SF General Strike 1934

Bloody Thursday is one of many dates with that name.  (I was even present at one of them, but that's another tirade.)  In this case, it was something of a transition from the San Francisco/West Coast longshore strike of 1934 into the San Francisco General Strike of 1934. The two strikes in combination lasted 83 days and enshrined Harry Bridges in the pantheon of labor heroes.  Ever since the end of WWI, the longshoremen on the entire west coast of the US were without unions, or forced to join company unions, which had the exact same effect as having no unions at all.   Localized strikes and other attempts at unionization were repressed and suppressed, often violently, such as the 1923 San Pedro strike where injunctions and mass arrests were accompanied by vigilantism carried out by the American Legion (somehow proudly helping veterans thereby???)

On May 9, 1934, longshoremen at every west coast port walked off of the job and went on strike.  The employers refused to negotiate and recruited strikebreakers, generally housed in secure places and provided police escorts.  Clashes between striking longshoremen and strikebreakers still broke out and, on May 15, police in San Pedro reacted by firing upon the strikers, wounding several and killing one; further exacerbating the tensions.  The employers having decided  to open the ports by force, clashes between police and strikers broke out all along the San Francisco waterfront on July 3.  The strikers took July 4th off because July 4th and all that, and resumed the strike on Thursday, July 5.  The employers' cabal had decided to further open the port on that day  and used the time honored US strike-breaking tradition of violent assault by the police, starting with the police firing tear gas into the crowds of strikers followed by a mounted charge in the morning.  Then, in the afternoon, the Police attacked the Longshore Association's strike kitchen, eventually firing into the crowd, killing two and wounding many, and followed up by firing into the Association hall and teargassing neighboring buildings. The National Guard was then sent in to patrol the waterfront with the US Army units at the Presidio alerted to standby as reinforcements if needed.  This day, Thursday July 5, 1934 became known as Bloody Thursday and is honored by Longshoremen to this day.  In fact, the ILWU has no doubt shut down all west coast ports for today as in all prior years.

These events, followed by a mass funeral procession down Market Street on the 6th that numbered in the thousands created sufficient sympathy for the strikers throughout San Francisco that when Harry Bridges asked the San Francisco Labor Council to meet and authorize a general strike on the 7th, they did so, as did the Alameda County Central Labor Council (Oakland, etc) and the rank and file teamsters in both Oakland and San Francisco, who overrode their leadership on the matter.  The "San Francisco General Strike of 1934" began on the 16th and involved the suspiciously round number of 150,000 workers.  This was followed by a police rampage on the 17th when the cops arrested about 300 people and methodically trashed offices and meeting halls, destroying any furniture and equipment belonging to organizations suspected of participating in the strike in some manner. Four days later, the strike was over and in its aftermath a lot of labor concessions were made, and a lot of government, police and private terrorism against the nascent unions and their supporters was committed.  However, it was also followed by a long string of assorted lesser strike actions up and down the west coast which were honored by the longshoremen and teamsters,  In the end, all of the west coast ports became unionized.

On this day in history:

1594 – Portuguese forces began an unsuccessful invasion of the Kingdom of Kandy

1610 – John Guy and 39 other colonists set sail from Bristol for Newfoundland.

1687 – Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

1807 – In Buenos Aires the local militias repelled the Second English Invasion.

1934 – Police opened fire on striking longshoremen in San Francisco.

1935 – The National Labor Relations Act was signed into law by FDR

1937 – Spam was put on the market by Hormel
 

1946 – Micheline Bernardini modeled the first modern bikini at a swimming pool in Paris.
1948 – National Health Service Acts created the national public health system in the United Kingdom.

1950 – The Knesset passed the Law of Return granting all Jews the right to immigrate to Israel.

1954 – The BBC broadcast its first television news bulletin.

1954 – Elvis Presley recorded his first single, "That's All Right", at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee.

1971 – The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 years, was formally certified by President Richard Nixon.

1975 – Arthur Ashe became the first black man to win the Wimbledon singles title.

1977 – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, was overthrown.

1989 – Oliver North was sentenced to a three-year suspended prison term, two years probation, $150,000 in fines and 1,200 hours community service. His convictions were later overturned.

