Chapter Three—
Shipowners Organize

One of the principal "staging areas of Communist penetration" during the 1930s, notes a leading specialist, was "violent employer opposition to unionism."^[1] Where reactionary employers aggressively resisted the extension of economic citizenship, as, for example, in auto, hardrock mining, and the marine industry, workers embraced a more combative and politically radical leadership than in such industries as rubber, glass, and wood products, where opposition to union recognition was less strenuous.^[2] Given that capital's initial response to labor is so crucial, why is it that some employers embark on a course of conflict while others follow a path of accommodation?

In the longshore industry, employers traveled down both roads during the formative stages of unionization. Whereas shipowners in New York maintained uninterrupted and harmonious relations with the ILA during the open-shop 1920s, their counterparts on the Pacific, including representatives from many of the same shipping lines, systematically suppressed any signs of independent unionism on the docks. Comparing employer responses in 1930, Joseph Ryan, ILA international president, commended shipowners on the North Atlantic for not taking "undue advantage" of the union and chastised steamship interests on the Pacific Coast for "not yet display[ing] sufficient confidence in our organization."^[3]

These contrasting employer approaches solidified the divergent political cultures that were already taking shape in these two regions. In the West, where recently recruited seamen and loggers

began interpreting and understanding their new surroundings as working longshoremen, their views were increasingly influenced by the particular way they experienced class relations on the docks. Protracted shipowner resistance served only to strengthen their existing syndicalist beliefs—providing, as two students of the industry observed, "powerful, practical support for the view that the interests of the employers and those of the men were deeply opposed."^[4]

In this way, the intransigence of West Coast shipowners fueled the fires of radicalism on the docks. As San Francisco longshore leader Henry Schmidt put it: "The union was made radical by the employers. They really left us no choice." Whether or not a choice actually existed, the rank and file, having endured years of employer abuse, did not see one. Once the longshoremen got the upper hand following the 1934 strike, they went after the shipowners with a vengeance. After being "exploited for years," admitted one old-timer, "it felt real good to spit in the employer's eye."^[5] This explosion of class consciousness in the West stood in sharp contrast to the continuing passivity of dockworkers in New York. There, in the absence of both syndicalist traditions and employer resistance, a working-class culture had taken hold that was as conservative as the West's was radical.

This chapter examines the sources of shipowner resistance and accommodation on the docks, arguing that employers' responses reflected their relative organizational capacities as shaped by regional differences in industry economics.

Determinants of Capital's Response to Labor

Early attempts to understand employer responses grew out of a voluntaristic conception of industrial relations in which the quality of face-to-face interaction between capital and labor, rather than the structural properties of the two, became the primary focus. Borrowing liberally from the human relations school, these analyses saw labor and management as mirror images of each other, with the actions of one conditioning and reciprocally influencing the other. This position was forcefully argued by Clinton Golden and Harold Ruttenberg in Dynamics of Industrial Democracy,

their seminal study of prewar collective bargaining. "Management as a general rule," they observed, "gets the kind of union leadership it deserves. A tough management begets tough union leaders, while a patient, friendly, cooperative management begets a like type of union leadership." From this perspective, "employer ideologies" were viewed as critical determinants of industrial peace or conflict. Others attached greater importance to the behavior of union leaders in first determining employer ideologies, but both approaches—whether they began with capital or with labor—were premised on a "strict parallelism" between the responses of both parties.^[6]

The interactive quality of this argument is at once its major strength and its major weakness. By drawing attention to the reflexive character of union and employer actions, the "mirror analogy" offers a dynamic model that is especially well suited for understanding changes in labor relations over time. But in treating unions and employers as simple reflections of each other, it becomes difficult if not impossible to distinguish cause from effect. Without a theory about the sources of union and employer behavior, we cannot know whether management created labor in its own image or whether in fact it was the other way around.^[7]

The question of causation would be of little consequence were it not for the fact that the quality of face-to-face relations is initially structured by the surrounding industrial environment. Thus, labor-management cooperation and low levels of conflict are more characteristic of some industries than others. To make sense of these interindustry patterns, economists came up with a more structuralist explanation linking employer responses to the character of the product market. The argument is that, ceteris paribus, firms whose markets are protected from cost-cutting competition are in a better position to promote cooperative relations with labor. Not only do they receive higher rates of profit with which to "buy" labor peace, but they are also, as sheltered producers, able to pass on added labor costs to consumers through higher prices.^[8] Much the same reasoning underlies the claims of "revisionist" historians who contend that the largest and most monopolistic firms—the so-called corporate liberals—have traditionally been the most supportive of collective bargaining and labor's right to organize.^[9]

Both arguments assume that sheltered producers, once they recognize the importance of pacifying labor, will choose to do so by allowing some portion of their "monopoly rents" to trickle down to "their" workers. But they may also choose a more belligerent route to working-class pacification, using their vast economic resources not to co-opt but to destroy unions. Or, more commonly, they may alternate between the two strategies: monopoly rents that one year are used to raise wages may be used the next to recruit strikebreakers. The conclusion seems inescapable that, as Randy Hodson put it, concentrated market power "appears to operate as a double-edged sword, providing an expanded base of revenues, from which wage increases may be secured, as well as providing heightened corporate power, which may be used to undermine worker power."^[10]

This element of indeterminacy is greatly reduced in situations where market power is low. For unprotected firms earning smaller rates of profit, the "corporate liberal" strategy of attempting to buy labor peace simply is not an option that individual employers are willing to entertain; and even if it was, the competitive reality of the market would require them to respond in the way that is perceived as most cost-efficient in the short run. As a result, competitive-sector employers normally face more uniform economic pressures, which compel them to resist unions.

