Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934

At celebrations on the Fourth of July, residents had traded stories about the strike and the violence from the afternoon of the previous day. On the morning of Thursday July 5th, curious onlookers lined the wharf to see what would happen next, and vendors paraded through the crowds selling snacks and cigarettes, adding to the approximately 800 lawmen and 2,000 strikers already on scene. Brutal battles erupted along the waterfront at 8 a.m., shocking the crowd and injuring innocent bystanders. Workmen constructing the San Francisco Bay Bridge suspend work for the day to avoid injuries from the riot’s spillover. Tear gas and a more pungent vomiting gas were loosed freely into throngs of strikers and spectators alike, as picketers and policemen beat each other with clubs and rocks, and law enforcement fired pistols and riot guns at the crowds. Fires broke out on dry grassy hillsides and empty boxcars were set alight. One newspaper described the day as “a hundred riots, big and little, first here, now there. Don’t think of it as one battle, but as a dozen battles” (Quinn 111). After a morning of beatings along the south end of the Embarcadero, many of the longshoremen and their sympathizers retreated to the ILA headquarters at 113 Steuart Street.

All parties ceased fighting and regrouped over the lunch hour, but at one o’clock, police officers launched their afternoon offensive, moving the battle into the industrial area of SOMA and closer to the heart of the city. As the workers finished lunch inside, police launched tear gas canisters into the building and filled the ILA hall with smoke. The men who came pouring out of the building were met with gunfire. It was in this exchange that two men, Howard Sperry, a longshoreman and WWI veteran, and Nicholas Bordoise, a union cook and communist member, were fatally shot in the street, and dozens of others were injured. Law enforcement executed a similar raid at the Seaboard Hotel at 226 The Embarcadero, just south of Howard Street, where many of the picketers boarded and were finding respite. The strikers sought safety by running further into the city, into the retail areas were residents were going about their daily business. The police pursued. Suddenly, ordinary citizens were witnesses to brutal aggression from the city agencies aimed at the striking laborers. Women suffering from the effects of tear gas were taken to hospitals where they mingled with scores of bloodied marchers. Confronted with this brutality, public opinion turned in favor of the maritime unions and the strategy of a general strike across the city gained traction.

The streets of San Francisco were bloodied from what is now Giants Ballpark all the way to the Financial District. All told, two men were dead on this day, over one hundred were admitted to the hospitals for their injuries, and countless more left the scene with minor wounds. That evening, Governor Merriam declared martial law along the waterfront and deployed two thousand National Guardsmen to quell any future violence (Quinn 108-118). 

Quin, Mike. The Big Strike. International Publishers, 1949.