C.I.O. to Sea

With only one struck plant remaining closed last week and with no agreements signed, it was apparent that John L. Lewis had about lost his strike in "Little Steel." "The C.I.O. failed to meet its first major test successfully," gloated A. F. of L.'s William Green, calling for an intensified campaign to stave off restrictive labor legislation. "We cannot permit all organized labor to be penalized because of the stupid mistakes of C.I.O." Sneered the leonine C.I.O. boss: "Droolings from the pallid lips of a traitor."

Contemptuous also was John Lewis last week when asked what he thought about an American Institute of Public Opinion poll showing A. F. of L. favored over C.I.O. 2-to-1. In the manner of the late William ("Public-be-damned") Vanderbilt, Mr. Lewis tossed his mane and snapped: "If the public wants to approve of C.I.O., it can; if the public doesn't want to approve, it can."

Superficially it looked as if John Lewis had picked a poor time to assume one of his haughty poses. Washington newshawks noted that he appeared tired and harassed. But fundamentally there was little reason for him to admit a general defeat. "Little Steel" was only one sector of the steel front; he still had the majority of the industry in his pocket. Moreover, steel is only one of C.I.O.'s many fronts. In other mass-production industries like oil, glass, rubber, motor, mining, there have been no serious setbacks. C.I.O.'s Transport Workers Union has been sweeping the field among Manhattan's taxi-drivers and subway and bus employes. Its office workers are invading Wall Street. Here & there C.I.O. has lost minor collective bargaining elections to A. F. of L.. but the defections of A. F. of L. unions into C.I.O.'s ranks still continues. Even Cigar Makers International Union Local No. 144, the local of Samuel Gompers. longtime pillar of the A. F. of L., lately voted to throw in its lot with John Lewis. C.I.O. membership is now nearly as large as A. F. of L.'s (3,000,000 as against 3,600,000). Said sarcastic Mr. Lewis last week: "If C.I.O. continues to lose ground at the present rate, I don't know how we'll handle all the applications that are pouring in."

Far from taking the defensive, John Lewis was last week busy extending his long, long lines. Already launched under the friendly eye of his brother, Alma Denny Lewis, was a drive to organize 800,000 Federal Government employes, a move which brought an official frown from the Chief Executive of the biggest employer in the U. S. (see p. 9). He chartered a new organization called the State, County and Municipal Workers of America, hoped for 2,000,000 members, declared that strikes and picketing would not be included in the organization's policy. And last week John Lewis was taking more than official pleasure in preparing to welcome into C.I.O. the 100,000 lumberjacks and mill hands in the Federation of Wood-workers, hitherto a unit of A. F. of L.'s Carpenters & Joiners, headed by William ("Big Bill") Hutcheson. A stanch Republican, Big Bill Hutcheson was the man John Lewis knocked down in a fist fight at the 1935 A. F. of L. convention.

But the newest & biggest C.I.O. objective is not the woods but the water. Invited personally by John Lewis to Washington last week was a hand-picked group of the nation's maritime labor leaders. Purpose of the meeting was to launch a "streamlined campaign" for the complete organization of the maritime industry and allied fields--some 300,000 workers. Seated in the red-leather chairs in the United Mine Workers boardroom, the conferring labormen voted not for one big union as in steel or motors, but for coordination and expansion under unifying C.I.O. direction of various unions already in the field. Mr. Lewis wants to see tightly teamed together all oilers, wipers, firemen, deck hands, cooks, inland boatmen, stewards, engineers, masters, mates, pilots, longshoremen, warehousemen, radio operators, shipyard workers, fishermen, fish cannery workers, wholesale fish handlers. No more ambitious program has John Lewis ever launched, for not only is the maritime industry divided among innumerable present unions, not only is it divided along C.I.O.-A. F. of L. lines, but it is also subdivided by the hottest factionalism to be found anywhere in U. S. Labor.

Ignoring personal jealousies, Mr. Lewis summoned only those leaders already affiliated with C.I.O. or whom he knew to be thoroughly C.I.O.-minded--men like Joseph Curran of the insurgent East Coast seamen, Captain E. T. Pinchin of the Masters, Mates & Pilots of America, Vincent Malone of the Marine Firemen, Oilers, Watertenders & Wipers Association, President Mervyn Rathborne of the American Radio Telegraphists. But it was clear from the start that Mr. Lewis had in mind the man who was to head his maritime drive--San Francisco's Harry Bridges, president of the Pacific Coast District of the International Longshoremen's Association.

