The following is an OPB original series.

Oregon Experience is a production of OPB in partnership with The Oregon Historical Society.

Leading support for Oregon Experience is provided by... Major support provided by... Additional support provided by the contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.

[ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: The employer cared very little about safety.

If it slowed the work down, to hell with safety.

We might kill four or five or six men a year in Portland.

MAN: It was a West Coast walkout of every longshoreman.

I call it the closest brush that Portland had with class warfare.

MAN: A strike is a small revolution.

Longshoremen showed the capability of fighting back.

WOMAN: Their blood was still on the ground and the railroad ties were red.

MAN: For the West Coast, it was fundamental in shaping the ability of people to organize unions.

MAN: What the employers sought to be prevented was the control of all hiring by labor union officials.

MAN: It changed everything.

In industrial relations, there's no bigger turning point in labor history.

MAN: When someone stands up for you, is willing to die for you, that's something worth remembering.

[ ship horn blows ] [ people chattering indistinctly ] NARRATOR: It's early morning in Portland, Oregon.

MAN [ over PA ]: 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.

Longshore workers gather at the local hiring hall to view available jobs on the waterfront.

MAN: We need a crane operator out here.

We need another winch driver.

A union dispatcher fills the positions as work opportunities are rotated and shared through the rank and file.

Now we'll hire the mechanics real quick... WOMAN: I'll take the ship checker.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Today, this democratic system of hiring meets the past and bears witness to hard-fought achievements.

Because many decades before, longshoring looked and operated differently.

During the 1930s, the Great Depression gripped the nation.

Massive unemployment had spawned shantytowns in cities like Seattle... and Portland.

The shipping industry coastwide had suffered dramatic declines in domestic and foreign business.

Jobs were scarce, and men flooded the docks in hopes of finding a few hours' work loading and unloading cargo from ships in port.

MAN: The average job only lasted from two hours to two or three days.

There were maybe 1,500 men hanging around the hiring hall.

I have been there from 6:30 in the morning till it closed at 4:00 in the evening for 14 days without getting a day's work.

There was fierce competition not only for jobs but among the shipping companies for profits.

MAN: And the way they compete, of course, is by cutting wages.

So that in 1930, you get a wage cut for longshoremen, and they go from 90 cents an hour to 75 cents an hour.

And they don't have any way of resisting that.

At this point, they're disorganized.

Back in the mid-1800s, longshoring was considered employment of last resort.

Ships' schedules were often irregular.

MAN: When men were needed along the coast, they would have criers go out: "Men needed along the shore.

Men needed along the shore."

And it got shortened down to, "Longshoremen, longshoremen."

The pay was low and respect nonexistent.

The dock workers, the longshore workers, were seen as riffraff.

They were seen as the underbelly of society.

They were not at all welcome in polite society.

The International Longshoremen's Association, the ILA, was founded back in 1892 along the East Coast and Great Lakes to fight for better wages and working conditions.

By the early 1900s, West Coast longshoremen were loosely affiliating with the ILA.

Local chapters like Portland operated independently.

At the time, workers were organizing in separate craft unions based on a specific skill or trade.

DIAMOND: There are different groups of workers even on the longshore.

It's not just people loading and unloading, but there are the seafarers, for instance.

There are the marine workers.

So that a single workplace could have many different unions.

WOMAN: So there's no solidarity there.

All the power was in the bosses.

The workers only had their bodies.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The radical Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, were offering an alternative to craft unions with a message of strength through solidarity.

The IWW vision was one big union that included all, that included women, that included Blacks, that included unskilled workers.

And that was much of their base, in fact.

They found early success organizing Northwest loggers and lumber mill workers.

There were Wobblies working on the docks and aboard ships as well.

But as World War I ended, aggressive anti-union campaigns erupted.

Militant union leaders were labeled unAmerican and subject to mass arrest.

Government troops were called to break strikes.

In many ports, longshoremen were forced into company-controlled unions.

In San Francisco, it was called the Blue Book.

It was implemented to keep real unionism out.

The idea was to have something that was going to control the men, something they would have to be members of to get work.

What it meant to them is degradation.

It meant to them you couldn't complain, it meant to them you couldn't have a real union.

[ ♪♪♪ ] In 1922, the well-connected and financed shipping industry dealt labor a decisive blow.

MAN [ as Green ]: Fifteen hundred strikebreakers were moved to San Francisco and there destroyed the local ILA.

The same group of strikebreakers moved to Los Angeles.

Next, Seattle was on the list, and Portland was next, where the same tactics were pursued.

DIAMOND: Each port was left on its own.

There was no coastwide coordination at all in 1922.

Not only wasn't there among the different cities and locations of longshore activity, but among the different groups of workers.

