1st Edition
Brotherhood of the Sea A History of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, 1885-1985
In 1934, the Pacific Coast was shaken by a massive strike of waterfront workers- on the docks and the ships. In this mighty struggle, the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific, quiescent since it’s defeat in the period after the first World War was reborn. Fighting on San Francisco’s Embarcadero led to the stationing of National Guard troops on the ‘front’. This book looks at the Union from 1885 to 1985.
Biography
Stephen Schwartz was born in 1948 and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since he was two. He publishedpoetry and other writings while at Lowell High School, and attended the City College of San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley. At the latter institution, he was awarded a scholarship and other honors. However, like many of his peers in the turbulent generation of the 1960s, Mr. Schwartz turned away from anacademic career to become an activist, in his case in the labor movement. After shipping out as a member of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, he swallowed the anchor and served almost ten years as a railroad employee. He has been a leading member of AFL-CIO Railway Clerks' lodges 248 (Western Pacific) and 226 (Santa Fe). Since 1980, Mr. Schwartz has concentrated on his work as a writer. In 1981-83, he was senior editor of Pacific Shipper, the leading West Coast maritime periodical, and he is now editor of the San Francisco-based quarterly Journal of Contemporary Studies. He participated in the massive 1986 study, Unions in Transition, edited by Seymour Martin Lipset with Herman Benson, Lane Kirkland, and others.
