Australian Alien: Where the ILWU Came From

Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend by Robert Cherny
University of Illinois Press, 2023, 475 pages

Reviewed by Fred Glass

If there is one figure from labor history that California DSA members should know about, it’s Harry Bridges. Yes, he was an old white dude from a long-gone era, the mid-twentieth century. But you should not let that stop you from finding out about him; you won’t be sorry.  

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) is, to this day, one of the key progressive unions in the state, and at a time when the labor movement is at an historic low density, the ILWU’s members are still capable of stopping their workplace—indeed, the economy—in its tracks. And not just capable: every so often the union wields that power on behalf of its members, but more often on behalf of all of us in righteous causes like fighting racial discrimination and unjust war.

The ILWU has worked with many DSA members in the Bay Area, helping to organize bike and walking messengers, bakery workers, brewery workers, and others outside its core jurisdiction on the docks. It is an integrated union, one with a large Latino membership in its biggest local in southern California and a majority Black membership in San Francisco’s Local 10. It has a tradition of militancy extending back to its spiritual founding in the 1934 San Francisco General Strike (its formal founding took place in 1937). Knowing the ILWU’s history is especially important at a moment when a rejuvenated labor movement is looking to organize Amazon and the rest of the logistics chain.

It's the rank and file

If any one person can be said to be responsible for this union’s values and history, it would be Harry Bridges—although he would be the first to say, as he often did, that it’s the rank and file who built the union and that that’s where the union’s power rests. 

This is why DSA members, whose delegates at their recent convention reaffirmed their commitment to a rank-and-file oriented labor strategy, should pick up a copy of Bob Cherny’s new biography, Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend. Weighing in at nearly 500 pages (don’t be too alarmed; 150 of those are footnotes and index), this is the final word on Harry Bridges’s life, decades in the research and writing. And in reading it you will be taken on a ride through some of the key events of California labor history with its attendant lessons. 

The Australian-born Bridges (dubbed “the Australian Alien” by right wingers seeking his deportation), although little remembered outside radical labor circles today, was in fact a national household name from the 1930s until his retirement forty years later. A brilliant strategist, and fiercely dedicated to his members, effective organizing, civil rights and a broad view of working class power, he was hounded for these reasons through four legal cases (pushed behind the scenes by business associations and the FBI, with J. Edgar Hoover’s rabid oversight) over two decades, threatening him intermittently with prison and deportation. While he denied membership in the CPUSA to the end, Bridges made no secret of his Marxist worldview, which even before the McCarthy era got him in continuous hot water, legal and otherwise.

What he accomplished

Cherny explores virtually every aspect of Bridges’s work, life and times, and settles—or at least sheds as much light as possible on—a number of contentious arguments in Bridges scholarship. Number one among these: Was he a Party member? Probably, for a little while, but no one ever proved it conclusively. Cherny notes that ultimately this didn’t matter. What is important about Bridges is what he accomplished, not what organizations he did or did not belong to.

No saint, Bridges was, off and on, an alcoholic, frequented brothels, and spent energy better utilized elsewhere in a long feud with his equally talented secretary treasurer, Lou Goldblatt, who should have succeeded Bridges as president. As Stan Weir, long time labor and third camp socialist activist would have been happy to tell you, Bridges was not flexible enough to find a creative solution to the problem of advancement in the union for B men, contingent workers of their day and industry, to full membership status. His advocacy for the union’s Mechanization and Modernization agreements in the late fifties and early sixties remains controversial to this day, ushering in as they did containerization on the west coast. And at forty years, his tenure in the ILWU presidency extended a decade beyond what it should have.

These failings, Cherny shows us, should be balanced against the positive side of the ledger, and the scales clearly swing Bridges’s way.  Rising to top leadership from the rank and file during the San Francisco General Strike, he was hated and feared by waterfront and maritime employers for good reason. 

He opposed the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II when few other leaders dared to, and the union was one of the few organizations to follow suit. When members of the Stockton local walked off the job following the war in protest against a Nisei gaining work on the docks, Bridges raced to the local hall, ripped their charter off the wall, and only restored it when the members signed pledge cards vowing never to discriminate. Trenchant in support of civil rights, he famously said that if automation reduces the longshore workforce to two men, one should be Black.

Prize target of McCarthyism

During the McCarthy era Bridges was one of its prize targets, but his membership never abandoned him, and despite his own troubles he made sure his union served as a haven for radicals chased out of other ones. The contracts negotiated by the union were and remain pacesetters for private sector workers. The ILWU was, in fact, the only union, of the eleven thrown out of the CIO in 1949-50 for the alleged sin of Communist leadership, that emerged from the experience with its member totals and power largely intact. 

Meticulous in its scholarship and in chasing down disputed details of various events in Bridges’s life and work, the book probably lands at times too much in the weeds for some readers. On the other hand, a curious omission is the Port Chicago incident in 1944, the largest home front disaster of the war resulting in hundreds of dead (almost all Black) from a massive explosion, which would have been avoided had the Navy taken the ILWU up on its offer to load warship munitions utilizing its experienced members instead of ordering untrained sailors to do the job.

For the most part, however, Cherny’s decades of research were well spent. His book will not be surpassed as the definitive biography of the most important left wing trade union leader in the history of the Golden State.