It was a brutal loss for the ILA and the longshoremen that were organized not just in Portland but up and down the West Coast.

The national ILA headquarters was based in New York City and affiliated with the conservative American Federation of Labor.

It offered little hope for a better future... even less when Joseph Ryan was elected president in 1927.

SCHWARTZ: King Joe Ryan.

That was his nickname, King Joe Ryan.

The East Coast ILA had the reputation of being mobbed up.

And acting to improve working conditions or raise wages only when there's enough agitation from below.

In New York and San Francisco, longshoremen "shaped up" each morning around gang bosses at company piers.

This is one of the reasons why the strike occurred.

It's called a brass.

It was distributed by the gang bosses to the shape-up of longshoremen.

And those who gave a bribe or were friendly with the gang boss would receive one of these brasses.

And he picks who he wants in a particular gang.

Tends to be younger, heftier, and those who bring a bottle of whiskey for him.

Or a ham.

You had to have that coin, that brass coin with a number on it.

It was their ID for work.

All right, let 'er go, Tony.

[ blows whistle ] MUNK: If you see On The Waterfront, you'll notice the same idea where the gang boss throws a handful of these brasses.

Who do you see to get a day's pay around here?

MUNK: And if there's anything left over, scramble for it like you would scramble for food among starving people.

It's a scene that dramatizes the anger that I think was the impetus for the '34 strike because it so demonstrated the inequality of the hiring process on the Portland and West Coast waterfronts.

SCHWARTZ: They had an employer hiring hall in Portland.

Conditions were just as bad.

You had discriminatory hiring there.

The guys, after the 1922 strike was broken, they called it the "Fink Hall."

Workers were forced to compete against each other.

RICKS: If Joe Blow could handle two more boxes an hour than you could, the next day, he had your job.

Marvin Ricks went to work on the Portland docks in 1932.

When I started on the waterfront, we might kill, oh, four or five or six men a year in Portland.

But life was very cheap.

The work was all hurry up before -- And of course, it was all -- everything was hand-handled.

You'd hear a holler, "Heads up," and look, and here'd the load would be coming down and sacks falling off.

DIAMOND: People end up having their hands crushed as the most common kind of injury.

They were supposed to report injuries.

Not much happened.

This is long, long, long before we have OSHA.

Little regulation allowed bosses to speed up the work with heavier loads so cargo could move faster.

Up to 36-hour shifts were common.

RICKS: Also, I have worked 10 and 12 hours without a chance to go for a meal.

The walking boss would say, come supper time, "Well, fellas, we only got another hour or two."

Then they'd find more cargo.

And you might be 2:00 in the morning while you hadn't eaten from noon the day before.

SCHWARTZ: Sometimes you were obliged to go and paint the gang boss' house on the weekend.

If you refused to do so, come Monday morning, you would not get a job.

It really was a disgraceful period of time.

With one gang boss, every week he had a raffle on a radio.

All the members of his gang bought a dollar ticket.

So that gave him an extra $12.

And then of course they never did have the raffle.

MUNK: Their cause was taken up by a radical caucus among the rank and file.

And it was lead on the West Coast in San Francisco by Harry Bridges.

Harry Bridges was born into a prosperous Australian real estate family in 1901.

At 16, he joined the Merchant Marines, where he met and mingled with Wobblies...

Joined the Wobblies early part of 1921 in the city of New Orleans.

NARRATOR: ...briefly becoming a member himself.

He landed in San Francisco soon after and stayed, finding work along shore.

SCHWARTZ: He says at one point, "I've been in unions in Australia.

I've been in the Sailor's Union of the Pacific.

I've been in the New Orleans strike as a picket captain in 1921."

That strike was broken, but he had experience in union activity.

[ ♪♪♪ ] By late 1932, Bridges was leading the Albion Hall group, 50 or so militant rank-and-filers who met secretly on the San Francisco waterfront.

They were determined to organize the unorganized.

About the same time, a crude mimeographed newsletter had begun appearing on the docks.

The Communist Party was involved initially in the Waterfront Worker.

Very, very quickly Bridges looked at the newspaper that they were putting out and he would talk to them, and he said, "There's too much international information here."

He said, "You know, we should make this a paper just for the longshoremen."

BRIDGES: We took it over in the middle of 1933.

SCHWARTZ: So then the stories began to be run about some slave driver on the waterfront.

There'd be a story about unsafe conditions.

BRIDGES: You'd put bundles aboard the ships.

We'd just leave them in the hold.

You'd leave them there so that the ships going north, there'd be a bundle there for the guys in the other ports to pick up and read.

There was a handful of guys in all the ports that knew the score, and they would go aboard the ships and look for them.

