Like the rest of the nation, California was hit hard by the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929 and lasted until American entry into World War II in 1941. Across the country many factories closed, and joblessness plagued both cities and farmlands. In 1932-3 unemployment soared to about 25 percent of the workforce as some 13 to 17 million laborers nationwide were without jobs. Those who were employed often suffered wage cuts. The United States, like much of the rest of the world, found itself in the throes of the worst economic collapse in its history. Amid the fallout from this collapse, union members fought back against pay reductions, often by going on strike, that is, stopping all work until their various demands were met. In California labor strife was particularly acute in the fields and on the docks. State officials were hard-pressed to maintain order and offer some semblance of economic relief. A prominent socialist ran for governor of California, and bizarre remedies for economic relief found their way into politics.
Labor conditions throughout the state were bad in the 1930s; they were at their worst in the fields, where union organizing made the fewest inroads. Desperate Okies and Arkies, so called because they migrated out of the soil-impoverished states of Oklahoma and Arkansas in the hope of finding work, arrived in the Central Valley farmlands in jalopies. These seasonal laborers were joined by Mexicans and Filipinos in the Imperial Valley, who comprised the remainder of the state’s farm labor force.
Wage cuts amid deplorable working conditions led to a number of strikes in California’s fields and canneries in the 1930s. A strike led by lettuce pickers in the Imperial Valley in 1930 was the first of many such stoppages. Five thousand field hands joined the strike, which, like a magnet, drew in communist organizers who persuaded the aggrieved workers to join the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU). Meanwhile, cannery workers in the state, nearly three-fourths of whom were women, grew restive about their 16-hour workdays for a wage of 15 cents an hour. Such conditions led to a 1931 cannery workers’ strike in the Santa Clara Valley. Latinas, like Luisa Moreno, held key leadership positions in the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America union representing the laborers. Some of the strikes led by Moreno and others in the early 1930s brought positive results. For example, by August of 1933 agricultural wages had risen from 16 to 25 cents an hour.
Fearing that unionization was spreading, major growers and their business allies formed the Associated Farmers in 1934. Horrified at the specter of Bolshevism (the anti-capitalist doctrines of the radical socialists who won the Russian Revolution) in the state, the Associated Farmers helped fund the prosecution of CAWIU leaders suspected of being Communist Party members. Seventeen members of this union were tried for violation of the 1919 Criminal Syndicalism Act (see Chapter 9) in 1935; eight were convicted.
Beyond the fields and canneries, unions met with greater success along California’s waterfronts. Successful dock strikes in San Francisco and San Pedro in 1923 served as preludes to the much more extensive longshoremen’s strike of 1934, which erupted in the City by the Bay and spread along the entire Pacific coastline. San Francisco’s Embarcadero, a strip of land abutting the city’s port that includes a roadway and wharves, was ground zero for the drama that unfolded.
In response to a weekly wage of about $10 and employer demands for faster work, Pacific Coast leaders of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), a powerful maritime union whose West Coast office was located in San Francisco, met in that city in February 1934. They authorized a coast-wide strike if the ILA and shippers could not come to a satisfactory agreement on wage rates and hours. As negotiations dragged into March, the ILA added more demands. The union insisted on a dollar-an-hour wage rate, overtime pay at $1.50 an hour, a six-hour workday and 30-hour work week, union-run hiring halls, a prohibition on employers using the facilities of one Pacific port to undermine a strike at another, and a demand that the employers bargain for all of the West Coast ports simultaneously.
The shipping companies and their allies in the maritime industries rejected the union’s demands as radical, charging that ILA organizer Harry Bridges was a communist. Bridges, an avowedly militant trade unionist who emigrated from Australia to California, denied the charge and his accusers never proved it.
On May 9, 1934, West Coast longshoremen went on strike. Other maritime unions and the teamsters soon joined. By mid-May 34,700 dockworkers and others from Tacoma, Washington, in the north to San Diego in the south brought Pacific Coast shipping to a halt. San Francisco shippers retaliated by bringing in three squads of UC Berkeley football players to break the strike. Though the teamsters refused to haul cargoes to and from vessels, a so-called Belt Line railroad, owned by the State of California, remained in operation to perform that service. Longshoremen emulated the nonviolent followers of Mohandas Gandhi in India by sitting on the tracks and roadbed. The strike cost San Francisco port businesses an estimated $1 million a day; to stanch this hemorrhaging of money, company executives enlisted support from the city’s police department, whose intervention would prove calamitous.
Matters came to a violent head on July 5, “Bloody Thursday.” Police armed with extraheavy riot sticks and teargas canisters defended the strikebreakers. Union workers overturned and burned trucks, strewing their cargoes onto the streets. Shots were fired, killing two strikers as scores of their fellow workers were beaten by police. Governor Frank Mirriam sent 1,700 National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets and machine guns to the Embarcadero. Labor officials responded to this show of armed force by declaring a general strike on July 16, that is, a union stoppage of business throughout the city.
