The Funeral That Called a General Strike

On July 9, 1934, two coffins moved up Market Street in San Francisco. Roughly 40,000 people walked behind them. Tens of thousands more lined the curbs. There was no band. There were no chants. Paul Eliel, the industrial relations director for the San Francisco employers' association and not a friend of the strike, later called it "one of the strangest and most dramatic" processions ever to move along Market Street. Police at the intersections took off their hats.

The coffins held Howard Sperry, a longshoreman, and Nick Bordoise, a cook in the Cooks and Waiters Union. San Francisco police had shot them four days earlier, during the waterfront strike that had run up and down the West Coast since May. That story is its own story. This one starts with the funeral.

Eliel, writing later, admitted what the march had done. It produced, in his words, "a tremendous wave of sympathy for the workers," and after it a general strike "became for the first time a practical and realizable objective." The employers' own man understood what had happened. The respectable city had watched workers bury their dead and had understood who killed them.

The rank and file moved first

The San Francisco Labor Council and the old-guard AFL leadership did not want a general strike. They had contracts. They had sympathy clauses forbidding exactly this kind of walkout. Michael Casey, president of Teamsters Local 85 and a labor figure in the city for 30 years, told his own members that a sympathy strike would break their contract. On July 12, his members voted 1,220 to 271 to go out anyway. Casey said afterward, "Nothing on earth could have prevented that vote. In all my thirty years of leading these men I never seen them so worked up."

Union after union took the same vote over the following days. On July 13, a convention of union delegates voted 315 to 15 to call a general strike. On July 14, with 21 unions already out on their own, the Labor Council finally endorsed what was already happening.

July 16, 8 a.m.

The general strike began on the morning of Monday, July 16, 1934. Roughly 150,000 workers across the Bay Area were out. Mike Quin, a reporter on the scene, wrote that "an uncanny quiet settled over the acres of buildings. For all practical purposes not a wheel moved nor a lever budged." Streetcars stopped. Restaurants closed. Gas stations closed. Only milk, bread, and hospital supplies kept moving, and only by permit from the strike committee.

It did not hold without cost. On July 17, police and vigilante raiders hit the Communist Party headquarters, the Marine Workers Industrial Union hall, and workers' homes across the city. They arrested roughly 300 people in a single day. They smashed furniture. They clubbed residents. Hugh Johnson, the National Recovery Administrator, went on the radio and called the strike "civil war."

The argument about the ending

On July 19, the General Strike Committee voted narrowly to end the strike and send outstanding issues to arbitration. The Labor Council had already voted 207 to 180 to put all issues on the table, over the objection of Harry Bridges, the longshore leader who wanted the union hiring hall kept off it. That fall, the federal arbitration award came back with a coastwide contract and a joint hiring hall with a union-selected dispatcher. The core demand, in other words, was won. The same award gave employers language on work methods that they used for decades after.

The left press at the time called the ending a sellout. It was more honest than that, and more complicated. The strike did not win everything. It was not a defeat. And the San Francisco that shut down on July 16 was not a fully integrated labor movement: the AFL craft unions that dominated the Labor Council had largely excluded Black workers from membership and from the strike's structure, and that exclusion did not end in July 1934. The ILWU's anti-discrimination principle was not codified for nearly two decades after.

What the four days in July did was teach every trade in San Francisco that solidarity across the waterfront could shut a city. That lesson outlived the compromise.

Sources

• The General Strike of 1934 (FoundSF)
• The dock workers strike and San Francisco general strike, 1934, Jeremy Brecher (libcom.org, excerpted from Brecher, Strike!)
• San Francisco and the General Strike, Kit Coleman ed. (University of Chicago)
• General Strike, A Camera-eye View, Mike Quin, The Big Strike (1949), excerpted at History Matters, George Mason University
• San Francisco's 1934 General Strike: The Fall and Rise of Organized Labor, John Caragozian, California Supreme Court Historical Society