SCHWARTZ: And so the word got around that we're trying to organize a new union.

NARRATOR: In 1933, Congress offered incentive to unionize.

It passed the National Industrial Recovery Act, part of President Roosevelt's New Deal program.

Labor took special note of Section 7A.

It declared workers had "the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing."

At the time, employers found the act easy to ignore.

Labor did not and took to the streets in more than 1,800 strikes.

[ crowd clamoring ] DIAMOND: And all across the country, of course, there's this big insurgence of not only radical labor organizing but radical visions for what's needed to pull us out of the Depression.

You know, the word "radical," it's digging things out by the root.

So it's not just making improvements, it's getting real change.

People were able in that early period, '33, '34, to say, you know, "Things are changing, it's going to change."

And Bridges kind of gets out in front of it.

Bridge's vision was clear: A legitimate rank-and-file controlled union.

But he knew it would require reinventing the ILA.

It was a lousy, rotten, racketeering organization.

Joe Ryan with his gunmen and all the rest of it.

[ Bridges continues speaking ] "On the West Coast, we're gonna make it something new and clean.

We're gonna make it egalitarian.

That's what's going to work the best."

RICKS: I had no idea what a union was.

They had their big union meeting in -- I believe it was July of '33 where we signed up several hundred members at one time.

And I believe it cost a dollar to sign up and monthly dues were a dollar.

That was our big organizational drive.

We all had buttons, but nobody wore a button on their cap.

Because you wore that union button, you didn't get any work.

I well recall how defeated the men were in those days and how fearful they were of being seen with a union organizer.

NARRATOR: In Portland, 37-year old Matt Meehan was a rising labor leader.

WISNOR: Matthew Meehan first worked on the ships.

He was a seaman.

During that time, he got involved at the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World.

In his oral history, he talks about leading sing-alongs, the IWW songs on Sundays with all the crew.

And he brought that sort of militancy and commitment to organizing when he got off the ships and started working on the docks.

MEEHAN: A few of us made up our mind that we are going to have a union again at all costs.

We preached unionism not only on the job but wherever longshoremen congregated.

And the employers soon placed many of us on a blacklist.

NARRATOR: By early fall 1933, job actions at a San Francisco dock spurred the growing rebellion.

In a test of strength, longshoremen defied employers by wearing ILA buttons, refusing to show their Blue Books for work, and walking off the job in support of four fired men.

Their show of solidarity closed the dock for days and forced the employers to reinstate the union men.

Blue Books were torn up, bonfires lit.

And the importance of that was it begins to show they're no longer afraid.

They're no longer intimidated.

And Bridges said that, "We have basically broken the control, the stranglehold of the Blue Book over the men.

And now we can move on to have a real union."

He says, "Now we're in business."

The Portland local soon boasted over 1,100 union members.

Coastwide, ILA membership soared to 10,000 strong.

But this time the local chapters unified as the reorganized Pacific Coast District of the ILA.

The West Coast had autonomy within the ILA.

And once the militant group, through Bridges and others, took over, they worked in an autonomous manner.

In late 1933, Bridges announced an ambitious plan.

BRIDGES: We'll call a rank-and-file convention of the whole coast, see?

And I laid out the program.

They thought I was crazy.

This was way beyond what they were suggesting, you see?

He went to Tacoma, he went to Portland, and he spoke to the guys.

He spoke to the men.

And so that trip was kind of an exposure of Harry Bridges to the rest of the people on the coast.

He could get out there and talk the worker's talk.

People knew that he was on the level and they knew he was clean.

And they knew he was different from Joe Ryan on the East Coast.

NARRATOR: In February 1934, elected delegates from 24 ports met in San Francisco, where they drafted four basic demands to present to employers.

BRIDGES: The number one demand: NARRATOR: But the employers refused to recognize the militant ILA strike committee as a legitimate bargaining unit for the coast and demanded each port negotiate separate agreements.

It stands to reason.

If one port is on strike and then the ship can move a few miles away and be worked by members of the same union, it's ridiculous, so... DIAMOND: Longshoring is basic to the economy, of course, and the whole West Coast was talking about going on strike, was building toward that, and so President Roosevelt intervened, and he established a national board to look into the issues, asked the workers to hold off, which they did.

They did for a while.

MAN [ as Green ]: The precipitation of this strike rests directly with the employers, as manifested by their contemptuous attitude and their refusal to meet and deal with the men upon the basis of collective bargaining.

What the employers were afraid of was that it would be organized in such a way as to put the entire operation under the control of labor union officials.

NARRATOR: With negotiations deadlocked, strike momentum grew.

Back in Portland, the police bureau's Red Squad, whose job was to combat radical activity, was surveilling ILA meetings.

