by Jeff Sharlet
Abram followed a teeth-rattling roller coaster of news for months, as the papers reported one day a red tide rising and the next labor peace in the offing. Neither story was true. The army of strikers grew larger and larger, bakers and cooks and waiters and even the proud and conservative Teamsters swelling the dockers’ ranks.
No peace was coming. “Riot Expected,” declared the papers in one of their grimmer moods. The Chamber of Commerce drafted a declaration and put it on the front page of the Chronicle: “American principles” vs. “un-American radicalism.” The chamber stood for “free labor,” for the “American Plan,” for the “right to work.” Lose San Francisco, and Seattle and Portland would fall like dominoes. “The winning of the strike means the abandoning of control by private owners over their own property,” declared the columnist Chapin Hall. “San Francisco is the real seat of war and right nobly is she standing up to the firing line.”
Seven hundred policemen in dark blue patrolled the waterfront on foot and in black cars and on high chestnut horses. Twice that number and more picketed or searched for strikebreakers. The middle class began contemplating last-minute vacations. The wives of the wealthy bunkered up at the Union Club, where Abram led prayer meetings for businessmen. As the blue tear gas sent tendrils up the hill, they must have felt frustrated by his optimistic lessons in biblical capitalism. Scripture has much to say about honest dealing and even more about handling the heathen, but not once does it mention organized labor. Kenneth Kingsbury, the president of the Standard Oil of California (and later a member of Abram’s movement), peered out of the club’s windows one day and saw pickets peering back; he panicked. A sign of the apocalypse, Kingsbury instructed a federal man to write his employers in Washington, was that Kenneth Kingsbury could not leave the club to hail a cab.
On July 3, the Industrial Association of San Francisco resolved to open the port by force. Mayor Angelo Rossi, a florist by trade, did not stop them. At 1:30 p.m. the steel doors of Pier 38 rolled up, and five trucks full of goods from the moribund ships in the harbor rolled out, police cruisers behind and alongside them. Driving the trucks were not ordinary strikebreakers but business executives, “key men,” in Abram’s vernacular. Young James A. Folger of Folger’s Coffee took the lead. A crowd of 5,000 pickets watched without making a sound. The businessmen raced to a warehouse four blocks inland and unloaded: birdseed, coffee, and tires. They went back for more. The strikers looked on. No songs, no chants, no stones. Silent witness to the labor of businessmen. This was the story the papers told when Abram opened their pages on the Fourth of July 1935, his twentieth anniversary in “the land of the Bible unchained.”
Did Folger and his 700 bodyguards in blue think, for just a moment, that peace was at hand? A police captain with gold braid gleaming on his shoulder, riding on the running board of a police cruiser with his revolver in the air, shouted, “The port is open!”—and gave the strikers the signal for which they had waited. They roared and attacked with cobblestones ripped from the street and bricks and stones, with clubs they tore from policemen’s hands and with wooden shafts they hurled like spears. The police opened fire into the crowd.
And with that, the first fight was over—thousands melted into alleys, dragging the wounded with them. Blood pooled between the cobblestones. The air smelled acrid. At night the blue and green lights of helpless ships blinked from the bay and went unanswered. The pool halls, the bars, the tattoo parlors, the brothels, were silent. Vice had been conquered, the Christian city on a hill defended from the barbarians.
There were not many picnics on the Fourth. A train burned and thirteen policemen’s wives were given reason to curse the red bastards. The governor said troops were coming. The commanders of the Guard strategized.
“My men…will talk with bayonets,” said their general.
This was not what Abram had dreamed of. Where were his key men, his top men, his up and out? Out of the city, hiding in the hills.
