1. Earl Browder interview with W. Goldsmith, August 1955, Box 9 Closed, Daniel Bell Papers, Tamiment Institute, New York University. Levenstein argues that "in general, the Communists were almost always better off the more remote they were from the control of Browder and his theorists, who were obsessive in applying 'the line'" ( Communism, Anti-Communism, and the CIO, p. 84).

2. The quote on scientific management is taken from David W. Mabon, "The West Coast Waterfront and Sympathy Strikes of 1934" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1966), p. 11. Cargo figures are cited in Clements, "San Francisco Maritime and General Strikes," p. 36.

3. Al Langley, interview with author, San Pedro, California, February 4, 1982.

4. Conditions in San Francisco are described in N. Sparks, The Struggle of the Marine Workers (New York: International Pamphlets, 1930), p. 40. Bridges described the shape-up in his 1950 deportation hearing; see United States District Court, Northern District of California, Southern Division, Case no. 32117-H, United States v. Harry Renton Bridges, Henry Schmidt, and J. R. Robertson, 1950, typescript (trial transcript), International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union Library, San Francisco, p. 4782 (hereafter cited as 1950 Deportation Hearing).

5. Bulcke is quoted in Frederick Chiles, "General Strike: San Francisco, 1934—An Historical Compilation Film Storyboard," Labor History 22 (Summer 1981): 437. Marine Workers' Voice, June 1933, p. 2, describes the speed-up.

6. For a closer analysis of the Third Period as it pertains to Communist trade union work, see James R. Prickett, "New Perspectives on American Communism and the Labor Movement," Political Power and Social Theory 4 (1984): 3-36. Harvey Klehr, in The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 12-17, discusses the doctrine of social fascism.

7. Cochran, Labor and Communism, pp. 43, 357n.

8. The MWIU's preamble is reproduced in Sparks, Struggle of the Marine Workers, pp. 59-60.

9. Bridges is quoted in United States Department of Labor, Official Report of Proceedings Before the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Department of Labor, Docket no. 55073/217, In the Matter of Harry Bridges, Deportation Hearing, 1939, typescript (trial transcript), International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union Library, San Francisco, p. 2602 (hereafter cited as 1939 Deportation Hearing); Orrick Johns, Time of Our Lives: The Story of My Father and Myself (New York: Stackpole, 1937), p. 325.

10. Sam Darcy, "The Great West Coast Maritime Strike," Communist 13 (July 1934): 665.

11. Sam Darcy, "San Francisco General Strike—1934," Hawsepipe: Newsletter of the Marine Workers Historical Association 1 (September-October 1982): 7. Slobodek is quoted in Larrowe, Harry Bridges, p. 13.

12. Party Organizer 6 (January 1933): 26; Waterfront Worker, April 1933, p. 2.

13. Darcy, "San Francisco General Strike," p. 7.

14. Klehr, Heyday of American Communism, p. 124; Levenstein, Communism, Anti-Communism, and the CIO, p. 24.

15. Nelson, "Maritime Unionism," pp. 188-193; Ben B. Jones, interview with author, Mill Valley, California, January 26, 1984.

16. Waterfront Worker, May 1933, P. 5.

17. Western Worker, July 10, 1933, pp. 1, 3.

18. Sam Darcy, interview with author, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, May 10, 1986. Testimony from former CP members indicates that Albion Hall was never conceived as "the beginnings of the CP's dual union for longshoremen," as Andrew Bonthius asserts in "Origins of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union," Southern California Quarterly 59, no. 4 (1977): 423n.

19. Darcy, "Great West Coast Maritime Strike," p. 666; Darcy interview, May 10, 1986.

20. This estimate of Communist strength inside Albion Hall is based on the testimony of former member Eugene Dietrich, who testified against Bridges in 1939; see 1939 Deportation Hearing, p. 1468. Jones is quoted in Larrowe, Harry Bridges, p. 16.

21. Quoted in Chiles, "General Strike," p. 443.

22. Larrowe, Harry Bridges, p. 17.

23. Certain details of the Matson walkout are still in dispute. The book-burning incident, which has become a part of waterfront lore, appears in a number of historical accounts, including Larrowe's authoritative work ( Harry Bridges, p. 19). Yet there are no reports of any such book-burning in the available contemporary sources.

24. Bridges is quoted in Larrowe, Harry Bridges, pp. 19-21; see also Mabon, "West Coast Waterfront and Sympathy Strikes," pp. 18, 19.

25. Radical Albion Hall members led the convention in adopting resolutions against loading Nazi vessels and in support of imprisoned labor leader Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro boys; see Darcy, "Great West Coast Maritime Strike," p. 667.