Four days later the ILA ended the general strike and by late July, after 83 days of turmoil and bloodshed, the shippers agreed to unconditional federal arbitration. On October 12 the arbitration board gave unions almost total control over hiring halls at the docks, a key demand of the ILA.
In addition to validating some of the ILA demands and spurring a growth in its membership, the 1934 San Francisco dock strike underscored how significant the city’s Pacific maritime economy was. When shipping was shut down, the West Coast’s leading mercantile city was shut down. In the wake of the longshoremen’s strike, the October 14, 1935, edition of the San Francisco Examiner contained a special section titled “Century of Commerce,” which traced the central role of seagoing trade in the city’s and the state’s history during the preceding 100 years. “It is only because of the unsurpassed maritime service San Francisco has enjoyed for so many years,” stated the article, “that California is able to compete in the markets of the world with her manufactured goods and her vast agricultural products. Fruits, cotton, hay and grain grown in the great inland valleys all find their way to wide flung markets of the world by way of The Embarcadero [the city’s ship-loading waterfront].” This statement bears testimony to the dependence of California’s agricultural sector on the state’s Pacific trade.
While the state’s maritime economy struggled yet remained afloat, the nationwide depression caused sufficient suffering to prompt California voters to support Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in 1932, and to put non-Marxian socialism on the ballot in the election of 1934. To the unease of Washington, D. C., New Dealers seeking to reform rather than replace capitalism, former Socialist Party member Upton Sinclair reregistered as a Democrat, securing his party’s nomination for the governorship that year. In order to promote his campaign, he wrote an idealistic novel, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future (1933). The acronym designating Sinclair’s campaign, EPIC, derives from the book title. In effect, it was an imagined, socialistic recounting of how during the years from 1933 to 1938 good times returned to the Golden State. For example, Sinclair pretended that farm lands and factories were publicly owned and operated as agricultural and industrial cooperatives.
The Republicans nominated conservative Frank Merriam, the incumbent governor. Louis B. Mayer, the movie mogul who ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, worked with other business leaders to portray Sinclair as an atheist, free love advocate, and communist whose policy prescriptions would draw trainloads of hobos to California. In the absence of support from President Roosevelt, the Republican strategy succeeded in discrediting Sinclair by showing him as outside of the mainstream of American society. Sinclair’s candidacy was also hurt by his opposition to the plan of Long Beach physician Francis E. Townsend calling for an old-age retirement program. Accordingly, a business transaction tax would fund monthly payments of $200 to every retired citizen over 60 years of age, with the requirement that recipients spend the money within the month. Townsend clubs attracted 1.5 million members nationwide, showing the reach of a Greater California in the public policy arena, and pushed President Roosevelt toward sponsoring the Social Security Act of 1935. Merriam’s support of the Townsend Plan probably helped win his reelection.
Governor Merriam’s conservatism proved highly pragmatic and somewhat supportive of Roosevelt’s New Deal. He antagonized a number of his most reactionary supporters by securing the adoption of a state income tax, and increasing imposts on banks and other corporations. By repealing the sales tax on food and providing a modicum of aid to the elderly, he showed some affinity for the spirit of the New Deal. The substance of the New Deal, however, resided in federal programs implemented in the state. For example, the Works Project Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps built numerous schools and other public buildings as well as parks in the Golden State.
Despite the practical New Deal programs brought to the state, California continued to flirt with more exotic responses to the depression. One such response, the Los Angeles-based Technocracy movement of the early 1930s, envisioned the evolution of a cooperative utopia ushered in by technology and the application of science to public policy. Capitalism’s benefits would thereby be more rationally and equitably distributed. The pension panacea that arose and enlivened California’s 1938 election serves as another example of an unconventional approach to the economic downturn. Informally called “Ham and Eggs” by a promoter, the scheme qualified as a ballot initiative titled Thirty Dollars Every Thursday. Its advocates proposed that the state pay $30 every Thursday to unemployed Californians over 50. The“Ham and Eggs” initiative went down in defeat on election day, along with incumbent Republican gubernatorial candidate Merriam, who had opposed the measure.
Democrat Culbert L. Olson, whose campaign took no clear stance on “Ham and Eggs,” won the governorship in 1938. Though more identified with New Deal policies than his predecessor Merriam, Olson was hampered by Republican control of the state Senate and by a bare, fractious Democratic majority in the assembly. Still, the new governor pardoned Tom Mooney (see Chapter 9) and oversaw modest reform of the state’s penal and mental health-care systems.
World History
