The Logic and Limits of Solidarity, 1850s–1920s

FEW OCCUPATIONAL GROUPS better illustrate the unevenness of working-class consciousness and the complexities of ethnic and racial conflict and accommodation in the United States than the men who labored “along shore,” loading and unloading ships. The longshoremen were classically proletarian. They worked with their hands, developed a muscular workplace culture, and were rooted in dense communal networks that merged class, ethnic, and racial identities. They organized unions as early as the 1840s and engaged in strikes that paralyzed the economic life of major metropolitan areas. They were at once insular and cosmopolitan—reflecting the relatively self-contained mores of their neighborhoods and yet linked by their work to a wider world of commerce and culture, intensely local in their allegiances but willing to turn for leadership to Communists, syndicalists, and other critics of capitalism. In the nineteenth century, immigrants from Ireland and Germany competed for employment on the docks with northern free blacks and southern slaves. In the early twentieth century, new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe entered the labor market in large numbers and changed the face of the waterfront. The embattled Irish succeeded in maintaining several major enclaves. Blacks were driven from the docks in some cities but predominated in others. Mexicans gradually created a niche for themselves on the Texas Gulf Coast and in the booming port of Los Angeles. Along with “swarthy” Italians, they complicated the question of race by creating a sizable intermediate stratum of people who were not “black” but not yet “white” either. In organizing unions and exercising some control of their work environment, longshoremen continually came up against questions of race and ethnicity. Who qualified as one’s fellow worker? Was it only kin, neighbor, and countryman? Or was it any able-bodied candidate who joined the ranks of job seekers at the “slave markets” where dockworkers vied for employment each day? There was no single answer to these