Weeks before the Maritime Conference was called Mr. Lewis dispatched his lieutenant, John Brophy, to the West Coast to do the necessary spade work. But Mr. Lewis did not need a confidential report to learn that Harry Bridges was the most conspicuous maritime labor leader in the U. S. today. Hurtling into headlines overnight during the San Francisco general strike of 1934, this militant young Australian has risen from simply the boss of the San Francisco waterfront to the principal threat to A. F. of L. power on the Pacific Coast. Numerically his own organization is not impressive--some 22.000 members. He does not even control the Maritime Federation of the Pacific, which he helped to found in 1935. Yet so great is his prestige among the rank & file of insurgent maritime labor that he towers above both rivals and loyal allies. Nor is his power confined to the West Coast. Even tall, tattooed Joe Curran and his Atlantic Coast deck hands take orders from dour-faced Harry Bridges.

Harry Bridges' position in the new C.I.O. drive was clearly indicated last week when John Lewis closeted himself with the San Francisco leader for an hour just before the Maritime Conference assembled. Thus unofficially Harry Bridges was admitted to the C.I.O. high command, taking rank with men like Philip Murray of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Harvey Fremming of the Oil Field, Gas Well & Refinery Workers, Charles P. Howard of the Typographical Union.

Bogey Man. In no small measure Harry Bridges can thank his enemies, particularly William Randolph Hearst, for his rise to national fame. The bitterness of unceasing attacks on him in the West Coast press has undoubtedly gained him more friends than enemies. As in the Presidential campaign last year, the workers began to suspect that if a man was so hated by Capital he must have considerable to offer to Labor. Privately and publicly damned as a communist, an alien agitator, a ruthless doctrinaire, an unscrupulous wrecker with a lust for power, Harry Bridges has become, in three years, the bogey man of the Pacific.

In the previous 34 years of his life Harry Bridges was completely obscure. Born at Kensington, Australia, in 1900, he was christened Alfred Renton Bridges. His father, an estate agent there, explains that his son was called Renton but "this name was a bit too much for his American Pals," who dubbed him Harry. At 17, after a sound schooling, Alfred Renton Bridges got a job as a clerk in a Melbourne firm called Sauls & McDougal, Ltd. It was his father's desire that his son eventually join him in business. But restless young Renton wanted to go to sea, and in the hope that he might be speedily discouraged, his father arranged with the skipper of a little ketch plying between Melbourne and Tasmania to take the boy for one stormy trip. Young Bridges loved it. In the next few years he was shipwrecked twice, being saved on one occasion by the buoyance of his mandolin.

Shipping as a seaman for San Francisco, he was legally admitted to the U. S. on April 12, 1930. For the next two years he shipped from U. S. ports, was arrested once in New Orleans for picketing during a seamen's strike. No charges were preferred and he was released without court hearing. His last job as a seaman was in the Coast & Geodetic Survey as a quartermaster on the U. S. S. Lydonia. It was while serving on the Lydonia that he met his future wife, who was born Agnes Brown in the Black. Craig Hills of Scotland, and brought to the U. S. by her parents at age 12. Shortly after he met her, Harry Bridges gave up the sea, settling down in San Francisco as a longshoreman.

The following were not easy years for Harry Bridges. Twice he was hurt in dock accidents. As early as 1924 he tried to organize his fellow workers but someone embezzled the union's funds. Though always bucking company unions, he nevertheless managed to find work until 1932, when he had to go on local relief for a short time. During the 1934 strike when he was turning back his union salary, he was on Fed- eral relief for about six weeks.

Today Harry Bridges draws $75 per week as Pacific Coast District president of the International Longshoremen's Association. He lives very modestly, moving next week from a five-room flat to a five-room house, for which he will pay $35 per month. He is behind on the installments on a two-year-old Ford, has about finished paying off $600 of hospital and doctor bills incurred for his wife, who fell out of a window while hanging out the wash. Harry Bridges himself has been in the hospital twice in the last two years for stomach ulcers.

