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Harry Bridges

 

(born July 28, 1901, Kensington, near Melbourne, Vic., Austl. — died March 30, 1990, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.) Australian-born U.S. labour leader. He arrived in the U.S. as a seaman in 1920, and he soon settled in San Francisco and became active in the local branch of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA). In 1937 he led the Pacific Coast division out of the ILA and reconstituted it as the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), affiliated with the CIO (see AFL-CIO). His aggressive labour tactics and Communist Party connections led the CIO to expel the ILWU in 1950 during a purge of allegedly communist-dominated unions, and opponents tried unsuccessfully to have Bridges deported. He retired as president of the ILWU in 1977.

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Biography: Harry A.R. Bridges
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The American labor leader Harry A.R. Bridges (1901-1990) became one of the best known radical trade unionists during the 1930s and was thereafter a subject of political controversy. He devoted most of his life and career to the cause of maritime industry workers on the Pacific Coast.

For more than 40 years (1934 to 1979) Harry Bridges earned a reputation as one of the most radical, astute, and successful leaders in the American labor movement. He first came to national attention during the combined waterfront and general strikes which paralyzed San Francisco in 1934. Bridges emerged from this labor conflict as the dominant leader and spokesperson for Pacific Coast waterfront workers. Then, and for many years afterward, his enemies accused him of serving Communist purposes and the federal government several times tried unsuccessfully to deport Bridges. Bridges built his union, the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), into one of the most militant and successful in the nation. Before he retired from active union service in 1979, Bridges also won plaudits from employers for his role as a labor statesman, which meant accepting technological innovations and less total employment on the waterfront in return for union and job security.

Harry Bridges was born in Melbourne, Australia, on July 28, 1901, the oldest of six children in a solidly middle-class family. His father, Alfred Earnest, was a successful suburban realtor, and his mother, Julia Dorgan, was a devout Catholic. Harry received a firm Catholic upbringing, serving four years as an altar boy and attending parochial schools from one of which he earned a secondary diploma in 1917. After leaving school he tried his hand at clerking but was bored by white-collar work.

The sea, however, enthralled Bridges. In late 1917, he found employment as a merchant seaman and remained at sea for the next five years. As a sailor Bridges saw the world, experienced exploitation, became friendly with his more radical workmates, and, for a time, even joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a left-wing, syndicalist American labor organization. When one of his ships made port in the United States in 1920, Bridges decided to become an immigrant. He even took out his first papers as part of the process of establishing U.S. citizenship. But Bridges' carelessness in meeting the statutory timetable for filing final citizenship papers (as well as his alleged links to communism) became the basis for the government's later attempts to deport him.

Having settled in the United States, Bridges left the sea in 1922 and took up work as a longshoreman in San Francisco. He labored for more than ten years in one of the nation's most exploitative job markets and in a city whose waterfront employers had established a closed-shop company union. During that decade (1922 to 1933) Bridges lived in relative obscurity as an ordinary longshoreman, marrying for the first time in 1923 (he was to be divorced twice and married a third time) and leading a conventional working-class life.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal changed all that. The labor upheaval of the 1930s lifted Bridges from obscurity to prominence. When discontent erupted among West Coast waterfront workers in 1933 and 1934, Bridges seized the moment and became a militant union agitator. In 1934 when labor conflict spread up and down the Pacific Coast and culminated in the San Francisco general strike, Bridges acted as the waterfront strikers' most effective leader. He led his followers to a great victory in 1934. The longshoremen in San Francisco won not only union recognition but also a union hiring hall to replace the traditional shape-up in which workers obtained jobs in a demeaning and discriminatory manner.

Building on this success, Bridges next tried to unite all the maritime workers of the Pacific Coast in the Maritime Federation of the Pacific (1935). His plans for waterfront labor solidarity were disrupted by the outbreak of a union civil war between the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Bridges chose the CIO side, took his union members out of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA)-AFL, and reorganized them as the ILWU. John L. Lewis, president of the CIO, appointed Bridges to the new union federation's executive board and also as regional director for the entire Pacific Coast. By 1939 Bridges had won a deserved reputation as one of the CIO's new labor men of power.

He had also won many more enemies. Employers found the ILWU to be an especially militant and demanding negotiating partner. Foes in the AFL, among public officials, and even within the CIO used Bridges' links to communism to undercut his influence as a labor leader. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins tried to deport him in 1939. Through votes and investigations, Congress sought to accomplish the same goal. Not until 1953 when the Supreme Court ruled in Bridges' favor did the government cease its deportation efforts. The charges against Bridges were dropped, and the Supreme Court said, "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 that belongs to him as a human being, and is guaranteed to him under the Consistution." While different branches of the federal government hounded Bridges, Lewis, in 1939, limited Bridges' sphere as a CIO leader to the state of California.

