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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , AUGTEMBER 2003
speaking out against U.S. involvement in this war was Harry
Bridges. Reporters from newspapers all over the country,
expecting the Longshore leader would be dumped by his union,
converged on a coastwide caucus of Longshore, Walking Boss
and Ships' Clerks Locals held in the isolated port of Coos Bay
But instead of turning him out, the caucus delegates sent
Bridges a long telegram of greeting and support
ROBERT MINOR
Emanuel Pickmosa, an early day leader of the Oregon
Communist Party, died before the Establishment could figure
out how to get rid of him. His modest stone at Greenwood reads
simply: Our Comrade. His friends feared to say more lest the
Immigration Service disinter his bones and deport them. Efforts
were being made at the time the stone was placed to deport one
of Pickmosa's pallbearers.
A deportation case that began in the 1930s and carried
over until the 1950s was that of the late Longshore leader, John
J. Fougerouse. Other famous cases centered around Filipino
members of the ILWU Local 37 (the Alaska Cannery Workers).
The Immigration Service at one time tried to deport all of the
titled officers and executive board members of that Local, head
quartered in Seattle with a sub-Local in Portland. These cases
were won because ILWU (International Longshore & Ware
housemen's Union) members closed ranks behind their targeted
brothers — as they did in the Harry Bridges case, which lasted
for more than 20 years — realizing that it was the Union itself
that was under attack. The only Filipino worker deported was
the government stoolie; but one defendant died of a heart attack
during the proceedings, and another committed suicide.
Two cases which were lost were those of Bill Mackie,
a Finnish housepainter, and Hamish Scott MacKay, a Canadian
born descendent of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
They were torn from the arms of American born relatives on
the same day in the 1950s — Thanksgiving Day — and hustled
aboard planes at the Portland International Airport for countries
one of them had not seen since he was an infant and the other
since he was a young man of 19.
The attorney who represented most of these defendants
over the years, including the sewer digger Ben Boloff, was the
late Irvin Goodman. So great was his fame among the disinherit
ed and damned that his phone number was carved in a booth at
the Portland City Jail.
The Establishment in the 1950s mounted attacks against
labor under a section of the Taff-Hartley law which made it illegal
for a member of the Communist Party to hold union offices. And
what is a Communist? The definition by Harry Bridges (a classic
on my side of the tracks) comes to mind: "Anyone who wants a
nickel more than the boss is willing to pay.”
That section of Taft-Hartley has since been repealed,
as has the section of the McCarren Act under which Japanese-
Americans were sent to concentration camps during World
War 2. The Portland Local of the International Woodworkers
of America fought to save its Japanese members from being
herded off to the Idaho desert and Tule Lake. Under the leader
ship of Stanley Earl, a city commissioner at the time of his death
several years ago, the Local beat back the efforts of Portland mill
owners to drive the Japanese off the job. The employers were
still smarting over the testimony these workers had given at
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearings during the
1937-38 lockout in lumber5. The Union's battle to save its Japa
nese members was carried to the Portland City Hall and to the
Oregon State Capitol in Salem, but was lost when the federal
government moved in and moved the Japanese out, first to the
Portland stockyard and then to the Idaho desert.
1287 COMMERCIAL ST
ASTORIA 325-5221
The jailing of the Japanese and confiscation of their
property was an act of blatant discrimination. Racism south
of the Columbia River has long roots, going back to the days
when the Willamette Valley was settled by the younger sons of
Southern slaveowners and Oregon barely escaped entering the
Union a slave state6.
In Astoria in the 1890s the fish packers brought in
Chinese to break a fishermen's strike. The bones of these
unwitting scabs are said to litter the bottom of the Columbia from
Pillar Rock to Desdemona Sands. But it was the packers who
murdered them, not the strikers, when you think about it.Just as
it was the packers who wanted unionization stopped in Alaska
and slave conditions continued on their cannery ships; and the
packers in the heyday of the Portland Police Bureau's Red
Squad who gave the late Captain Keegan and Big Bill Browne
money to bug the hotel room of Harry Bridges; and the packers
who gutted the Pacific Coast Fishermen's Union with an injunct
ion in 1939, and broke the gillnetters' strike in September 1951
with an injunction that stopped picketing of the canneries.