But it would be misleading to explain employer actions simply as results of product markets, even highly competitive ones. Indeed, some of the most accommodating employers in the country have been found in traditionally competitive industries such as bituminous coal mining, building construction, and long-distance trucking. In such cases, the lack of fit between market characteristics and employer behavior is no accident. It does, however, reflect the failure of most economically oriented observers to consider the intervening role of organizational processes; as economist Almarin Phillips notes, few of his colleagues ever look beyond the interests of individual firms to the conditions affecting interfirm coordination and organization.^[11]

The study of interfirm collaboration has been taken up by organizational theorists, mostly through research on corporate networks. Various dimensions of intercorporate life have been systematically examined, particularly the strength and direction of

interlocks, the centrality of finance capital, and the processes of political mobilization.^[12] Although this research has shed considerable light on the interorganizational structure of corporate capitalism, we still know relatively little about the conditions that allow employers to organize themselves within the industrial relations arena.

The following analysis illuminates the process of employer organization through a comparison of shipowner responses on the two coasts. Incorporating the insights of the interactive model as well as certain arguments advanced by labor economists, it acknowledges the influence of union-employer interaction on the one hand and product market competition on the other. But, as we will see, neither of these variables adequately accounts for the pattern of employer responses on the waterfront. Our analysis therefore turns to an investigation of organizational dynamics, in which differences in employer responses are traced to the shipowners' relative capacities for self-organization.

Employer Responses on the Waterfront

During the interwar years, the maritime industry closely approximated the economist's model of perfect competition. With a large number of suppliers and little to differentiate one from the other, shipping was a risky, highly competitive undertaking. Profit margins, never very wide to begin with, all but disappeared with the slump in shipping activity following the stock market crash. In 1931, 83 percent of all American-owned intercoastal carriers lost money, as did 36 percent of coastwise companies (servicing either the Pacific or Atlantic seaboard) and 37 percent of operators engaged in overseas trade.^[13] For individual shippers already operating close to the margin, failure to "hold the line" meant financial ruin, while for the industry as a whole, stiff competition from alternative modes of domestic transportation as well as from foreign shipping lines exerted a strong downward pressure on wages and other variable costs of production. The competitive nature of the product market severely limited most employers' ability to afford unions, thus creating an industrywide intolerance to labor organization.^[14]

Within the constraints imposed by industry economics, water-

front employers were far more intransigent on the Pacific than in New York. In part, this reflected the different character of the initial contact between labor and capital on the coasts, with employers in the West reacting more aggressively to the strength of syndicalism on the docks—"matching fire with fire," as the shipowners saw it. But whether the first spark was actually struck by the union or by the employers is difficult to say. What is clear, though, is that employer fires raged on waterfronts all across the country regardless of the character of the union. On the Gulf Coast, shipowners "energetically opposed" the ILA, despite the union's unquestionably "conservative philosophy and moderate actions." Before World War I, Southern shipowners fought the conservative ILA with determination, deploying the full range of anti-union weapons then available to "eradicate any vestige of organized labor" from the waterfront.^[15] It was much the same story on the Great Lakes, where the ILA, led by District President Daniel Keefe, was characterized as "anti-radical to the point of being radical." Keefe's collaborationist policies, marked by his absolute refusal to authorize any form of strike action, earned for him "only the strongest words of commendation" from local employers.^[16] And yet, as on the Gulf, union moderation failed to elicit a like response from employers. Instead, Great Lakes employers "displayed a solidarity, determination, and ruthlessness unequaled on the coasts." If, as the interactive model suggests, labor gets what it deserves, then clearly the noncombative unions on the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes were shortchanged.^[17]

Thus it is not likely that labor radicalism alone caused employer resistance on the West Coast; rather, it merely brought such resistance to the surface. So, too, did the competitive nature of the product market, which compelled shipowners on both coasts to oppose unions. The reason they were so much more aggressive in the West than in New York had less to do with the organization of labor than with the organization of capital—specifically, the shipowners' relative abilities to constitute themselves as a class of actors in opposition to the longshoremen.

In shipping—as in most competitive product markets—the capacity for employer self-organization grew as the industry itself became more concentrated. In England, for example, ship-

owner associations did not really take hold until after the turn of the century, when the process of concentration had advanced far enough to create a few large firms whose consolidated economic strength and more expansive vision enabled them to provide leadership as well as organizational direction for the industry as a whole. Summarizing these developments, Hobsbawm writes: "On the waterside, employers had to achieve a degree of concentration which allowed them to see the problem as one of the industry as a whole, and not merely as one of individual entrepreneurs or sections within it; or else sections of large employers, with wider views, had to be effectively counterposed to the multiplicity of small ones with a narrower outlook."^[18] In the United States, too, the industry had to reach a high degree of concentration before employer organization became possible. On the Great Lakes, the massive Isthmian Line, a corporate subsidiary of U.S. Steel, was the driving force behind the Lake Carriers Association. The powerful Lykes-Ripley shipping combine took charge of organizing its smaller Gulf Coast competitors, while on the Pacific Coast, this crucial leadership role was collectively assumed by the "Big Three" firms of Matson, American-Hawaiian, and Dollar.^[19] In each case, capital concentration enhanced the shipowners' capacity for self-organization, which—given the competitiveness of the product market—manifested itself in vigorous employer opposition to unions.

In New York, the port's largest domestic lines confronted a similarly competitive product market. However, unlike shipowners elsewhere, they ended up cooperating with the union. Although the conservative character of the East Coast ILA may have moderated employer hostility to some extent, what set the port's employers apart from other shipowners was the wider dispersion of capital, which left local shipping interests leaderless and without direction.

Table 1 compares the extent of capital concentration in New York and on the West Coast for 1930. Compiled from records of the American Bureau of Shipping, it ranks, on the basis of vessel ownership, the ten largest domestic lines headquartered in both regions. The aggregate vessel tonnage of the ten largest companies in each region was approximately the same: 1.2 million tons on the

Pacific as compared to 1.1 million in New York. But as Table 1 reveals, the overall distribution of vessel tonnage was very different. In the West, vessel ownership was concentrated among the Big Three—Matson, American-Hawaiian, and Dollar. Together they accounted for more than three-fifths (63 percent) of the tonnage held by the ten largest West Coast lines. The concentration was so marked that Dollar, the third-ranked firm, had more than twice the holdings of the next largest company. In contrast, vessel ownership in New York was more evenly distributed, with no single line enjoying more than a 20 percent advantage over its nearest-ranked competitor. The top three New York lines held about two-fifths (40 percent) of all tonnage on the East Coast, considerably less than their counterparts on the West Coast.

