Frank Thompson: Islands organizer, 1944-1946

Introduction by Harvey Schwartz

This is the first of a three-part series featuring the recollections of ILWU leaders who made important contributions to the building of the union in Hawaii. In 2004 The Dispatcher carried oral history articles on former officers Louis Goldblatt (International Secretary-Treasurer, 1943-1977) and Jack Hall (Hawaii Regional Director, 1944-1969), who are generally considered the main figures in the organization of the Islands. This month’s oral history spotlights Frank Thompson, the Sacramento warehouse Local 17 charter member and founder who was also the chief field organizer in Hawaii during the 1944-1946 unionization drive there.

Goldblatt was instrumental in selecting both Hall and Thompson to organize the Islands. “We decided we needed a guy in the field like Frank Thompson who was as good an organizer as this country has ever seen,” he told Edward D. Beechert of the University of Hawaii in a 1979 interview.

“He was quite a character, an old-time Wobbly (member of the militant Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW), a hardy, efficient guy with an endless amount of energy. Frank worked well with Jack, although they didn’t see too much of each other because Frank spent so much time in the field.”

Thompson, who was born in 1906, worked tirelessly during his brief career in Hawaii. During those two years more than 20,000 new workers were organized into the ILWU. Most of the workers Thompson talks explicitly about here were from Filipino sugar plantation camps. But he also organized Japanese, Chinese, native Hawaiians, Portuguese and other workers and some pineapple facilities.

In many ways 1944-1946 was a unique moment in time, as Thompson’s oral history reveals, when things came together just right for the union. Still, Thompson was the man who went out into the field and made it happen. As then International President Jimmy Herman said when Thompson died in 1979, “Frank Thompson was one of those incredibly devoted and selfless people that made the very existence of this union possible.”

After his return from the Islands in 1946, Thompson was elected secretary-treasurer of Local 17. He held that post until his retirement in 1970. During 1967 he sat for a tape session in Sacramento, Calif. with Professor Beechert, the author of the indispensable “Working in Hawaii: A Labor History.” That interview was conducted as part of the Pacific Regional Oral History Project at the University of Hawaii, which Beechert founded and directed. We are greatly indebted to Beechert for allowing us to use the transcript of that tape as the basis for this article.

FRANK THOMPSON
Edited by Harvey Schwartz,
Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection

In 1934 I started putting together what later became ILWU warehouse Local 17 here in Sacramento. Going back into the ’20s, I organized for the IWW in the logging camps. I worked in them camps a good many years. After 1929, during the Depression, I supported the unemployed councils and the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU). We’d go see Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraker, when he was still alive in the early 1930s. He was living down at Carmel with his wife, Ella Winters, who was a progressive writer herself. We’d put the bum on them for money when we wanted to put out a leaflet or feed somebody.

Around the beginning of 1935 I was approached by the guys in the Pacific Coast District of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). This was two years before the West Coast ILA became the ILWU. The ILA had a bargemen’s local on the waterfront in Sacramento. They were out on strike and needed help from somebody who’d had a little experience. I stayed with them until the strike was won.

After the bargemen’s strike, we put on a big drive to finish up organizing warehouses here. We’d actually started in ’34, but our organizing drive stalled in the early spring of ’35. Warren Denton from the San Francisco ILA warehouse local had been up here working with us, but he had to drop it. I had to pick the thing up after he left. This was later that spring.

n November of ’35 we got our first contract. It was at the old Pioneer Mill and the warehouse here. Then we organized the wholesale groceries and the rice mills. We’ve been in business ever since. I stayed with Local 17 until ’44 when the ILWU International asked me to go to Hawaii.

They had sent Mat Meehan down there, the longshoreman out of Portland. He was there a couple or three months and indicated he had no desire to stay. Lou Goldblatt, the ILWU International secretary-treasurer, was looking for somebody else that could go down there and do ’em a job. He asked me if I’d go. I told him, “Things are in pretty good shape in this local. I’ll go on down and take a whack at it.” That’s how I went to Hawaii.

I went down there as regional director, but after looking the thing over a week or two I decided they didn’t need no regional director. That is, they didn’t need me, anyway. I decided I’d rather go out to organize the outside islands and let Jack Hall stay in Honolulu and take care of being regional director.

The first island I went to was Hawaii. I went down there on a ship under blackout conditions because WWII was still on. It took all night to get to Hilo from Honolulu. I made a visit up Hamakua Coast and over to Olaa. Then I went back to Honolulu. The next visit I made was over to Kauai. All our organization there had been smashed since Pearl Harbor was bombed and military rule came in. We had to pick up the pieces from there.