Nervous, quick, wary, intolerant, Harry Bridges is scornful of the press, both Right and Left. Even when cornered for an interview, he ignores any questions which he does not choose to answer, punctuates his own points with jerks of his knotted longshoreman's arms. He used to have a pronounced Australian accent (an exaggerated Cockney) but has now lost most of it, speaking in a soft, low, emphatic voice. On the platform he is restrained, though he sometimes stops, tosses back his brown hair, pushing his beak forward as if into the wind at sea on lookout. He demonstrated his spellbinding platform power at a Madison Square Garden rally last year when, near the end of a long program, he held a tired crowd of 15,000 for a full hour extemporaneously. His suspicious, self-assured attitude comes naturally, for despite the publicity value of attacks made on him, Harry Bridges has had to endure what is pretty close to persecution. Innumerable attempts have been made to have him deported, although his immigration status cannot be challenged. Like many another resident alien, he filed first papers for citizenship, then let them lapse. As soon as the waiting period is up on his third set of first papers he may apply for citizenship. Government authorities have dutifully checked charges of false identity, of subversive activities, of a criminal record in Australia--and have given Harry Bridges a clean bill of health. Ship owners have even asked the Department of Labor to deport him on general principles. Occasionally Mr. Bridges loses patience, as he did this spring when he sued the Portland Oregon Journal for $100,000 damages. Without naming Bridges the Oregon Journal editorialized favorably on a reader's suggestion that "alien provocateurs of revolution" be run out of the country forthwith.

Harry Bridges denies that he is a communist. He is not a member of the Communist Party. He simply says communists make good unionists. The speech most used against him was made last spring at the University of Washington: "We take the stand that we as workers have nothing in common with the employers. We are in a class struggle, and we subscribe to the belief that if the employer is not in business his products still will be necessary and we still will be providing them when there is no employing class. We frankly believe that day is coming."

That is good Marxist ideology, but Harry Bridges is doing no more than any other militant labor leader to hasten the end of the employing classes in his day-to-day tactics. John L. Lewis is as much of a capitalist as Tom M. Girdler. Their immediate objectives may differ but neither could conceive of working for those objectives except within the framework of capitalism. But while Harry Bridges also works within a capitalistic framework, socialism to him is a desirable reality. Both Harry Bridges and John Lewis are working for Labor, both believe in political action by Labor. But their thinking processes are as different as those of Trotsky and Stalin. Theoretically the organizing team of Lewis & Bridges is about as formidable as could be lined up in the field today. But while Harry Bridges has a masterful hand with the rank & file he has never been able to work smoothly with his labor peers. This may prove to be the real weakness in the C. I. O. maritime drive, for John Lewis, who knows little about waterfront labor, will have to rely almost entirely on Harry Bridges.

Harry Bridges' entrance into C. I. O. may raise another problem for John Lewis. That is the fact that though Harry Bridges is no revolutionist, millions of people think he is. And at the moment the favorite method of attacking C. I. O. is to raise the hoary cry, "Communism!" Typical was a charge made in San Diego last week by E. H. Dowell, an A. F. of L. organizer. He solemnly declared that he had been "authorized" to announce that the Department of Justice had in its possession $750,000 in canceled checks paid to John L. Lewis by communist sources. Repudiated by A. F. of L. headquarters, shrugged at by Department of Justice officials, this spurious tale was probably accepted as gospel by all good haters of C. I. O.

Factionalism. Not all of Mr. Bridges' enemies are publishers and shipowners. He has had to battle the old-line A. F. of L. leaders as well as insurgents he himself boosted to power. As early as 1931 he ran head on into a movement to affiliate the San Francisco company unions with A. F. of L.'s International Longshoremen, headed by Manhattan's Joseph P. Ryan. Having stopped this movement, the Bridges group founded their own local, got a charter from Ryan in 1933. At the start of the 1934 strike Mr. Bridges was on the Ryan payroll as an organizer. Not until he was made chairman of the Joint Marine Strike Committee did San Francisco wake up to the fact that there was a Harry Bridges. Old Michael J. Casey, Irish boss of the West Coast teamsters, fought to keep .his men out of the maritime strike, fought the general strike, rising in one meeting to cry: "Don't do it, lads. I know what it means." In the end the venerable old teamster had to play ball with the dynamic young longshoreman, and while they represented the two extremes of U. S. Labor they grew to have mutual respect for each other.

After Teamster Casey died last spring at 79, his reins passed to Teamster David Beck pudgy, aggressive "Tsar of Seattle labor" who is out to organize "everything on wheels," a definition broad enough to take warehousemen as well as restaurant help, newspaper circulation hustlers and already organized brewers.

