Description
Book SynopsisIn the early years of the Great Depression the Marine Workers Industrial Union was a colorful presence on the American Waterfront. In 1935 the MWIU seemed to vanish, closing its halls and stopping its publications. The author convincingly demonstrates that the MWIU did not vanish, instead it was ordered by the Moscow based Communist International to send its members into mainstream ALF unions and take over from the inside. Deliberately duplicated on the east coast, the Communists succeeded in destroying the International Seamen's Union and creating the Communist dominated National Maritime Union.
Trade ReviewVernon L. Pedersen has diligently mined a host of heretofore untapped and close archival sources to present the first thorough examination of the efforts of the Communist Party of the United States to organize maritime workers in the 1930s. His careful evaluation of their successes and failures offers both a correction to previous interpretations and revealing insights into the internal conflicts and rivalries in the Party and among those trying to organize a radical union. -- Harvey Klehr, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, Emory University
Table of ContentsChapter One: Radicals on the Waterfront Chapter Two: The Birth of the Marine Workers Industrial Union Chapter Three: Rivalries and Divisions Chapter Four: A Hamburg Difficulty Chapter Five: Eddy, Ralph and Jones Chapter Six: The Baltimore Soviet Chapter Seven: On the Embarcadero Chapter Eight: The Lessons of the San Francisco General Strike Chapter Nine: The End of the MWIU Chapter Ten: The Strike of the SS California Chapter Eleven: The Birth of the National Maritime Union