1996 – Dolly the sheep became the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.

1999 – Bill Clinton imposed trade and economic sanctions against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

2015 – The US women's national soccer team won the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup
 

2016 – The Juno space probe arrived at Jupiter 

Born this day in:

“Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.”

--- And ---

“There's a sucker born every minute.”

~~   P. T. Barnum

1057 – Al-Ghazali, jurist, philosopher, and mystic
1586 – Thomas Hooker, colonist, founder of the Colony of Connecticut
1675 – Mary Walcott, colonist accuser and witness at the Salem witch trials
1810 – P. T. Barnum, seminal proponent of the US business model and business ethics
1820 – William John Macquorn Rankine, physicist, mathematician, and engineer
1857 – Clara Zetkin, marxist theorist, communist and women's rights activist
1862 – George Nuttall, bacteriologist
1867 – A. E. Douglass, astronomer
1879 – Wanda Landowska, harpsichord player and educator
1885 – André Lhote, sculptor and painter
1888 – Herbert Spencer Gasser, physiologist and academic
1888 – Louise Freeland Jenkins, astronomer and academic
1889 – Jean Cocteau, novelist, poet, and playwright
1891 – John Howard Northrop, chemist and academic
1900 – Yoshimaro Yamashina, ornithologist, founded the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology 
1904 – Ernst Mayr, biologist and ornithologist
1913 – Smiley Lewis, singer, songwriter, and guitarist
1915 – Al Timothy,  musician and songwriter
1923 – Mitsuye Yamada, activist, feminist, poet, and author
1925 – Jean Raspail, author and explorer
1933 – Paul-Gilbert Langevin, musicologist, critic and physicist
1938 – Ronnie Self, singer and songwriter
1941 – Terry Cashman, singer, songwriter ,and record producer
1943 – Robbie Robertson, singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor
1946 – Gerard 't Hooft, physicist and academic
1950 – Huey Lewis, singer, songwriter, and actor
1950 – Michael Monarch, guitarist, songwriter, and producer
1953 – Caryn Navy, mathematician and computer scientist
1954 – Jimmy Crespo, guitarist and songwriter
1958 – Veronica Guerin, journalist
1958 – Bill Watterson, author and illustrator, Hobbesian Calvinist
1959 – Marc Cohn, singer, songwriter, and keyboard player
1968 – Nardwuar the Human Serviette, singer, songwriter, and keyboard player
1973 – Bengt Lagerberg, drummer
1973 – Róisín Murphy, singer, songwriter, and producer
1980 – Jason Wade, singer, songwriter, and guitarist
1982 – Dave Haywood, singer, songwriter, and guitarist
1986 – Owl City, singer, songwriter and composer

Died this day in:

The mistake which most critics make is to persist in trying to evaluate pop culture as if it were something else: the equivalent of insisting on considering a bicycle as if it were a horse.

~~   George Melly

1826 – Stamford Raffles, politician, founded Singapore 
1833 – Nicéphore Niépce, inventor, created the first known photograph
1859 – Charles Cagniard de la Tour, physicist and engineer
1920 – Max Klinger, painter and sculptor
1927 – Albrecht Kossel, physician and academic
1969 – Walter Gropius, architect
1983 – Harry James, trumpet player and actor
2002 – Ted Williams, Teddy Ballgame, baseball's  best pure hitter evah
2007 – George Melly, singer, songwriter, and critic
2011 – Cy Twombly, painter, sculptor, and photographer
2015 – Yoichiro Nambu, physicist and academic,

Holidays, Holy Days, Festivals, Feast Days, Days of Recognition, and such:
Bloody Thursday (International Longshore and Warehouse Union)
Mechanical Pencil Day
Independence Day (Algeria v France, Cape Verde v Portugal, and Venezuela v Spain)
Bikini Day
National Apple Turnover Day
SPAM Day

Music goes here, iirc, well, With apologies

Bloody Thursday

That's All Right

Mary Walcott

P.T.Barnum

Smiley Lewis

Ronnie Self

Robbie Robertson

Huey Lewis

Michael Monarch

Harry James

George Melly

Ok, it's an open thread, so it's up to you folks now. So what's on your mind?