Ballad of Bloody Thursday, The

DESCRIPTION: "As I went walking one day down in Frisco... I spied a longshoreman all dressed in white linen.... and cold as the clay." The boss owned the unions. The workers fought back to regain their rights. 400 workers were killed or injured. He tells them to fight
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1960 (Greenway); probably written c. 1934
KEYWORDS: labor-movement strike battle death
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Jul 5, 1934 - Bloody Thursday, the first day of serious violence in the three-month-old strike on the San Francisco docks
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Greenway-AmericanFolksongsOfProtest, pp. 237-238, "The Ballad of Bloody Thursday" (1 text)
Cohen-AmericanFolkSongsARegionalEncyclopedia2, pp. 668-669, "The Ballad of Bloody Thursday" (1 text)
Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest, pp. 524-525, "The Ballad of Bloody Thursday" (1 text, 1 tune)
NOTES [245 words]: According to Robert E. Weir and James P. Hanlan, editors, Historical Encyclopedia of American Labor, 2 volumes, Greenwood Press, 2004, pp. 135-136,
"In 1933 alone, more than 1.2 million workers went on strike, a six-fold increase from 1930 [as a result of New Deal laws making unionization more possible]. Typical of these struggles was that involving West Coast dockworkers. By August 1933, nearly 95 percent of San Francisco's longshoremen joined the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), the first successful organizing drive since the Industrial Workers of the World enrolled waterside workers in the 1910s. Anger had long simmered among dock workers, riggers, and longshoremen. Many were tired of the dehumanizing morning shape-up, in which men stood on the docks while foremen decided whom to hire. On May 9, 1934, some 12,000 dock workers from British Columbia to San Diego stayed away....
"Within two weeks, an additional 10,000 workers were on strike. In July, the city of San Francisco was virtually closed by a four-day general strike that idled more than 125,000 workers from a variety of trades. The strike fizzled out, due in part to brutal repression, but mainly because a Longshoreman's Board was established to arbitrate long-standing disputes."
Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest lists the tune as "The Cowboy's Lament," so the book prints it with a "Streets of Laredo" variant, but I'm not entirely sure I trust that linkage. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: CAFS2668

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