The Story of the Great San Francisco General Strike of 1934

Mike Quinn     1979     259p     5 x 7

On May 9, 1934, International Labor Association (ILA) leaders called a strike of all dockworkers on the West Coast who were joined a few days later by seamen and teamsters, effectively stopping all shipping from San Diego to Seattle. San Francisco would become the scene of the strike’s most dramatic and widely known incidents, aptly described in one headline as ‘War in San Francisco!’ On Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, two strikers were killed by the San Francisco police. A mass funeral march of tens of thousands of strikers and sympathizers four days later and the general strike that followed effectively shut down both San Francisco and Oakland. Mike Quin, a self-described ‘rank-and-file journalist,’ offered a sympathetic picture of the striking workers actions in The Big Strike, a collection of his published articles. Here, Quin described the events leading up to Bloody Thursday, and what happened in its aftermath.

$5-12