Girl of My Dreams (34 page)

Outside the hall a day earlier, the afternoon atmosphere along the Embarcadero was of a battlefield where combat had not begun. The police lined up to protect the docks while the strikers marched on the landward side of the street shouting and shaking their picket signs. “It's not the cops they're shouting at so much,” Quin said. “It's the scabs.”

The nonunion workers, the scabs, were returning to work from lunch. Some were thickset football players from the University of California at Berkeley; their coach had told them strikebreaking was a healthy form of spring practice. Some were hoboes who needed any kind of work during the Depression; some had been imported from other cities along the coast, like Los Angeles, where strikebreaking was essentially a profession. A few were blacks whose only chance to work on the docks was as strikebreakers. In the years he himself had spent at sea before becoming a journalist and pamphleteer, Quin noted that the only blacks among the seamen were ones hired as stewards. “But it'll change if the strike wins,” he said. “The Seamen will stay out in support of the Longshoremen, and both unions will bring Negroes aboard if they won't work as scabs anymore. But first these owners need to be taught a lesson they won't forget.”

I never asked Quin if he was a Communist; I assumed it.

As a landlubber, I did ask what was the attraction of the job for seamen. They were routinely mistreated by captains and first mates, underpaid, often robbed and beaten when they went ashore. Aboard ship, they were held almost like prisoners.

“Yes,” Quin said, “and the cruelty at sea is matched by the cruelty of the sea.”

“Then why ship out in the first place?”

“It's a job when you can get one. And have you ever stood at the railing with spray in your eyes at sunrise, come through a storm that tested every fiber of your body and brain, felt your ship roll under you like it was a woman, breathed with it as it plowed furrows in the fickle currents, or tangoed into a distant port with all that fun and possibility and strangeness ahead of you?”

That shut me up.

In addition to police on foot along the Embarcadero, guarding the docks as though they were working for shipowners, which in a sense they were, other police cruised the waterfront in radio patrol cars, on motorcycles and on horseback. The cavalry were everywhere. Quin pointed to police lookouts on top of the Ferry Building.

“Pressure is mounting, Skinny,” he said.

That night Quin took me to a workers' meeting in Dreamland Auditorium. Four or five thousand Longshoremen, Teamsters and Seamen were packed in, many with their families. Curious San Franciscans also showed up, some no doubt hoping to see a fight, many interested in the strike that was paralyzing their city. A stout Teamster told me they called the hall Dreamland because it was used for boxing matches, and many of the fighters left the building unconscious. He horselaughed.

The great cavern of Dreamland could have been a studio sound stage with seats. The various unions—most had already joined the strike, some hadn't—were convened as if for a pep rally before a big game. Mike Quin said it was much more. It was the outpouring of a century of frustration, of overwork and underpayment, of earlier strikes that had failed, of a kind of barbarism where human beings were treated as beasts of burden. “The working men,” he said, “have now come together to claim their own.”

Most of the huge crowd were not sitting but milling, greeting friends, shouting encouragement. Quin mingled. Small groups were singing labor songs. Nick Bordoise, the cook in the Longshoremen's headquarters, was passing out sandwiches. He sang a Greek accented “Solidarity Forever”: “You can't fooling me I'm stuck to the union.” In some parts of the auditorium there were arguments—whether the unions should all make common cause or hold to their separate crafts, whether a union shop was a necessity, whether Communists were helpful or bad for the labor movement, whether union members with families could hold out as long as single men.

A bell sounded, the chiming kind used to signal the start of a prize fight. Lights dimmed and a spotlight coned the stage, where a microphone stood. As I looked for a seat I spotted a tall elderly lady, a white-haired woman in a long, rather foreign dress buttoned to her neck. She held her chin high as though she were under some kind of siege and needed to keep all her dignity about her for the sake of some principle. Peering at her, I was shocked to see Yancey Ballard escorting her, deferring to her. What the hell was Yeatsman doing here? Who was the old lady? Mike Quin reappeared as the bell was rung several more times, and we wedged ourselves into seats next to two large union men. “The Longshoremen's national leader, Joe Ryan, is here,” Quin said, “and he's sent around a deal to the local committees that he's negotiated by himself.”