The next morning, the police went forward in waves, rows of Martians in khaki gas masks and black helmets, revolvers drawn. A few blocks from the water, on Rincon Hill, a knoll tall as a four-story building, a crowd of longshoremen gathered. From widemouthed riot guns police thumped out gas shells that sliced through dry brown grass and sparked it like tinder. Strikers scorched their fingers on the shells and hurled them back down the hill. Blue smoke from the gas, black and gray from the grass, an oily stink that pushed the armies away from one another. Up the knoll went the strikers. Policemen in ripped uniforms, blood dripping from facial wounds, squinted and aimed and unloaded revolvers and rifles. A striker crested and fell, shot like a turkey. A tear-gas salesman, deputized, cheered. The smoke stank of vomit and gunfire. Airplanes dipped and whined, dropping messages to police command. Horse hooves thudded; out of the blue smoke went the charge, horses snorting and shrieking.
The strikers were ready with slingshots: two poles stretching a car tire inner tube hurled a three-pound stone fast and hard 400 feet, or less should a policeman agree to catch it with his belly. Back down the hill went the horses.
Up went another charge, replied to with another volley. The police charged again, and this time they took a wall, but the men behind it had gone missing. So it went, charges and stone volleys and feints and men vanishing like quicksilver.
The police found them. They blocked off both ends of the street in front of the union hall. A plainclothesman drove into the crowd, stepped out of his car, and opened up with a shotgun held at the hip, and in front of the hall he brought down three men. One pulled himself up and looked at the crowd with blood in his mouth, blood in his eyes, and then his head dropped and his jaw cracked like an egg.
At least thirty-three more nursed gunshot wounds that night. They were laid in rows in the union hall or hidden in bedrooms by wives and mothers and brokenhearted fathers who boiled water and pried bullets out with thick fingers while their men screamed and the neighbors cried. Down on the docks a boat landed, and into the city marched soldiers, the first of 5,000. A sharp wind snapped the fog, the gas, the smoke up into the atmosphere, but the smell of violence lingered.
“I walked down Market that night,” wrote the novelist Tillie Olsen, then twenty-one-year-old Tillie Lerner fresh from Nebraska, in one of her first pieces of published prose. “All life seemed blown out of the street; the few people hurrying by looked hunted, tense, expectant of anything. Cars moved past as if fleeing. And a light, indescribably green and ominous, was cast over everything, in great shifting shadows. And down the street the trucks rumbled. Drab colored, with boys sitting on them like corpses sitting and not moving, holding guns stiffly, staring with wide frightened eyes.”6
That was what Abram didn’t understand: the fear of death and the fear of sin, real sin, killing a brother or a sister. He was as delighted by the prospect of his death, whatever hour God should appoint for it, as Abigail Hutchinson had been. Compassionate in the abstract, he thought of the masses as just that, blocks to be arranged neatly. The troops that moved in on San Francisco that night had no feelings with which Abram would have been concerned; they were expressing the will of God, which to him was order. After the Strike of ’34, Abram’s allegiance would be forever given to the men who commanded soldiers, not the soldiers themselves. As for those defined as the enemy, they were not even human. Their grief never registered.
A few days later, men and women marched tens of thousands strong five miles up Market Street behind two black-draped flatbed trucks. The trucks bore coffins and mountains of flowers, like canvases by Diego Rivera set in slow motion. A band played Beethoven. Nobody said a word. “‘Life,’ the capitalist papers marveled,” wrote Tillie Olsen, “‘Life stopped and stared.’”
It was incomparable drama, simultaneously staged and real. A ritual, yes, the procession of the plain folk, the march of the martyrs, a script older than Christendom. Bridges, surely aware of the moment’s theatrical power, nonetheless choked up when his turn to speak came. Not a well-timed sob but
wide-eyed, grief-stricken silence. He offered no inspiration. None was needed. The funeral was religion: not just solidarity, workers arm-in-arm, but communion, a coming together. The march up Market Street was the embodiment of faith, not as a metaphor but as a new fact in the American story. One Big Union on the move.
The strike went on, but the shippers were defeated by the time the coffins went into the ground. Their old beliefs could not compete. Management—capital—would require a new faith if it was to survive.
THE IDEA, PART 2
The strike of 1934 scared Abram into launching the movement that would become the vanguard of elite fundamentalism, and elite fundamentalism took as its first challenge the destruction of militant labor. Destruction was not the word Christians used, however. They called it cooperation.