Despite his enemies inside and outside the CIO, Bridges led his union from victory to victory. The labor shortages associated with World War II, the Korean War, and the war in Vietnam, combined with the strategic importance of Pacific Coast ports in the shipping of war-related goods, provided the ILWU with enormous bargaining power which Bridges used to the fullest. He used the power his union amassed on the West Coast as a base from which to organize waterfront and plantation workers in Hawaii. The ILWU brought stable mass unionism to the islands for the first time in their history and thus transformed Hawaii's economic and political balance of power.

Bridges meantime initiated a long strike among Pacific Coast waterfront workers in 1948 that would win them the best labor contract such workers had ever had. But that was to be the last strike Bridges led as a militant labor leader. Shortly after that success for the ILWU, the CIO in 1949-1950 expelled Bridges' union as one of eleven charged with being under communist control and serving the interests of the Soviet Union. By 1960, however, Bridges won a new reputation for himself as a labor statesman. In that year he negotiated a contract with the Pacific Maritime Association which eliminated many union work rules, accepted labor-saving machinery, and tolerated a reduced labor force in return for either guaranteed jobs or annual earnings for more senior union members. A decade later, in 1971-1972, Bridges led his last long strike of 135 days, but it aimed mostly to ratify and strengthen the agreement of 1960, rather than to dilute it. Bridges had made his peace with employers and relished his role as a labor statesman.

In 1968, Bridges was appointed to a city Charter Commission, and then in 1970 he was appointed to the San Francisco Port Commission. In 1977 he retired as ILWU president. During his last eight years as a union leader, Bridges had left far behind the radicalism and controversy that marked his earlier career. But both Bridges and his union remained distinctive. In an era of highly-paid union officials, many of whom lived ostentatious private lives, Bridges remained as abstemious as ever, living frugally on an atypically modest union salary; he had earned only 27,000 dollars a year. In an age of more conservative trade unionism, the ILWU still behaved as a union with a social conscience, promoting racial solidarity, opposing the war in Vietnam, and supporting disarmament and world peace. The ILWU built by Bridges was a legacy in which any trade unionist could take pride, but he always downplayed his role. In 1985 he said, "I just got the credit … I just happened to be around at the right time." Bridges died on March 30, 1990, in San Francisco.

Further Reading

The standard biography is Charles P. Larrowe, Harry Bridges, The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States (1972). The same author's Shape-Up and Hiring Hall (1955) is the best scholarly treatment of labor on the West Coast waterfront. Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (1969) includes a fine brief sketch of Bridges. Gary M. Fink, editor, Biographical Dictionary of American Labor Leaders (1984) provides essential facts.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Harry Bridges
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Bridges, Harry (Alfred Renton Bridges), 1901-90, American labor leader, b. Melbourne, Australia. Arriving (1920) as an immigrant seaman in San Francisco, he became a longshoreman and militant labor organizer. Bridges led (1934) the West Coast maritime workers' strike, which expanded into an abortive general strike, and in 1937 he set up the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), and became West Coast director of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Proceedings in 1939 to deport him as a Communist alien ended when he was officially absolved of Communist affiliation. The U.S. House of Representatives passed (1940) a bill to deport him, but it was ruled (1945) illegal by the Supreme Court. He became a citizen in 1945. His support of Henry A. Wallace for President in 1948 resulted in his ouster as CIO regional head. He was convicted and sentenced (1950) to a five-year prison term for swearing falsely at his 1945 naturalization hearing that he had never been a member of the Communist party. In 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the indictment for perjury against Bridges, thus voiding his prison sentence. He was reindicted on similar charges, but in 1955 a federal district judge ruled that the government had failed to prove that he was a Communist or that he had concealed that fact when he was naturalized. Shortly thereafter the U.S. Justice Dept. announced it had given up its long fight to deport Bridges. In 1958 he was granted a U.S. passport. In 1971 and 1972 Bridges led the ILWU in a strike that tied up the West Coast waterfront for several weeks.

Bibliography

See study by C. P. Larrowe (1972).