These differences in the levels of capital concentration significantly shaped employer responses in each region. The more concentrated structure of shipping in the West allowed the Big Three lines to play a decisive leadership role on the Pacific Coast. Already backed into a corner by the industry's low tolerance for unionism, then forced to confront a well-organized and militant labor force, the Big Three came out fighting, using their superior economic muscle to galvanize the many smaller firms around an uncompromisingly anti-union program. In New York, however, the more even distribution of shipping capital produced a leadership vacuum. Without an organizational center of gravity, the many medium-size employers were scarcely able to initiate, much less enforce, any plan of portwide action for dealing with labor.

The organizational ability of New York's domestic lines, already diminished by the wider dispersion of capital, was undermined still further by the deep fragmentation of the local maritime economy. Unlike the West Coast where the largest American commercial lines clearly dominated the industry, shipping in New York was more evenly parceled out among domestic commercial operators, subsidized U.S. government lines, and powerful foreign shippers. Though trade agreements and international maritime law prevented certain classes of shippers from directly competing with one another, the presence of three distinct groups of employers made the search for portwide unity that much more elusive. Lacking both a core leadership group at the top and an enduring basis for solidarity at the bottom, the shipowners' intolerance toward union-

ism was expressed not in collective resistance—as on the West Coast—but rather through informal modes of accommodation between individual shipping lines and the port's conservative union leadership.

The Big Three Organize the Pacific

Employers on the West Coast vigorously opposed organized labor from the very beginning. In 1914, well before the MTW was a force on the docks, San Francisco shipowners formed the openshop Waterfront Employers Association, the first such organization of its kind anywhere in the country to deal exclusively with longshore labor. Within a few years, employers in each of the major ports had established separate negotiating bodies for sailors and longshoremen. This "departmentalization" plan altered the basic contours of the emerging marine working class, splintering an already fragmented labor force along traditional craft lines and reasserting the primacy of occupation over industry as the basis of collective action. In the words of a leading maritime historian, this formal reorganization "made it appear that there was no common interest between shore workers and the men who sailed the ships—a strategy which prevented all the waterfront workers from uniting along industrial lines for many years."^[20]

The Big Three were prime movers in these early reorganization efforts. Through their control of the San Francisco employers' association, which provided leadership to local associations in the Northwest and San Pedro, they exercised a significant influence on coastwide policy. According to Thomas Plant, past president of the San Francisco association, American-Hawaiian was the "moving spirit" behind the city's waterfront employers, with Matson, Dollar, and two smaller lines playing an important supportive role throughout the 1920s.^[21]

Pacific shipowners grew restive with the onset of the Depression. Plant, a corporate vice-president with American-Hawaiian, assumed the presidency of the San Francisco waterfront employers group. Under his aggressive leadership, West Coast shipowners adopted an increasingly belligerent posture toward longshore unionism. In March 1934, with twelve thousand longshoremen on the Pacific Coast preparing to walk out in support of closed-shop

recognition of the ILA and union-controlled hiring, Plant defiantly announced that "thousands of men now unemployed will be glad to get the jobs." When the strike finally broke out two months later, Roger Lapham, president of American-Hawaiian, took an equally firm line. Branding strike leaders "out and out Communists," he characterized the demand for union recognition as an attempt to "break down the walls of government."^[22]

The employers at first welcomed the 1934 walkout as an opportunity to finally rid the waterfront of longshore unionism. A government mediator directly involved in pre-strike negotiations later wrote to his superiors at the National Labor Board that "the shipowners were confident of victory and gave me to understand that even if they lost two or three million, it would be worth it to destroy the union."^[23] But the cost of doing battle with the ILA proved far greater than the employers had anticipated. The paralysis of maritime commerce during the first month of the strike idled an estimated $45 million of coastwise cargo. Besides incurring huge losses in revenue, shipowners paid considerable sums out of their own pockets to maintain small-scale, largely symbolic strikebreaking operations in several ports. In San Pedro, where these efforts were most successful, provisions for housing, feeding, and protecting scabs cost local employers nearly $7,000 a day.^[24]

Yet the shipowners remained adamant. Early in the walkout, the mayor of San Francisco convened a meeting with the city's most "prominent shipping men" to discuss the impasse. The shipowners, represented by an officer from each of the Big Three firms and one other company, flatly refused to concede any ground to the union. With these hard-liners dictating employer strategy, the walkout dragged on for three months before the shipowners reluctantly agreed to recognize the ILA.^[25]

Settlement of the 1934 strike failed to soften employers' opposition to the new union. Instead, the shipowners attempted, as the La Follette Committee later described in its report to the U.S. Senate, "to drive a wedge between the radical and conservative elements" in the ILA. Harry Bridges, the fiery young leader of the San Francisco local, was the principal target of this campaign. Early in 1935, Lapham traveled to Washington to personally urge the Secretary of Labor to initiate deportation proceedings against Bridges, an Australian immigrant and alleged communist.^[26] When govern-

ment cooperation was not readily forthcoming, San Francisco employers turned to conservative union officers for help in dislodging Bridges. Over a period of several months, the shipowners—again led by the Big Three—covertly supplied money, organizing resources, advice, and encouragement to conservative ILA leaders at both the district and the international levels. Summing up these efforts in a confidential memo in the spring of 1935, Plant wrote:

We have worked all angles—the Department of Labor, J.P. Ryan, Lewis, Peterson, and other conservative ILA leaders on this coast. Our only apparent hope of progress lies in trying to persuade the conservative leaders that if they wanted to preserve anything for the ILA, they would have to set their own house in order.... We have had reason to believe that [conservatives] Lewis and Peterson and some of the others are really making progress. It is, of course, a slow process. It is obvious that if we do anything to hurt Lewis and Peterson and the other conservatives at this time, we nullify all the work they are doing in their efforts to clean out the radicals.^[27]

But conservative ILA leaders were in no position to rally the rank and file behind any such anti-radical crusade. Recognizing this, the employers embraced a more confrontational approach. "I am for decisive action at this time," Lapham declared in presenting his "suspension program" before a strategy meeting of the waterfront employers in the fall of 1935. His proposal called for unilaterally suspending relations with the ILA until its radical leadership publicly agreed to clamp down on unauthorized job actions. In this way, Lapham argued, they would pit Bridges and other union leaders, who were contractually bound to enforce the existing agreement, against an increasingly restive rank and file. Lapham's proposal encountered strong opposition from many smaller employers who saw it as dangerously provocative. Reservations were also expressed by several New York-based intercoastal lines. But the Big Three once again prevailed. In December, representatives from American-Hawaiian, Matson, and a leading British line were sent east to shore up support for the suspension program. Shipowners on both coasts "are said to be in constant contact," reported the New York Times, "and well informed sources indicate the employers are ready for a showdown."^[28]

The shipowners patiently waited for an appropriate situation to

execute their suspension program. Employer documents from this period, as summarized by the La Follette Committee, reveal "a somewhat startling spectacle of a group of employers, who, having determined to engage the unions with which they had agreements in a struggle that would interrupt commerce and business on a wide scale, were unable to find a pretext for initiating the conflict that could be put reasonably before the public and the unions."^[29] A suitable opportunity finally presented itself in April 1936, when the Santa Rosa, an intercoastal steamer with a crew of strikebreakers, docked at San Pedro. Declaring the Santa Rosa "unfair," local marine workers refused to service the nonunion vessel. The employers decided to discharge all passengers and mail in San Pedro and then reroute the Santa Rosa north in an attempt to unload its remaining "hot cargo." When the disputed vessel reached San Francisco, it was greeted by an angry crowd of pickets dispatched by the Maritime Federation of the Pacific. Even though the port's longshoremen voted not to join the picket line on the grounds that the entire incident "was a bum beef," the shipowners used the boycott of the Santa Rosa as an excuse to suspend relations with their union.

It immediately became apparent that removing Bridges from office, rather than the public issue of contract compliance, was the employers' main objective, as they announced that the entire port would remain shut "until Harry Bridges is no longer head of the union." But this smoothly executed lockout backfired. Instead of discrediting Bridges, the employers' attack transformed him into a martyr, rallying to his defense not only rank-and-file longshoremen but also some of San Francisco's most conservative and respected labor leaders. After the port had been tied up for one week, "Bloody Mike" Casey, an old-line Teamster leader who had openly clashed with Bridges during the 1934 waterfront strike, presented a motion to the Central Labor Council condemning the shipowners. "We can't let the employers tell us who will represent us," he argued, "no matter what we may think of the particular leader who happens to be in question." With the rest of the labor movement contemplating sympathetic action in support of the longshoremen, the shipowners acquiesced, opening the port the following morning.^[30]

Calm had hardly returned to the waterfront when battle lines

began forming once again. In June, an eight-member "Coast Committee for the Shipowners" was assembled to coordinate employer efforts aimed at modifying the longshore agreement scheduled to expire in a few months. Chaired by Plant of American-Hawaiian and including both Dollar and Matson representatives, the Coast Committee approached contract negotiations with extreme inflexibility, issuing a series of relatively inconsequential but firm ultimatums to the union. In this acrimonious atmosphere, the ILA's "fairly moderate demands"—as the Pacific Shipper, a leading industry journal, characterized the union's position—were rejected outright by the Coast Committee. During the final days of negotiations, a coalition of twenty-six European and East Coast American lines broke with the Coast Committee and offered the ILA a separate agreement. Describing the offer as "virtually a capitulation," the commercial press reported that "it struck the waterfront like an earthquake."^[31]

Buoyed by the prospect of an imminent settlement, the Pacific Shipper editorialized that the employers' conciliatory mood evidenced "the lessons which the shipowners have learned in more than two years of incessant contact with the modern labor problem. It explains why they are confident that the disputes will be settled by arbitration and conciliation in the long run; why they are neither as reactionary nor as craven as they have been painted ... why such of them as did not know the virtues of moderation before have discovered them now." But if some shippers had learned the virtues of moderation, the Big Three were not among them. Working feverishly behind the scenes, they patched up the schism within their ranks and pressed forward with strike preparations. As the union later charged, a "minority group ... known on the coast as the 'Big Three,' blocked all reasonable efforts for peaceful settlement." The rift among the employers was acknowledged even by industry sources. Midway through the ensuing three-month walkout, the Pacific Shipper conceded that the aggressive methods of the Big Three "have been questioned by other operators—even to the extent of breaking away from their leadership."^[32]

The 1936–1937 strike ended without significant gains by either side. But the employers came away with a deeper understanding of the need for regional organization. The "go it alone" attitude of many shipowners, exemplified by the pre-strike defection

of twenty-six companies from Coast Committee policy, had produced only divisiveness and defeat. To combat the growing solidarity of the marine working class, individual lines, even local port associations, were no longer any match. What the shipowners needed, insisted Lapham, parodying the Wobblies, was nothing less than "One Big Union of Employers." Lapham's continued pleading for solidarity was finally heeded in the summer of 1937, and the Waterfront Employers' Association of the Pacific Coast (WEA) was born.^[33]

Forming their own association was an essential first step on the road to employer organization, but for the shipowners to reach their intended destination the WEA still had to win over the very constituents it was created to represent. First, however, the WEA had to forge an industrywide consensus out of the immediate and sometimes conflicting interests of its potential members. Organizational survival demanded proof that the new association, unlike the short-lived Coast Committee, was capable of representing the entire industry, not just a segment of it.