The April after the strike, Harry Bridges traveled to Seattle to convene a meeting of a new federation of maritime workers, with “maritime” broadly defined to include pretty much anyone within driving distance of the ocean. For a brief moment that year, he came close to turning the old Wobbly dream of One Big Union into a political reality. But it wouldn’t last. Indeed, the revived Wobbly dream began unraveling right there in Seattle, where Abram finally plucked up the theocratic strand and began pulling it taut into the twentieth century.
That April, Abram had been having dreams of his own, unpleasant ones. Subversives stalked his sleep, hammers and sickles danced like sugar plum fairies, a Soviet agent “of Swedish nationality” assigned to Seattle—probably the brawny and bellicose six-footer from the Seamen’s Union whom Bridges had tapped to lead the maritime federation—roared his nightmare defiance of that which was godly. One night Abram could sleep no longer. He sat up in bed and resolved to wait for God. At 1:30 a.m., He appeared: a blinding light and a voice. Abram listened and took notes. “The plan had been unfolded and the green light given.”7
A few hours later, Abram dressed and put on his coat and hurried to downtown Seattle for the morning rush, where he waited for God to bring him the means to put his plan into action. On a busy street corner, a local developer of means hailed him. “Hey, Vereide, glad to see you!”
The developer, a former major named Walter Douglass who still preferred to be addressed by his military title, cut straight to the matter on both men’s minds: “Where is this country going to, anyway?”
“You ought to know,” said Abram.
Indeed, the major did: “The bow-wows,” he harrumphed, “and the worse of it is you fellows aren’t doing anything about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” growled Douglass, “here you have your churches and services and merry-go-round of activities, but as far as any actual impact and strategy for turning the tide is concerned, you’re not making a dent.”
Abram could not have agreed more. While San Francisco had boiled, Abram had developed the prototype of the Idea, preaching a manly Christ to a group of business executives who had no time for hymnals and sob sisters and soup kitchens and the Jesus of long eyelashes beloved by old ladies. Jesus, for such men, “must be disentangled from church organization,” Abram had discovered. In the 1930s, the meaning of that was plain: a rejection of the “Social Gospel” of good works for the poor in favor of an unhindered Christ defined by his muscles, a laissez-faire Jesus proclaimed not by spindly necked clergymen bleating from seminary, but by men like Major Douglass, officers who commanded troops who brought order to cities.
“You ought to get after fellows like me,” Douglass told Abram. He was standing in just the right spot for chest puffing—behind him towered the city’s Douglass Building.
These were the words Abram had been waiting for, in the place, he was certain, to which God had guided him. He revealed the plan God had given him just hours earlier that morning: the Idea. He kept secret the bright light, the voice, the automatic writing in the dark hours. Men like Major Douglass, men of affairs, would not understand. But Major Douglass got the Idea.
“We are where we are,” Abram said—on the brink of anarchy, both men thought—“because of what we are.” By that he meant sinful, only his concept of sin was not so much concerned with immorality as with “duty.” “Top men” had a responsibility to do for God what lesser men couldn’t. Their failure to take on this burden had led the nation to its terrible position. “Obedience,” concluded Abram, is “the way to power.” God wanted his chosen to rule—to “serve,” as Abram liked to say. Were men such as Major Douglass ready to report for duty?
Douglass stared at the silver-haired preacher. A “piercing gaze,” Abram recalled. “Vereide,” he said, “if you will settle down in this city and do a job like that, I will back you.”
Abram demanded specifics. Douglass delivered: a suite of offices in the building behind Abram and a check to get him started.
“That’s tangible,” said Abram.
Then they set off together to see William St. Clair, one of the wealthiest men in Seattle. There’s a whiff of The Wizard of Oz in Abram’s later retelling of this story, the major and the minister popping lightbulbs over their fedoras on the Seattle street corner and rushing on to the man who would bring it all together, but that is, apparently, what happened: St. Clair, president of Frederick Nelson, the biggest department store in the Northwest, cleared his office and insisted the two men sit down. “We told him the story,” Abram remembered. “And he, too, looked searchingly at me and remarked, ‘That’s constructive.’”
