Editorial

SF Chronicle, November 5, 2011

It would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: Harry Bridges, San Francisco’s firebrand union leader and alleged Communist rabble-rouser, hated and feared by the city’s establishment, is about to become a mainstream icon.

Australian-born Alfred Bryant Renton Bridges was the controversial and charismatic head of the West Coast longshoreman’s unions during the turbulent ’30s. He was the militant leader of numerous strikes and was prosecuted several times by the U.S. government, which tried repeatedly to deport him.

Now he is about to be immortalized in bronze in front of the Ferry Building. It’s about time.

Bridges led the violent West Coast maritime strike of 1934 that shut down the port of San Francisco for 83 days. Amid the uproar, police shot and killed two union members, sparking a four-day general strike by most labor groups and many small businesses in the city and in Oakland. For years afterward, Bridges staged waterfront walkouts almost annually.

A hero among the union rank-and-file, he was vilified by the business community and by most California newspapers. Opponents insisted he was a member of the American Communist Party, but nobody ever proved it. In 1970, when he was appointed to the Port Commission, a Chronicle editorial recalled that he had once been considered a “flaming agitator.”

Fast forward to today: Bridges now is a venerated San Francisco figure. When he died in 1990, Mayor Art Agnos ordered city flags to fly at half-staff. In 1999, the city Art Commission christened a little park between lanes on the Embarcadero as Harry Bridges Plaza. And last week, the Port Commission unanimously approved the installation of a 12-foot bronze statue of Bridges atop a pedestal of California granite in the middle of the plaza.

One can argue over the methods and philosophies of the West Coast labor movement of the mid-20th century, but nobody can question the role Harry Bridges played in making San Francisco a strong union town and in defending the rights of workers.

“No other man’s jousts with the federal government … have done more to broaden and strengthen the Constitutional rights of immigrants, political dissenters and racial minorities,” wrote Grif Fariello, chairman of the private committee that proposed the statue. Now that it has the city’s blessing, the group is trying to raise around $750,000 for construction and maintenance. It hopes to erect the monument by 2013.

Widely considered irascible but incorruptible, Bridges loomed large on the city’s waterfront for decades. It seems fitting to recognize his place in history in a year when protests over economic inequality have sprung up all over the country, notably in Oakland and just across the street from Harry Bridges Plaza.