by MARK REUTTER

It was a scene worthy of On the Waterfront. On December 19, 1936, a group of Baltimore seamen, striking to win better pay and working conditions, were confronted by a surprise visit from the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA).

Big, burly Joseph P. Ryan –  who was to become the real-life model for union boss “Johnny Friendly” in the 1954 film classic – was hopping mad.

ILA Local 829 had been persuaded by the seamen to join in their strike. To knock some sense into these renegades, Ryan made an emergency trip to Baltimore with a full entourage of “business agents” led by Sam (Chowderhead) Cohen.

What played out next on the steps of St. Stanislaus Kostka Hall, a now-vacant lot in Fells Point, had the markings of a made-in-Hollywood drama.

A Crowd Gathers

Red-faced Ryan charged up the steps, only to find that the ILA meeting was over and the doors locked. As his bodyguards looked around, about 2,000 striking seamen ran down Aliceanna St. to Ann St.

They were coming from a mass rally where Harry Bridges, a San Francisco longshoreman, had just finished lambasting Ryan’s kind of unionism. Upon seeing Ryan and his entourage in the flesh, the strikers went wild.

They pelted the New Yorkers with rocks, bottles, clods of earth, shoes, and even loose change – “anything they could get their hands on,” according to labor historians Linda Zeidman and Eric Hallegren.

Ryan and Cohen finally made it to the car, but its path on Aliceanna was blocked by the crowd, which began rocking the large black sedan in an attempt to overturn it. After much shoving and liberal use of their nightsticks, the police were able to force an opening large enough for the car to escape.

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Bodies in the Harbor

Even before this near-riot, the waterfront had been riven by violence. The bodies of eight strikers had been found floating in the harbor. Several had broken beer bottles jammed up their anuses.

For their part, the strikers often attacked and beat dockworkers who broke the picket line. No lives were lost as a result of these attacks, but two men had their ears cut off.

A shaken Ryan had enough, and his sedan sped up Broadway. The strikers whooped and cheered. Beating back Joe Ryan and his goons was exhilarating enough, but watching them hightail out of Fells Point was damn funny. A waterfront bard known only as Forty Fathoms commemorated the victory thusly:

In Baltimore town

The boys are rough,

Ryan lost his pants

By an ILA hand

And clad in fig leaves

He turned and scrammed.

Battle Lost, but War Won

As it turned out, the renegade strikers lost. On January 25, 1937 – 87 days after the strike began – the Baltimore waterfront was back to normal.

Or at least the semblance of normalcy. According to Zeidman and Hallengren, something had changed. Men who had taken bad conditions, favoritism and bribery as a matter of course were no longer willing to accept those conditions.

Within a year, a number of new unions had organized to challenge the old order. Harry Bridges was put on the cover of Time magazine for his success in forming the “rank-and-file” International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU).

The National Maritime Union (MNU) took root in Baltimore. It became one of the first unions in an otherwise segregated city to accept black and white seamen on an equal basis.

Ryan kept his grip on the New York docks, but he never regained any power in Baltimore. When the New York State Crime Commission held hearings on Ryan’s role in waterfront corruption in the 1950s, the investigators cited Baltimore as a model of clean union governance.

A fuller description of the 1936 strike can be found in “The Baltimore Book,” (Temple University Press, 1991).

– Mark Reutter can be reached at reuttermark@yahoo.com.

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Links to the full series: BIKING INTO BALTIMORE’S HISTORY

Part 1 (4/28/10): Born by the Falls

Part 2 (4/29/10) : The Bottlecap Capital of the World

Part 3 (4/30/10): Conflict on the Docks