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ers. The Governor sent 1700 National Guardsmen in to the ports to restore
order—meaning to stop the strike—and they installed barbed wire and
machine gun nests and were given orders to shoot to kill the protestors. The
Teamsters, however, still refused to move any goods so over 250 ships were
stalled between San Diego and Seattle, and the companies were now losing
$1 million daily. The mayor and owners blamed “Communists” for the strike
and violence and they clearly meant Bridges, who headed the Longshoremen
and then called a General Strike for the entire city. All of San Francisco
seemed ready to explode into class warfare as Bridges, the dockworkers, the
Teamsters, and a number of Communists were refusing to back down against
the violence of the state. But Bridges’ tactic worked. After shutting down
the entire city for 4 days, the shippers finally gave in. The Longshoremen and
Teamsters got their demands and more violence was averted. Again, rather
than rely on politicians and drawn-out negotiations, labor took to the streets
to get a living wage and better work conditions.
As much as the San Francisco action alarmed Americans, perhaps the larg-
est and most violent labor confrontation began on Labor Day, September 3d,
in South Carolina when 65,000 textile workers walked out of work. Within a
day it grew to over 200,000 workers, and a day later to 325,000. Angry
confrontations and violence were the norm, none worse than on September
6th, at the so-called Honea Path Massacre in South Carolina. Sheriffs and
armed strikebreakers fired on pickets there, killing 7 and wounding over 20.
“It was on Labor Day,” an Atlanta labor lawyer observed, “that I witnessed the
closest thing this country has had to a revolution.” The massacre caused more
textile workers to join the strike, and it moved northward. In Rhode Island,
a crowd of 3000-4000 came out after state troopers with machine guns and
local police had fired on them earlier. They imprisoned scabs in the factory
and then attacked and took possession of the plant until deputy sheriffs shot
5 and 300 more Guardsmen arrived on the scene. Within days, by September
12th, strikers and National Guardsmen were engaged in class struggle in every
state of New England but Vermont and New Hampshire. In nearby
Pennsylvania, about 50,000 textile workers went on strike. It had become one
of the biggest labor actions in U.S. history and was growing. FDR implored
the mill owners and workers to settle their disputes and urged the firms to
rehire all the union organizers and workers they had fired, but the bosses
refused, so as late as October 23d, over 340 mills remained shut down, while