The Family (13 page)

This “B” is almost definitely Beck; no businessman in America “went along” with Harry Bridges. And yet it was Beck, ironically, who inadvertently exposed big business of the 1930s for what it was: a racket with rewards reserved for the big men. In most parts of the country, that would be someone like James A. Farrell or Henry Ford, commanding Pinkertons and the police; in Seattle, it was Dave Beck, Teamster, who owned the law. That’s why Abram hated him: Beck was living evidence that God’s invisible hand blessed the ruthless as much as or more than those whom he considered the deserving.

But Abram had been living in San Francisco in 1934, leading prayer meetings for a group of business executives at the Pacific Union Club, and he had witnessed the power of Bridges up close, worse than anything he had seen during his years of preaching and organizing in Boston, New York, and Detroit. “It was the utter helplessness of the rank and file,” wrote his friend Grubb, “under the political control of subversive forces in the saddle.”

That’s not Beck—his hit squads struck any union meeting that showed radical inclinations harder than the most brutal lumber baron could imagine. Abram wanted to convert communists; Beck wanted them beaten and dumped in the drink. No, the “subversive forces in the saddle” must have been Bridges, although Bridges was not subversive, he was a revolutionary. And in 1934 and ’35, to Abram—indeed, to much of the world—it looked as if he might be successful.

B
RIDGES WAS THE
anti-Abram. Raised middle class and Roman-Catholic in Melbourne, Australia, he shipped out to sea when he was sixteen and got off the boat in America four years later. Abram had his faith, and Bridges had his. God hadn’t spoken to him; a Wobbly had—a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. They aimed for one simple goal, paradise on Earth. They called it
One Big Union
and fought for it with the fine art of sabotage: Wobblies blasted steam into the pipes of refrigerated shipping containers, sabotaged blacktop so it cracked open, literally jammed wrenches into the works. They didn’t steal from the rich and give to the poor; they
were
the poor, and they took. Most of all, though, they lingered and gabbed and winked at one another and then
quit
—they loved leaving work behind. “Hallelujah, I’m a bum again,” went a favorite American Wobbly song. Abram had nightmares about such hymns, mistook their radicalized Tin Pan Alley humor for the ponderous phrasing of the European “Internationale.”
⁵

But the Wobblies weren’t red; they were romantic, deliberately and desperately so, skeptical of power and organization and compromise, and constantly amused by themselves. Sabotage, after all, is a kind of joke—not just on the bosses but also on anyone who works, on the very idea of work. The God Wobblies believed in had made humanity not for hard labor but for pleasure. Why else did He give us legs on which to dance?

And yet the first noble truth of the Wobblies was suffering, a sure thing for as long as there was a ruling class with which to wage war. So Wobblies fought, but they fought for the paradise they felt in their bones and their bellies had been promised to them. A city upon a hill. What else was worth fighting for?

Their dream was ill defined, less an agenda than a story, about class warfare and the spoils that would one day go to the victors. They didn’t have politics, they had a parable.

Wobblies whispered in young Bridges’s ears as God had spoken to Abram in the elder trees. But Bridges was of a more independent turn of mind. He liked the Wobbly story about the One Big Union still to come, and took it as his own, but he didn’t believe workers would win squat without organization. That idea he took from the communists, though he wasn’t a communist, either. Like Abram, he loved to be around people and yet was a loner, kept his own counsel, looked inward, and what he found there he told no one. But unlike Abram, there is no record of him crying but for the day he stood by the coffins of two men he had led out on strike. The police had shot them down. Bridges wept and said nothing.

What the two men shared were dreams. The Australian and the Norwegian were utopians in the American vein. Bridges thought the Promised Land awaited construction; Abram thought it was simply to be recovered. Bridges had read a bit of theory, Abram some theology, but both believed that they could bring forth the good life for all who would accept it without recourse to ideology. Bridges took the communists into his ranks but never entered theirs, Abram strolled along the fence of fascism but never hopped over. Neither man cared much about ideas; both believed in power. Bridges wanted to see it redistributed. Abram wanted to see it concentrated.

