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Eighty years ago this summer, when San Francisco still thrived on the sea trade, the streets of the city teemed with men on strike. Fed up with humiliating working conditions, the longshoremen had called for a halt to labor on the docks. They rallied in public spaces, crammed into the Civic Center, and organized a march down Market Street. In early July, things quickly turned violent. The police cracked down, attacking the unarmed protestors. On a day that became known as “Bloody Thursday,” two strikers were shot and killed, as was one bystander, and hundreds more were hospitalized or injured. Journalists documented the violence, and the city shut down.
Among those who witnessed the chaos of the summer was a young radical writer and organizer, Tillie Lerner. Charismatic and impetuous, Lerner was just twenty-two that summer, but she had already fallen in love many times—with books, with revolutionary causes, and with bookish, activist men. She eloped with one of these men, Abe Goldfarb, after her high-school graduation. Though she devoted herself to politics, she also had literary ambitions (at sixteen, she placed a photo of Virginia Woolf on her desk and practiced writing like Woolf and Gertrude Stein). At the time of the strike, she was living in San Francisco with Abe and their young daughter. The couple was growing apart, though, and Lerner kept herself busy planning the strike’s actions. She became close to one of the leaders, Jack Olsen, whom she later married. (She would take his name, becoming Tillie Olsen.) She also reported on the strike, but she wrote about it in a strange way. “The Strike,” published in the Partisan Review, discusses the longshoremen’s labor in relation to her own work—her work as a writer. “Do not ask me to write of the strike and the terror,” her essay begins.
I am on a battlefield, and the increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is impossible to turn them back into the past. You leave me only this night to drop the bloody garment of Todays, to cleave through the gigantic events that have crashed one upon the other, to the first beginning. If I could go away for a while, if there were time and quiet, perhaps I could do it. All that has happened might resolve into order and sequence, fall into neat patterns of words. I could stumble back into the past and slowly, painfully rear the structure in all its towering magnificence, so that the beauty and heroism, the terror and significance of those days, would enter your heart and sear it forever with the vision.
The essay continues in this manner, juxtaposing violent images of the protests with the author’s internal turmoil. “I am feverish and tired,” she writes near the end. “Forgive me that the words are feverish and blurred.” Such stream-of-consciousness writing is well suited to modernist fiction, but it’s far from the plain style prescribed for proletarian literature.
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