Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (9 page)

Cargoes would swing through the air, barely missing men's heads, steel cables swayed precariously in the wind, a hundred competing noises distracted the focus, buckets of coal were dumped with a roar, releasing clouds of dust. At night the dangers increased, because of lowered visibility and the buildup of fatigue, and along with them came a curious indifference to personal safety, the men having successfully dodged so many close scrapes already. But however invulnerable a longshoreman might come to feel, virtually none were spared some incapacitating injury in the course of their careers. “One man who said he had never been hurt, was reminded by his daughter that his toe had been cut off while he was at work,” wrote Barnes. And so on: these dockworkers seem to have been blessed with a mixture of stoicism and amnesia. Still, there was no way to put a good face on fatal accidents. Here, Barnes rose to grisly enumeration:

The ways in which a man may meet death at longshore work are many and varied.… In four cases a heavy log or case rolled over and caught the men.Two men were overcome by the heat. Four were caught in the cog wheel of a winch or pulled around the drum end by the rope fall. Four were killed by the breaking of a boom or block. A sling thrown down the hatchway dragged two men from one of the decks to the lower hold. In two cases a draft on a lower deck became entangled, and as the power of the fall loosened it, it swung around in a circle and caught a man. While drafts were being dragged across one of the lower decks by the fall, they caught and
crushed three men. Loads coming down with a rush, swung a little too far and struck four. In four cases a spiegel iron or other cargo fell from a tub and killed the men. The insufficient foothold of ladders built too close to the bulkhead caused three men to fall. Where the vessel's rail was unshipped opposite the hatch, slight blows sent four men overboard. Two men were pulled off the deck by mooring ropes, or caught in a rope coil and dragged from the pier loft. The side door of the pier loft slipped and knocked two workers to the lower deck of the pier. In two cases a hand truck collided with a wagon and blows from the truck handles killed the men. Drums of chemicals exploded with dire result for two men. While a gangway man was leaning over the hatch coamings a box of tin slipped from a draft above and cut off his head.

Alongside the danger of accidents were more subtle health risks attached to working on the waterfront: extremes of weather that would often lead to bronchitis, rheumatism, pneumonia, or heat prostration; the inhalation of harmful dust particles from, say, loading bulk grain, or dangerous fumes from sacks of potatoes, bone dust, rags, or sugar, strong enough to overcome the men. Barnes remarked as well on the toll taken by the irregularity of work on the piers,
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which forced longshoremen into a debilitating pattern of idleness and drinking. Because there were so few dock structures in which the men could wait, and even fewer toilets, they had little choice but to hang out in saloons. Men were discouraged from straying to another pier to seek work, and each pier became a world unto itself, refusing to pool labor along the waterfront in the event of shortages. Imagine a situation in which one crew was forced to operate shorthanded, four men doing the job of five, increasing the chances of accident, while three blocks away a dozen men were sitting on their hands, desperate for work.

The workforce was changing ethnically, Barnes observed. Traditionally the waterfront had been an Irish preserve; blacks and Italians were initially introduced as scab labor, making them unpopular, but by 1915 the docks had settled into a cosmopolitan mix. Barnes described it thus: “Variety is
as characteristic of the worker as it is of the cargoes he handles. Irishmen, Scandinavian, German, Italian, Polack, and Negro jostle one another on the piers of New York. And the impact is not physical alone. The clash of race, temperament, language, industrial and personal traditions, flare up in disagreements, more or less violent, or are smothered by the exigencies of the trade and overcome by time. Most often, good-natured indifference does duty for real toleration and the work proceeds.” Lest we give Barnes more credit for lack of prejudice than he deserves, he added: “Always there is the shifting of races with the gradual increase of the less efficient types of worker; the substitution of the southern and southeastern European for the older, more easily assimilated Celt or Saxon.” And he worried that this new breed was getting scrawnier: “… many are small and wiry, but …the eagerness of the Italians for work, their willingness to submit to deductions from their wages, leaving a neat little commission to be divided among foremen, saloon keepers, and native bosses—all these considerations insured the permanence of the Italian in longshore work.”

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Longshore work tends toward the casual and irregular, dependent as it is on shipping schedules, the weather, seasonal variations in business, and global patterns of international politics and trade.

