ABSTRACT
The Sailors began a series of organizational steps to isolate the M.W.I.U. The competition with the Communists continued even as the Sailors girded for the waterfront war. In anticipation of violent action by the employers and government, as in Toledo and Minneapolis, and as foreseen in the Northwest, the maritime strikers in the Bay Area realized they must widen the strike. With the June 17 rejection by the rank-and-file of the Ryan “settlement;’ the strikers’ enemies in San Francisco, including the Waterfront Employers Union represented by T.G. “Tear Gas” Plant, and the anti-union Industrial Association, an old enemy of the Sailors, declared a similar intention to “open the port” by force. On July 13, Robert Evans, Bennie Barrena, Thomas Hookey, and Albert Milbourne were sent as S.U.P. delegates to a general strike strategy meeting at the San Francisco Labor Council’s headquarters in the Labor Temple at 16th and Capp Streets.