Just as Dave Beck has his "everything on wheels" so Harry Bridges has his "march inland," the Bridges credo calling for unity not only among waterfront workers but all workers in the surrounding territory. So he went after the warehousemen, who stand economically between the longshoremen and the teamsters. There he clashed with Dave Beck in a violent struggle which is still far short of settlement. Meantime Bridges is being attacked on the flank by Harry Lundeberg, a tough, towering Norwegian from Oslo who arrived on the Pacific Coast a few years after Harry Bridges. Like Bridges, he is a life-long unionist who was catapulted to power in the 1934 strike but in the Sailors' Union of the Pacific. After the strike Harry Bridges was rewarded with official leadership of the Pacific Coast longshoremen, and one of his first ideas was to create a united maritime front. For this purpose he sponsored the Maritime Federation of the Pacific with the longshoremen and seamen as the key unions. The motto: "An injury to one is an injury to all." For the Federation's first president he hit on Harry Lundeberg, who was even more militant than he. This was such a boost for Lundeberg that he was soon given leadership of the Sailors' Union. Meantime the two Harrys settled down to battle for control of the Federation's 40,000 members.

One of the myths about this struggle is that it started over a smartly-dressed, auburn-haired secretary named Norma Perry, whom Mr. Bridges inherited when he took over presidency of the longshoreman's local. It was also reported that Norma Perry was the brains behind Harry Bridges. Miss Perry, who was read out of the Communist Party for disruptive tactics, was fired by Mr. Bridges in the autumn of 1935, promptly went over to the Lundeberg camp, where she now handles publicity for the Sailors' Union, running a stenographic service on the side. Harry Bridges claimed that she tried to influence union affairs, even to the extent of countermanding his orders. Actually the break between the two Harrys was caused by divergent policies. Bridges believes in unity at all costs, being willing to sacrifice the interest of one group for the benefit of the whole. Lundeberg is intensely loyal to his sailors, and Bridges suspects him of trying to gain advantages for them at the expense of other unions in the Federation. West Coast business has done its best to encourage the break, tending to play up to Lundeberg, just as it plays up to Dave Beck and other A. F. of L. leaders. The divergent viewpoints of the two Harrys is evident even in their attitude toward C. I. O. Both regard A. F. of L. as ineffective. But while both were invited to John Lewis's Maritime Conference last week, only Harry Bridges attended. Harry Lundeberg stayed home to get in his licks at the month-old convention of the Maritime Federation in Portland. And as soon as the C. I. O. committee was announced, Lundeberg objected by wire that it was "undemocratic and not representative." He got the convention to vote down endorsement 107-to-72, in effect, by having it referred to a rank & file referendum. This simply meant that Lundeberg was afraid his sailors might lose their independence in the big C. I. O. maritime scheme. The longshoremen have already voted overwhelmingly for C. I. O. affiliation. Though the official count of the sailors' ballot has been locked up by Harry Lundeberg, it is understood that they also plumped for C. I. O. Harry Bridges is a stickler for union democracy, and in rank & file votes he usually wins. Incorruptible by cash, favors or flattery, Harry Bridges has an almost fanatic following.

With West Coast maritime labor apparently sold on C. I. O. the big job for Messrs. Lewis & Bridges is the East Coast. There in one of the biggest National Labor Board elections yet scheduled, some 75,000 seagoing workers are about to be polled to see whether they prefer A. F. of L.'s International Seamen's Union of America or C. I. O.'s National Maritime Union. The effort to get members of these rival unions aboard ships before the election begins was causing almost daily tie-ups along the Atlantic seaboard all last fortnight.

The other big eastern maritime group, the longshoremen, are under the manicured thumb of Joseph P. Ryan. Lately Chairman Joseph Patrick Kennedy of the new Maritime Commission brought Mr. Ryan and Mr. Lewis together, Chairman Kennedy being anxious to obtain assurance of labor peace while he is putting the Government's new shipping policy into effect (TIME, July 12). Though the story is that Mr. Ryan is looking eagerly for an excuse to lead his men into C. I. O., the hulking longshoreman simply stormed "Communism!" when questioned last week on the Lewis-Bridges campaign. Nevertheless, a sub-committee of maritime labor headed by Harry Bridges left for Manhattan as soon as the Washington conference broke up to lay before Joe Ryan a program which includes two national conventions in Chicago, one in August, another in September, to set up a national Industrial Maritime Federation under C. I. O. On arrival in Manhattan Harry Bridges clearly indicated the temper of his campaign. Compromise was out. Snapped he: "The C. I. O. has put forth certain proposals for the consideration of Mr. Ryan and all others concerned. They can accept or reject them."

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