Some of these European dockworkers brought with them a familiarity with radical politics, and at the very least a working-class solidarity, which made them ripe for unionization and willing to strike, if necessary. It was these same groups of politicized immigrants who helped get five Socialist Party candidates elected to the State Assembly from New York City. Indeed, in 1920, during the so-called “Red Scare,” when the Lusk Legislative Committee investigated subversive activity throughout New York State, it went so far as to prepare an “Ethnic Map” of Manhattan, showing in which neighborhoods the non-Anglo-Saxon nationalities were concentrated, making an unapologetic equation between foreign birth and revolutionary activity.

Admittedly, the powers that be did have something to worry about. The era around the First World War saw the resurgence of a militant labor movement, culminating in a national wave of strikes during 1919. That year the federal government had decided to hold the line on wages, and shipping companies offered longshoremen only a five-cent increase on the regular sixty-five-cents-an-hour pay, and ten cents an hour on overtime. (This insulting five-and-ten offer was sardonically called the Woolworth Award.) When the longshoremen struck, in a wildcat action that paralyzed the port, tying up more than 600 vessels in the harbor, the head of
the union, International Longshoremen's Association president T. V. O'Connor, who opposed the strike, said it was the work of “the Italian element, aided by German sympathizers.” The press agreed that it was a “Bolshevik conspiracy,” led by foreigners, chiefly Italians, men from “166 Sackett Street in Brooklyn.” This address was the headquarters of the International Workers of the World—the “Wobblies,” as they were called—above a fruit-and-vegetable stand. (By coincidence, I live on Sackett Street, in an old Italian neighborhood, and my heart raced when I saw that in print; but when I looked for number 166, I found the entire block had been torn down and replaced by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.) The truth was, the rank-and-file dockworkers had walked out in 1919 without either union or IWW leadership, and only afterward appealed to the Wobblies for guidance.

“The strike ended in the first week of November,” wrote labor historian Calvin Winslow. “It failed for many reasons: certainly the odds were overwhelming—the unwavering opposition of the union leadership, the shipping companies, and the federal government. Federal soldiers actually entered the Harbor in the second week of the strike, though their presence was mostly symbolic. They confined their activities to the army terminals and never directly confronted the strikers. The strikers themselves were undoubtedly exhausted by this conflict, as must have been their families, existing a month without wages or strike benefits.”

There was not another major strike on the waterfront for twenty-six years, though working conditions for longshoremen remained as problematic as ever. Joseph Ryan, who ruled the International Longshoremen's Association throughout this period, getting himself elected the union's “president for life,” saw to it that there would be no strikes, by promoting a system that kept the men weak and subservient. The cornerstone of this system was maintaining an oversupply of labor, which tended to depress wages and employ men on a casual basis, with no guarantees of an income from one day to the next. Long after most industries, even most other waterfronts, had gotten rid of the practice, the New York docks continued to be ruled by the infamous “shape-up,” in which longshoremen would have to gather every eight hours outside the pier shed, usually in horseshoe configuration, and the pier foreman would select the workers lucky enough to form the crews that day. All troublemakers and organizers were
excluded, thus limiting the possibility of reforming locals from within. Not only was the shape-up a demeaning way for men to seek work, but it gave hiring foremen the opportunity to profit by various extortions: kickbacks for jobs, bribes, payroll padding, loan-sharking (those wanting work had to agree to take out a loan), card games in which the longshoremen were expected to lose, and contributions extracted to phony charities.

Many of these hiring foremen were ex-convicts, who intimidated the men by threats as well as acts of violence, sufficient to ensure the “D&D” (deaf and dumb) response characteristic of longshoremen. Shipping companies condoned the use of thugs to run things because it kept the men in line. Ultimately this criminal element translated into racketeers taking over the union. Extensive pilferage of imported goods became routine, and the mob took a cut of everything that moved in and out of the port. Illegal immigrants who had jumped ship were given waterfront jobs immediately, so long as they bribed the foreman and bought a brass check. (A dockworker collected his pay by turning in a brass check or disc, but he could sell it to someone else before payday if he was hard up for cash.)

