[9] Longshoremen and sailors on the West Coast also had contacts with an Australian syndicalist movement that called itself the "One Big Union" formed after the defeat of a general strike there in 1917.

[13] Harry Bridges, an Australian-born sailor who became a longshoreman after coming to the United States, was repeatedly accused[further explanation needed] for his acknowledged Communist party membership.

[14][15] Militants published a newspaper, The Waterfront Worker, which focused on longshoremen's most pressing demands: more men on each gang, lighter loads and an independent union.

[16][17] While a number of the individuals in this group were Communist Party members, the group as a whole was independent of the party: although it criticized the International Seamen's Union (ISU) as weak and the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), which had its base on the East Coast, as corrupt, it did not embrace the MWIU, but called instead for creation of small knots of activists at each port to serve as the first step in a slow, careful movement to unionize the industry.

Just as the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act had led to a spontaneous significant rise in union membership among coal miners in 1933, thousands of longshoremen now joined the fledgling ILA locals that reappeared on the West Coast.

The militants who had published "The Waterfront Worker", now known as the "Albion Hall group" after their usual meeting place, continued organizing dock committees that soon began launching slowdowns and other types of job actions in order to win better working conditions.

[20] When the conservative ILA leadership negotiated a weak "gentlemen's agreement" with the employers that had been brokered by the mediation board created by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bridges led the membership in rejecting it.

[29] On Tuesday, July 3, fights broke out along the Embarcadero in San Francisco between police and strikers while a handful of trucks driven by young businessmen made it through the picket line.

[33] Shipping companies, government officials, some union leaders and the press began to raise fears that the strike was the result of communist agitation.

[34][35] This "red scare" also helped ignite a controversy about the New Deal Public Works of Art Project murals that were at the time being completed in San Francisco's Coit Tower (on Telegraph Hill, close to the location of the strike in San Francisco), leading to the postponing of the tower's July 7 opening, and later to the removal of communist symbols from two of the American Social Realism style murals.

[47] The following day, several thousand strikers, families and sympathizers took part in a funeral procession down Market Street, stretching more than a mile and a half, for Nicholas Bordoise and Howard Sperry, the two persons killed on "Bloody Thursday".

The march made an enormous impact on San Franciscans, making a general strike, which had formerly been "the visionary dream of a small group of the most radical workers, became ... a practical and realizable objective.

[53] Roosevelt later recalled that some persons were urging him to steer the USS Houston, which was carrying him to Hawaii, "into San Francisco Bay, all flags flying and guns double-shotted, and end the strike."

While food deliveries continued with the permission of the strike committee, many small businesses closed, posting signs in support of the strikers.

[59] When the National Longshore Board put the employer's proposal to arbitrate to a vote of striking longshoremen, it passed in every port except Everett, Washington.

While Bridges, who had preached solidarity among all maritime workers and scorned arbitration, apologized to the seamen for the longshoremen's vote, the President of the ISU urged them to hold out and to burn their "fink books", the membership records of the company union to which they had been forced to pay dues.

[60] On July 17, 1934, the California National Guard blocked both ends of Jackson Street from Drumm to Front with machine gun mounted trucks to assist vigilante raids, protected by SFPD, on the headquarters of the Marine Workers' Industrial Union and the ILA soup kitchen at 84 Embarcadero.

[64] General Hugh S. Johnson, then head of the National Recovery Administration, gave a speech urging responsible labor leaders to "run these subversive influences out from its ranks like rats".

[66] In Hayward in Alameda County someone erected a scaffold in front of the city hall with a noose and a sign stating "Reds beware".

[67] In Piedmont, an upscale community surrounded by Oakland on all sides, the chief of police prepared for a reported attack by strikers on the homes of wealthy ship-owners.

Spontaneous strikes over grievances and workplace conditions broke out as strikers returned to their jobs, with longshoremen and teamsters supporting their demands.

[70] Longshoremen also began dictating other terms, fining members who worked more than the ceiling of 120 hours per month, filing charges against a gang boss for "slandering colored brothers" and forcing employers to fire strikebreakers.

[citation needed] The union soon utilized the "quickie strike" tactic to force many concessions from employers such as safer working conditions and better pay.

[77] The ILWU continues to recognize "Bloody Thursday" by shutting down all West Coast ports every July 5 and honoring Nick Bordoise, Howard Sperry and all of the other workers killed by police during the strike.