Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend
- Winner of a Silver Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards
- Won Honorable Mention for 2023 ILHA Book of the Year (International Labor History Association)
The iconic leader of one of America's most powerful unions, Harry Bridges put an indelible stamp on the twentieth century labor movement. Robert Cherny's monumental biography tells the life story of the figure who built the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) into a labor powerhouse that still represents almost 30,000 workers.
An Australian immigrant, Bridges worked the Pacific Coast docks. His militant unionism placed him at the center of the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike and spurred him to expand his organizing activities to warehouse laborers and Hawaiian sugar and pineapple workers. Cherny examines the overall effectiveness of Bridges as a union leader and the decisions and traits that made him effective. Cherny also details the price paid by Bridges as the US government repeatedly prosecuted him for his left-wing politics.
Drawing on personal interviews with Bridges and years of exhaustive research, Harry Bridges places an extraordinary individual and the ILWU within the epic history of twentieth-century labor radicalism.
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"A must-read for students of 20th Century US History." --Labor History
"A detailed account of Bridges's life and achievements, using not only the extensive government files from his various prosecutions and the ILWU's voluminous archives but also Bridges's own papers, a number of interviews with him, and, crucially, CPUSA files in Russian archives. It is unlikely that a more complete story of the man will ever be told." --Commentary
"Harry Bridges is little-known, but he was arguably the most important left-leaning union leader in twentieth-century America. Cherny has written the most comprehensive biography of Bridges that exists--or, I imagine, ever will exist."--Peter Cole, author of Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area
"Allows us to revisit a monumental twentieth-century life. Bridges the man may not be widely known, but his philosophy of inclusive, democratic unionism imbues much of today's most ambitious organizing campaigns, from Starbucks and Amazon to the teachers' unions in Chicago and Los Angeles." --New York Review of Books
"Cherny's text is as complete a biography of Bridges as one will find. Politically astute and with a deep understanding of the complexities of labour organizing and union work, the text presents a portrait of a man, his politics, and his steadfast belief in the necessity and potential power of an organized working class. " --Morning Star
"A monumental achievement. More than thirty-five years in the making, it is exhaustively researched, gracefully written, and comprehensive. . . . Offers tantalizing details that may surprise even those who already know a great deal about Bridges and the ILWU. . . . It should appeal to everyone interested in Harry Bridges, the history of the ILWU, and the American labor movement in general." --Dispatcher
