By Camille T. Taiara

WHEN JOURNALIST BILL Mandel was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in San Francisco on May 13, 1960, he refused to answer questions about his alleged relationship to the Communist Party and to name suspected members. Instead, he raged: "If you think I'm going to cooperate with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any way, you are insane! This body ... is a kangaroo court. It does not have my respect; it has my utmost contempt."

It wasn't the first time Mandel had run afoul the McCarthyites. One of the nation's leading experts on the Soviet Union at the time, he'd been called to testify before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Committee in 1952, and before Joseph McCarthy himself one year later. He was blacklisted from publishing for 18 years. Mandel's speech before HUAC cost him his jobs at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and at KQED, channel 9. Only KPFA-FM, where he had a regular show, kept him on. But his rebellious response – and its consequences – was typical of Bay Area leftists.

While high school history books' treatment of the McCarthy era largely focuses on the trials against famous Hollywood actors, San Francisco had its share of victims. What made the city stand out, then as now, was the way its citizens fought back against right-wing tyranny.

The war on dissent

McCarthyism represented far more than the actions of one reactionary Wisconsin senator. The phenomenon that took his name – the persecution, through hearsay and shady evidence, of political undesirables – both preceded and outlasted McCarthy's eight-year tenure in federal office (from 1946 to 1954).

The House of Representatives and the Senate each established a committee in the 1940s to investigate and question suspected subversives – aided by J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation, which fed them information on those against whom it lacked evidence of actual wrongdoing. (Hoover would later launch the FBI's infamous Counterintelligence Program [COINTELPRO] in 1956.)

And in 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security (a.k.a. McCarran) Act, which required Communists to register with the attorney general, barred them from holding passports and jobs in government or defense, tightened espionage laws, and barred foreigners from the country if they'd ever been Communists.

It was in this atmosphere that "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance and that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted in June 1953 for conspiring to steal atomic secrets and pass them on to the Soviets.

Local authorities followed Congress's lead – including, notably, the California legislature, whose Tenney Committee (named after conservative Democratic senator Jack Tenney from Los Angeles) became renowned for the zeal with which it pursued leftists in education, the film industry, the legal profession, and beyond.

Although few ever faced formal charges, thousands lost their jobs and were blacklisted.

The press, for the most part, jumped on the bandwagon.

"Nobody was immune," Ann Fagan Ginger, founder and executive director of Berkeley-based Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, told the Bay Guardian. A progressive attorney, former labor organizer, and free speech activist, Ginger herself was a victim of extensive FBI investigations. She had her passport revoked and was blacklisted from practicing law for 20 years.

"There was misinformation about who'd done what," she said. "The second thing is that what they'd done was nothing. They'd picketed, run for office as a member of the Communist Party, made a speech, wrote a letter to the editor. They'd helped organize a union, or didn't believe the U.S. should go to war with the Soviet Union or go on doing atomic energy. They thought women should have equal rights, and they believed in racial desegregation before it became popular. None of it was illegal."

In San Francisco, the progressive California Labor School was a constant victim of red-baiting and harassment. Professors at UC Berkeley found themselves targeted by a loyalty oath imposed by the Board of Regents that cost 31 academics their jobs in 1951. And the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild battled for three years, from 1954 until 1957, against being included on the attorney general's infamous list of subversive organizations.

These are but a few prominent examples of McCarthyism's targets in the Bay Area.

But two of the main catalysts of popular struggle against the McCarthyite purges in San Francisco were the decades-long persecution of International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union president Harry Bridges and the HUAC hearings held in the Board of Supervisors' chambers at City Hall.

Labor strikes back

A labor leader for 40 years and one of the most infamous trade unionists in U.S. history, Bridges was known for his militancy and the loyalty he elicited among the rank and file. He weathered 20 years of trials, investigations, and congressional hearings – including two cases that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

"What's important about Harry Bridges is not whether he was a member of the Communist Party, but what he did for working people," San Francisco State University Labor Archives and Research Center curator Harvey Schwartz told us.

Bridges was blacklisted in the mid 1920s for refusing to join the shipping companies' official union and agitating to revive the defunct International Longshoremen's Association. But it was his role in spearheading the historic general strike of 1934 that caught the attention of the White House.

The strike began at the San Francisco docks May 9 and within a week grew to involve 15,000 seamen up and down the Pacific Coast. Picketers and police battled it out for two months until two strikers and a bystander died in a clash. Their deaths set off a four-day, citywide strike involving 150,000 workers.

As a result, the longshoremen won a six-hour workday and enough control of the hiring hall to get rid of the corrupt system of kickbacks for jobs.

Bridges also founded his own union. Expelled from the American Federation of Labor in 1937, Bridges "took his newly named International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union into the CIO [and was] promptly appointed ... Pacific Coast Director of the national organization," Stanley L. Kutler wrote in The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War.

Bridges was an Australian by birth, and his immigrant status proved to be his Achilles heel. Pressure from traditional labor bosses, shipping industry leaders, and conservative congressmen led to a series of attempted deportations of Bridges under alien sedition laws beginning in 1938.

