Hardhats and Longhairs

In May 1970, as a college student in Portland, Oregon, I took part in the national campus strike protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard. Every day for a week, several thousand students set off on antiwar demonstrations through downtown Portland. One morning our march took a different route, out to the port of Portland to bring our antiwar message to the longshoremen who worked on the waterfront. We knew that Harry Bridges’s ILWU was a “good union,” which was to say antiwar. We also knew that the longshore union had a radical past; though few of us qualified as knowledgeable students of labor history, leftist folklore in Portland had p...