This issue of representativeness holds the key to any successful combination of capital. If an employer association is to be effective, it must be clearly demarcated from its constituent members; the association must acquire, in the words of Clark Kerr and Lloyd Fisher, "an institutional character and identity somewhat distinct from that of any of its member firms."^[34] Transposed into the language of structuralist Marxism, the employer association—much like the state in capitalist society—requires some independence or "relative autonomy" from individual capitalists in order to function effectively as a representative of the industry (or class) as a whole.

Such autonomy was especially critical for the WEA. The fallingout between the Big Three and the twenty-six defecting lines made it imperative that the WEA demonstrate at the outset its independence from either faction. Accordingly, its founding board of directors sought a neutral administrator from outside the industry to head the organization. Almon Roth, comptroller of Stanford University for eighteen years, was ultimately chosen, not "for his ship operating experience, but for his ability to solve public relations problems and to reconcile diverse points of view, " observed the Pacific Marine Review, a usually reliable industry journal. With an

industry "outsider" at its head, the WEA enjoyed greater organizational autonomy than any of its predecessors, including the many local port associations and the Coast Committee.^[35]

But the concentrated structure of the industry sharply limited the WEA's independence from the largest employers. This was perhaps most evident in the procedures for allocating votes to each member company. Table 2, compiled from internal employer documents, shows the strength of the major voting blocks within the WEA at the time of its incorporation, as determined by the total volume of tonnage shipped through Pacific Coast ports during 1936. West Coast operators, including both deepwater and coastwise lines, held a clear majority of all votes. Within this majority block, the Big Three accounted for more votes than either the thirty-nine coastwise schooner companies or the six other deepwater lines. The Big Three, with fifty-one votes between them, directly controlled almost one-fourth of the total votes allocated to all member companies of the WEA. A more detailed breakdown of voting strength shows that only eight other companies received as many as three votes each and, of this small group, only two lines had more than six votes.

Underpinning the Big Three's political power within the WEA was, of course, their economic supremacy within the industry itself. Size alone was an important factor in their ability to dictate to other employers. Smaller companies, lacking the vast economic resources available to the Big Three, were in no position to challenge their leadership and risk provoking a costly rate war that they were sure to lose. The prospect of being slowly "starved out" of business kept many small firms in line.^[36]

Although size was an important part of the Big Three's success, economic centrality was even more critical. By the early 1930s an expansive corporate network had developed in the West, with the Big Three constituting its core. Dollar's holdings included five vessels operated under the name of the Admiral Line, along with a half-million-dollar investment in the American Mail Line, the fifth largest company on the West Coast. American-Hawaiian's fleet included seven vessels belonging to the Williams Steamship Company, a wholly owned subsidiary; half ownership of the twenty-one-vessel Oceanic and Oriental Navigation Company; and ten thousand shares of stock, valued at half a million dollars, in the

Pacific-Atlantic Steamship Company, the fourth largest company on the Pacific Coast. Matson's holdings included the other half of the Oceanic and Oriental Navigation Company and an additional sixteen ships belonging to the Los Angeles Steamship Company and the Oceanic Steamship Company, both wholly owned subsidiaries. In short, the Big Three were really more than three, with sizable financial investments in at least a half dozen other lines.^[37]

The Big Three were thus in a class by themselves. Large enough to discipline their smaller rivals and financially tied to a host of other firms, they had little difficulty imposing their views on the rest of the West Coast. Occupying the commanding heights of the industry, the Big Three were in a position to provide leadership and organizational direction for the multiplicity of smaller operators who passively, and sometimes reluctantly, followed them down a path of maximum resistance to unionism.

Employer Disorganization in New York

The maritime industry in New York was marked by a wider dispersion of capital than in the West. Whereas shipping on the Pacific was dominated by three large firms, the economic landscape in New York was cluttered with more than a dozen medium-size commercial American lines. Although they were as intolerant of

unionism as their West Coast counterparts were, New York's domestic shippers were handicapped by a lack of portwide leadership, which left them poorly and incompletely organized. Unable to resist collectively, individual lines cultivated informal, often collaborative, relations with local ILA leaders whose deeply ingrained conservatism prevented them from fully exploiting the employers' organizational weaknesses.

The moderating influence of employer disorganization on the New York waterfront was evident as early as 1907 when, during a wildcat dock strike, several coastwise companies broke a "solidarity pact" with deepwater lines in order to accommodate union wage demands. After settling the strike, the shipowners were still unable to agree on a portwide labor policy, leaving the basic issue of union recognition to be resolved by each company. Few lines formally recognized the ILA, but its presence was tolerated on the more solidly unionized docks. This policy of expediency underscored the importance of self-reliance to New York's already atomized shipowners. Following a decade of such practices, seven separate waterfront associations had emerged to represent the port's increasingly diverse employer interests. This factionalism, concluded a 1918 Labor Department study, is "not particularly favorable for any close association of boat owners.... The result has been a more or less aloofness ... and a jealously guarded independence on the part of private operators."^[38]

Employer disunity, however, was conducive to the growth of longshore unionism in New York. By sounding out weak spots among the shipowners and then targeting the most vulnerable lines, the ILA grew from six thousand members in 1914 to more than forty thousand four years later. In the face of the advancing union, waterfront employers offered little or no resistance, even when the relation of forces was clearly favorable. During the 1919 portwide strike, for example, the shipowners never once threatened to sever relations with the ILA. On the contrary, the degree of support given union leaders in the course of the walkout was, as a contemporary observer noted, "almost without parallel in labor history, and is evidence of the confidence which the shipping interests at the port have in the intention of the organization to observe its agreements."^[39] After the walkout collapsed, the shipowners still failed to retaliate against the defenseless union. Such restraint may

have indeed been partly a measure of the employers' continuing confidence in the ILA's conservative leadership, but it also reflected their own capacity for self-organization—limited as it was by the absence of an industrywide leadership group on the waterfront.