Wikipedia: Harry Bridges
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Harry Bridges

Harry Bridges on the cover of Time Magazine, July 19, 1937.
Born July 28, 1901(1901-07-28)
Melbourne, Australia
Died March 30, 1990 (aged 88)
San Francisco, California
Occupation Labor leader

Harry Bridges (July 28, 1901–March 30, 1990) was an influential Australian-American union leader, in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), a longshore (dock) and warehouse workers' union on the West Coast, Hawai'i and Alaska which he helped form and led for over 40 years. As controversial as he was charismatic, he was prosecuted by the US government during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and was convicted by a federal jury of having lied about his Communist Party membership, a conviction which was set aside. On the West Coast, Bridges still excites passions both for and against the labor movement.

Contents

Early life on the docks

Bridges was born Alfred Renton Bridges in Melbourne. He went to sea at age 16 as a merchant seaman, and joined the Australian sailors' union. He took the name Harry from a beloved uncle, who was a socialist and an adventurer, much in the cut of Jack London, the writer who also inspired young Harry to go to sea.

He entered the United States in 1920, where his American colleagues nicknamed him "The Beak" for his prominent nose, "The Limey," as they couldn't tell the difference between an Australian and an Englishman, and finally "Australian Harry" or "Racehorse Harry" to differentiate him from all other Harrys by his nationality and love of the racetrack. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1945.

In 1921, Bridges joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), participating in an unsuccessful nationwide seamen's strike. While Bridges left the IWW shortly thereafter with doubts about the organization, his early experiences in the IWW and in Australian unions would influence his beliefs on militant unionism, based on rank and file power and involvement.

Bridges left the sea for longshore work in San Francisco in 1922. The shipowners had created a company union, generally known as the "blue book union" because of the color of the membership books that members carried, after the International Longshoremen's Association local in San Francisco was destroyed by a lost strike in 1919. Bridges resisted joining the blue book union, finding casual work on the docks as a "pirate". When he joined the San Francisco local of the ILA and participated in a Labor Day parade in 1924, he found himself blacklisted for several years. Bridges eventually joined the blue book union in 1927, finding work as a winch operator and rigger on a steel-handling gang.

The Albion Hall group

The ILA renewed its efforts to reestablish itself on the West Coast, chartering a new local in San Francisco in 1933. With the passage that year of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which contained some encouraging but unenforceable provisions declaring that workers had the right to organize unions of their own choice, thousands of longshoremen joined the new ILA local.

At the time Bridges was a member of a circle of longshoremen that came to be known as the "Albion Hall Group", after their meeting place. The group attracted members from a variety of backgrounds: members of the Communist Party, which was then trying to organize all longshoremen, sailors and other maritime workers into the Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU), as a revolutionary, industry-wide alternative to the ILA and other American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions; former IWW members, and others with no clearly defined politics. The federal government later spent an unsuccessful effort for nearly two decades to deport or convict Bridges on the ground that he was a secret member of the Communist Party. He was convicted of perjury for lying about his Communist Party membership when making his application for naturalization, but the Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1953 on the ground that the prosecution was untimely. (In 1994, Harvey Klehr published evidence from Soviet archives, suggesting Bridges was a member at one point of the Communist Party USA and served on the party's Central Committee for a time in the 1930s; there is no evidence he was a Soviet agent, though Klehr's The Soviet World of American Communism indicates that any member of the CPUSA's Central Committee was operating at the direction of Moscow. Cf. Klehr, p. 20.)

This group had acquired some influence on the docks through its publication The Waterfront Worker, a mimeographed sheet sold for a penny that published articles written by longshoremen and seamen, almost always under pseudonyms, that focused on workers' day-to-day concerns: the pace of work, the weight of loads, abusive bosses, and unsafe working conditions. While the first editions were published in the apartment of an MWIU member on a second-hand mimeograph machine, the paper remained independent of both the party and the MWIU.

Although Bridges was sympathetic to much of the MWIU's program in 1933, he chose to join the new ILA local. When the local held elections, Bridges and fellow members of the Albion Hall group made up a majority of the executive board and held two of the three business agents positions.

The Albion Hall Group stressed the self-help tactics of syndicalism, urging workers to organize by taking part in strikes and slowdowns, rather than depending on governmental assistance under the NIRA. It also campaigned for membership participation in the new ILA local, which had not bothered to hold any membership meetings. Finally, the group started laying the groundwork for organizing on a coastwide basis, meeting with activists from Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington and organizing a federation of all of the different unions that represented maritime workers.

