledged member of the union. And I’ll be a son of a bitch, some fireman or some conservative saw me, and passed the word on to the machinists. So when I went up to get my full-membership book, which would now give me a little status, the committee was waiting for me. They says, “Well, before we give you a book, we want to see your Coast Guard pass.” I said, “I haven’t got one.” They say, “Well, no Coast Guard pass, no membership.”
I said, “But half your members don’t have it!” They said, “Yeah, but we want you to have one.” So, I lost that job. I said, “I’ll work—I’ll get a job someplace.” So I work for Pacific Gas and Electric in the engine room. I’ve always been a sober son of a bitch. They say, “Be there at eight o’clock,” I’m always there five or ten minutes to eight, that type of stuff. I’m working three, four months and doing all right, and it’s a job I like. One day I get a call from the head engineer—“Come on upstairs, I want to talk to you.” It’s always over the loudspeakers, you know.
So everybody figured, “Jesus Christ! Bailey, they’re calling you upstairs. You must be going to get a big job. They never do that.” So I go upstairs. There are four people standing there. They were really embarrassed, when I think about it. I walk in, and nobody wants to talk to me. I thought, “Jesus Christ! What’s happening?” The three of them turned their back and left it to this other guy, and he’s fumbling some papers and dropping them. And I said, “Yes, sir, what can I do? Here I am.” He says, “Well, I’m glad the FBI told us that we have a number-one Communist working here, and we found out in time before you blew up the plant!”
I said, “Excuse me, what was that again?” [Laughs.] And the other guys are trying to tell him to shut up, put his temper down, because he’s letting the cat out of the bag by saying the FBI told them. He said, “Well, we don’t want this plant blown up and we have a guard to escort you to your locker. You’re going to be out of this plant within five minutes.” I said, “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but will you put that down on paper?” “No, we won’t put nothing on paper!” All the other guys are jumping, “No, nothing on paper! Nothing!” And so you’re stuck. What the hell is there to do? So you’re steaming. But I did remember he said the FBI told him. Now the only way the FBI would know that I was working in a PG&E plant was that some of the conservatives in the union heard it. There may be one hundred firemen, oilers there; and there’s always one of them, while waiting for a ship, that goes to work for PG&E, or someplace else. And he probably brushed alongside of me, the son of a bitch, and he ran back to the union hall and says, “I just seen Bill Bailey working at a PG&E plant.” “Oh yeah? Call up the FBI!” This is the way the conservatives were working to get you completely out of their hair. They didn’t give a goddam. All they wanted was to make sure you’ll never take over their position in the union or influence the union one way or the other.
So anyway, when I walked down it was just tough. Everybody’s saying, “What the hell’s going on? Where are you going?” I went to the locker, never said anything, took out one or two things—“Hey, wait a minute”—I left the plant just humiliated.
Another job I got with the CIO machinists in Oakland. They say, “We don’t give a goddam about it, come on over here. You can organize for this union.” So I went over, and where do you think they put me? On a destroyer, fixing a valve way down—all by myself. When I come to think of it, Jesus Christ, way down in the bow of the ship where only one man can shimmy his way down. There was a little goddam intake valve or something down there and I had to work on that for three or four hours, then shimmy myself back up, pull all the tools up—not a soul around. If I was a bomb-throwing son of a bitch, I could’ve done all sorts of things!
Anyway, I worked about three, four days, maybe—no, a whole week. And all of a sudden, “Mr. Bailey, you come back here Monday, you got to have a Coast Guard pass.” Just like that. I had talked to a bunch of other guys working the Oakland Yards. “Do you have passes?” They say, “Nah, we don’t need a Coast Guard pass. Nobody needs one around here.” But when it came time, that’s the way they got to me.
So this went on and on, a job here, a job there, and finding myself losing them all. Four, five years, one job after another, just blown left and right. So I said, “Ah, to hell with this!” I talked to some guy I knew in the ILWU International. And he said, “Bill, maybe there’s a place for you in longshoring, but you’ll have to go north. Either Alaska or Eureka.” I say, “Well, let’s try Eureka, it’s closer.”