They'd come around at any meeting and have photographers take pictures of the group, trying to intimidate them, you see.

Some of them would get up and red bait in the meeting.

Nobody paid any attention to it, you know.

[ man reading on-screen text ] NARRATOR: For the rank and file, it was a matter of survival.

For the women in their lives as well.

WOMAN: "This is not only the fight of our husbands, but the fight of every woman whose men work on the waterfront, be they husband, father or son.

Their victory is our victory."

The women have just as much stake in it.

And this was a time when very few women had jobs.

There were not opportunities for women, so they were very dependent financially upon their husbands.

NARRATOR: Union members cast their ballots, determining their future coastwide.

WISNOR: The union decided, and the workers decided, to "hang the hook," which meant to not work, to put their tool of their trade on the shelf and to move into the streets and to prevent any cargo or men from getting in or out of the ports.

On May 9th, 1934, more than 12,000 longshoremen walked off the job from Bellingham to San Diego.

In Portland, nearly 20 miles of waterfront docks fell silent.

More than 30 ships idled.

Mills shut down.

Shipments of wheat and lumber ground to a halt.

More than 5,000 men from the seafaring unions would join the picketers, as did marine and warehouse workers.

Rank and file Teamsters refused to truck cargo to and from the docks, immediately strengthening the strike's economic impact.

MUNK: The employers took out advertising that warned that Communists in the unions were taking over and that good union people needed to reject Communism.

BRIDGES: We were called Wobblies, anarchists and Reds.

FANTZ: I was branded a Communist.

And Matt Meehan was.

So what?

Forget about it.

We're just working people that want to protect our jobs and make it better.

NARRATOR: Employment opportunities emerged, offering a wage boosted just months before in an attempt to counter growing worker solidarity.

MUNK: One of the shippers said, "Go ahead, strike.

We'll break it the same way we did ten years before, by hiring desperate out-of-work people to break the strike, to go through the picket lines and do the work."

What they may not have taken into account was the way the longshoremen had reached out extensively for months ahead of time to the Unemployed Councils.

Unemployed Councils were a national phenomenon organized in neighborhoods by the Communist Party.

They focused on forestalling evictions and turning utilities back on for unemployed workers.

Longshoremen urged solidarity.

It was not only an abstract message about, "We're all workers together."

It was also that when we're on strike, all our resources will be available to you as well.

The whole thing is getting the workers to understand that there's power in solidarity and that they have power if they do this together.

In Portland, day one of the strike remained quiet.

Day two did not.

DIAMOND: May 10th is the crucial day for pitting the forces against each other because the employers are there in the hiring hall at NW Everett and Ninth, filled with about 150 people who are anxious to get out and go to work and cross picket lines.

But they're not being permitted to leave by the longshoremen.

An estimated 1,000 picketers had surrounded the hall, essentially holding the strikebreakers hostage.

Police eventually escorted them out of the building... but no one worked that day.

MUNK: And this was the first showdown between the strikebreakers and the strikers that led the employers to worry that the Portland police were too weak or perhaps even sympathetic to the strikers.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The third day reinforced the fear.

Waterfront employers had moored a retired passenger steamer, the Admiral Evans, near the Broadway Bridge as a hotel for strikebreakers.

Longshoremen stormed aboard, executing a planned invasion.

Fists and clubs cracked heads and broke bones.

A police guard was thrown into the river.

"We broke up their playhouse," declared one of the strikers.

And eventually they cut the ship loose, and it drifted down the river until it hung up on the bridge itself.

So this was considered a great victory, celebrated all over town.

And, again, showing the power of the strikers and the weakness of the employers.

RICKS: During the '34 strike, we kept 10 men at every gate, at every dock on the waterfront.

We kept them 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

We put in the full time.

I was on the Flying Squad.

We called them a riot squad.

They were made up of football players and boxers and wrestlers and the single men.

So we were the ones that, if there was trouble at a dock, you call the hall right quick for help, and all of a sudden you got another 30 men down to supplement your ten men.

One night I was on a riot squad at the hall at that time, and a bartender called us up from up on 22nd at Third and Burnside and says, "Hey, I've got two fellas here that sound like your scabs."

We says, "Fine.

We'll relieve you of them."

We walked in, "Well, hello, fellas, good to see you."

And you grabbed them and got a good wrist lock on each one.

So we helped them out and gave them a little talking to by hand and turned them loose.

[ typewriter clacking ] Everyone on strike had a job to do.

The Publicity Committee canvassed the region with flyers and newsletters.

Prominent Portland labor attorney Beryl Green would champion the longshoremen's cause.

[ man reads on-screen text ] They went out into the community.