“Boys, gentlemen, and ladies,” said a man in a business suit who had stepped to the microphone at the center of the stage, “I bring you greetings from the president of the United States.” This received conditional applause, some boos. In back of me someone said that if Roosevelt was on their side the best thing he could do was stay out of their way. The man on the stage introduced himself as Edward McGrady, the Assistant Secretary of Labor. “This strike,” McGrady said, “can be settled as all issues are, through compromise, and you men can be back at work with pay raises if you just won't let the radicals and frankly the Red element control what you're doing.” This was greeted by a shout from the rear of the auditorium: “No one controls what we're doing but us!” Cheers. “All right,” McGrady continued, “what I mean is President Roosevelt, the most pro-labor president in our history, fully supports your right to collective bargaining, but he believes the continuation of the strike can only hurt everyone out here on the Coast, all the working people and honest businessmen alike. So it's time to go back.”

This line of reasoning was going nowhere. The general sentiment was, We've been pushed around enough. Chants erupted: “Support the strike! Support the strike!”

A gaunt man of perhaps eighty shuffled to the microphone to respectful applause. “The old man of the sea,” Quin said. “Andrew Furuseth has worked for seamen's rights since the last century, believes labor is holy and wages are like divine grace.”

“The anger of early days,” Andrew Furuseth said, “the denial of our rights has led us to where we are. But the owners now offer us most of what we want. We can settle this far better when you're back at work.” A few clapped; everyone else was silent. No one would boo someone regarded as a union saint, but they wouldn't do his bidding either. “To work,” Furuseth went on, “is to pray. Your labor is your sacred possession. I want to say to our brothers who are former seamen come ashore to start your families and become longshoremen, it is time after three weeks to return to our tasks. As sons of God everything we want can be achieved, can be settled, and can be settled by arbitration.”

As Furuseth ambled off to far less applause than greeted his entrance, Quin told me arbitration would not win the one point longshoremen care most about, the union shop. “Old Andy's day is done, and at this point he merely clutters up the scene.”

The strikers wanted their pep rally and were being told to end their strike. The next two speakers came to the stage together—Mike Casey, San Francisco's International Brotherhood of Teamsters leader, and Joe Ryan, International Longshoremen's head, whom Quin told me had made his own deal with the dock owners. Casey, who had once been so tough he was known as Bloody Mike, tried to shoo his men back to work and was met with boos. He left quickly.

The dignified elderly woman with Yeatsman as her escort rose from her seat several rows behind Quin and me and began making her measured way to the front. She leaned on her cane as well as on the arm of a young woman I recognized with disbelief. It was Comfort O'Hollie from Jubilee. Yeatsman cleared the aisle in front of them.

Joe Ryan strutted to the microphone. He had risen from poverty, but Quin told me he was now more comfortable with politicians, racketeers and even business leaders than with his own longshoremen. He was wearing a double-breasted suit, splashy cufflinks, a diamond stickpin in his ostentatiously handpainted tie, and a huge ruby ring on his pinkie. “You men have made your point,” Ryan began, “You've made it loud and clear, as your brothers have up and down the Coast. I salute you.”

Scattered applause. But it was provisional; essentially the union members were applauding Ryan for applauding his longshoremen. “I'm here to announce very excellent news,” Ryan went on. “I've arrived at an agreement with the major industrialists here. We have the best offer we can get, and it will bring better offers in every new contract.”

“It won't bring us a union shop!” a man shouted from behind Quin and me.

“High time to get the Bolshies off our backs!” Ryan shouted right back. “And high time for San Francisco to lead everyone on the Coast back to work!”

“You're leading us straight to Hell, Joe!” from another corner of the auditorium.

“I've negotiated fair terms,” Ryan tried again, but this was met with guffaws.

A beefy man next to Quin said, “I've been to fixed fights here before. This is nothing new for Dreamland.”

