by Fred Glass
Thirty-four-year-old socialist Job Harriman came to Los Angeles in 1895 from the Midwest after giving up the pulpit to become a lawyer. He was also seeking a better climate to combat recurrent tuberculosis. Thanks to his impressive speaking ability and strong organizational sense, in 1900 he was asked to run for vice president of the United States with the fledgling Social Democratic Party, soon to become the Socialist Party, USA. Eugene Debs was the party’s presidential candidate. Their ticket drew 100,000 votes and helped bring national recognition to the emerging party.
Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, Harriman functioned both as a Socialist activist and labor lawyer. He became the attorney for the Los Angeles Labor Council, winning friends and admirers for his work on behalf of the victims of the city’s open shop organization, the Merchants and Manufacturers Association (M&MA).
His vision of a peaceful path to democratic socialism was through labor-socialist “fusion:” the belief that workers’ best hope for achieving their goals in the workplace was their union, their best bet in politics was to vote for Socialist candidates, and the two goals would best be served through mutual support.
In Los Angeles Harriman’s view came to predominate, thanks to the uncompromising anti-labor attitude of the city’s business elite, which pushed socialists and unionists toward each another. An important moment in the evolution of labor-socialist fusion occurred in 1907.
At the request of Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the anti-union Los Angeles Times, leader of the M&MA and a close friend and business associate of the corrupt Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, police arrested several leaders of the opposition to Diaz, exiled in Los Angeles. The incarceration and trial of Ricardo Flores Magon, one of the founders of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) touched off a protest movement that quickly spread beyond the Mexican American community. Defense of Magon and his associates, arrested on trumped up charges of “violating neutrality laws,” united the Los Angeles labor movement and political left. PLM activists rubbed shoulders in demonstrations and legal defense committees with anarchists, Socialists, and AFL unionists.
Magon asked Harriman to lead his legal team. He defended the PLM leaders ably; eventually the case against them was dropped. Although Magon’s enemies weren’t through with him. In October 1908 he was extradited to Arizona, convicted on other charges and sent to prison for a year a half.
The rising tide of struggle of Los Angeles workers against the open shop was met with a Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association-led counterattack. The centerpiece of the union assault was a Metal Trades Council strike for the eight-hour day, involving eight unions representing 1500 workers against the largest iron works, ship building companies and tool manufacturers in town, extending to Long Beach. A ten-hour day, low pay, and yellow dog contracts (that stipulate the worker would not join a union) had been the industry standard for years. The workers also had to contend with company spies, whose reports resulted in the firing of any worker determined to be a union member.
San Francisco metal trades unions sent organizers in early 1910 to prepare the ground. They recruited hundreds of metal trades workers into unions—too many to fire. By mid-May, after the employers rejected a proposal for four dollars for an eight-hour day and time and a half for overtime, the workers walked. The Bay Area’s major labor councils and building trades councils, along with the California AFL and state building trades council, formed a General Campaign Strike Committee and assessed their entire memberships twenty-five cents per week, which brought in nine thousand dollars per week (three hundred thousand today) to disburse in strike benefits in Los Angeles.
The M&MA urged landlords to grant the smaller companies shuttered by the strike a reduced rent for the duration. It collected a large war chest. Job Harriman described the struggle to the national AFL convention later that year, informing the delegates that Henry Huntington had personally given one hundred thousand dollars to the bosses’ collective fund.
Parallel to the metal trades strike burned a fierce conflict in the only fully unionized industry in Los Angeles. Through effective use of the boycott in working class communities over the years, brewery workers had won union shops in a half dozen companies. But when they attempted in 1910 to raise the lowest-paid workers’ wages, the companies refused. The workers struck four companies, and the other two firms locked out their employees. They joined leather workers and employees of the major gas works on the sidewalks.
The employers persuaded Mayor George Alexander in mid-June to proclaim that strikers who blocked the streets would be arrested. The following week the police chief began to carry out the threat, and one week later cooperative judges issued injunctions preventing picketers from appearing near the larger struck companies.
This was not enough for the M&MA. On July 1, its attorneys proposed a new law to the City Council. Foreshadowing San Diego’s ordinance banning free speech in 1912, it outlawed picketing, loitering, the display of signs and banners, loud noises and unusual verbal proclamations on the streets of Los Angeles. It also provided for steep fines and imprisonment of guilty parties.
The City Council invited both sides to speak. Harriman, appearing with officers of the metal trades unions and brewery workers, protested that the law would violate basic freedoms of speech and assembly. The Council ignored these arguments, unanimously passing the ordinance. Mayor Alexander dutifully signed it. The jails soon filled with hundreds of strikers, keeping Harriman occupied defending them in court.
If the intent of the law was to demoralize the strikers, it had the opposite effect. Northern California unions sent down more organizers and raised more money, and prevailed on the national AFL to do the same. Only a handful of the jailed picketers were ever convicted. Despite months out of work, the strikers’ ranks remained solid. A boycott on local beer exacted a deep financial toll on the breweries. In the first sign of a crack in the owners’ united front, one of the brewing companies signed a contract with its workers.
By the end of September, the new seven-story Labor Temple on Maple Street, which had opened in February, was a beehive of activity. On its premises, in addition to the offices of the Los Angeles Labor Council and a number of affiliated unions, were the headquarters of the Socialist Party. The party had grown by more than a thousand members since moving in the same day the M&MA presented its anti-picketing ordinance to the City Council. The building also housed offices of the San Francisco union organizers; the local office of the northern California-based General Campaign Strike Committee; and the new Union Labor Political Club, which pledged to endorse candidates who agreed with a labor platform.
On September 30 the breweries, acting against M&MA directives, reached agreement with their unions. Measured by the unprecedented level of union organizing and membership growth, increasingly united labor political action, and public support for major strikes in the face of hostile employer groups and their allies in city government, the Los Angeles labor movement had seemingly arrived at a new position of strength.
Fred Glass is the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (UC Press, 2016) and a former member of the State Committee of California DSA
Stay tuned for next week’s installment of the Labor Corner…