This is not to say that leadership dynamics alone determine how employers will respond to unions. Particularly in competitive product markets, it is also necessary to consider how market forces differentially shape the economic interests of rival employers. Where individual firms compete on a more or less equal footing, industrywide resistance remains relatively easy to organize. This, it seems, was the key to employer organization in New York City's fragmented and leaderless garment industry. Down by the docks, however, where shipowners were internally divided by differing economic ability to tolerate unionism, unity in the face of organized labor was far more difficult to achieve and even harder to maintain.

A leading source of employer disunity on the New York waterfront was the sizable presence of government operators. Commissioned under renewable cost-plus contracts let by the United States Shipping Board, government lines were effectively insulated from market competition. Consequently, they found it easier to absorb the costs of unionism than did their commercial competitors. At the same time, Shipping Board operators, as representatives of the federal government, were necessarily more sensitive to public opinion than were private interests: they could hardly expect to treat their own workers as harshly as commercial operators treated theirs without being accused of harboring anti-labor biases.^[40]

These conciliatory government operators were a force to be reckoned with in New York.^[41] In 1929, government vessels carried almost 10 percent of all cargo handled through the North Atlantic custom district, compared to less than 1 percent on the Pacific Coast. As late as 1931, almost three years after the Shipping Board had transferred its entire Pacific Coast fleet to private ownership, regular government service to New York was still being provided by eight separate lines with a total of sixty-seven vessels. Adding to the government's already considerable influence was the fact that the port's largest domestic carrier—the 187,000-ton United States Line—was under exclusive contract to the Shipping Board.^[42]

Alongside government operators stood some of Europe's most powerful commercial shipping lines. Before World War I, Euro-

pean influence had been so pervasive in New York that the port's overseas shippers organized a Foreign Commerce Club to promote their common interests. The withdrawal of most European vessels from the transatlantic carrying trade during the war afforded a brief respite from foreign competition. But the postwar resumption of commercial shipping restored European supremacy on the North Atlantic. By 1920, more than half of the nation's overseas waterborne commerce was being carried in foreign ships. To protest America's steadily deteriorating position in foreign trade, Herbert Hebermann, president of the Export Steamship Company, then the largest private New York line flying the American flag, resigned from the city's leading commercial association. In tendering his resignation from the New York Maritime Exchange, Hebermann declared that "it was time foreign interests ceased to have a share in the direction of the American merchant marine."^[43]

Foreign influence on the East Coast can also be seen in statistics on overseas commerce. Table 3 compares the volume of domestic and foreign cargo shipments reported for the Port of New York and the Pacific Coast for 1930. The figures on coastwise and intercoastal trade provide a negative measure of foreign penetration, for both categories of domestic shipping were reserved by federal maritime law for American flag ships. On this basis alone, more than three-fourths (80 percent) of all cargo passing through Pacific Coast ports was legally protected from foreign competition, compared to less than two-thirds (62 percent) of all shipments in New York. The volume of overseas trade represents a more direct measure of foreign influence. Table 3 shows the profound regional disparity in foreign trade, which, in relative shares, was almost two times larger in New York (38 percent) than on the Pacific Coast (20 percent).^[44]

What these aggregate tonnage figures only begin to suggest is the greater economic power wielded by foreign lines in New York. The heavily trafficked North Atlantic shipping corridor connecting Europe and the United States, already supporting many of the world's largest steamship lines, experienced a wave of corporate consolidations as a result of the Depression. In 1930, Germany's two largest lines pooled their enormous resources, bringing threefourths of that nation's tonnage directly under their control. Brit-

ish shippers retaliated with rationalized transatlantic sailings and mergers. Less than a year later, Britain's four largest companies held in excess of two million gross tons. France's largest line then met this challenge by augmenting its fleet with modern combination passenger-cargo vessels.^[45]

Whereas New York's commercial shippers were, according to one industry observer, "hard-pressed to hold a footing" against such established maritime powers as Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France, Norway, and Sweden, American lines engaged in the transpacific trade confronted a more decentralized, less competitive Japanese fleet, along with a small number of tramp steamers and European vessels engaged in round-the-world service.^[46] Restricted to the West Coast's comparatively small overseas market, foreign lines lacked both the means and the motives to challenge their American hosts. Instead, they tried to "get along," as Paul St. Sure, former head of the Pacific Maritime Association, explained in a 1957 interview:

The foreign lines on this coast represent a minority of tonnage. They've always taken the position, at least until recently, that "we are visitors in your country. We are a minority group, even on the waterfront. We should not dictate to you how you should handle your labor problems. We would like to get along, but if we can't, we're not going to tell you how to do it."^[47]

In sharp contrast, the highly concentrated European lines servicing the East Coast operated far more independently of domestic shipowners. And, as in the case of government operators, their independence took the form of a more accommodating stance toward dockside unionism. Foreign lines were better able to absorb higher stevedoring costs. With most voyages originating overseas, European vessels typically covered greater distances, spending more of their time on the open seas than in port. Unlike domestic carriers confined to the intercoastal trade, whose routes took them from port to port, discharging and taking on cargo along the way, foreign lines docked only at ports of origin and destination. Consequently, cargo handling costs constituted a smaller, and therefore more affordable, expense for Europe's deepwater lines. Then, too, foreign operators had a stronger interest in cooperating with dockside labor. With their own offshore crews, they had little to gain by engaging an American longshore union in an extended and possibly costly confrontation. Their main concern was keeping the lid on offshore labor costs, which they attempted to do by fighting unionization aboard ship, not on the docks.^[48]