“All right,” he says. So I hopped in a car and I head off for Eureka, and done it secretly—at three o’clock in the morning, shut everything down, got out of the house, just in case some son of a bitch was standing around, and took off. Well, I’m up in Eureka the next day, got a little room, and went down to the union hall. Sure enough, I got a longshore job and got settled. And I’ll be a son of a bitch, after six months, the dispatcher up there, he got ahold of me and said, “Hey, Bill, I don’t know what the hell is going on. Some FBI guy was up here and making all sorts of inquiries about you.” I say, “Yeah, what’d he want?” “Well, he wanted to know how long you been working here, where you’re from, did you come from San Francisco, this and that.”
So apparently, for some reason, it took them six months to find out where the hell I was working. But this guy, being a good dispatcher, told them, “That’s as far as we go. We don’t give out any more information. He’s working for us. We’ll defend him.” They put a good front on, and the guy backed off.
I lasted the whole year up at Eureka, then I got my book and transferred down here to San Francisco. I longshored on most piers and I’d see these bastard officials coming aboard and I could see them eating their cud when they saw me—they didn’t know how to accomplish further their discriminatory business, because the longshoremen wouldn’t go for it. You see, Harry Bridges wouldn’t allow his membership to be screened out. The ILWU worked a deal with the Coast Guard, they said, “All right, on commercial ships you could put anybody you want on them, but on Navy and Army ships they have to have special passes.” So there’s where Bridges goes, “Okay, we’ll go for that.” So I was able to go aboard commercial ships, and most of the ships that I went on were West Coast ships with MFOW guys—old-timers. “Hey, Bill, what are you doing here?” I say, “Well, I’m a longshoreman.” “Oh, sit down! Have a beer! Come on in and have a meal with us.” And the officials, these bastards who did the job on me, would see this and there was nothing they could do about it.
So anyhow, that period was pretty tough, some lean, miserable goddam times, yeah. You had to be careful, you’d look around if anybody was watching you. Trying to get a job, running your unemployment insurance out. Mostly, it was sad—not that you didn’t miss a meal, or sometimes you didn’t know where the hell you were going to sleep or get a job, but to run into some of the guys you sailed with and hear them rationalize what had happened—“Well, Bill, I want to do something. Can I give you a couple bucks?” I says, “Aw, I don’t want a couple of bucks, just keep the faith some way.” But to hear them talk about how sorry they was, they couldn’t do nothing. So naturally, to be a good guy, you’d say, “Hey, you did okay. Now don’t get involved, don’t lose your job. You got a family.” As if I didn’t. But to make it easy for them, you know.
The FBI did come to the house a few times. A very peculiar thing happened right after the Hungarian revolt when I decided to drop from the Party.2 You now, my theory was that if the people hit the streets fighting for things, there’s got to be something wrong. After all, we go into the streets when we think something’s wrong and demonstrate. Nobody has the right to come down with a goddam battleship and blow them away just because they’re squawking. So I said, “That’s it.”
The minute I quit the party—the next day!—the FBI was at the door. I was down at a girlfriend’s house at the time, on Grant Avenue, and the FBI came and knocked and she answered the door and said, “Yeah? What’s ya want?” Two guys: “We’re looking for Bill Bailey. We’re from the FBI.” I’m sitting there eating at the time, taking all this in, see. She says, “Well, what is it about? Has he done something?” And they say, “No, we want to talk to Bill Bailey, we don’t want to talk to you.” Anyhow, to save her embarrassment, I got up and said, “Okay, what’s all the bullshit about?” The guy says, “Well, first of all, we wanted to congratulate you for leaving the Party!” And that was like an anchor dragging. “Yeah, a great thing to do, Bill, great thing. And the second thing is, do you want to sit down and talk with us now?” I said, “Sit down and talk with you guys? Get out of here!” I slammed the door in their face! All I could think about was how fast the machinery was they had in their apparatus, that they knew immediately that I had quit the Party. Now it had to been somebody working within the organization. We always did say that you couldn’t call a quorum unless the FBI attended! [Laughs.]
Then on the job, of course, I’d run into a couple of FBI guys; they’d come in every now and then. “Hello, Bill. Look like you’re working hard.” “Yeah, working hard. Who the hell are you?” “Oh, hi, I thought you knew me, I’m FBI.” “Well, just by accident that you’re here on the waterfront?” “Well, I thought maybe you’d like to sit down and talk with us.” “I got nothing to say to you! Come off it!” “All right, all right, don’t get mad!” I’d walk off, and a month, two months later, I’d be sitting in a restaurant having coffee and I’d turn around, the same guy’s standing there. “You feel like talking, Bill?” “Get away!”