Under Bridges' leadership, the group organized a successful 5-day strike in October, 1933 to force Matson Navigation Company to reinstate four longshoremen it had fired for wearing ILA buttons on the job. Threats also issued from Longshoremen at other ports to refuse to handle Matson cargo unless the company rehired the four men.

The Big Strike

As 1934 began, Bridges and the Albion Hall group and militants in other ports began planning a coastwide strike. The Roosevelt administration tried to head off the strike by appointing a mediation board to oversee negotiations, but neither side accepted its proposed compromise. Bridges was elected chairman of the strike committee.

The 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike began on May 9. While the elected local officers were the nominal leaders of the strike at its outset, Bridges led the planning of the strike along with his friend Sam Kagel, the rank-and-file opposition to the two proposed contracts that the leadership negotiated and the membership rejected during the strike, and the dealings with other unions during and after the four-day San Francisco General strike after "Bloody Thursday" on July 5, when police aided the Waterfront Employers Association in trucking cargo from the pierheads to the warehouses through the union's picket line. Scores of strikers were beaten or wounded by gunfire during the battle. During a coordinated raid on the union mess hall at the corner of Steuart and Mission San Francisco Police shot and killed Howard Sperry, a striking sailor, and Nick Counderakis (AKA Nick Bordoise), member of the cook's union and a strike sympathizer helping out at the mess hall. Scores of others were wounded by police gunfire as well, including a number of bystanders as the ensuing battle quickly spilled into the nearby downtown area.

Bridges became the chief spokesperson for the union in negotiations after workers rejected the second agreement negotiated by the old leadership in June. Bridges did not, on the other hand, control the strike: the ILA membership voted to accept arbitration to end the strike over his strong objections. Similarly, Bridges' opposition did not stop the ILA leadership from extending the union's contract with the employers, rather than striking in solidarity with the seamen, in 1935.

Growth and independence

Bridges was elected president of the San Francisco local in 1935 and then president of the Pacific Coast District of the ILA in 1936. During this period the ILA commenced "the March Inland", in which it organized the many warehouses, both in the ports themselves and further removed from them, that received the goods that longshoremen handled. Bridges led efforts to form Maritime Federation of the Pacific, which brought all of the maritime unions together for common action. That federation helped the sailors union win the same sort of contract after a long strike in 1936 that the ILA had achieved in 1934.

In 1937, the Pacific Coast district, with the exception of three locals in the Northwest, formally seceded from the ILA, renaming itself the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, after the International attempted to reorganize the existing locals, abandon representation of warehousemen and reverse the unions' policies on issues such as unemployment insurance. Bridges was elected president of the new union, which quickly affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Bridges became the West Coast Director for the CIO shortly thereafter.

The ILWU also established strong unions on the docks in Hawai'i during this time and later—despite the concerted opposition of the employers, the military and most of the political establishment—among sugar and pineapple workers there. The ILWU's work changed the political climate in Hawai'i, breaking the hold on power that the white landed elite had exercised for half a century.

Legal battles

In the fall of 1934, two immigration officials from Seattle and Portland wrote Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor, asking for a warrant for Bridge's arrest and deportation and backed their request with affidavits by four men who said they'd seen Bridges participating in Communist Party activity. Also included was a photostatic copy of a CP membership card issued to one "Harry Dorgan." The claim being that as Harry's mother's maiden name was Dorgan, that this was his name in the Party and this was a copy of his membership card. Under intense pressure from Congressional conservatives, Perkins reluctantly agreed to allow the charges to proceed. But when the case finally came to hearing in 1939 the government's case fell apart: its witnesses included an admitted perjurer, a lawyer who had been disbarred by New York and Illinois for jury tampering and racketeering, a former party employee facing prosecution for fraudulent receipt of relief checks, the manager of a restaurant who thought that Bridges was a party member because one of the people who frequently had lunch with Bridges and his wife may have been a communist, and a former official with another union who testified that Bridges was a communist because he introduced a resolution at a meeting of the Maritime Federation that urged all the member unions to join the CIO. The administrative judge ruled that the government had failed to prove its case.

The government made a second effort to deport Bridges in 1941. In this case the administrative judge found that the evidence supported the charges against Bridges, but the Board of Immigration Appeals reversed him. The US Attorney General, Francis Biddle, overruled the Board, only to be reversed in turn in 1945 by the Supreme Court, which found the evidence to be insufficient as a matter of law.

That was not, as it turns out, the end of the battle. In 1948, the federal government tried Bridges for perjuring himself when he stated in his application for naturalization that he was not a member of the Communist Party. The jury convicted Bridges and his two co-defendants; the Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1953 on the ground that the prosecution was untimely.