St. Clair made a list of nineteen businessmen and invited them to breakfast at one of the city’s finest hotels. St. Clair certainly didn’t choose on the basis of Christian morality. Of the nineteen, only one was a churchgoer, and he pointed out at the first meeting that the other men there knew him mainly as a creature of cocktail lounges and poker tables. Among the nineteen sat a lumber baron, a gas executive, a railroad executive, a hardware magnate, a candy impresario, and two future mayors of Seattle. “Management and labor got together,” Abram would later claim, but there were no union representatives at the meeting, where nineteen businessmen plus Abram agreed to use the “Bible as blueprint” with which to take back first the city, then the state, and perhaps the nation from the grip of godless organized labor.
Their first success soon followed. “One morning,” remembered Abram, “a labor leader, who had been a disturbing factor in the community, was seen at the table.” Abram never fails to provide full names and corporate titles for the management side of his equation, but his first convert from labor is known only as “Jimmy.” Jimmy came back for more meetings, sitting quietly in the corner and listening as the businessmen testified to one another about the Bible’s transforming power in their lives. So Abram took Jimmy aside and had a talk with him about his responsibilities. Jimmy had been a leader in the “big strike.” There, at the breakfast table, sat many men in whom Jimmy’s actions had provoked “bitter feelings.” One man, in fact, had been burdened with leading the industrialists’ committee that organized management’s fight against the strike. Jimmy had now taken meals with this man but had done nothing to make amends. Jimmy remained “unreconciled.”
The next week, before a group of executives that now numbered seventy-five, Jimmy rose and spoke for the first time. “You fellows know me.” He nodded toward one businessman. “I picketed your plant.” He looked toward another. “I closed your factory for months.” He pointed to a third: “I hated you.”
But with Abram’s help, Jimmy had discovered “how absolutely honest” these men he had hated were. They were humble. They were sincere. In fact, Jimmy realized, if they could bring more businessmen in on the Idea, “there would be no need for a labor union.” This, understandably, had been a bit of a shock to Jimmy. He had gone to his knees in his home, he told the men, and begged God’s forgiveness “for the spirit I had been manifesting.” And now he was ready to ask their forgiveness. He had been a thorn in capital’s flesh, he said, but he would prick no more.
Jimmy sat down. The room was silent
. Then “the sturdy, rugged capitalist who had been chairman of the employer’s committee in the big strike,” Abram observed—this probably refers to the “Citizens Emergency Committee,” headed by the aptly named John Prim8—stood at the head of the table and walked over to Jimmy without a word. Worker looked up at boss. Boss glared down at worker. The businessman let drop a heavy hand on Jimmy’s shoulder.
“Jimmy,” he said, “on this basis we go on together.”
IN THE YEARS to come, Abram would tell polished versions of this story hundreds of times, in dozens of countries, to CEOs and senators and dictators, a parable of “cooperation” between management and labor, the threat to Christ and capital subdued, order restored. That was where it began, he’d say: Jimmy the agitator confessing his sins before a room full of businessmen, God’s chosen men. This was “Unit Number One” of what Abram called his “new world order.”
Abram was a kind of artist, just discovering in 1935 that there were other men and women with powers like his, feelings like his—“American,” he would say, “terrified,” we might translate—with whom he could join forces. Together they would smooth the dream. They claimed their religion was very old, “first century Christianity,” but in their hearts they understood that it was a new faith, a new politics. Its conservatism was not vestigial; what made it thrilling was that the new religion made conservatism forceful again. It was not just a veneer for capitalism, nor simply a vehicle for power. It was a different way of wielding power. It shrugged off old inhibitions. It scoffed at liberal restraints and ignored traditional conservative reservations. It was Rotary Club dada, surrealism for businessmen from Seattle. It was the Word made fresh for the industrial age, vital and strong.