26. Ibid.

27. The scene in San Francisco is reported in the Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1934, P. 1; Paul Eliel, The Waterfront and General Strike (San Francisco: Hooper, 1934), p. 11.

28. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 263; Darcy, "Great West Coast Maritime Strike," pp. 672, 673.

29. Marine Workers' Voice, November 1933, p. 1; Walter Stack, interview with author, San Francisco, May 28, 1982.

30. Mabon, "West Coast Waterfront and Sympathy Strikes," pp. 8, 9, 16; Meyer Baylin, interview with author, Mill Valley, California, January 23, 1984.

31. Personal correspondence from Sam Darcy to author, dated September 22, 1982.

32. On the party's earlier condemnation of working inside the ILA, see Mabon, "West Coast Waterfront and Sympathy Strikes," p. 202. Browder is quoted in the Western Worker, August 30, 1934, p. 3.

33. "Longshore Labor Conditions in the United States—Part I," Monthly Labor Review 31 (October 1930): 7, 8.

34. Johnnie Dwyer, interview with Debra Bernhardt, November 21, 1980, Immigrant Labor History Collection, Tamiment Institute, New York University.

35. Sam Madell, interview with author, New York, October 6, 1981.

36. Roy Hudson, "The Work of the Marine Union," Party Organizer 7 (May-June 1934): 30.

37. Madell interview, October 6, 1981.

38. One of Darcy's successors, Steve Nelson, who was assigned to District 13 in 1939, offered a similar explanation for the independence of his West Coast comrades. "The California Party," he wrote years later, "... enjoyed more autonomy than most districts because the national leadership was over three thousand miles away, in New York City.... In many ways we set our own course. There was a lively internal life to the organization, due in part to an iconoclastic Western mood. It was the healthiest Party district I'd been in. People talked back to you—they argued their points and did it in plain language, freer of leftist jargon than in most places." See Steve Nelson, James R. Barrett, and Rob Ruck, Steve Nelson: American Radical (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), p. 255.

39. Sam Madell, interview with author, New York, May 6, 1986.

40. Party Organizer 6 (November 1933): 17.

41. Daily Worker, January 12, 1934, p. 3.

42. Hudson, "Work of the Marine Union," pp. 29, 28.

43. Madell interview, May 6, 1986; Jones interview, January 26, 1984.

44. Roy Hudson, "Rooting the Party on the Waterfront," Party Organizer 14 (December 1934): 1164.

45. Kenneth Waltzer, in "The New History of American Communism," Reviews in American History 11 (June 1983): 259, writes that "while affiliated with and obedient to the Comintern, American communism was also shaped by national experience." Prickett, in ''New Perspectives on American Communism," also emphasizes the indigenous sources of organizing strategies and tactics. The same point about the role of Communists on the waterfront is made by Bruce Nelson in "Unions and the Popular Front: The West Coast Waterfront in the 1930s," International Labor and Working-Class History 30 (Fall 1986): 59-78.

46. Staughton Lynd, "The Possibility of Radicalism in the Early 1930s: The Case of Steel," Radical America 6 (November-December 1972): 37-64; Frank Emspak, "The Breakup of the CIO," Political Power and Social Theory 4 (1984): 122, 123. The argument being made here—that the choice of which organizing tactics to follow during the 1930s had a significant impact on Communist success—has its critics; see David Brody, "Radical Labor History and Rank-and-File Militancy,'' Labor History 16 (Winter 1975): 121-122; and Harvey Levenstein, "Economism, Anti-Economism, and the History of the Communist Party," Political Power and Social Theory 4 (1984): 289-295.

47. Putting the importance of strategy bluntly, William Overholt writes: "Had Mao been a better sociologist and a worse military strategist he probably would have lived a short life" ("Sources of Radicalism and Revolution: A Survey of the Literature," in Bialer and Sluzar, Radicalism in the Contemporary Age, p. 334). On the importance of tactical innovation to movement success, see also David R. Cameron, "Toward a Theory of Political Mobilization," Journal of Politics 136 (February 1974), esp. pp. 147-153; Doug McAdam, "Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency," American Sociological Review 48 (December 1983): 735-754; and Jo Freeman, ed., Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies (New York: Longman, 1983), esp. pt. 4. Along with discovering the importance of strategy, movement theorists have come to appreciate the significance of activists; see Richard F. Hamilton and James Wright, New Directions in Political Sociology (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), pp. 40, 41; Richard E. Ratcliff, "Introduction," Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change 6 (1984): xii; David Montgomery, "Spontaneity and Organization: Some Comments," Radical America 7 (November-December 1973): 70-80; and Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984).