Klan Terror, Rough Working Conditions in San Pedro Before Union Organized

The Dispatcher, November 1994
Edited By Harvey Schwartz

John Rodin

Before the 1934 strike my father was blackballed on the waterfront on account of the Wobblies. He wasn’t no Wobbly, but he sympathized with them. He was a union man, he believed in them. In 1924 the KKK raided the hall across from my mother’s house. The meeting was supposed to be an IWW party for the working people.

The KKK come in there and they busted out the window and kicked the people around. We went out the back door where they were cooking coffee and I was pushed in. I still got the scars from here to here. I was nine years old. I remember going home and telling my mother I got burned. Frank Sundstedt’s sister was burned there too. We was in the hospital together. The Wobblies paid for the hospital bill. I guess they got donations.

The KKK wanted my father. They knocked on his door and when he opened it they busted him over the head. My father was bleeding and they had a gun on him. That’s what I remember when I come back from being burned. They thought my father’s house was an arsenal for the Wobblies; that’s what they said. He was just a sympathizer; he figured the Wobblies might do something for the unions.

Frank Sundstedt

I remember the KKK burning crosses on the hillsides and in front of people’s homes. They were out after the foreign born and the Catholics. A number of longshoremen were taken out by the KKK into the Santa Ana Canyon and tarred and feathered just for being trade unionists.

In 1924, the Wobblies and their families were having a social; all of a sudden these KKK’s threw pipes and broke the glass at the doors and came in and started tossing chairs around. They went into the kitchen and dumped this hot coffee on my sister as well as Johnny Rodin. My sister had to learn to walk all over again. She was hospitalized for three weeks. Then they brought her home, but she was bed-ridden for months.

In the 1920s they had a shapeup system down here. You just showed up at the dock where the ship was coming in. If they needed you they’d hire you. If they didn’t know you or didn’t like you they wouldn’t. They had all kinds of little systems. For example, the old timers would wear matches stuck in their hat bands. Three matches was a code. Maybe it meant a duck to the boss or a chicken, or a turkey, or a bottle of wine or whiskey. It was a signal that the longshoreman would take care of the boss if he’d give him a job.

Where they had break bulk cargo they worked the men until the ship was done. The man would catch his job out of the employer-run fink hall and then he’d work until the ship left. The fink hall wasn’t much of a hall. You’d just show up down on 7th Street between Center and Palos Verdes. The guy that ran the fink hall would come out with sheets of paper indicating where the jobs were. They also had what were known as star gangs. A star gang was one they knew would pump, would put out more tonnage than another gang. So if you were a member of a star gang you were assured of regular work.

Henry Gaitan

If a ship was going to sail that day you kept on working until it left. The longest shift I ever worked was 32 hours. On one long jitney driving job I done pretty good until midnight, when I started going to sleep. I was pulling this ore. They had a steel bucket that landed on the four wheeler. I had to take it off the hook. So when the guy seen me sleep they hit the side of the bucket to wake me up. Boy, was I glad when I was through. I had a bite to eat, laid down in my car, and completely passed out. I’d worked 30 hours. I was making 60 cents an hour, no overtime.

I had a lot of trouble because I was one of the first Mexicans to drive a lift. The company used to hire Italians over here, then a group of Mexican over here, then a group of something else, and then they’d say, “Look, those guys can do better than you guys.” And at that time the winch drivers had to be Scandinavian, or German. As a Mexican you weren’t allowed on the winch handles.

If you had a nice looking sister, and liquor, and a wife that would put out you’d have a job. I seen it here on these dock before we had the union. There’s one case where a guy was fired: he was drinking at somebody’s house where they were bootlegging, and the guy wasn’t buying, so the foreman fired him!

Elmer Mevert

Nitrate jobs were tough. I did that at Outer Harbor. They’d just hire enough guys. The higher the piles got—they’d go clear to the beams with sacks of nitrate—the more guys they’d have to hire to keep passing the sacks up.

It was just a continual operation, and your hands would bleed from that rough burlap. Packing bananas, your shoulders would swell up, your arches would break down. God it was tough. Sesame seeds come in great round sacks and they were slick as silk. You couldn’t stack those things for love or money. And they weighed 100 kilos, that’s 220 pounds. If you had a bum partner who didn’t know how to handle them you broke your God damn neck.

You never worked fast enough. The boss would come around and he’d pressure, “Hey, the hook’s hanging.” Jack Foster, one boss, would stand there by that port. He’d tap you on the shoulder: “Door six, door seven, door three.” Once in a while he’d tap a little too hard. He was just a big, tough, gung-ho boss who was brought up in the old confrontation days of the post-Wobbly strike.

Ed Thayne

You had a lot more accidents in those days. The companies were so greedy and hoggish that they wanted to get every ounce of energy and blood out of you that they could. If you were hurt it didn’t mean anything to them. I got hurt several times myself. You’d go down in the hold—you never heard of a safety net before the 1934 strike. The boss just said, “There’s the cargo, you work it.” A lot of men got hurt because they didn’t have something to protect them from falling, or to keep falling objects from hitting them.

Some of those bosses liked those huge big loads of pipe and steel. You bring out a load on a pipe truck, there’s pipe falling off all the way from the hatch to the street. There’d be scattered pieces of pipe all up and down the waterfront. Then you’ve got to get down and straighten it out. They lost time by their overloading. They were stupid.

I know of favors that people done. I was working steady; it was about 1931 or ’32. I was asked to come up on Sunday and paint the foreman’s house. He says, “You be there, I’ve got a whole gang coming.” I said, “I can’t make it.” I didn’t go along, but I drove by and there was ten or fifteen guys with paint brushes, all steady men. On Monday morning I went back and stood by the jitney I’d usually been using. The foreman came down, looked us over, and say, “Spider, you come and take this jitney here.” And he just left me stand there. I still waited, diligently stood by. He assigned five guys to hatches, and then he just looked at me and walked away.

When I first started to work on the waterfront it was 80 cents for dock men and 90 cents for hold men. In a year or so, a notice come out in the papers: longshoremen accepted a pay cut from 80 to 70 cents an hour. When I got my check that week we found out, yeah you guys got a cut. So then it wasn’t very long until they put another ad in the paper: longshoremen accept another pay cut from 70 to 65 cents an hour. And they never discussed that with anyone.

Wel1, when we fine-read the full gist of it, all dock work had been reduced to 50 cents an hour. Car loading and unloading had been reduced to 50 cents an hour, and no overtime. Well, that broke our back. I said, “Them sons of bitches, what else will they think of.” After they’d given us these cuts, why we figured it was just about time to go on strike. All they done is put it in the paper, so we thought we’d really give them something to write about!