They talked to the people from whom they bought their groceries and said, "Look, we're gonna be in for some hard times.

Are you in a position to carry us and to support us?"

The biggest boost to morale, I believe, came from the community support, which was displayed daily.

Farmers donated potatoes, produce and milk.

Women poured it cold for thirsty picketers on the street.

Union fisherman delivered the catch of the day.

And butchers, meat.

WOMAN [ as Cusic ]: The strike was a popular conversation topic.

The local bakery sympathized by sending daily trays of pastry, bread rolls and coffee to the picket lines.

In return, strike leaders rallied squads to help small farmers harvest their crops.

Some were allowed periodically on closed docks to pick up needed supplies.

A thousand bags of sugar unloaded prior to the strike were moved out to preserve jobs at fruit canneries and employment to pickers.

MAN: "We were getting ready to close the soup kitchen on Third and Flanders when someone said a bunch of loggers was coming up from Astoria.

Could we feed them?

They would eat and go straight to the picket line."

-- Gilbert Lowery Another working group, the local prostitutes, prepared sandwiches for picketers once a week.

RICKS: That sandwich would be wrapped up real nicely with their card in it.

So it was a way of advertising.

You could see the girls had their names on the cards.

And Broadway Cab was delivering them free.

Being as times were tough, the madams were donating rooms.

They could put four or six men in the room for the duration of the strike.

There was even a meeting composed of students from Lewis and Clark and a couple of other schools, including Reed, pledging that they would not be strikebreakers.

And that's important, because in the '20s, they did recruit college students.

The militancy really was spread in the community.

There was great solidarity not only among the longshore workers, but there wasn't a single instance of a member of the Unemployed Council crossing the picket -- It's quite extraordinary.

Not a single one of them tried to break the strike and go to work.

SCHWARTZ: In San Francisco, Harry Bridges went to the Black community and he said, "Give us a shot.

Don't have anybody from the Black community work during the strike.

We'll make sure that the hiring is on an equal basis and fair and square after the strike."

He went to his membership and he said, "We gotta accept all the people.

Everybody gets an equal shot," and he made it stick.

As the strike continued, employers' predictions of a quick end had faded fast.

Shipping remained at a standstill coastwide.

Members of Portland's Chamber of Commerce declared: "The strike is no longer a longshoremen's strike but a siege on Portland industry."

MUNK: It did create economic hardship for business.

They were losing money.

It was an increasingly desperate situation as the weeks went on.

This led in early June to the Chamber of Commerce considering, "What can we do?"

The executive vice president of Portland's Chamber of Commerce was William Daniel Boone Dodson, who called for law and order at whatever the cost.

Mr. Dodson, he said, "We have to organize, as a chamber in Portland, some kind of force to break this strike."

And this meant that they would form this emergency committee.

The Citizens' Emergency Committee included some of Portland's most powerful business leaders.

Labor groups coined their own name for the committee.

The Silk Stocking Mob.

And, of course, it's an old-fashioned phrase, silk stocking, describing the elite, the aristocracy, the rich.

With Mayor Joe Carson's approval, the committee agreed to initially hire and privately finance 200 special police to protect the strike breakers.

The goal, declared committee director Horace Mecklem, was to end the strike peacefully if possible or, if necessary, by other means.

"By other means" meant recruiting more than a thousand men into the semi-military Citizens' Emergency League to back up the specials.

They represented themselves as part of the most patriotic Americans.

They called themselves the Minutemen.

They gave every member a badge.

They were street fighters, and that's all it was, an all-out vigilante group.

Former World War I commanders were hired to lead the deputized men.

MAN [ as Green ]: General Ulysses McAlexander is now in control of the police department in the city of Portland.

Mayor Carson has made the city the active strike-breaking agency in the controversy.

But in mid-June, with no end to the strike in sight, ILA President Joseph Ryan arrived on the West Coast.

Joe Ryan was in San Francisco and he met with the employers.

And he said, "I'm the international president and I can solve the situation.

We don't really have to have worker total control over hiring.

It's not that important."

It wasn't important to him because he himself profited financially from this, from the shape-up and from discrimination on the East coast, in his own bailiwick.

DIAMOND: And Ryan negotiated a settlement.

As far as he was concerned, they had a contract.

It was all done.

And he gave statements to the press that: "Of course the workers will vote for this unanimously."

You know, "I've won this victory."

SCHWARTZ: Harry said, "Let him make his statement."

And he did make his statement, but he was booed off the stage.

And I think at that time he basically felt that he had lost power, at least on the West Coast.

BRIDGES: Ryan left town with a blast, saying that the Communists had taken over the strike.

And we served notice on the employers that they'd have to meet with us to negotiate.