We started the drive in Lihue, Kauai, particularly the big plantations. The rest of ’em fell into line as we went along. One time the manager of the Lihue Plantation invited me to take a trip. He had a dandy yacht and he went fishing way out for swordfish. I refused to go. You get on the guy’s boat, maybe he dumps you overboard. That’d be one good way to get rid of Thompson.

The union was definitely attractive to the workers. In many cases, from the time a guy was born until he died his whole life was run by the plantations. In other words, life was a form of serfdom, a peonage. On the Big Island at a lot of places if some worker had a friend in another plantation and he wanted the guy to come see him, he had to get permission from his manager. And the other guy had to get permission from his manager to go over to see the first guy. The workers were used to this, but a lot of ’em resented it. So anything they could do to improve their wages and things of that kind, why, they were for it.

One thing that helped us organize is that during the war the workers were frozen to their jobs in all the outside islands. They couldn’t go to Honolulu even to work in defense unless they got a permit, and they couldn’t get a permit because the manpower committees wouldn’t allow ’em to. The authorities had to keep men on the islands to run that sugar ’cause sugar was considered war essential. So we weren’t organizing people one day and then having to reorganize a place over again the next day. The workers were all stuck there.

Another element that helped was the background of the union sailors coming ashore in Hawaii at the various ports and talking to the sugar workers and other people about the ‘34 strike. The maritime workers were probably among the world’s best organizers back then because of the nature of their travels and the people they came in contact with. They could carry a message quicker than a newspaper.

Beyond this, the missionaries and planters had given the Hawaiian workers a pretty good primary school education. Consequently the people weren’t illiterate. They could read what was going on. So they finally got the idea that going ILWU was one way to solve some of their problems. I knew this whole psychological background was there, too. I could feel it all the time. Coupled with the fact that when you organized a plantation the people stayed there, why, very few of ’em got away from us.

Of course, the conditions on some of the plantations were pretty rough, too. At Ewa on Oahu they had a good facade. Any visitor would be shown the front part. But in the back they had open sewers. The toilets were in the house, but the offal would run down this wooden tube right through the camp. This was right alongside where people were walking. It’s a wonder they didn’t have typhoid or something. We raised hell about that and about housing, but during the war the plantations didn’t do a hell of a lot about it. They couldn’t get the materials even if they wanted to. But when the war was over we put the heat on, and the plantations began to clean up some of these backward places.

In Hawaii you had to deal with these different racial camps the planters had set up, but I’d had a lot of experience with racial groups in California before I went to the Islands. In the Sacramento Valley you had Filipino and Mexican agricultural field workers. You had people who in many respects were similar to what you got in Hawaii. I’d helped these different groups in the CAWIU all the way from 1929 on.

I spent hours up in the mountains in Hawaii, particularly around Hilo. All along the Hamakua Coast you’d go in there around quitting time in the afternoon. The Filipino workers didn’t want to be bothered right away. The first thing a guy did was get that fighting cock. Pretty soon another Filipino would come along. A chunk of dough would go down, the roosters would hit the ground, and zing-zing, it’s over. Then you could sign ’em up. You learned that pretty early.

The Filipino workers spoke either Ilocano or Viscayan, but we really didn’t have any trouble with language. Most of the guys understood what was going on. You’d use pidgin English and those that didn’t understand, why, one of the other guys with you would translate pretty easily.

After we organized several Big Island plantations there was a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearing. The employers screamed that the workers were agricultural and were legally excluded from the NLRB, which could only certify non-agricultural bargaining units. The hearing was in Hilo in October 1944. In January 1945 a decision came from the NLRB in Washington, D.C. directing NLRB elections in about a dozen plantations and ordering two units giving us everything out to the end of the railroad tracks, or out to the flumes. They even gave us the bargaining rights on the guys that worked a horse pulling a stone boat loaded with sugar cane. The NLRB called them transportation workers.

Basically we got anything that was transported from the field. One bargaining unit went right into the mill. The second one covered the bull cooks, the storekeepers, the janitors—all the basic camp personnel. I think we held our first election in February 1945 at Olaa. Then we had other elections right on up to Hamakua Coast. I think we ended up down around Naalehu, or Pahala, south of Hilo.