Joe Ryan, a famous labor leader unused to opposition, made one more try, but he was angry at his own rank and file. “Now listen to me, all of you, I was on the Chelsea docks in Noo Yawk loading pig iron before most of you were born. I've fought for fair deals all my life, and this is the fairest deal I've ever made—it's a gentleman's agreement, raises for every dockworker, no scabs, no overtime without extra pay, no more kickbacks at the shape up … ”

And that was as far as Joe Ryan could go. At the phrase “shape up,” which meant continued control of hiring on the docks by straw bosses working for the owners, Dreamland exploded in a thunder of boos and nos and catcalls.

A longshoreman with an eyepatch, a former brawling seaman known as Pirate Larsen, ran to the stage and hurled himself onto it. “It's unanimous, King Joe!” he shouted. “You're a fink yourself and you're trying to make finks of all of us! No to your shape up, no to the owners, and no to making separate sweetheart deals up and down the coast with any owner who pays for your next holiday in Europe!” Cheers.

“And I say,” Ryan bawled, “no to your radicals and no to the Communist line!”

“The only line I follow is the picket line, King Joe!” To the accompaniment of wild cheers, Ryan evaporated from the stage, taking a seat in the front row. Boxing had returned to Dreamland, and Pirate Larsen knocked out Joe Ryan in one round.

Comfort O'Hollie was now helping the old lady up the steps of the stage while Yeatsman waited below. Had he come along as Hibernophile and chaperone for Comfort, or were he and Comfort … ? I didn't dare finish my own thought. “Is this a union meeting or a vaudeville show?” I asked Quin. “You might call it a resistance festival,” Quin said.

Pirate Larsen was speaking again, and there seemed to be a program for the evening's events after all. “Before we turn the proceedings over to the man who's really representing us in the strike,” Larsen said, “meet a true worker's hero, heroine rather, the courageous woman who not only stood on the barricades in Dublin against the might of the British Empire, who fought alongside the Irish Revolutionary Army after her brave son was martyred in the cause of Irish liberty, but who also happens to be the aunt of our own working-class martyr, Tom Mooney. Say hello to Patricia Mooney O'Hollie, best known as Grandmother O'Hollie!”

Accompanying her grandmother, Comfort O'Hollie was paying her debt to the father she'd never known, who had been ambushed by the British in 1916. “What do the Irish have to do with this?” I asked Mike Quin. “Your guess equals mine,” he said. “I'd heard an old Irish firebrand came down from Vancouver to plead with the governor for her nephew's release, but I didn't know she'd be in the hall tonight.” On the stage, Pirate Larsen had taken the arm of Grandmother O'Hollie. Tom Mooney was a radical who had been arrested in San Francisco almost twenty years earlier when a bomb went off, killing ten people, during a World War Preparedness Day parade. Although the district attorney's case against him was based on perjury and the jury was tainted, Mooney was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. His name became a rallying cry for the Left. Union members often chanted “Free Tom Mooney,” and that was what they did now as Grandmother O'Hollie hobbled on her cane to the microphone.

She was brief. “The greetings I bring you from my nephew Tom are clear,” Grandmother O'Hollie said, her brogue quavering but stronger with each syllable. “Make the owners hear you, make them listen to your needs, never you mind the social theories, stick to the real problems the strike has to solve. And no matter what anyone tells you, stay out until your just needs are met. So says Tom Mooney from his prison cell!”

This was easy for everyone to applaud because her dismissal of social theories was a signal not to pay attention to Communist proselytizing.

“I promise you as sure as I stand here,” she went on, “to continue the struggle wherever working people are oppressed to the appointed end of my days.” Grandmother O'Hollie paused as more chants of “Free Tom Mooney” filled the hall. For a moment she looked to be swallowed by her memories, but then she held up her hand for silence. “When this too short earthly span is over,” she said, her Irish voice rising now, “and others have taken up the causes we've all lived for and a few have died for and more of us will
have
to die for, when my hour comes round I promise to pass out leaflets on the number of hours a day Saint Peter can require wings to be worn while I organize the angels!” The cheering started, but this time she held up her cane and shook the hall to silence. “To those who think I'll be traveling the other direction, send word to the Devil he'll have his hands full and more with Grandmother O'Hollie! God bless this strike!”