The 1937 San Francisco Hotel Strike

At five in the afternoon of May 1, the desk clerks closed the registers on the desks of the St. Francis, the Palace, the Mark Hopkins, the Fairmont and the other eleven hotels rated Class A. The cooks laid down their ladles, waiters and waitresses took off their aprons, porters and bellhops set down the luggage they were carrying, and they all walked out of the hotels. They returned a short while later, this time wearing red and white ribbons proclaiming AFL PICKET, and began to walk in lines in front of the hotel entrances. As soon as they walked out, it was announced that the other unions of the San Francisco Labor Council would support them; themusicians, bakers, drivers, chauffeurs and butchers all refused to cross the picket line.

At the St. Francis the assistant manager explained to a circle of angry guests that they would have to make their own beds. A puffing Oliver Hardy had to carry his own bags up the stairs to his room, and other administrators were put to work answering the telephone. At the Palace the elevators stopped. Three hundred guests on the top floors were moved to the first and second floors. At the Fairmont there was no heat or ice, the new swimming pool closed, and the assistant manager was handed an apron and sent to the kitchen to cook for the remaining guests. George Smith [the real estate speculator who built the Mark Hopkins Hotel] himself was running the elevator at the Mark Hopkins. Angry and bewildered, nearly all the guests, unable to get clean towels or room service, checked out and left the hotels silent and ghostly. Private guards stood at the entrances, watching to see that the strikers didn’t try to enter. The only trouble that day came when groups of Stanford students, arriving at the Palace for their annual Barn Dance, found it canceled because of the strike; they heckled the pickets until the pickets chased them off.

The strikers were in a good mood, expecting a quick victory. “Scramble your own eggs, folks, and eat raw meat,” some of them yelled good-naturedly at some guests going into one hotel. “It’s good for you.” “We are convinced the hotels cannot hold out another twenty-four hours,” Walter Cowan, the president of the joint board of culinary workers, announced. But the hotel owners were determined, and their doors stayed closed.

“We are prepared to hold out as long as two months if necessary,” Cowan now announced. The strikers settled in for a long siege. They established cafeterias and kitchens for their members, parties for their children and coffee stands for the pickets on the line. For Mother’s Day they voted to allow florists to cross the picket line to deliver corsages to the elderly women still in the hotels. When a rumor came that a hotel was trying to reopen, carloads of pickets, followed by squad cars full of police, would rush to the hotel, bringing the number of pickets from a dozen to more than 200. None of the hotels tried to reopen.

The hotel owners had long been looking forward to the business they would get from the Golden Gate Bridge Fiesta at the end of May, when the great red span, under construction since 1933, would be thrown open. Now they faced the fiesta through locked doors. They published advertisements reading: “The unions are endeavoring to impose upon us conditions which in our opinion would destroy the splendid reputation for outstanding hotels which this city has earned.” Walter Cowan replied, “We are just as anxious to end this difficulty as you are. Our jobs are at stake.”

The fiesta went ahead, without the hotels. President Roosevelt touched a key that set off cannon at the Presidio, Mayor Rossi used a torch to cut through a silver chain, and formations of planes from the Pacific Fleet buzzed over the bridge as it opened for the first time. Five thousand cars lined up to cross the first day. Pullman cars were lined up at the stations in Oakland and San Francisco to house the overflow of guests.

As May turned into June and the hotel owners made no new offers, the strikers got angrier. A ball bearing was shot through the window of one of the smaller hotels, acid was poured on the carpet of another, and two nonunion plumbers were jumped by eight men and beaten as they walked away from a struck hotel. Near the Hotel Gaylord, strikers saw twelve men in full dress suits walking toward the hotel; thinking they were waiters coming to break the strike, the pickets gave a yell and chased the men down the street, cornering them in a garage until they were rescued by police. The shaken men turned out to be Shriners coming back from an initiation; the embarrassed strikers apologized.

Yet compared with the other strikes going on in the country at the same time, the hotel strike was remarkably tame. That same week at the Republic Steel Plant in Youngstown, Ohio, four strikers were killed and eighty-eight wounded in open battle between strikers and police, hired guards and soldiers. The plant owner hired airplanes to drop food to strikebreakers working inside the besieged plant, and the strikers outside tried just as earnestly to shoot them down.

As it turned to July and got soggy hot, the city started planning for the visit of a celebrity. AMELIA EARHART DUE IN S.F. NEXT WEEK, the Chronicle reported. The aviatrix and her Navy navigator were in New Guinea, getting ready for the hop to Howland Island, then to Honolulu and at last to San Francisco. The San Francisco city fathers moaned that with the hotels on strike there would be no place to give her a banquet; she would have to be honored in Oakland. What sort of honor was it to have Oakland give you a banquet?