The International Longshoremen's Union both exploited immigrants and gave them a leg up. In this way the union was similar to the old, patronage-dispensing Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall, which, on the one hand, was incorrigibly corrupt, and on the other, in its muzzy fashion, at least negotiated with the needs of newly arrived immigrants when the patrician Establishment could not be bothered. Joseph Ryan, the ILA president, was as much a creature of Tammany Hall as he was of the labor movement: a beefy ex-longshoreman with a sentimental streak he indulged in after-dinner speeches at testimonial banquets in his honor, his favor was sought by every important public official in the region, from Mayor Jimmy Walker to Governor Franklin Roosevelt. Ryan's indifferent stewardship of the longshoremen looks all the shabbier in contrast with his dynamic West Coast counterpart, Harry Bridges (“Red Harry”), who helped eradicate the shape-up by registering longshoremen and instituting a system of seniority and rotation in hiring, while fighting for better wages.

Though Ryan appeared in public as the union's leader, each New York pier was in fact a “pirate's nest,” as one reporter called it, dominated by different “warlords.” The Irish controlled the West Side's Chelsea Piers, with
the Bowers Gang holding sway, and the Red Hook docks in Brooklyn were run by “Tough Tony” Anastasia, brother of Albert Anastasia, who was chief executioner for Murder Incorporated during the late 1930s.

One of the ironies of the Italian-American immigrant story is that Italian longshoremen were split into two factions, activist reformers and racketeering union officials, but popular culture remembers only the second branch. The most outspoken, courageous leader against the racketeering locals was a twenty-seven-year-old Italian-American named Peter Panto, who signed up more than a thousand supporters in 1939. Then he disappeared. According to the gangster Abe Reles, who offered to turn state's witness, Panto kept an appointment with some guys he didn't trust. He was taken to a shack on the waterfront where Albert Anastasia instructed Mindy Weiss to strangle him. His body was then dumped in a lime pit in New Jersey. Vito Marcantonio, the American Labor Party congressman, and author Richard Wright were enlisted to bring pressure for an investigation into Panto's demise. Reles “fell” to his own death from a hotel window while under police protection, and the case was dropped. The murder of Panto and the failure to prosecute his killers had a chilling effect for years on efforts to democratize the union.

In the postwar 1940s, the rank and file's appetite for struggle reawakened: the ILA's sweetheart contracts with shipping companies and the introduction of the sling load, a more onerous, injury-inflicting apparatus, had provoked the longshoremen's anger. There were wildcat strikes in 1945, 1948 (this one reluctantly backed by Joseph Ryan and the ILA), and 1951, with concessions won in the areas of increased hourly wage, overtime, guaranteed vacations, and the establishment of a welfare fund. Still, the union remained largely a tool of organized crime.

In Manhattan the loading racket had become the most lucrative scam of all. It operated this way: When goods were left on a pier-shed floor, truckers needed a helper or mechanical forklift to get the shipment onto the truck. Those who performed this task—the equivalent of public porters in a train station—came to control all movements on the pier. Lower Manhattan's narrow piers and antiquated cobbled streets near the waterfront exacerbated the congestion, as did the vast increase in trucking of freight. The greatest expense in shipping through New York became the waiting time for loading. Truckers in a hurry agreed to pay an extortionate
fee to jump the line. In this way a group of middlemen ended up dominating the docks, with thugs and organized crime families fighting for the privilege. One especially brazen case occurred in 1947, when John “Cockeye” Dunn and Andrew “Squint” Sheridan, of the Bowers Gang, emptied a gun into John Hintz, the hiring boss of Pier 51, to gain control of that dock's public loading.

The loading racket, Daniel Bell notes in his book
The End of Ideology,
existed only in New York: “There has never been a loading racket in San Francisco, in New Orleans, in Baltimore or Philadelphia—the other major maritime ports in the U.S.… [T]he
spatial
arrangements of these other ports are such that loading never had a ‘functional’ significance. In all these ports, other than New York, there are direct railroad connections to the piers, so that the transfer of cargoes is easily and quickly accomplished; nor is there in these ports the congested and choking narrow-street patterns which in New York forced the trucks to wait, piled up ‘time charges,’ or made for off-pier loading.”