While the Supreme Court's decision ended the criminal prosecution against Bridges and his co-defendants, the government's civil case to revoke his naturalization proceeded in federal court. The trial judge ruled in Bridges' favor in 1954; the government did not appeal.

Political battles

Bridges hewed to the Communist Party line throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed in 1939, the party attacked Roosevelt and Churchill as warmongers and adopted the slogan "The Yanks Ain't Coming", Bridges denounced Roosevelt for betraying labor and preparing for war. John L. Lewis, the head of the CIO, responded by abolishing the position of West Coast director of the CIO, limiting Bridges' authority to California, in October 1939.

Bridges continued opposing the Roosevelt Administration, belittling the value of the New Deal, and urging union voters to withhold their support from Roosevelt and to wait to see what Lewis, who had now also split with the Roosevelt administration, recommended. That position proved highly unpopular with the membership; many locals had already endorsed FDR for a third term and several locals passed motions calling for Bridges to resign. He declined to do so, noting that the union's constitution allowed for a recall election if fifteen percent of the membership petitioned for one. The ILWU executive board gave him a vote of confidence and the storm passed.

Bridges soon took the union in a wholly different direction after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. Having opposed the United States' entry into the war, Bridges now urged employers to increase productivity in order to prepare for war. When the CIO later adopted a wartime no-strike pledge, Bridges not only supported the pledge, but even proposed at the highpoint of the Communist Party's enthusiasm for unity—immediately after the Teheran Conference in 1943—that the pledge continue after the end of the war. The ILWU not only condemned the Retail, Wholesale Department Store Employees union for striking Montgomery Ward in 1943—after management refused to sign a new contract, cut wages and fired union activists)—but also assisted it in breaking the strike, by ordering members in St. Paul, Minnesota to work overtime, to handle overflow from the struck Chicago plant.

Bridges also called for a speedup of the pace of work—which may not have been inconsistent with the ILWU's goal of controlling the way that work was done on the docks, but which sounded particularly strange coming from the leader of a union that had relentlessly fought employers on this issue and which was rejected by many ILWU members. Bridges later joined with Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union, which represented sailors on the East Coast, and Julius Emspak of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America to support a proposal by Roosevelt in 1944, to militarize some civilian workplaces.

Bridges' attitude changed sharply after the end of World War II. While Bridges still advocated the post-war plan for industrial peace that the Communist Party, along with the leaders of the CIO, the AFL and the Chamber of Commerce, were advocating, he differed sharply with CIO leadership on Cold War politics, from the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine's application in Greece and Turkey to participation in the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Those foreign policy issues became labor issues for the ILWU in 1948, when the employers claimed that the union was preparing to strike in order to cripple the Marshall Plan. Emboldened by the new provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, which required union officers to sign an oath that they were not members of the Communist Party, outlawed the closed shop and gave the President authority to seek an 80-day "cooling off" period before a strike that would imperil the national health or safety, the employers pushed for a strike, hoping to rid themselves of Bridges and reclaim control over the hiring hall. As it turned out, their strategy was a failure and the employer group reached a new agreement with the union after replacing their bargaining representatives and enduring a ninety-five day strike.

At the same time, Philip Murray, Lewis' successor as head of the CIO, had started reducing Bridges' power within the CIO, removing him from his position as the CIO's California Regional Director in 1948. In 1950, after an internal trial, the CIO expelled the ILWU due to its communist leadership.[citation needed]

Coping with change

Expulsion had no real effect, however, on either the ILWU or Bridges' power within it. The organization continued to negotiate agreements, with less strife than in the 1930s and 1940s, and Bridges continued to be reelected without serious opposition. The union negotiated a groundbreaking agreement in 1960, that permitted the extensive mechanization of the docks, significantly reducing the number of longshore workers in return for generous job guarantees and benefits for those displaced by the changes.

The agreement, however, highlighted the lesser status that less senior members, known as "B-men," enjoyed. Bridges reacted uncharacteristically defensively to these workers' complaints, which were given additional sting by the fact that many of the "B-men" were black. The additional longshore work produced by the Vietnam War allowed Bridges to meet the challenge by opening up more jobs and making determined efforts to recruit black applicants. The ILWU later faced similar challenges from women, who found it even harder to enter the industry and the union.