The next election we held was over in Maui. Then we moved down to Oahu. They were still holding elections on Kauai about the time I left Hawaii for the first time. This was in 1945. Of course, we won almost all of the elections quite handily. After that, and after the passage that same year of the Hawaii Employee Relations Act, nicknamed the Little Wagner Act, that covered agricultural workers, the plantation owners said, “Look, there’s no use having elections. If you sign up the people in the agricultural fields and think you’ve got a majority, see the plantations manager. If you can show applications signed by 51 percent, we will recognize you.” That’s how we got the agricultural units in.

Like I said, I left the Islands for a while, but I came back on VJ Day (Victory over Japan Day), August 15, 1945. I wasn’t gonna go back, but things got rough so I hustled back and stayed until the end of August 1946. The problem was that the workers were having a little dispute among themselves, a little disunity you might say.

Some of the guys on the Big Island and the Jack Kawano faction in Honolulu was whipping up a little storm. Jack Hall was having to keep the peace. I figured out a scheme whereby we’d send a lot of these people out of the Islands so they couldn’t engage in divisiveness. I called Harry Bridges and said, “I wish you’d blow a little smoke and tell these guys how good they are. Tell ’em you’d like to give ‘em schooling and you’re inviting them to the mainland as students.” This is what he did. When they came back from the mainland they were different people.

The guys had been green and they had figured things should gel a lot faster than they did. But things just gel so fast and no faster. The first contract they had in sugar wasn’t much to speak about and they were pretty dissatisfied about that. But it was a start. Some of the red hots expected more in the way of benefits than what they originally got.

Going into the 1946 sugar negotiations we pretty well figured there’d be a strike. During the war the sugar planters tolerated us to keep the war going, and ’course we got quite a boost when we got that NLRB decision. But what we got in that first contract in 1945 was goddamn little and the sugar planters had no desire to do real collective bargaining. So with the war over, we knew what we were faced with. We either moved with the whole bunch and did a job on those planters or they’d run us out of business.

To prepare we had a lot of educational meetings. We knew one of the questions in the workers’ minds was, “How do you feed this bunch of people?” So Bob Robertson, the ILWU International vice-president, and I exhorted the workers that we’re gonna have to set up kitchens, send some of our people out to sea to catch fish, and send others into the hills to do some hunting if there was anything running around loose up there to shoot at. In the meantime we’d organize to ship rice to the Islands from the outside. We prepared for a long siege. When the strike came, it lasted for three months and all the planning paid off.

A bit before the strike the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association recruited 6,000 workers from the Philippines as potential strike breakers. I was there the day the first group came ashore in Hilo. We’d sent John Elias and another Filipino guy, Joe Dionas, down to the Philippines on a freighter. They could speak the language and tell the guys about the union. Between the both of ’em, when the Filipino workers come down that gangplank, they had these big blue ILWU buttons on.

The Filipino guys had all been organized into the union on the way over. Those goddamn planters were around there looking at all these guys, figuring what they were gonna do to our union. When those employers saw those buttons, man, their faces dropped a foot-and-a-half, you know? So then we raised a lot of hell because the accommodations the planters had for these people were the same as you’d do cattle, only worse. We had a hell of a demonstration over that one.

When I left Hawaii that second time at the end of August 1946 it was the eve of the sugar strike. Back on the mainland I spent a good deal of time with Virginia Woods, one of the research workers in the ILWU. We were the ones who got the rice for the sugar strikers. First we got a commitment on rice from the rice mills over here. You had to go through the maritime commission to get a ship, and the guy sitting on that commission was an ex-shipowner. No surprise, we couldn’t get our own ship, but we got enough space on this one vessel to get the rice to Hawaii.

The psychological idea of the rice was to show that the union could not only organize the people, but it could also deliver, because the Hawaiian workers were always fearful that the employers would starve ’em to death. Going back 50 years, the employers had starved many people to death in those islands during strikes before. So when our rice came through, it had a hell of a psychological effect. And, of course, the union won the strike, got some important concessions and survived in the Islands.

A powerful red-baiting campaign against the union got going the year after ’46 sugar strike. A lot of the workers didn’t pay any attention to it. It didn’t have the effect that was expected. The workers in Hawaii remained pretty true to the people who had organized them. With the drive for union organization, I think the moment had arrived in Hawaii when things that had been brewing over time came to a head. The workers were tired of living in a sort of island reform school. That’s what I would call living on a Hawaiian plantation before the union, where people were treated like kids who can’t leave or go over the wall. Since the ILWU broke that, most of the workers remained loyal to it despite the red-baiting.