Harry Bridges

Harry Bridges was born Alfred Renton Bridges on July 28, 1901, in the Melbourne suburb of Kensington, Australia, the son of a suburban real-estate agent and a devoutly Catholic mother. Jack London's sea stories pulled him toward the water rather than his father's business, and he went to sea as a teenager, working merchant ships across the Pacific. He landed in San Francisco in 1920, at 19, planning to keep moving, and instead stayed. Two years later he switched from sailing to loading and unloading ships on the San Francisco docks, casual, backbreaking, day-to-day work controlled entirely by hiring bosses who picked favorites each morning at the pier gate and sent the rest home unpaid.

Bridges chaired the strike committee when West Coast longshoremen walked out on May 9, 1934, demanding an end to hiring-hall favoritism and a union-run alternative. On July 5, remembered as Bloody Thursday, police fired into the picket lines in San Francisco and killed two men, Howard Sperry and Nicholas Bordoise. The dead were carried up Market Street in a funeral march that turned into a citywide general strike days later, and the longshoremen won the union hiring hall they had struck for. Bridges built the local into the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in 1937 and ran it for 40 years, negotiating a coastwide contract that covered every port from San Diego to Seattle and pushing racial integration inside the union decades before most of organized labor followed.

For nearly 20 years the government tried to deport Bridges as a Communist. A 1939 hearing collapsed after a witness admitted perjury. A 1941 hearing recommended deportation, reversed on appeal, and in 1945 the Supreme Court ruled in Bridges v. Wixon that the government had never proved Communist Party affiliation. Prosecutors tried a different charge in 1948, that he had lied about party membership on his citizenship papers. A jury convicted him and stripped his citizenship, and in 1953 the Supreme Court threw that out too, on a statute-of-limitations technicality. Bridges denied membership his whole life. A 1937 Comintern document, found after the Soviet archives opened, lists a Central Committee member named ROSSI (Bridges), read by some historians as confirmation, and by others, including his 2023 biographer Robert Cherny, as evidence he advised the party without ever formally joining.

Bridges retired from the ILWU presidency in 1977, after 40 years, and died in San Francisco on March 30, 1990. California marked what would have been his hundredth birthday, in 2001, as Harry Bridges Day, and thousands of longshore workers marched across the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro while the port shut down for eight hours in his honor. The union headquarters in San Francisco carries his name, and so does a boulevard in Wilmington and a labor-studies center at the University of Washington. The deportation fight that consumed a fifth of his life is now taught mainly as a case study in Cold War excess, the government having lost in front of the Supreme Court twice.

Harry Bridges's life against the full span of the corpus.

• International Longshore and Warehouse Union company
  Founded when the Pacific Coast district broke from the ILA 1937
• 1934 West Coast waterfront strike other
  83-day strike that won the union hiring hall after Bloody Thursday 1934
• Bridges v. Wixon case
  Supreme Court ruling that the government had not proven Communist Party affiliation 1945
• Mechanization and Modernization Agreement law
  Traded automation of the docks for job security and pension guarantees 1960

• July 28, 1901 aged 0 Born in Kensington, Victoria, Australia
• 1920 aged ~19 Arrives in San Francisco as a merchant seaman
• 1922 aged ~21 Switches from sailing to longshore work on the San Francisco docks
• May 9, 1934 aged 32 The West Coast waterfront strike begins
• July 5, 1934 aged 32 Bloody Thursday: police kill two strikers in San Francisco
• August 11, 1937 aged 36 Founds and becomes president of the ILWU
• 1945 aged ~44 The Supreme Court rules in his favor in Bridges v. Wixon
• April 18, 1977 aged 75 Retires as ILWU president after 40 years
• March 30, 1990 aged 88 Dies in San Francisco

• Frances Perkins 1880–1965
  First woman in a presidential cabinet and labor secretary who helped create Social Security, minimum-wage, and workplace protections. resisted deporting
• John L. Lewis 1880–1969
  Union leader who built the United Mine Workers and helped found the CIO, expanding industrial unionism and collective bargaining. allied with
• César Chávez 1927–1993
  Labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers union. influenced
• Dolores Huerta b. 1930
  Labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. influenced