Free Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate Page B

or Saxon.” And he worried that this new breed was getting scrawnier: “… many are small and wiry, but …the eagerness of the Italians for work, their willingness to submit to deductions from their wages, leaving a neat little commission to be divided among foremen, saloon keepers, and native bosses—all these considerations insured the permanence of the Italian in longshore work.”
    * Longshore work tends toward the casual and irregular, dependent as it is on shipping schedules, the weather, seasonal variations in business, and global patterns of international politics and trade.
    Some of these European dockworkers brought with them a familiarity with radical politics, and at the very least a working-class solidarity, which made them ripe for unionization and willing to strike, if necessary. It was these same groups of politicized immigrants who helped get five Socialist Party candidates elected to the State Assembly from New York City. Indeed, in 1920, during the so-called “Red Scare,” when the Lusk Legislative Committee investigated subversive activity throughout New York State, it went so far as to prepare an “Ethnic Map” of Manhattan, showing in which neighborhoods the non-Anglo-Saxon nationalities were concentrated, making an unapologetic equation between foreign birth and revolutionary activity.
    Admittedly, the powers that be did have something to worry about. The era around the First World War saw the resurgence of a militant labor movement, culminating in a national wave of strikes during 1919. That year the federal government had decided to hold the line on wages, and shipping companies offered longshoremen only a five-cent increase on the regular sixty-five-cents-an-hour pay, and ten cents an hour on overtime. (This insulting five-and-ten offer was sardonically called the Woolworth Award.) When the longshoremen struck, in a wildcat action that paralyzed the port, tying up more than 600 vessels in the harbor, the head ofthe union, International Longshoremen's Association president T. V. O'Connor, who opposed the strike, said it was the work of “the Italian element, aided by German sympathizers.” The press agreed that it was a “Bolshevik conspiracy,” led by foreigners, chiefly Italians, men from “166 Sackett Street in Brooklyn.” This address was the headquarters of the International Workers of the World—the “Wobblies,” as they were called—above a fruit-and-vegetable stand. (By coincidence, I live on Sackett Street, in an old Italian neighborhood, and my heart raced when I saw that in print; but when I looked for number 166, I found the entire block had been torn down and replaced by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.) The truth was, the rank-and-file dockworkers had walked out in 1919 without either union or IWW leadership, and only afterward appealed to the Wobblies for guidance.
    “The strike ended in the first week of November,” wrote labor historian Calvin Winslow. “It failed for many reasons: certainly the odds were overwhelming—the unwavering opposition of the union leadership, the shipping companies, and the federal government. Federal soldiers actually entered the Harbor in the second week of the strike, though their presence was mostly symbolic. They confined their activities to the army terminals and never directly confronted the strikers. The strikers themselves were undoubtedly exhausted by this conflict, as must have been their families, existing a month without wages or strike benefits.”
    There was not another major strike on the waterfront for twenty-six years, though working conditions for longshoremen remained as problematic as ever. Joseph Ryan, who ruled the International Longshoremen's Association throughout this period, getting himself elected the union's “president for life,” saw to it that there would be no strikes, by promoting a system that kept the men weak and subservient. The cornerstone of this system was maintaining an oversupply of labor,