The 1934 San Francisco general strike was a four-day citywide stoppage in July, called by San Francisco labor unions during a West Coast dockworkers’ dispute. Although the longshoremen returned to work having achieved almost none of their wage demands, the strike drew popular sympathy to their cause and strengthened organized labor, turning a limited economic outcome into a major political victory.

Causes and Escalating Conflict

The strike grew out of months of labor conflict during the Depression. In late January, 3,000 lettuce pickers in the Imperial Valley struck; police acting for employers arrested hundreds, the strike was broken, and wages fell from 20 cents to 15 cents an hour. On May 9, more than 12,000 longshoremen walked out at ports along the West Coast. By the end of June, the dock strike had virtually strangled the economies of California, Oregon, and Washington.

In early July, authorities tried to reopen the port of San Francisco. Police threw tear-gas bombs at thousands of longshoremen, and a riot followed. After four days of skirmishes, several policemen fired into a crowd: three men were wounded, two fatally. July 5 became known as “Bloody Thursday,” and that same day the Republican governor ordered the California National Guard to take control of the streets. The confrontation made the labor dispute a citywide political crisis rather than a matter confined to the docks.

The Four-Day General Strike

Eleven days after Bloody Thursday, on July 16, San Francisco labor unions called a general strike. For four days, the city was paralyzed. Federal mediators eventually intervened, and the largest strike in the history of the West Coast ended by July 30. The stoppage’s brief duration did not mean that the conflict had been resolved on workers’ terms: the longshoremen went back to work with almost none of their wage demands secured.

The outcome nevertheless had a significance beyond the wage settlement. The strike had gathered popular sympathy for the longshoremen’s plight and greatly strengthened the union movement. Its political success lay in the shift it produced in public support and labor’s influence, even as its direct economic gains remained meager.

Berkeley Solidarity and Oppenheimer

The dispute also divided Berkeley. When the longshoremen first walked out on May 9, conservative physics faculty member Leonard Loeb recruited University of California, Berkeley football players to serve as strikebreakers. In contrast, J. Robert Oppenheimer invited students including Melba Phillips and Bob Serber to attend a longshoremen’s rally in a large San Francisco auditorium. Seated high in the balcony, the students became caught up in the strikers’ enthusiasm and shouted, “Strike! Strike! Strike!”

After the rally, Oppenheimer went to the apartment of his friend Estelle Caen, where he was introduced to Harry Bridges, the longshoremen’s charismatic union leader. The episode places Oppenheimer and his students among the spectators drawn into the labor movement’s public appeal, while the competing actions in Berkeley—strikebreaking on one side, rally attendance on the other—show how sharply the dispute divided the university community.

Political Aftermath

The strike’s effects reached beyond the waterfront and its immediate settlement. On August 28, in a sign that California’s political atmosphere had shifted to the left, radical writer Upton Sinclair decisively won the Democratic nomination for governor. He later lost the general election, partly amid Republican slander and fear-mongering, but the political consequences of the labor upheaval endured: California politics, the account observes, would never be the same.