So this would go on, and pretty soon, we got to know each other in the sense of calling each other by the first name! [Laughs.] And laughing at each other, you know. He’d say, “Oh, no sense in talking to you. I guess you don’t want to talk, right?” I say, “Yeah, I don’t want to talk!” “Okay.”
You know, all them sons of bitches in the Firemen’s Union who did that to me. All them characters are long gone dead—heart attacks; one guy, his wife ran over him in the car accidentally; another guy dropped this way, another guy that. And I can say I lived long enough to piss on their graves! So that’s the only satisfaction you get.
Recently, I went down to see one of the new officials in the union. A younger guy, broader outlook on life, who remembered me. I said, “You know, I don’t want nothing from the union. I don’t intend to sue the union. But it would be nice if the membership were told that people within their union were allowed to be ostracized and humiliated, their union books taken away from them without a trial, their livelihood and everything else destroyed.” All I wanted is my book back to show that a mistake was made and that it should never happen again to anybody. That was all I wanted.
So he said, “Well, at that time, there was about six passages in the old constitution dealing with if you’re a left-winger you can’t be a member of the union; if you’re caught reading left-wing newspapers, they could throw you out of the union.” He put those rules to a vote and all that Red-baiting was taken out. So we’re back to the way it was in the old days: as long as you’re a working stiff and you believe in the struggle and stay together—that was the gospel in those days. I don’t know, I tried to convince him that he should do something, but on the other hand it takes a hell of a lot of courage to stand up and say, “Hey, fellas, during the McCarthy period, we screwed some guys, and now we want to give them their books back.”
On July 5, 1989, Bill Bailey was reinstated with honorary membership in the Marine Firemen, Oilers and Watertenders Union “in recognition of over fifty years of devotion . . . to the principles of unionism.”
Jack O’Dell first began as an activist as a member of the National Maritime Union, the first international maritime union to break the color line. The coming of the Cold War saw the NMU riven by a bitter internecine struggle between progressive and reactionary factions. O’Dell was expelled from the union in 1950, and subsequently blacklisted off the waterfront. (For more on O’Dell, see “Fighting Jim Crow.”)
I was an active member of the National Maritime Union and sailed for some five years. I got my union papers in ’43, during World War Two, and sailed until ’46. I took a year off to work in the South with Operation Dixie1 and then came back and sailed from ’47 to ’50.
NMU was considered a very progressive union,2 and one of the reasons was that it had the highest-ranking black in the trade union movement. The general secretary of the National Maritime Union was Ferdinand Smith.3 The union was very strong on the unity of black and white workers and against any divisiveness and had generally set a good record. I was privileged to get in a union like that. The AFL maritime unions followed the pattern that prevailed in the South, with segregated union halls and segregated jobs. But NMU was a CIO union and believed that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” and therefore they organized on different principles. You could throw in for any job in NMU regardless of race or color.4
But with the McCarthy period that union, like many others in the CIO, came under attack on the issue of foreign policy. Those unions had a different attitude toward the Marshall Plan. They were for the post-war reconstruction of Europe, but they were in favor of doing it through the United Nations. There was already a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Program being run by the UN, headed by the former mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia. We felt that the reconstruction of Europe ought to be done through this international agency and not unilaterally by the United States. We knew that while it was being sold to the American people as an altruistic program to rebuild Europe, it was really an economic lever for getting American corporations into the European economy. The Marshall Plan did help to rebuild Europe, but that wasn’t its only purpose.
So being a union whose membership traveled a[??]t, we became a target in the government effort to whip the trade union movement into line. And the Curran5 machine inside the union carried out this work for them. I was in New York at the NMU convention in 1947 when Joe Stack6 was expelled by one or two votes, that’s how divided the union was. That’s also the convention that affirmed that Paul Robeson would have an honorary membership in our union. So you could see how the currents were going back and forth.
