Lexington Books
Pages: 224
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-4985-9801-9 • Hardback • December 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-4985-9802-6 • eBook • December 2019 • $99.50 • (£77.00)
Vernon L. Pedersen is a professor of history and the Head of the International Studies Department at the American University of Sharjah
Chapter One: Radicals on the Waterfront
Chapter Two: The Birth of the Marine Workers Industrial Union
Chapter Three: Rivalries and Divisions
Chapter Four: A Hamburg Difficulty
Chapter Five: Eddy, Ralph and Jones
Chapter Six: The Baltimore Soviet
Chapter Seven: On the Embarcadero
Chapter Eight: The Lessons of the San Francisco General Strike
Chapter Nine: The End of the MWIU
Chapter Ten: The Strike of the SS California
Chapter Eleven: The Birth of the National Maritime Union
Vernon L. Pedersen has diligently mined a host of heretofore untapped and close archival sources to present the first thorough examination of the efforts of the Communist Party of the United States to organize maritime workers in the 1930s. His careful evaluation of their successes and failures offers both a correction to previous interpretations and reveals insights into the internal conflicts and rivalries in the Party and among those trying to organize a radical union.
— Harvey Klehr, Emory University
Pedersen’s The Communist Party on the American Waterfront is the most comprehensive archivally based historical study of American Communists in longshore and maritime unionism in the 1930s that has appeared. The decade opened with weak unions throughout the maritime industry and ended in the late 1930s––after a series of often violent strikes and organizational confusion––with the Communist-led ILWU controlling longshore work on the west coast and the Communist-led NMU equally dominant among sailors on the east and gulf coasts. So thoroughly has Pedersen mined American Communist Party and Communist International archives in Moscow, and so careful is his narrative that, likely and deservedly, this book will be the definitive study of the subject.
— John Earl Haynes, author of Early Cold War Spies