Even after Bridges became a citizen in 1945, the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried to revoke his naturalization by arguing that he'd lied when he claimed he wasn't a Communist on his citizenship application. Three of the government's witnesses eventually confessed to perjury during the trial. The Supreme Court ruled in Bridges's favor, for the second time, in 1953.

Bridges also withstood an attempt in the House of Representatives to pass a bill calling specifically for his deportation.

In 1949 to '50, the Congress of Industrial Organizations expelled the ILWU and other leftist unions – a move widely credited with breaking the back of progressive syndicalism in the United States. The more conservative, AFL-affiliated Teamsters then attacked the ILWU in a bloody attempt to take over the union's San Francisco warehouse division, Local 6. "There were big confrontations involving hundreds of people," Schwartz said. But in the streets, as in the courts, Bridges's ILWU prevailed.

By the time Bridges began serving a three-week stint behind bars in August 1950, during the INS's failed attempt to nullify his naturalization, he'd become a cause célèbre of the San Francisco left. Young people, old unionists, and others lent their energies toward raising funds and providing other kinds of support.

His union – a strong supporter of workplace desegregation – had become one of the most ethnically diverse in the city, with blacks and Latinos joining its ranks in large numbers after World War II. It had also become one of the only places where McCarthyism's victims could still find a job. "The ILWU became a haven for people who'd been blacklisted by employers elsewhere in the country – all kinds of political dissidents and radicals who found themselves investigated by the government," Schwartz said.

"The rank and file of the union felt Harry Bridges was their leader – there was no doubt about that," said Don Watson, a desegregation activist and one of hundreds of former merchant marine members "screened" out of their jobs by the National Guard. Watson found a job through the ILWU in 1955 and remained with the union until his retirement 10 years ago.

S.F. vs. HUAC

As the battle raged over Bridges and the ILWU, there was another movement brewing in San Francisco: the mobilization that finally kicked HUAC out of town for good.

The committee conducted three sets of hearings in San Francisco during the 1950s – in '53, '56, and '57 – before the hearing-to-end-all-hearings (in San Francisco, at least) in May 1960.

"The hearings in 1957 were especially controversial, in part because subpoenaed witness William K. Sherwood, a Stanford University professor, killed himself before being compelled to testify," Joshua Paddison wrote in an article in the fall 1999 issue of California Journal.

"I will be in two days assassinated by publicity," the professor wrote in his suicide note.

Shortly thereafter, three groups helped build local opposition to HUAC. Ernest Besig, executive director of the northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, helped lead the charge – in defiance of the national ACLU's policy of nonopposition to HUAC. San Franciscans for Academic Freedom and Education (SAFE), a group established by then-assistant SFSU professor Arthur Bierman in 1959, took a more moderate approach. SAFE conducted a centrist, grassroots campaign to persuade moderates to oppose the committee. The East Bay Community Forum, comprising subpoenaed teachers and East Bay activists, also played an active role.

The three groups were able to raise such an outcry that HUAC chair Francis Walter saw fit to cancel a fourth San Francisco HUAC hearing scheduled for 1959.

Nonetheless, those called to testify – 40 elementary and high school teachers – still paid the price. In a vengeful move, HUAC forwarded their names and those of 53 others to local school boards, and six teachers lost their jobs.

When HUAC returned to San Francisco for three days beginning on May 12, 1960, it was met by more than a thousand protesters.

On the second day of the hearings – henceforth referred to as Black Friday – HUAC stacked the room with sympathetic conservatives. Mandel remembers clearly what happened next: "They rigged a loudspeaker outside, where the students gathered," he said. Edgy from the long wait and irritated at not being allowed into the proceedings, the crowds got more and more incensed. Soon, the police turned fire hoses on the crowd, beat the protesters with clubs. and dragged, punched, and pushed them down the steps of City Hall.

The next day at least 5,000 protesters filled the plaza in front of City Hall calling for an end to HUAC.

"The events in San Francisco in the summers of 1959 and 1960 marked the most dramatic clash between pro- and anti-HUAC forces in U.S. history," Paddison wrote.

The demonstrations were widely credited with dealing a death blow to HUAC. Encouraged and emboldened by the public protests, more organizations and individuals across the nation began mobilizing against the committees until political fallout made it impossible for the trials to continue.

Then and now

Today many people who lived through the McCarthy era or have dedicated themselves to keeping its history alive are suffering a serious bout of déjà vu. The crackdown on "undesirable" immigrants and activists, expanded FBI powers, detentions based on secret evidence, imprisonment without right to representation, the ever growing lists of "terrorist" organizations, and the general atmosphere of fear are all too familiar.

"It's worse today," Meiklejohn's Ginger lamented. "The laws are more draconian. The number of people attacked is greater. The fear is greater."

But if there's one thing the San Francisco of the 1950s can teach its successors 50 years later, it's that solidarity and concerted, multifaceted opposition can turn the tide.

"I do know that we've beat them in the past," Mandel, now 86, told us. "And if we pursue this policy of not obeying, then we can beat them this time."