IMMIGRATION: Down Under Man

One day last week a gawky, sallow-faced man of 39 stood in the U. S. Immigration station on San Francisco's Angel Island and swore to tell the whole truth. Alfred Renton Bryant ("Harry") Bridges proceeded to tell more about himself than anyone had told before. Because he is the most potent and feared Laborite in the western U. S., Bridges on Bridges was bound to furnish 1) news, 2) insight into the innards of Leftist Labor.

As the first witness called by the Government at his deportation hearing four weeks ago, Alien Bridges denied in two Nos that he is or ever was a Communist. For all that the next 15 Government witnesses established to the contrary, the Service's Deputy Commissioner Thomas B. Shoemaker might have dispensed with them and saved much wear & tear on Harvard Law School's Dean James M. Landis, sitting as special examiner by the very special request of Secretary of Labor Perkins. Since Mr. Shoemaker had no direct evidence that Bridges actually belonged to the Communist Party when the complaint was filed (March 2, 1938), his only recourse was an attempt to show circumstantially that Defendant Bridges thought, talked, acted like a Communist who advocates forceful overthrow of the U. S. Government.

Witness Bridges demonstrated that whether he is a Communist or not is important primarily because it will determine whether U. S. citizens who own property and hire labor can be rid of Harry Bridges, trade unionist. The quality which made him tick as precisely and dangerously as a bomb-clock did not come from Marx. It was simple, deep and active discontent—with things as he found them during his boyhood Down Under in Australia, with the U. S. as he found it when he sailed through the Golden Gate on a freighter in 1920.

By the standards of contented Americans, he painted himself Red with his disquisitions against corporate employers as a class, his belief that the U. S. should be so far socialized as to liquidate big companies and substitute public ownership of their properties. Since there are 100,000 accredited and much more ambitious Reds in the Communist Party, U. S. A., this credo was no great distinction. What distinguished Witness Bridges was that he put his union ahead of their Party. He confessed that he had used and would continue to use Communist money, brains and brawn when they could help win something for the discontented stevedores, lumberjacks, fruit pickers, etc., in his longshoremen's and related C. I. O. unions on the West Coast. He conceded that Communists try to use him and his unions, denied that they succeeded, invited them to keep on trying. That his brass-tacks unionism has worked well enough to make him bigger game than any U. S. Communist, his predicament proved.

Bridges on Bridges:

> He declared that the Communist Party is not subversive, that he and his union membership believe in its current trade-union policies (but not necessarily in its longer-range social and political policies).

> "Sometimes I get a little irritated when my views are ascribed to the Communist Party because I had them before the Communist Party came into being. . . ."

> "Communist teachings . . . are mostly theory, and I generally stay with the practical matters."