So then we took over negotiations, the Joint Marine Strike Committee.

MUNK: Regardless of Ryan's efforts to settle, Harry and the West Coast longshoremen refused.

They needed to win what they were after.

The cooperation from the Teamsters and the entire coast working together, all of the groups from Seattle, Portland, from San Pedro, was excellent.

It was complete cooperation on what was happening in San Francisco as to the direction of the strike.

BRIDGES: I'd get on the soapbox and make a report to our guys there before they scattered and went on picket duty along the waterfront.

Was only five minutes to give them a day-by-day report from the strike committee.

NARRATOR: But two months into the strike, events to come would test the longshoremen's courage and outrage a city.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Says Bridges, 'We workers have nothing in common with the employers.

We're in a class struggle."

NARRATOR: On July 5th, San Francisco police confronted strikers in an all-out attempt to open the port by force.

SCHWARTZ: It's warfare.

Huge fights break out, and there's battling up and down the waterfront.

[ gunshots ] There are guns going off.

The police are shooting guns.

And they had these tear-gas canisters that were being fired at them.

Sometimes a longshoreman tried to kick them backwards too.

During the battling, they actually threw bricks and things that they could find.

Bridges actually said to the guys, "You can't have weapons."

He said, "You can't carry guns.

We can't outgun them."

That day, forever known as Bloody Thursday, ILA member Howard Sperry and union cook Nick Bordoise were shot dead by police.

Charles Olsen survived his wounds to the neck and back.

Longshoremen chalked a memorial outside the local union hall to honor the fallen men.

Fifty thousand people watched the funeral procession down Market Street as a union band played Beethoven.

The longshoremen showed up.

They all marched bareheaded without hats, very somber, without saying anything.

Public opinion turned against the employers at that time.

It turned against the ship owners.

And at that point, things were going to be different, or so it seemed like they were going to be different.

But the war was far from over.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Here are the first pictures of strike-paralyzed San Francisco in the grip of a general labor tie-up.

NARRATOR: In support of the picketers, more than 120,000 San Francisco workers shut down the city in a four-day general strike.

Back in Portland, city officials feared the same, with all eyes now focused on Terminal 4 in the north end of the city.

WISNOR: Terminal 4 was one of the most significant entry points and exit points for shipping in Portland.

And it was one of the more advanced locations for that shipping, had a direct rail line to it.

If they could open up Terminal 4, they could break the strike, and that's what they were aiming to do.

Nicknamed Fort Carson, T4 was fortified with machine guns and bunkers.

Special police were housed there, guarding strike breakers moving small amounts of cargo.

MUNK: There was also sustained effort on the part of the strikers to harass the specials in that Terminal 4 headquarters.

The strikers launched an ILA Navy, as they called it.

RICKS: We had a 16-foot picket boat, and they were working a ship at Terminal 4 with scabs.

So we got up close with our bean shooters and started shooting ball bearings at them, and they started throwing shackles at us.

The worst of it is, they did capture our Navy.

With Teamsters supporting the strike, moving cargo in and out by rail had become the only viable option.

But adjacent to T4 in the St. Johns neighborhood there was a large unprotected tract of land.

WISNOR: Pier Park had a very wooded and forested character to it.

It also butted against the railroad line that went straight into Terminal 4, giving it a strategic point for the union to rally and take action.

On July 6th, a train loaded with supplies and 50 police approached the terminal, reaching the north end of the park.

They found longshoremen waiting on the tracks.

[ man reading on-screen text ] WISNOR: The longshoremen and the strikers, they greased the rails of the train with animal fat and what they had from their cooking kitchen to keep the train from proceeding any farther.

At what became known as the Battle of Slippery Gulch, the strikers celebrated their victory.

But the celebration was short-lived because Police Chief Burton Lawson soon arrived with reinforcements.

Lawson ordered gas bombs fired on the picketers, forcing their retreat to a nearby farm.

The farm owner was quoted as saying that, "These men have the right to be here.

You, the police, do not," and shielded the workers from mass arrest.

But five days later, the mayor and chief would try again.

On the morning of July 11th, a 25-car Union Pacific train left the Albina Train Yards loaded with wool, lumber, and other goods bound for export.

This time, the engine pushed two flat cars with nearly a hundred armed police onboard.

And once again, the train reached the park's edge about a mile from the terminal.

This was the scene of Bloody Wednesday.

Five hundred strikers were on the tracks, preventing the train from proceeding.

As the train slowed, longshoremen broke air lines, causing the train to lurch to a stop.

Brakeman James Bateson was thrown from a boxcar, dying three days later from his injuries.

Both sides maintained that the other side initiated the violence, with one picketer later testifying he heard Chief Lawson say, "We're going through.

