Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.news From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Waterfront's Bridges was a Communist Date: Sun, 8 Nov 92 15:50:37 EST Message-ID: \SE A;NATION \SS (WS) \HD Waterfront's Bridges was a Communist \BY ASSOCIATED PRESS \DT SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Two researchers say they found documents in Soviet archives showing that the late waterfront union leader Harry Bridges was a member of the Communist Party. In fact, they say, he was a high-ranking official. Mr. Bridges, who acknowledged communist sympathies but denied party membership, was on a list of people elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA at its 1936 convention, the two said. The federal government spent 16 years trying to deport Mr. Bridges, charging that the founder of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union had falsely denied being a Communist Party member when he applied for citizenship. The U.S. Supreme Court twice reversed orders for his deportation, and the Australian native was once jailed for 20 days as a communist conspirator. Harvey Klehr, a political science professor at Emory University, and John Haynes, who edits the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism, found documents at the old archives of the Communist Party in Moscow that shed new light on Mr. Bridges' political status, Mr. Klehr said. He said he uncovered a list of members elected to the U.S. Central Committee in 1936. "Brief biographies, really just evaluations, were with the list," he said. One of the names on the list was "Rossi," identified in the biography as the pseudonym for Mr. Bridges. The biography described him in Russian as "president of the Dockers' and Port Warehouse Workers' Union." "He is a strong leader of the union movement and a mass worker but up till now has only limited party knowledge and experience," the document said. Mr. Bridges, who died in 1990 at age 88, founded the union in 1934 and was its president until 1977. In 1934, he led a three-day general strike in San Francisco that ended with an agreement on a contract establishing a union-operated, rather than employer-run, hiring hall. Mr. Bridges may have taken Rossi as a pseudonym as a jesting reference to Angelo Rossi, then mayor of San Francisco and a Bridges foe. Kathy Wilkes, a spokeswoman for the union and a Bridges biographer, took no stock in the new findings, which Mr. Klehr and Mr. Haynes reported in the December issue of the American Spectator, a conservative journal. "The government tried and failed to prove this claim more times than are worth counting, and we consider it ridiculous for anybody to try to revive it," she said. Last month, a high-ranking Russian general said the archives showed that Alger Hiss, the State Department lawyer accused of espionage during the McCarthy era, never spied for the Soviets. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM