Progressive Lawyers Under Siege

Discussion of the political troubles progressive lawyers encountered during the McCarthy era, focusing on the San Francisco law firm Gladstein, Andersen and Leonard and its clients, including labor leader Harry Bridges.

This is a study of a progressive law firm and its three partners. The firm was founded in 1936 and existed until the death of one partner in 1965. The partners were harassed by the FBI primarily for defending labor union members and leaders and the defense of both. The firm’s primary client was Harry Bridges, the long term President on the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU). The irony was that the more the FBI persecuted labor unions, the more business the firm had from those harassed by the FBI. During this time the FBI was primarily interested in controlling the Communist Party. While the clients of the firm were sometimes Communists, the law partners were not Communist Party members. In both of these ways the FBI was wasting its time in persecuting this firm. Although the primary data used involved existing records (for example all of the partners had extensive FBI files), we also interviewed colleagues and relatives of the partners.

As protest movements took to the streets during the 1960s and 1970s, a group of lawyers joined forces with America's most confrontational activists. In pursuit of radical change themselves, these militant attorneys went beyond providing mere representation. They identified with their clients, defied the habits of a conservative profession, and formulated a corrosive critique of the legal system, questioning the neutrality and transformative power of law. While exploiting the courtrooms as political forums, they developed aggressive litigation strategies and became involved with the organization of protest. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, historian Luca Falciola reconstructs this largely unmapped phenomenon and challenges the reader to think anew about the pivotal role of lawyers in social movements. At the heart of this book is the story of the National Lawyers Guild. Founded in 1937, the Guild represented the first integrated and progressive bar association of America. The Guild returned to prominence in the early 1960s, at the vanguard providing legal aid to civil rights workers in the South. Since then, leftist students, disobedient soldiers, rebellious inmates, radical minorities, and revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground have relied on this cadre of sympathetic lawyers to defend and empower them.

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.

Founded in 1919, the Communist Party (CP) in San Francisco survived an ineffectual early period to become a force in the trade union heyday of the 1930s. Robert Cherny uses the lives and careers of more than fifty members to tell the story of the city’s CP from its founding through 1958. Cherny draws on FBI files, the records of the CP at the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History, interviews, and memoirs to follow male and female party and union leaders, rank-and-file members, and others. His history reveals why people joined the CP while charting the frequent changes in policy, constant member turnover, and disruptive factionalism that limited party aims and successes. Cherny also follows his subjects through their resignations, expulsions, or other reasons for departure and looks at the CP’s influence on their lives in subsequent years. Vivid and exhaustively researched, San Francisco Reds is a long view account of the personal motivations and activism of an Old Left generation in a West Coast city.

This creative non-fiction book for the reader is a great introduction to the effects of global capitalism on the dynamic region that is the San Francisco Bay Area. It is written by the author with deep knowledge of the business practices, which have shaped the area into what it is today. What will interest the reader most, however, are the multicultural aspects in the book, from the main protagonists background as an Eastern European, to the chasing of the American dream, afforded and provided by opportunities in the Silicon Valley. Things are not so simple. What the book does well is offer a perspective of the globalized effects that fracture the American dream in terms of both business and law practices sweeping the region (and the U.S. at large). For someone who is a new transplant to the area under question, it was truly fascinating to get this well-documented historical perspective. What is more, and this is where the true literary merit of the book comes from, is that this larger economic element is reflected in the fracturing of the American family itself, issues with which Thaddeus Sikorski, the protagonist of the novel, struggles. To this, readers get access to a perspective on the laws shaping divorce in America, the repercussions of which causes emotional turmoil for Thaddeus and his Angels. These more personal, emotional stakes are what will truly grab the reader. They provide a much-needed grounding of the broader themes explored in the novel, making them palatable and engaging to a casual reader. We are taken through the pursuit of the American dream, the establishment of the American family, and a smattering of suspense and intrigue. If you want to know more about the forces that shape modern business practices in all their dream-fulfilling and dream-shattering capacities, this is a good read.

"Project of the program on human rights and the global economy, Northeastern University School of Law"--T.p.