If anyone gets in the way, shoot to kill."

The longshoremen struck with rocks and slingshots.

The police opened fire with shotguns and pistols, and the men retreated.

They had to get out from the area.

Many of the men took safety behind the trees at Pier Park, the Douglas firs here.

Four men were injured in this battle.

The most seriously, Elmus Beatty, survived a gunshot blast to the jaw.

Picketers delivered Beatty's bloodied shirt to Matt Meehan, working in the downtown Labor Temple across from City Hall.

It enraged him to hear that the police would open fire on his men, and he took the shirt and walked straight into the City Council chambers and interrupted a City Council meeting and threw it in Mayor Carson's face.

MUNK: And he said to the mayor: "Here's an example of what you have produced."

And from there on, the strikers referred to Carson as "Bloody Shirt" Carson.

The name stuck.

Other labor leaders had accompanied Meehan to the meeting and testified in support, including the business manager of the waitress' union, Agnes Quinn.

WOMAN [ as Quinn ]: I represent many women, and we strenuously object to having our men shot down by the police.

Councilmen requested that the police involved in the shooting be removed from strike duty.

But Mayor Carson, who'd served under Chief Lawson during World War I, refused.

After July 11th, the mayor and the police never tried again to break through the line.

Lifelong Northwest labor and social justice activist Julia Ruuttila was a young woman in 1934, living in the sawmill town of Linnton across from the terminal.

RUUTTILA: We wanted to see what was going on, and what I saw over there changed the entire course of my life.

Julia came out of the working class, and she was living in a company town in these shacks.

She heard that four men had been shot.

[ ♪♪♪ ] A striker's son took us down to Pier Park, and we saw the trees in the park that were literally pockmarked with bullet holes.

We also saw the place at a railroad crossing where the strikers had carried their wounded comrades and fellow workers, and there was still blood there.

Some of it had sunk in, and the railroad ties were red.

[ children laughing ] The children that were playing in the park thought the Fourth of July had come back and that was firecrackers, and they got off their swings and teeter-totters and all ran down there.

Why they weren't all killed, I've never been able to figure out.

WISNOR: Meehan, he credited the trees for saving the lives of the strikers and their wives and children that were at the park.

The boldness and carelessness that the police had to open fire in a public park is, I think, in part what compelled so many Portlanders to condemn the police action.

NARRATOR: A few days after Portland's Bloody Wednesday, New York Senator Robert Wagner, a leader in U.S. labor legislation, arrived to inspect the terminal and meet with local strike strategists.

But leaving T4, Wagner's auto entourage was hit with a surprise.

And would you know it, the specials shot up his car.

One of those amazing incidents which caused tremendous resistance from the country as a whole.

I mean, here you are shooting at a U.S. senator.

Who are these gangsters, these gunmen?

The specials claimed it was a case of mistaken identity.

Passenger Beryl Green called it "a piece of monstrous stupidity."

Now under intense pressure to open the port, Governor Julius Meier mobilized 1,100 guardsmen at Camp Withycombe southeast of Portland.

A small number remained at the downtown armory.

If the police can't stop these strikers, then bring in the National Guard.

It's a situation we're familiar with I think now in Portland of our own days.

But Portland's Central Labor Council had long advocated a general strike if the governor called the Guard to the waterfront.

And a threatened boycott of the Meier family business loomed, where striker's wives were already picketing, deterring would-be shoppers.

The store itself starts suffering, and Governor Meier, whether of a result of that or not, decides the National Guard is not going to come in.

But the strike was closing in on both sides.

Violence had become nearly a daily occurrence in the larger ports.

Seven union men had died, hundreds injured, picketers and police.

Lost business and the long work stoppage had thrown an estimated 50,000 Oregonians out of a job, up to 15,000 in Portland.

"Order must be restored," declared the waterfront employers.

"Commerce must be resumed."

In other words, the employers gave up.

They said, "Well, listen, we have to get commerce moving on the West Coast again."

[ ♪♪♪ ] Both sides agreed to arbitration, to submit all strike issues to President Roosevelt's National Longshoremen's Board.

That included the archbishop of San Francisco.

And one of the things that's extraordinary about this particular strike up and down the coast is that people stay active, stay mobilized.

"We're not stopping the struggle.

If this is going to arbitration, then we know that we have to keep up the pressure until we get the arbiter's ruling, because they have to be aware that we're ready to go back on strike."

At 6:00 a.m. on July 31st, 18,000 union men tentatively returned to work after 83 days on strike.

At the same time, President and Mrs. Roosevelt were steaming towards Portland to dedicate the site chosen for the future Bonneville Dam.

Much to the mayor's relief, the planned visit would unfold without incident.

