Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 915

demands that they said hadn't been met, and they weren't going to work until they were met.

The man who stood out as the leader and said he was the leader, and nobody disputed it, so we assumed that he was, was a man named Joe Curran - unheard of, unknown. Nobody had ever heard his name before. I think the word of the strike reached the Secretary of Commerce before it reached me because the irate steam-ship owners were telephoning to him to cancel the licenses of all these seamen. Within a few minutes I had the News. I was on the telephone with our conciliators on the West Coast. We had two very good conciliators - at that time excellent ones, the best we ever had. One was a man named Fitzgerald, and another older, calmer man, a very solid, substantial person, Ernie Marsh. They were both on the West Coast and they were both in San Francisco. Fitzgerald was a kind of a roughneck, but a very good conciliator. They, of course, rushed to the pier. By the time I reached them they had heard of the strike and were down seeing what they could do.

I got the information that it seemed spontaneous, that there didn't seem to be any union involved, that they didn't have any organization. This fellow Curran





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help