Bridges had difficulty giving up his position in the ILWU, even though he explored the possibility of merging it with the ILA or the Teamsters in the early 1970s. He finally retired in 1977, but only after ensuring that Louis Goldblatt, the long-time Secretary-Treasurer of the union and his logical successor, was denied the opportunity to replace him.

On July 28, 2001, on what would have been Bridges' 100th birthday, the ILWU organized a week-long event celebrating the life of Harry Bridges. This culminated in a march of over 8000 unionists and supporters across the Vincent Thomas Bridge from Terminal Island to San Pedro, California. The longshoremen shut down the port for eight hours in honor of Bridges.

Marriage

Bridges met Noriko Sawada during a fund-raiser for Mine, Mill, and Smelter workers and the two became a couple thereafter. In 1958, the couple decided to marry. Although they could have married in California, they decided to travel to Reno, Nevada for their marriage license. However, Nevada had a law banning marriage between any white person and "any person of the Ethiopian or black race, Malay or brown race, Mongolian or yellow race, or American Indian, or red race."[1] At the county courthouse, the clerk refused to give the couple a marriage license on account of Ms. Sawada's race being "yellow."[2]

Bridges and Sawada then sought a court order from District Judge Taylor Wines for issuance of the marriage license. Judge Wines granted the order, in direct contradiction to the law, and the couple married December 10, 1958. This order prompted the Nevada legislature to repeal all anti-miscegenation laws in the State on March 17, 1959. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared all such anti-miscegenation laws to be unconstitutional in the decision Loving v. Virginia.[3]

Quotes

On his position as president: "I'm a working stiff. I just happened to be around at the right time and nobody else wanted the job."

"The most important word in the language of the working class is 'solidarity.'"

"Why should we take it upon ourselves to pick up the pieces after industry discards people for machines? Isn't it about time unions got in there before the fact to insist that there must be some obligation to people in all this?"

"It is a good union policy that officers shouldn't earn so much that they drift away from the members."

"Labor can not stand still. It must not retreat. It must go on, or go under."

"Interfere with the foreign policy of the country?....Sure as hell! That's our job, that's our privilege, that's our right, that's our duty.'

"I would have worked with the devil himself if he'd been for the six hour day and worker control of the hiring hall."

Trivia

  • The Almanac Singers recorded a single featuring "Song for Bridges" (B side: "Babe O'Mine") in late June 1941 [4].
  • The Bay Area punk band Rancid has a song called "Harry Bridges" on their 1994 album "Let's Go".
  • July 28, 2001, Harry's 100th birthday, was declared "Harry Bridges Day" by the Governor of California; on the same day the City of San Francisco dedicated a plaza in honor of Harry Bridges. The Committee for Harry Bridges Plaza, an ad hoc organization of citizens and labor activists, are working to raise a monument to Harry Bridges on the plaza named for him.
  • "From Wharf Rats to Lords of the Docks", a feature directed by Haskell Wexler consists of a one-man play developed by actor Ian Ruskin, who portrays Bridges, and the nonprofit Harry Bridges Project, which produced it as a film. The Project was created to promote the Bridges legacy and aid in the public's understanding of his importance to history of his work, which had enormous impact but is largely unknown outside specific labor union and academic circles. The Harry Bridges Project presents his story to a wider audience through a variety of media, including the one man play and film and radio documentaries that take audiences through some of America's most turbulent years, with Bridges as their guide. "From Wharf Rats to Lords of the Docks: The Life and Times of Harry Bridges" was broadcast on some PBS stations summer and Labor Day Weekend 2009.

[5]

References

  1. ^ Earl, Phillip I., Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 37, Spring 1994, "Nevada's Miscegenation Laws and the Marriage of Mr. & Mrs. Harry Bridges", 7
  2. ^ Earl, Phillip I., Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 37, Spring 1994, "Nevada's Miscegenation Laws and the Marriage of Mr. & Mrs. Harry Bridges", 9
  3. ^ 388 U.S. 1 (1967)
  4. ^ The Almanac Singers: Song for Bridges/Babe O'Mine
  5. ^ The Harry Bridges Project

Additional reading

  • Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes: "Communists and the CIO: From the Soviet Archives," in Labor History, vol 35, no. 3 (Summer 1994).
  • Reds or Rackets, The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront, by Howard Kimeldorf ISBN 0-520-07886-1
  • Harry Bridges, The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the U.S., by Charles Larrowe ISBN 0-88208-001-6
  • Workers on the Waterfront, Seamen, Longshoremen and Unionism in the 1930s, by Bruce Nelson ISBN 0-252-06144-6

 
 

 

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