In 1952 the employers and their henchmen in Congress
forced through the McCarren-Walter Act, under which 3 million
non-citizens were forced to carry registration cards reminiscent
of Nazi Germany and the pass system in South Africa.
Deportation of the foreign born and denaturalization of
citizens of foreign ancestry rose to a peak in the 1950s, the era
of Joseph McCarthy. It was during this period that the hapless
Mackie and MacKay were sent into exile.
When Labor, with the aid of the few Christians among
the clergy, tried to get the vicious McCarren-Walter Act repealed
the Establishment hurled new troops into the battle in the guise
of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), and a
witchhunt was begun against the American-born defenders of
their foreign born neighbors and shopmates.
The HUAC hearings were accompanied by an outburst
of hysteria in the press. Headlines such as the following were
typical "RED HEARING ILWU Leader Ousted From Courtroom",
"Woman Labor Reporter Branded A Chief Propagandist For The
Communist Party", and so on.***
The HUAC hysteria followed the "conviction” under the
Smith Act of the top leadership of the American Communist
Party and the self-maiming CIO, which sought to save itself from
the Red label by expelling some of its strongest unions.
These events were roughly paralleled by the U.S. entry
into the Korean War in 1950. One of the labor leaders jailed for
FOOTNOTES
1. This committee was headquartered in Portland Its
chairman was S. P. Stevens. E B Weber, then treasurer of
the Federation of Woodworkers, was its treasurer. Julia Ruuttila
(then Julia Bertram) was its secretary
2 With the exception of a professor at the University of
Wisconsin at Greenbay, who has written a novel based on some
of the events which led up to and followed the Centralia raid
3. This occurred when workers who had chartered
a boat in Seattle to go to Everett to express solidarity with
a shingle weavers' strike were gunned down as the boat
approached the dock
4 Hartwig was responsible for getting Oregon's first
employers' liability law passed in the State Legislature
5. The heroine of the lockout of workers at the West
Oregon Mill was Mary Fujiyama, wife of a Japanese greenchain
worker who testified that the mill foreman threatened to deport
the Japanese workers unless they went through the picketline
All of them remained faithful to the union and did not scab, but
a few white workers did scab
6 Several volumes could be written on discrimination
against minority racial members, including not only blacks but
against Mexican workers and Native Americans, deprived of their
fishing and land rights, and many others, including exploitation of
Southeast Asians who have settled in this country
7. For strikebreaking purposes the employers were
forced to bring in students from Oregon State University, then
known as the "Cow College" Strikebreakers during Oregon's
longest labor beef, the Portland newspaper strike which began
in 1959 and lasted five years, were imported largely from other
states Many were professional scabs
—JR
One of the witchhunting devices used against workers
during the Korean War was the waterfront screen,which required
dockers, seamen, fishermen and workers in waterfront related
industries to secure Coast Guard passes The gillnetters, at
least at first, refused to have anything to do with the screen
The ILWU, which early on was split on the issue, tried it out
before deciding the screen was a blacklisting attempt at gagging
the union leaders, splitting the ranks and running workers off the
job to starve.
Some amusing (or not so amusing) incidents occurred
when the screen was in force. An oldtimer who had worked
cargo during two World Wars was rated as too subversive to
load flour in Astoria but rated safe to put ammunition over the
ship's rail at Beaver. And the Irish dock leader Matt Meehan,
hero of the union's 1934 strike, was called to settle a beef at the
ammo dock (he was representative for the International at the
time) and had the satisfaction of telling the Coast Guard, "I can't
get through the gate at Beaver. You screened me, remember?"