Like Abram, Bridges knocked around, first as a sailor, then as an oil rigger, and finally as part of a San Francisco steel gang, unloading heavy metal on the docks. Like Abram, he’d been beaten out of his wages. He got beaten every day, in fact, just like every other longshoreman. The shipowners had multiple methods for keeping their workers in line. Once, the San Francisco dockers had been among the toughest union men in the country, but the company had broken them back in 1919, herding them into the “Blue Book,” a company collective in which the CEO effectively served as union boss, negotiating with himself. The bosses thought they were being kind. So did Abram. To him, such arrangements seemed like the “reconciliation” promised by Christianity, the solution at last to the old problem of labor and capital. The laws of property obtained—was it not the company’s right to hire and fire at will?—but were softened, in the minds of Blue Book believers, by the company’s voluntary decision to treat its employees not as hostile contractors but as children. That made sense to Abram, who divided the world between big men and little men and preferred the company of the former.

By 1933, the “children,” the workers, ate—that is, earned—only if they could survive the shape-up, the speed-up, and the straw boss. The shape-up began before dawn, in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle. Along the Embarcadero, the long curving cobblestoned street between the Bay City and its eighty-two piers, 4,000 men gathered in the fog and the dark, hoping to be picked for one of fifteen hundred jobs. They jostled for a place close to the front of the crowd and puffed themselves up to look thick and strong even if they hadn’t eaten in days. They felt, more than one man would remember, like whores trying to look pretty. The picker—the pimp—was called the straw boss. If you wanted to be chosen, you promised him a part of your wages. And if he gave you a job, you might work for four hours or twenty-four. You might work with a gang or with a small crew, too few men for the task. That was the speed-up: the job didn’t go faster; you did. Longshoremen were not a delicate breed, but they collapsed with exhaustion and some dropped dead, their heart muscles bursting. Say a word about what you saw around you, and you were gone. Silence was golden. For the company, that is. In 1933 it shaved a dime off wages, and the Blue Book “union” accepted the loss as the cost of harmony.

But a few men didn’t, and that summer, emboldened by FDR’s New Deal, they organized. By spring of 1934 they were talking strike. In May it sparked: first in Seattle, where longshoremen battled deputized vigilantes, took their riot clubs away from them, and sent five to the hospital; then in San Francisco, where police shot a twenty-year-old kid in the heart as he led a striker’s charge just hours after joining the union. There was something almost quixotic in the first responses of the owners: in San Francisco, shippers trolled fraternity houses for the state’s best young men, who considered a few days of heavy labor the duty of gentlemen, and the Berkeley football coach recruited three squads of big-shouldered boys from the Golden Bears to join down-on-their-luck white-collar workers on a floating barracks for strikebreakers, a ship called the
Diana Dollar
.

Abram followed a teeth-rattling roller coaster of news for months, as the papers reported one day a red tide rising and the next labor peace in the offing. Neither story was true. The army of strikers grew larger and larger, bakers and cooks and waiters and even the proud and conservative Teamsters swelling the dockers’ ranks.

No peace was coming. “Riot Expected,” declared the papers in one of their grimmer moods. The Chamber of Commerce drafted a declaration and put it on the front page of the
Chronicle
: “American principles” vs. “un-American radicalism.” The chamber stood for “free labor,” for the “American Plan,” for the “right to work.” Lose San Francisco, and Seattle and Portland would fall like dominoes. “The winning of the strike means the abandoning of control by private owners over their own property,” declared the columnist Chapin Hall. “San Francisco is the real seat of war and right nobly is she standing up to the firing line.”

Seven hundred policemen in dark blue patrolled the waterfront on foot and in black cars and on high chestnut horses. Twice that number and more picketed or searched for strikebreakers. The middle class began contemplating last-minute vacations. The wives of the wealthy bunkered up at the Union Club, where Abram led prayer meetings for businessmen. As the blue tear gas sent tendrils up the hill, they must have felt frustrated by his optimistic lessons in biblical capitalism. Scripture has much to say about honest dealing and even more about handling the heathen, but not once does it mention organized labor. Kenneth Kingsbury, the president of the Standard Oil of California (and later a member of Abram’s movement), peered out of the club’s windows one day and saw pickets peering back; he panicked. A sign of the apocalypse, Kingsbury instructed a federal man to write his employers in Washington, was that Kenneth Kingsbury could not leave the club to hail a cab.

