"The most devastating work stoppage in Oregon's history," lasted 82 days, paralyzed commerce, and laid off 50,000 Oregonians, but established one of the nation's strongest unions on the west coast.

When 95-year old retired longshoreman Marvin Ricks, the last surviving Portland veteran of the great west coast waterfront strike of 1934, needs a taxi, he wants a Broadway. He remembers Broadway cabbies delivered sandwiches to him and his comrades on the picket lines.

Those sandwiches were lovingly prepared by Margie, Kay, Florence, Helen, and "Smiles"-- women of the Villa Rooms on Northwest Third Avenue off Burnside, who may also have offered other services on credit for the duration. And the eventually victorious strikers also got crucial support from farmers who brought milk, fishermen clams, hunters deer for the strike soup kitchen, and college students who signed pledges not to scab. Despite widespread unemployment, the Oregon Workers Alliance promised their 30,000 members would stand "five men deep along the waterfront and there would be no scabbing." Even some sympathetic Portland police officers passed on intelligence to the strikers.

There are no known survivors among the opponents--or targets--of the strike. As holders of Oregon's better known names, including those linked to its early history and present prominence, they were just as determined to break the strike as Ricks and his union members were to win it. Indeed, they formed a Citizens Emergency Committee to open the port, because they considered the strike a clear and present danger to the state. Led by the Failing Estate's Henry Cabell, Henry L. Corbett, lumberman Aubrey Watzek, Amedee Smith, E.G. Sammons, attorney Robert Sabin, Frank Warren, E.B. MacNaughton, Harold Wendel, Henry Wessinger, Harold Stanford and even Gen. Ulysses U.S. Grant "Rock of the Marne" Alexander --all supported by the staff of the Portland Chamber of Commerce-they represented a classic conflict between the influential few against the less individually powerful many. If local press showed more sympathy for them than to the strikers, perhaps the presence on the Committee of Simeon Winch, Don Sterling, and Philip Jackson of the Oregon Journal, Paul Kelty, Palmer Hoyt and O.L. Price of The Oregonian, and Tom Shea of the News-Telegram offers an explanation.

Oregon Governor Julius Meier pleaded unsuccessfully with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to send federal troops because, he concluded, "we are now in a state of armed hostilities." The Portland Chamber of Commerce received a warning from the U.S. Army that "Portland is the worse spot in which to release troops at this time because if there is a revolution in the making, such action would precipitate it."

In that atmosphere, the Citizens Committee voted to hire more than 1,000 vigilantes, organized into a semi-military organization called the Citizens Emergency League to distinguish them from their "silk-stocking" sponsors. Declaring that "we must end the strike with peaceful means, if possible, but if necessary by other means," they accepted that deployment could "doubtless lead to bloodshed and perhaps loss of life."

And there was bloodshed and loss of life. Hired strikebreakers were housed on the Admiral Evans, which the strikers attacked and cut loose to drift into the Broadway Bridge. Police, escorting a train to Terminal Four in St. Johns, fired on the strikers, wounding four of them in what became known as Portland's "Bloody Wednesday." The strikers' "navy" plied the waterfront armed with slingshots to discourage strikebreakers. A car carrying New York Senator Robert Wagner, sent by President Roosevelt to mediate the strike, was fired on by the vigilantes. But it was not until the strike ended in victory for the longshoremen that the first death was recorded. James Connor, a student, was killed by shots fired when union men demonstrated against strike breakers at Alberta Hall. Marvin Ricks was among the 29 longshoremen falsely arrested for murder in that incident.

Their solidarity, community support, and militancy won the longshoremen coast-wide union recognition, a joint hiring hall, and substantial wage and hour improvements. The Portland local joined the post-strike movement to reject their former corrupt AFL union and joined Harry Bridges' International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) in the the new labor federation the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) until it was expelled as "communist dominated "during the McCarthy era. Today, Oregon ILWU locals include Portland 8 and 40, North Bend 12, Astoria 50, Powell's 5, as well as the Columbia River Pensioners Association, which stand on the foundation of the 1934 strike as rare survivors of militant unionism.

Michael Munk
Michael Munk retired after teaching political science for more than 25 years, most recently at Rutgers University. He is author of The Portland Red Guide: Sites & Stories of Our Radical Past (Ooligan Press, 2007).

Sources

E. Kimbark MacColl, “The Waterfront Strike of 1934� in The Growth of the City: Power and Politics in Portland, Oregon 1915 to 1950 (Portland: 1979), pp. 467-486.

William Bigelow & Norman Diamond, “Agitate, Educate, Organize: Portland, 1934,� Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol 89, 1 (Spring, 1988), pp 5-29.