The strike remained deadlocked, but the Amelia Earhart Welcome Home banquet site problem was solved: She disappeared. EARHART AND AIDE DOWN IN MID-PACIFIC—FATE IS MYSTERY, the Chronicle reported. "Fuel Gone, No Land in Sight, Said Last Radio from Amelia: Plane Can Float, Asserts Expert,"

While the Navy was trying to find Amelia Earhart, the unions, exhausted and nearly bankrupt from the two-month-old strike, decided to make their last, best offer. If the hotels would recognize them and let an arbitration panel of union, employer and government officials decide about hours and wages, they would end the strike. It was a great concession by the union; they knew they were likely to lose before an arbitration board. But the hotel owners, feeling they had finally beaten the unions, decided to go for all the cards and try to crush the unions completely; they refused the offer.

The next day the union launched a final, desperate assault. As long as the forty Class B hotels stayed open, they knew, there would not be too much pressure on the hotel owners to settle the strike. Trying to close the Class B hotels would utterly ruin the unions and stretch their manpower to the limit, but they had to do it if they wanted to win.

Harvey Toy was the manager and owner of the Class B Manx Hotel on Powell Street, the president of the San Francisco Hotel Association and a self-described enemy of the unions. A big, square, scowling man with glasses, he was standing in the lobby of his hotel, leaning on his crutches from a recent accident, when there was a tremendous commotion outside on the sidewalk. Stepping to the door to look out, Toy found dozens of men in white hats, suits and red AFL PICKET ribbons climbing out of cars in front of his hotel, forming into lines and marching in a chain, chanting, "Unfair!" Immediately he was on the phone to the police, but the police were already arriving; two squad cars parked in front of the hotel and reserves on horseback arrived to control the curious crowd, now in the thousands, that was blocking Powell Street, trying to find out what was going on. His lobby was jammed now with strike supporters, bewildered guests and people trying to escape the madness on the sidewalk outside. Toy was on the phone to a newspaper. "My hotel is running," he shouted. "A lot of rowdies came into the hotel and
created a disturbance. I asked the police to protect my property and the rowdies were thrown out bodily."

Outside, the strikers were handing out streamers to anyone who would take them. The strikers were shouting, "Unfair!" at Toy, and the reporters who had arrived were shouting "Unfair!" at the police for not letting them into the lobby. One reporter, Kevin Wallace of the Examiner, was particularly abusing the police for not letting him do his duty. "That's the spirit, sonny," a picket, an "underfed man who looked something like Abraham Lincoln," told Wallace and handed him a streamer. Somehow Wallace wedged himself past the police into the lobby and charged up to the first man he saw. “Where is the manager?” he demanded. “We wish to complain to the manager!”“I am the manager,” the man snapped. “Harvey M. Toy, at your service.” Then Toy looked down and saw the banner in Wallace’s hand. “Officer, show this gentleman the egress,” he said to a policeman standing next to him. Wallace was shouldered out, and Toy was left to explain to a group of tourists from Alabama why their luggage couldn’t be carried upstairs, while a photographer from the Examiner took his picture. Outside, the picketers were war-dancing on the sidewalk.
Seventy-one of his seventy-five employees had walked out. Toy, furious, hoisted a banner over his hotel proclaiming THIS IS FREE AMERICA.

When the picket lines marched out front, Toy, puffing furiously on his cigar, would hobble to the entrance; if he was particularly annoyed, he would throw water balloons at the strikers. The picketers jeered him loudly and pushed up against him when he came outside; if anyone came too close he would seize them and put them under citizen’s arrest; one striker put him under citizen’s arrest for hitting her with his crutch. An increasingly angry Toy called for citizen vigilantes to defend his hotel if the police “cannot control the situation,” an appeal that was denounced by the unions and even the other hotel owners. Contributions began to come in to the union headquarters, as news of the statement spread, from unions as far away as Maine and Alaska.

The unions won their desperate gamble. Faced with the closing of nearly all of the city’s hotels and the loss of their business to Oakland, the hotel employers accepted the union offer of recognition and arbitration, eighty-seven days after the strike had begun. For the first time the workers had won, and the unions were firmly established in San Francisco’s hotels. Wrote a jubilant culinary worker in the union’s magazine, “Yes sir, no sir, please sir, were just about all the words these poor devils knew when they came out on strike. But now they’re learning, how they are learning!”