The Communist Party on the American Waterfront: Revolution, Reform, and the Quest for Power

by Vernon L. Pedersen

Overview

In the early years of the Great Depression, the Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) was a colorful presence on the American Waterfront. In 1935, the MWIU seemed to vanish, closing its halls and stopping its publications. Vernon L. Pedersen 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. Initiated by accident on the west coast and deliberately duplicated in the east, the Communists seized control of the west coast longshoremen’s union, destroyed the International Seamen’s Union, and created the Communist-dominated National Maritime Union.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498598019
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	12/20/2019
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.31(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.89(d)

About the Author

Vernon L. Pedersen is a professor of history and the Head of the International Studies Department at the American University of Sharjah

Table of Contents

Chapter 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

Editorial Reviews

Pedersen’s The Communist Party on the American Waterfront is the most comprehensive archivally based historical study of American Communists in longshore and maritime unionism in the 1930s that has appeared. The decade opened with weak unions throughout the maritime industry and ended in the late 1930s––after a series of often violent strikes and organizational confusion––with the Communist-led ILWU controlling longshore work on the west coast and the Communist-led NMU equally dominant among sailors on the east and gulf coasts. So thoroughly has Pedersen mined American Communist Party and Communist International archives in Moscow, and so careful is his narrative that, likely and deservedly, this book will be the definitive study of the subject.

John Earl Haynes

Vernon 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 reveals insights into the internal conflicts and rivalries in the Party and among those trying to organize a radical union.

Harvey Klehr