The critical point was the 1948 elections, in which Ferdinand Smith and Blackie Meyers and some others7 represented an attempt to maintain the traditions of the union against Curran and his machine that was using anticommunism to consolidate its position in the union. The progressive forces lost in 1948. The Curran machine began a purge of those who voted for the other group.8
In ’48, I was down in New Orleans, very active in a group called Seamen for Wallace. In fact, maritime workers across the country had organized for Henry Wallace in the Presidential campaign of the Progressive Party. But that automatically tagged you as being “Communist.” So once the election’s over, I grabbed a ship and went to Japan. When I got back to New Orleans, it was 1949. All the guys I knew had been expelled. But I was able to go in the union hall, because I had recognized that the membership was on the ships and had shipped out and it really protected my union book.
Well, the NMU continued to deteriorate in terms of maintaining working conditions on the ships, and the Red-baiting continued to be Curran’s chief weapon. Of course, working out of the South, we saw this in its very naked form. In Houston, for example, the Curran forces lined up with the Klan and the police to eliminate all of the people that were identified as having voted for Ferdinand Smith in the ’48 elections.9 The port agent in Charleston—a native-born South Carolinian, an outstanding union representative who had stood up for equality for all the seamen—was killed by an assassin, he was stabbed to death in his office.10
When Ferdinand Smith fulfilled his obligation as general secretary to inform the other ports that a port agent in South Carolina had been murdered, he was brought up on charges of “malfeasance in office” by the Curran machine. They argued that this was not the responsibility of the general secretary, that he had acted inappropriately. Smith had telegrammed the NMU port agents, and Curran called appropriating the money to send the telegrams malfeasance.11
In any case, Ferdinand Smith was removed from office, and then the immigration authorities came right behind that a few years later and had him deported to Jamaica.12 That was a big loss for the whole progressive movement. I had come to know Ferdinand Smith in New York, he was a very fine man, we all felt that very personally. We felt that as long as the union stood by Ferdinand Smith, that was at least symbolically representative of a commitment to a nonsegregated union, a union that regarded all of its members with the same respect.
I continued to sail and remained very active in the union. In 1950 I came off a trip to Beirut where some of Curran’s people had been part of the crew. When we came into dry dock in Galveston, Curran’s people went to the port agent there, named Tex George, and told him I was a Communist. So he brought me up on charges! Never saw me before in his life. All he had was some stamps in my union book. The campaign for the NMU Progressive slate had sold stamps to finance its activities. You might put your stamps in your union book, so they saw a couple of those stamps with Ferdinand Smith on them in my union book and automatically concluded, “Well, we got one here.”
So they brought me up on charges of “bringing the union into disrepute.” That meant you supported a different policy from the government, not from the union. For example, we didn’t agree with the Marshall Plan—Curran did. Remember, a union is an economic organization, it is not a political organization. You may have many political opinions in a union, but certainly foreign policy is not the decisive thing that determines the union. So being identified with a different trend in the union meant that according to them you were bringing the union into disrepute. That’s the kind of thing that was being imposed by the Cold War.
Many guys in ’48 and ’49 never had a trial. They just identified people, and when you turned in your union book trying to get a job they would snatch it and that was the end of it. But in 1950, I did have a trial. I didn’t know anybody in Galveston, it was the first time in my life I’d ever been there. I was there about four or five days from the time we went on dry dock until the time I was brought on trial, so I really didn’t have much time to organize an opposition. And as it turned out, the Korean War broke out on the 25th of June and on the 26th we had the union meeting. The port agent, Tex George, brought me up on charges and I was expelled. I lost by about twenty votes, out of more than two hundred cast.
So that ended my seagoing days. Then right after that the Coast Guard began to implement its screening program. So even if I was going to appeal the actions taken in Galveston, I and many others still faced being screened. Of course, this had as one of its by-products consolidating the Curran machine inside the union. All they had to do was pass your name on to the Coast Guard and—boom!—you ended up losing the papers required to sail, even though the papers you had been using allowed you to sail during World War Two, when the struggle was against fascism. But in the Cold War you couldn’t sail, because suddenly you had become subversive.
After that, I took odd jobs in construction and waiting tables, that sort of thing. I stayed in the South, because I had shipped out of New Orleans, I had gone to school there and knew my way around. But I was blacklisted as far as working on the docks was concerned. I tried to get work in longshore, and got a little bit, but then when they found out my name, I wouldn’t get any more. The same was true with standby work. The Marine Cooks and Stewards had a port agent down in New Orleans, a good guy, and he used to give guys who’d been screened preference on relief work while the ship’s in port. I got some of that. But then pretty soon the shipowners got onto it and said no, anybody whose name was on that blacklist couldn’t do port work either. The idea was not only can’t you sail because you might sabotage the ship, but you might sabotage the port. It was that kind of hysteria that was carefully cultivated.