On July 3, the Industrial Association of San Francisco resolved to open the port by force. Mayor Angelo Rossi, a florist by trade, did not stop them. At 1:30 p.m. the steel doors of Pier 38 rolled up, and five trucks full of goods from the moribund ships in the harbor rolled out, police cruisers behind and alongside them. Driving the trucks were not ordinary strikebreakers but business executives, “key men,” in Abram’s vernacular. Young James A. Folger of Folger’s Coffee took the lead. A crowd of 5,000 pickets watched without making a sound. The businessmen raced to a warehouse four blocks inland and unloaded: birdseed, coffee, and tires. They went back for more. The strikers looked on. No songs, no chants, no stones. Silent witness to the labor of businessmen. This was the story the papers told when Abram opened their pages on the Fourth of July 1935, his twentieth anniversary in “the land of the Bible unchained.”

Did Folger and his 700 bodyguards in blue think, for just a moment, that peace was at hand? A police captain with gold braid gleaming on his shoulder, riding on the running board of a police cruiser with his revolver in the air, shouted, “The port is open!”—and gave the strikers the signal for which they had waited. They roared and attacked with cobblestones ripped from the street and bricks and stones, with clubs they tore from policemen’s hands and with wooden shafts they hurled like spears. The police opened fire into the crowd.

And with that, the first fight was over—thousands melted into alleys, dragging the wounded with them. Blood pooled between the cobblestones. The air smelled acrid. At night the blue and green lights of helpless ships blinked from the bay and went unanswered. The pool halls, the bars, the tattoo parlors, the brothels, were silent. Vice had been conquered, the Christian city on a hill defended from the barbarians.

There were not many picnics on the Fourth. A train burned and thirteen policemen’s wives were given reason to curse the red bastards. The governor said troops were coming. The commanders of the Guard strategized.

“My men…will talk with bayonets,” said their general.

This was not what Abram had dreamed of. Where were his key men, his top men, his up and out? Out of the city, hiding in the hills.

The next morning, the police went forward in waves, rows of Martians in khaki gas masks and black helmets, revolvers drawn. A few blocks from the water, on Rincon Hill, a knoll tall as a four-story building, a crowd of longshoremen gathered. From widemouthed riot guns police thumped out gas shells that sliced through dry brown grass and sparked it like tinder. Strikers scorched their fingers on the shells and hurled them back down the hill. Blue smoke from the gas, black and gray from the grass, an oily stink that pushed the armies away from one another. Up the knoll went the strikers. Policemen in ripped uniforms, blood dripping from facial wounds, squinted and aimed and unloaded revolvers and rifles. A striker crested and fell, shot like a turkey. A tear-gas salesman, deputized, cheered. The smoke stank of vomit and gunfire. Airplanes dipped and whined, dropping messages to police command. Horse hooves thudded; out of the blue smoke went the charge, horses snorting and shrieking.

The strikers were ready with slingshots: two poles stretching a car tire inner tube hurled a three-pound stone fast and hard 400 feet, or less should a policeman agree to catch it with his belly. Back down the hill went the horses.

Up went another charge, replied to with another volley. The police charged again, and this time they took a wall, but the men behind it had gone missing. So it went, charges and stone volleys and feints and men vanishing like quicksilver.

The police found them. They blocked off both ends of the street in front of the union hall. A plainclothesman drove into the crowd, stepped out of his car, and opened up with a shotgun held at the hip, and in front of the hall he brought down three men. One pulled himself up and looked at the crowd with blood in his mouth, blood in his eyes, and then his head dropped and his jaw cracked like an egg.

At least thirty-three more nursed gunshot wounds that night. They were laid in rows in the union hall or hidden in bedrooms by wives and mothers and brokenhearted fathers who boiled water and pried bullets out with thick fingers while their men screamed and the neighbors cried. Down on the docks a boat landed, and into the city marched soldiers, the first of 5,000. A sharp wind snapped the fog, the gas, the smoke up into the atmosphere, but the smell of violence lingered.