Two and a half months later, after 2500 pages of testimony, the arbitration board issued its decision.

The victory for longshoremen was big: A coastwide contract that included a wage increase and union hiring halls.

They got basically a hiring hall in the sense that it was a joint-run hall, but there was one important kicker in there: The hiring person, the dispatcher, would be a union member, and that meant the total control was really in the hands of the workers.

And it meant you were finished with the shape-up.

You were finished with the discrimination.

You were finished with the kickbacks, with bringing a bottle of wine or your wife to the waterfront or whatever the heck it might be to get a job.

And they complied with those promises that they would open up jobs on the longshore for unemployed supporters.

And part of what enabled them to do that was cutting back the hours that longshoremen themselves worked to spread the work around.

Their perception of themselves changed.

RICKS: We used to be drunken, Communistic bums and looked down upon by the world.

MUNK: From the bottom of the ladder to the top of the labor aristocracy, as you could say.

SCHWARTZ: They were sometimes nicknamed "the lords of the docks."

So it's like a whole change.

It's total change.

You know, when God is on your side and right makes might, you take chances that are absolutely screwball and think nothing of it.

Possibly the most important achievement resulting from the 1934 strike was the establishment of a strong democratic union.

DIAMOND: For the West Coast, it was fundamental, I think, in shaping power relations out here, in shaping the ability of people to organize unions, in showing possibilities that -- The Depression had in many ways taken away from people a sense of possibility.

"If the longshoremen can do it, we can do it."

They were a model for everybody.

Following the longshoremen's lead, many other people got organized along the West Coast.

I mean, there were retail clerks, there were people working in department stores.

In what they called the March Inland, Bridges people in '34, '5 and '6 had organized in San Francisco 8,500 warehouse workers in various industries.

NARRATOR: In 1937, most members of the Pacific Coast District voted to form the independent International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union, leave the AFL, and affiliate with the new Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO.

The split resulted in two separate organizations that exist to this day, the ILA on the East Coast, the ILWU in the west.

Harry Bridges became its first president, Matt Meehan the first secretary treasurer.

[ ♪♪♪ ] RICKS: Matt Meehan believed in doing a day's work, but he believed in a man being treated right, only working so long or lifting so much.

He maintained those same views all his life.

Many notable ILWU brothers attended Meehan's funeral in 1977, the same year Bridges retired from the post he held for 40 years.

He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945.

MAN: Brother Harry Bridges, the founder of the ILWU.

[ audience applauding, cheering loudly ] Put your faith in the labor unions.

Put your faith in the rank and file.

If you don't, there's no other place to put it.

[ ♪♪♪ ] SCHWARTZ: The ILWU took as a motto "An injury to one is an injury to all," which harkened way back to the old Industrial Workers of the World, the old IWW motto.

And it took that and it tried to stick by it.

One of the things that I think that Harry Bridges brought to the whole West Coast waterfront was he made people feel like they were hard workers and did dirty work and they were necessary to move the ships.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Containers and mechanization have long eased the extreme manual labor of years past.

Today, longshore workers pilot cranes and heavy machinery, depending on seniority and skills.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has remained one of the nation's strongest unions on the West Coast.

MAN: Our worker demands were very simple.

We wanted a union-controlled hall to take out all discrimination.

We wanted to end the shape-up.

We wanted equal opportunity for everyone.

[ playing "Taps" ] Most every year, there are gatherings coastwide, including Portland, honoring the sacrifices made during the summer of '34.

I came here to show a little bit of respect or a lot of respect for the people in 1934 that took a stand for working people and gave them the ability to work under safe conditions and basically create a union that believes that people should be respected, people should be taken care of from the bottom up.

A lot of our newer folks that are coming in, they get to know how we came to be and how fortunate we are for what we have.

Camaraderie, togetherness, unionism.

MAN: Too many people in unions say, "What has the union done for me?"

And my question is, what have you done for your union?

[ ♪♪♪ ] Today, a peaceful Pier Park welcomes visitors.

WISNOR: It's hard to find the trees that were here in July of 1934, but I like to believe that there are a few here that were there then.

This was a moment in both Portland history and Portland's labor history.

The whole West Coast strike relied on all of the port cities being solid and not breaking.

And Portland played its part in that strike, and the blood that was shed for that was here.

MUNK: To achieve that victory over the really quite desperate opposition of the employers showed that class solidarity can work.

It's a big deal, and it's always been used as a symbol for other labor union organizing drives, none of which have ever equaled the success on the West Coast.

There's more about Solidarity on the Docks on Oregon Experience online.

To learn more, visit opb.org.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Leading support for Oregon Experience is provided by... Major support provided by... Additional support provided by the contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.