Harry Bridges

Harry Renton Bridges was an Australian citizen, a San Francisco labor leader and clandestine Soviet operative. Bridges entered the United States in 1920 and underwent two failed deportation attempts between by the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations for his affiliation with the Communist Party.

Bridges was born in 1901 in Melbourne, Australia and settled in San Francisco in 1920 where he became an organizer of the longshoremen. In 1921 he joined the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

As a labor organizer, he played an important role in the 1934 San Francisco waterfront strike. Two years later Bridges became the founding president of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). "My thinking is Marxist," Bridges later proclaimed. "And the basic thing about this lousy capitalist system is that the workers create the wealth, but those who own it – the rich – keep getting richer, and the poor get poorer." When unemployed Depression workers tried to take the waterfront jobs that union members had walked away from, Bridges’ workers unleashed verbal and physical violence against the new workers.

"Harry’s boys got out their baseball bats to persuade the Scabs that it wasn’t worth the trouble," boasted one dockworker union propagandist. Some replacement workers died in unusual "accidents," including two college students. Many others were severely beaten, injured, and crippled. A deputy sheriff in Seattle who tried to arrest violent union thugs was murdered, shot through the head. "Up and down the coast," wrote Bridges biographer Charles Larrowe, "the waterfront was turned into a battlefield."

In 1938 the government instituted a deportation proceeding against Bridges pursuant to a law allowing deportation of individuals who are, at the time the proceeding is instituted and being prosecuted, members of or affiliated with an organization that advises, advocates, and teaches the overthrow by force and violence of the U.S. government. Bridges requested that the government name the organization and the government stated it was the Communist Party of the U.S. In December 1939 the Trial Examiner found that Bridges was neither a member of nor affiliated with the Communist Party and therefore could not be deported.

In 1940, in response to the failure to deport Bridges, the United States House of Representatives amended the law relating to the deportation of aliens to allow for deportation of those who were at the time they entered the U.S. or any time thereafter a member of or affiliated with an organization that advices, advocates, and teaches the overthrow by force and violence the U.S. government. Attorney General Francis Biddle then ordered the FBI to investigate Bridges to see if there was cause under the amended law to reopen deportation proceedings. Bridges was again arrested in 1941.

The Presiding Inspector in the second deportation proceedings ordered deportation on the basis of finding that after entering the U.S. Bridges was a member of and affiliated with the Communist Party. The Immigration Appeals Board reversed. The Attorney General reviewed the case and ordered deportation. Bridges petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus but was denied by the District Court for the Northern District of CA. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. Bridges v. Wixon, 144 F.2d 927 (9th Cir. 1944). The Supreme Court reversed, 326 U.S. 135 (1945), on a 5-3 ruling that "affiliation" was improperly construed by the appellate court and that under a proper construction, Bridges had not been affiliated with the Communist Party at any time after entering the U.S.

The trials received national attention, thanks in large part to the Song for Bridges written and sung by Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, and Millard Lampell.

Soviet Archives

Emory University historian and political scientist Harvey Klehr in a book he co-edited, The Secret World of American Communism (Yale University Press, 1995), reveals that documentation from the archives of the fallen Soviet Union identifies Bridges not only as a member of the Communist Party USA but also as a clandestine member of the CPUSA’s Central Committee.

"Bridges," said Marxist-turned-conservative David Horowitz, "was a member of the Central Committee of the American Communist Party, a perjurer, a lifelong servant of the greatest mass murderer in human history and a sworn enemy of the United States.”

While claiming not to be a Communist Party member loyal to Moscow, Harry Bridges led his Longshoremen union to do everything that Communist Party apparatchiks would do. In 1936, he ordered his workers not to load shipments of scrap metal sold to Japan. Japan at the time was at peace with the United States, but its fascist troops in Manchuria were a barrier to the Soviet empire's expansion in the Far East.

While Hitler’s Germany had a peace treaty with the Soviet Union, Bridges refused to expedite FDR’s shipments of military supplies to Great Britain. But the moment Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Bridges mobilized his workers to set productivity records speeding the flow of goods to those opposing Nazi Germany. Bridges also attacked other unions’ workers who threatened strikes or work slowdowns to get higher wages when this might reduce the flow of goods to those on the Soviet side of the conflict.

Bridges became a U.S. citizen in 1945. Under Bridges' leadership the ILWU continued to grow in size and influence, and took an active stand against the Korean war and Vietnam war.