The employers found the screen a costly gimmick
Gangs sent out to load and unload ships were constantly losing
their passes. Gang members sent out to replace the uncleared
workers frequently misplaced their own passes or left them in
yesterday's pants.
And so the waterfront screen, undercut also by court
actions initiated by union lawyers, faded into history. But not
before a number of militants in the seagoing unions had been
driven onto the beach for good.
The deportations, the Taft-Hartley cases, HUAC witch
hunts and the waterfront screen of the 1950s were reminiscent
of the Palmer Raids 30 years earlier. On the night of January 2,
1920, according to labor historians Boyer and Morais, "both
aliens and citizens, most of them tradeunion members, were
hauled from their beds, dragged out of meetings, grabbed on the
streets and from their homes and thrown into prison by federal
police acting under the jurisdiction of U.S Attorney General
Mitchell Palmer and his aide J. Edgar Hoover."
In Portland, several hundred persons were jailed in the
raids which extended to the Labor Temple, where several trade
union officials, including the late S. P. Stevens, business agent
of the Shipyard Riggers, Laborers & Fasteners Union, and the
late Teamsters leader Phil Brady (later a state representative)
were seized at their desks. Stevens, an ex-logger who had come
to Oregon a few years earlier, later served as chairman of the
defense committee which the Federation of Woodworkers, "heirs
of the Wobblies," set up to get Ray Becker out of Walla Walla
State Penitentiary. Brady, too, served on that committee, as did
Beatrice Stevens (no relation to S.P.), and Paul Gurks, then with
the Street Car Men's Union.
The Palmer Raid victims were defended in part by
the late Colonel Charles Erskine Scott Wood, writer, poet and
attorney. He had two law offices at the time, one in which he
practiced corporation law for such clients as Southern Pacific
Railroad, and one in which he represented the damned and
dispossessed.
The economic establishment and its allies in the
legislature and the courts, in Oregon and elsewhere, had many
other devices for hamstringing Labor and attempting to silence
protesters against the status quo. One of these was the criminal
syndicalism law. Dirk deJongg, a leader of the unemployed who
persuaded Portland's jobless not to scab on the 1934 waterfront
strike, was sent to prison under this law7. The law which sent
deJongg to prison was repealed by the Oregon Legislature after
it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and after
hearings in Salem which found spokesmen for the Communist
Party and tradeunion officials, including the late Ben Osborne,
head of the State Federation of Labor, on the same side of the
issue.
Laws relating to riot and conspiracy were also invoked
against working people to slow their revolt against long hours,
low pay and the high death and accident frequency rate in heavy
industry. Some of the court actions were brought under laws
originally designed for the people's protection, such as the
Sherman Antitrust Act.
Pickets were jailed on riot charges stemming from a
logger's strike at Seaside where two union members were killed
and another was maimed for life by soft-nosed bullets from a
scab's gun. Neither the scab nor his employer were indicted
Strikes were often broken without any semblance of
court action or any weakening of the workers, as at Florence,
Oregon, when IWW members striking a railroad construction job
were marched to Eugene over tracks they had laid by troopers
called out by Governor Oswald West A leaflet from that time has
survived. It depicts a worker stumbling along over the track ties
with his blanketroll on his back, and had this caption: "He built
the road / With others of his class / He built the road / Now o'er
its many weary a mile /He packs his load / Spurred on by
hunger's goad /And wonders why in Hell /He built the road "
Two decades later another Oregon governor, "Ironpants
Martin", called out troopers in the 1935 lumber strike to march
pickets at bayonet point from Bridal Veil to the Multnomah
County Courthouse.
The National Industrial Recovery Act and the Wagner
Act by this time had made it illegal for workers to organize in
unions of their own choosing, to bargain collectively, and to
CONTINUED ON PAGE 8
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-RICHARD FENCSAK, THE DAILY ASTORIAN
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