The presence of so many competing interests undermined employer solidarity on the waterfront. When conciliatory foreign and government operators clashed with the port's more intransigent commercial operators, the resulting employer factionalism often worked to the advantage of the union. Such was the case during contract negotiations in 1931. The shipowners opened negotiations that year by demanding a significant cut in wages. After the union balked, industry leaders hastily assembled a Committee of Ten to bargain on behalf of all waterfront employers in the port. But the appearance of unity masked deep-seated divisions, particularly between foreign and subsidized government lines, on the one hand, and domestic commercial lines, on the other. The former, generally more tolerant of unionism, openly voiced their desire to

avoid a costly work stoppage. ILA leaders then promised that, in the event of a walkout, they would continue supplying union labor to any company willing to meet their counterproposal. In the absence of a few powerful American lines capable of enforcing discipline—as the Big Three in the West would be able to do when faced with a similar situation in 1936—the threat of a selective strike shattered the employers' fragile unity. Within hours, Ryan reported that several transatlantic lines had "expressed a willingness to meet the demands of the men." As more foreign companies defected, all seven Shipping Board lines in New York promptly signed with the union. The Committee of Ten, now representing the more intransigent private American operators, reluctantly accepted the union's wage offer, although two of the largest domestic shippers, Grace Lines and United Fruit, refused to sign a union contract.^[49]

This experience drove home the importance of establishing some form of portwide organization, if only as a defensive measure to prevent the union from playing off one shipowner against another. A few months later the New York Shipping Association (NYSA) was formed for the explicit purpose of representing all of the port's deepwater lines, both foreign and domestic. Its inclusive membership finally enabled the shipowners to contest the union's effective use of "whipsaw" tactics. One of the association's principal objectives was to secure an agreement stipulating that the contract could not be changed through "individual action on the part of a company or union official." This provision was "mainly inserted to deter the union from concentrating on the weakness of an individual employer to establish a precedent-setting action to bind all employers and the New York Shipping Association."^[50]

The NYSA provided a formal instrument for collectively responding to the union. But its voting procedures, reflecting the fragmented state of the industry, rendered it all but powerless. Unlike the employers' association in the West, which codified the influence of the Big Three through proportional representation, each member of the NYSA received one vote, regardless of size. To further restrain powerful minorities, all major policy decisions required approval by three-fourths of all members. With numerous small voting blocks exercising effective veto power, no single inter-

est group possessed sufficient strength to formulate basic policies on any controversial matters. Hamstrung by excessive democracy, the NYSA succumbed to bureaucratic inertia, capable only of passively reacting to union overtures.^[51]

Many of the port's larger lines, frustrated in their attempts to influence the direction of the employer organization, established informal bargaining relations with the ILA. Thus during the 1930s the powerful Clyde-Mallory Line and nine other coastwise companies formed an unofficial negotiating committee to deal directly with the union. A confidential investigation conducted by the United States Maritime Commission elaborated:

The representatives of the ten principal coastwise operating lines find it convenient to meet as a body and negotiate basic terms and conditions with the ILA. The same group acts in the same informal manner in settling disputes of a major character that arise under the agreement.... All other disputes are settled individually between the companies and the union—in most instances it is a matter of a telephone call—no records of settlements or disputes are kept.

Similar informal relations later developed between the employer association itself and the ILA. In 1939 the chairman of the NYSA told a government interviewer that the written contract between both parties was supplemented by "gentlemen's agreements or understandings." Describing their collective bargaining relationship as "one of perfect harmony," the interviewer added that from the standpoint of the employers, "everything is lovely—they wouldn't change anything even if they had a chance. No problems—no trouble—just peace and contentment all around."^[52]

Although these harmonious relations were fundamentally grounded in employer disorganization, the port's urban geography also came into play. Antiquated and congested piers created inordinate delays in discharging cargo, inadequate railroad connections to piers complicated the transfer of rail shipments, narrow surface streets caused trucks to back up for several blocks on main waterfront arteries, and limited space for maneuvering vessels inside the harbor forced additional delays as costly "time charges" piled up. These cramped spatial arrangements provided, in Daniel Bell's phrase, an "economic fulcrum" for industrial racketeering

through the unique system of "public loading" that arose during the 1920s as a response to port congestion. Explaining the origins of loading, Bell writes:

The most expensive cost item in trucking became waiting time. Rather than pay a driver's helper for snoozing on the truck, the practice arose of sending a driver alone to the pier and having him hire a loader from among the "shenangos" or barflies at the nearby saloon. Gradually, through a process of squatters' rights, various individuals began to assert a monopoly on loading at each pier. At first they offered a service; later they began to charge, literally, all that the traffic would bear.... So the toll-gate was established. Whether you needed a loader or not, you had to pay for the service, and on each ton of goods an extra tax was levied.^[53]

Time-conscious shippers were thus placed at the mercy of local union leaders who controlled the loading rackets and who, for an extra fee, could guarantee that a client's shipment would be expedited. Payoffs of this sort, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, became an economic fact of life in New York, tolerated by most shipowners as a necessary cost of conducting business in the world's busiest port. Of course, their generosity was repaid in kind by conservative union leaders who signed "sweetheart" deals, failed to enforce legitimate contracts, and in countless other ways neglected their members' interests. In words that perhaps best convey the collaborative nature of labor relations on the waterfront, a prominent New York stevedoring contractor told a Citizens' Waterfront Committee in 1945 about the collective bargaining process. "We call Ryan in once a year or so," he explained, "and say, 'Joe, how much of a raise do you need to keep the boys in line?'"^[54]

Conclusion

Maritime employers on the two coasts responded very differently to the emergence of working-class opposition on the docks following World War I. Whereas shipowners in the West waged a protracted struggle against longshore unionism, their counterparts in New York established close, and at times openly collaborative, relations with the same union. These differing approaches reinforced

the contrasting political cultures that were taking shape on both coasts.