But one must keep in mind that was not the actions of Joe McCarthy or any local official, that was the official government policy. The tone and atmosphere was set by the Truman administration, by the President himself, by the Attorney General that he appointed, and by a Democratic Party Senate that had confirmed his cabinet—that’s who set the tone for McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy just saw the opportunity to take that and run ’cause he wanted to be President someday.
It would be a big mistake for Americans to regard this period as merely an unfortunate episode from a fading past. The Cold War lasted forty-five years and represents a tragic chapter in the American experience—as well as a major setback for millions of people all over the world struggling to improve their quality of life. Without doubt, the whole thing was avoidable. The question today is whether we as a nation are able to achieve the moral and spiritual maturity and strength required to recover from its influence.
1For more on Harry Bridges, see Robbie Bridges under “Red Diapers.”
1Marine Engineers Beneficial Association.
2A mass exodus of American Communists out of the Party took place after the Soviets put down the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Khrushchev’s revelation of Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress was another instigating factor.
1Initiated in 1946, Operation Dixie was the CIO’s drive to organize Southern workers into integrated unions. The AFL opened its rival organizing campaign by blasting the CIO as “Communist-dominated” and urged Southern industrialists to cooperate or “fight for your lives against Communist forces.”
2From its beginning in 1937 until its purge of its left wing in 1948, the NMU was one of the most radical labor unions in the United States. Founder Robert McElroy described it in its prime as a “militant, class-conscious, racially integrated, rank-and-file-controlled, revolutionary union of seaman and waterfront workers.”
3Ferdinand Conrad Smith (1892–1958), Jamaican immigrant and seaman, was also executive secretary of the Harlem Trade Union Council and a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party.
4Prior to the advent of the NMU, black seamen had been restricted to jobs in the stewards’ department.
5Joseph Edwin Curran (1906–81), president of the NMU from 1937 to 1973, was described by one observer as having “a head like a block of granite, a loud, angry voice, and the attitude of someone struggling against an impulse toward mayhem.” (Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Water-front: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s [Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988], p. 229) Allied with the left in his early years, Curran moved far to the right with the coming of the Cold War.
6Joe Stack (b. 1916) was NMU founding vice president and a member of the Communist Party.
7Surrounding Curran in the NMU leadership was a constellation of veteran seamen—along with Smith, Myers, and Stack were Jack Lawrenson, Al Lannon, and Tommy Ray—all of them gifted mass leaders and members of the Communist Party.
8Joe Curran’s purge was backed by squads of New York City policemen, volunteer muscle from the newly cleansed Transport Workers Union, and hired goons paid for by Phil Murray, president of the CIO.
9In both Houston and Galveston, NMU anti-Communists and their allies relied on brass knuckles, clubs, and guns to drive the militant seamen, many of them black, off the waterfront. In Galveston a pitched gun battle erupted between the two factions. Whether the Klan was involved in Houston is difficult to establish. Histories of the period are silent on the matter. Several NMU veterans of the Gulf turmoil have no such recollection, except for one who recalled “hearing the story” and that it was generally believed at the time, but could not vouch for it.
10The murderer was not hard to find. Rudolfo Serreo, an anti-Communist member of the NMU, had telephoned police of his intentions to kill the port agent, twenty-eight-year-old Robert Now, chairman of the local Wallace for President committee. Serreo was charged with manslaughter only and sentenced to three years. Apparently, the victim was known around town as a “nigger-lover.”
11The broader charges brought against Smith and two other left-wing officers, Howard McKenzic and Paul Palazzi, included violation of the union’s constitution and participation in a conspiracy to disrupt the labor organization. One specific accusation was that they had spent $1,000 of unauthorized union funds to send investigators to the Gulf of Mexico to discover whether union officials were being denied access to union-contract ships in Gulf ports.
12Smith was declared an “undesirable alien” by the Truman administration and deported in 1951. Upon his departure he told reporters: “I helped build a union which enabled sailors to marry and have children and a home just like other workers, instead of being kicked around like bums. For this I earned the enmity of the shipowners and their agents in and out of the government.”