Down Under Man

One day last week a gawky, sallow-faced man of 39 stood in the U. S. Immigration station on San Francisco's Angel Island and swore to tell the whole truth. Alfred Renton Bryant ("Harry") Bridges proceeded to tell more about himself than anyone had told before. Because he is the most potent and feared Laborite in the western U. S., Bridges on Bridges was bound to furnish 1) news, 2) insight into the innards of Leftist Labor.

As the first witness called by the Government at his deportation hearing four weeks ago, Alien Bridges denied in two Nos that he is or ever was a Communist. For all that the next 15 Government witnesses established to the contrary, the Service's Deputy Commissioner Thomas B. Shoemaker might have dispensed with them and saved much wear & tear on Harvard Law School's Dean James M. Landis, sitting as special examiner by the very special request of Secretary of Labor Perkins. Since Mr. Shoemaker had no direct evidence that Bridges actually belonged to the Communist Party when the complaint was filed (March 2, 1938), his only recourse was an attempt to show circumstantially that Defendant Bridges thought, talked, acted like a Communist who advocates forceful overthrow of the U. S. Government.

Witness Bridges demonstrated that whether he is a Communist or not is important primarily because it will determine whether U. S. citizens who own property and hire labor can be rid of Harry Bridges, trade unionist. The quality which made him tick as precisely and dangerously as a bomb-clock did not come from Marx. It was simple, deep and active discontent--with things as he found them during his boyhood Down Under in Australia, with the U. S. as he found it when he sailed through the Golden Gate on a freighter in 1920.

By the standards of contented Americans, he painted himself Red with his disquisitions against corporate employers as a class, his belief that the U. S. should be so far socialized as to liquidate big companies and substitute public ownership of their properties. Since there are 100,000 accredited and much more ambitious Reds in the Communist Party, U. S. A., this credo was no great distinction. What distinguished Witness Bridges was that he put his union ahead of their Party. He confessed that he had used and would continue to use Communist money, brains and brawn when they could help win something for the discontented stevedores, lumberjacks, fruit pickers, etc., in his longshoremen's and related C. I. O. unions on the West Coast. He conceded that Communists try to use him and his unions, denied that they succeeded, invited them to keep on trying. That his brass-tacks unionism has worked well enough to make him bigger game than any U. S. Communist, his predicament proved.

Bridges on Bridges:

> He declared that the Communist Party is not subversive, that he and his union membership believe in its current trade-union policies (but not necessarily in its longer-range social and political policies).

> "Sometimes I get a little irritated when my views are ascribed to the Communist Party because I had them before the Communist Party came into being. . . ."

> "Communist teachings . . . are mostly theory, and I generally stay with the practical matters."

> "There are officials of the Communist Party that in my official duties now I have known for quite a while. . . . When they have a matter that they are looking for support on, they call me up and ask me if they can drop down to the office. . . . That is the way it works."

> "It has been my experience that [Communists] concern themselves more with building democracy in the trade unions than trying to take them over. ... I haven't any doubts that they are trying [to take over unions]. But anybody that does that. . . . must convince the majority of rank and file of the union that it was to their benefit. Otherwise it would be a pretty dumb bunch of workers."

> Q.: "Do you believe in social ownership of the means and implements of production?"

A.: ". . . I certainly believe that . . . we could have a lot more municipal or government ownership than we now have. . . . If we raise the issue that we are going to take over the means of production, that is a long, long ways ahead. I am not concerned with that. . . . There are plenty of things to be done today . . . gaining simple recognition of trade unions and so on. . . ."

Q.: ". . . Would you believe in the abolition of private property for reasons stated by the Communists?"

A.: ". . . When they talk of private property, they don't talk of somebody's two-by-four piece of land. . . . I take it to mean the big utilities, the big factories . . . the various heavy industries. . . . I am in favor of government ownership of those things, yes, and if the government can't do a better job of running them . . . I would say give it back to private industry again. . . ."

Q.: "Do you believe in a democratic form of Government?"

A.: ". . . If you mean the capitalistic form of society, which to me means the exploitation of a lot of people for profit, and a complete disregard of their interests for that profit, I haven't much use for it. But that is apart from the government. . . ."

> ". . . There seems to be a great aversion to talking about the class struggle. The employer interests, they say it should be hushed up and never spoken of. . . . But the class struggle is here. . . . War? It is on right now, every day. . . . Every where in the country today . . . there are workers now being shot down on picket lines. . . ."*

Q.: "Do you believe that the ballot . . . is sufficient means to accomplish all the ends sought by the working class?"

A.: "I do. ... I think that if [the people] ever reach the point where they have gone as far as they can under the constitution, it will be time enough then to sit down and decide what is next to be done and how much farther to go. I can't -- I'm no prophet."

> "My experience with human nature has been . . . that 95% of the people . . . are born honest and fair and if treated honest and fair . . . return the favor . . . provided it wasn't some government official that . . . smiled into your face while he had a knife in your ribs."

Q.: "Nothing personal?"

A.: "Nothing personal, Mr. Shoemaker. . . ."

* Blood was shed last week at Green Mountain Dam in the Colorado Rockies, where a private contractor is building a dam for the U. S. Reclamation Bureau. Five A. F. of L. unions struck last month for a closed shop at the dam. Last week 200 deputized vigilantes (non-strikers, ranchers, businessmen) attacked the strikers, shot and wounded five, subsided only when Governor Ralph L. Carr sent National Guardsmen to quell "a state of insurrection."

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