Shipowner intransigence in the West nourished the rich Wobbly legacy on the docks. Combining the experience of employer resistance with the preexisting syndicalist beliefs of the labor force produced a militant, politically radical working-class culture out of which the union's left-wing leadership emerged in the course of the 1934 strike. As former Wobbly and strike activist Jack Mowrey put it, "The employers organized the longshoremen. No question about it. They were the best organizers we had. It got so bad you couldn't take it any more. They organized the whole West Coast."^[55]

The employer's role in "organizing" the men is also suggested by the evolution of longshore unionism in Tacoma, Washington, where local waterfront employers were the least combative on the coast. Refusing to join the coastwide open-shop crusade after World War I, they instead maintained close and friendly relations with the local ILA, "using entirely Union men and practically working under closed shop conditions." In 1921, while the rest of the West Coast was convulsed in industrial warfare, the port's leading shipowner boasted of the "splendid co-operation between the men and the managers," adding that they had done "everything possible ... to foster good fellowship in Tacoma."^[56] This cooperative atmosphere continued well into the 1930s, sparing Tacoma's longshoremen the radicalizing experience of employer resistance during the crucial years of union building. Consequently, in 1937, when fifteen thousand West Coast dockworkers followed Bridges into the CIO to launch the ILWU, six hundred longshoremen in Tacoma and two smaller satellite ports—still firmly anchored to the conservative AFL—voted to remain behind with the ILA.

Employer moderation in the East had much the same effect. Having seen the shipowners on their best behavior—as men of reason and restraint—New York's longshoremen maintained their healthy skepticism toward ideologies of class conflict. Coupled with the lack of a syndicalist tradition, employer moderation pointed to the reconcilability of class interests. This combination, unlike the West's, spawned a distinctly nonmilitant and conservative political culture, which Ryan skillfully wielded against leftist insurgents for more than two decades.

The very different ways in which shipowners on the coasts responded to unionization were partly influenced by their interactions with labor. In the West, worker radicalism and employer resistance reinforced each other. With the growth of syndicalist, and later Communist, agitation on the docks, the shipowners themselves grew more determined to resist unionization. Just as radicalism galvanized employer opposition in the West, union conservatism in New York moderated somewhat the anti-union inclinations of the port's shipowners.

This is not to suggest, however, that waterfront employers responded like mirrors in simply reflecting the character of dockside unionism. On the contrary, the image cast by labor was never that compelling. Thus ILA leaders on the Great Lakes and the Gulf Coast, as conservative as any in New York, drew considerable heat from local shipowners—more heat, in fact, than those on the West Coast, the hotbed of labor radicalism.

In responding to organized labor, the shipowners were guided not only by the character of the union but by stubborn economic realities as well. The competitive nature of the product market squeezed profits to the point where unionization posed a serious economic threat, particularly for unprotected domestic operators, who proved to be the most intransigent on both coasts. In the West, their intransigence produced militant coastwide resistance, whereas in New York it dissolved into union-employer cooperation. Part of this difference was a result of the conservatism of New York's union leaders and their greater willingness to cooperate. But no matter how cooperative local ILA leaders may have been, driving the union from the docks remained the overriding objective of American commercial shippers everywhere, whether on the Pacific, the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, or the North Atlantic. If New York's employers ended up being the most conciliatory, it was not because the local union was that much more conservative than in other parts of the country, nor was it because the economic interests of the port's shipowners differed that much from those of commercial operators elsewhere.

Rather, the most telling difference between New York and the West Coast was the relative ability of shipowners to constitute themselves as a cohesive social force in opposition to waterfront labor. These varying "class capacities" were determined initially

by differences in industry structure. Concentrated ownership in the West created favorable conditions for unifying individual shipowners, whose limited horizons were subsumed under a broader and more militant vision forcefully articulated by the largest firms. Conversely, the wider dispersion of capital in New York meant that no single leadership group was powerful enough to transcend the many smaller employers and initiate portwide organization.

The relative organizational potential of shipowners was then transformed by regional economic processes into markedly different policies toward organized labor. On the Pacific Coast, employers' intransigence, though spurred on by labor radicalism, was mostly a product of their greater capacity for self-organization set within the context of an industrywide intolerance toward unions. In New York, however, the industry's low tolerance for unionism was never realized in employer resistance. There, against a backdrop of labor conservatism, the port's lack of capital concentration created a leadership vacuum at the top, while at the bottom deep economic cleavages among commercial, government, and foreign operators reproduced conditions for employer disorganization. Unable to resist collectively, New York's maritime employers, including even the staunchly anti-union commercial lines, sought instead to neutralize the union by establishing close working relations with local ILA leaders whose control over the loading rackets provided a particularly durable foundation for union-employer collaboration for many years to come.

Although product market competition created strong incentives to resist unions, shipowners on the two coasts were not equally capable of doing so. Effective resistance had to be organized, and that required a sufficient concentration of capital to create regional leadership roles. Capital concentration fulfilled the shipowners' need for centralized leadership in much the same way that the various "vanguard" parties provided the longshoremen with muchneeded leadership of their own. But in neither case was the presence of leadership sufficient to ensure durable organization. Lasting and effective organization also required rank-and-file solidarity based on shared economic interests. For domestic shipowners, such solidarity was achieved on the West Coast but not in New York, where the greater presence of foreign and government lines fractured their

ranks. Leaderless and divided, the port's employers responded in much the same way that disorganized workers have responded throughout history—by cutting the best possible deal they could as individuals.

The organization of capital, then, may not be so different from the organization of labor. On both sides, internal stratification, cross-cutting pressures, different organizational capacities, and other obstacles make the transition to a "class for itself" most uncertain. Facing many of the same challenges, each class will respond differently, in ways that reflect its particular strengths and weaknesses. But the likelihood that either one will succeed in actually constituting itself as a collectivity of actors with a single unified will may be only marginally greater for capital than it is for labor. Whatever organizational advantages employers enjoy are partially offset by the potentially higher costs—including bankruptcy—that may result from coalescing with weak allies, or taking on too powerful an adversary, or committing any number of other tactical blunders in the course of waging the class struggle. To even admit such contingencies into an analysis of class relations is to remind ourselves that capital's own organizational capacities, like labor's, are far from absolute.