The Oakland Tribune Collection, the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of the ANG Newspapers

Police face off with protesters

People crowding the streets. Protesters arriving on roller skates. Downtown commerce coming to a standstill.

Scenes from Occupy Oakland? No, those come from Oakland's General Strike of 1946, the last general strike in the United States.

After the removal of the Occupy Oakland encampment last week led to violent confrontations between protesters and police, leading organizers to call for a general strike Wednesday, the city has once again taken center stage in a national protest movement.

Historians see echoes of that past radical action in the current situation — from the tensions between police and protesters to the signage displayed on the streets and online.

"Oakland is a city that has diversity built into its DNA," said Chris Rhomberg, a Fordham University professor who is the author of "No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland."

"The very fact that there is a strike has a resonance," Rhomberg said. "It wouldn't be the same in other cities."

The 1946 General Strike was a watershed event: it brought Oakland commerce to a standstill for 54 hours and helped usher in a new generation of progressive politicians in the city (at least temporarily.) It also contributed to Congress' decision in 1947 to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, which forbade unions from stopping work in solidarity with a picket line.

Images from previous General Strikes in Oakland, in 1934 and 1946:

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The General Strike in ’46 began with a group of Kahn’s Department Store workers (mostly women, noted Rhomberg) who had been striking for weeks. A group of downtown businessmen, the political elite at the time, convinced the police department to escort trucks through the picket line early on the morning of Sunday, Dec. 3. In response, the American Federation of Labor unions called a strike, and very quickly, other unions mobilized to shut down commerce in the city center and beyond.

Crowds of 30,000 people flooded the streets, according to estimates, with around 100,000 union members participating in the strike. The protest had a party-like atmosphere for much of the first day. Rhomberg said bars were allowed to remain open, with the stipulation that they serve only beer and move their jukeboxes to the sidewalks, where they were to play at full volume for free.

"People arrived on roller skates. There was dancing in the streets," Rhomberg said.

By Dec. 5, union leaders and the city had reached an agreement to end the strike. In the following months, four progressive labor candidates were elected to the City Council — a trend Rhomberg said was curtailed by the red-baiting of the early 1950s.

The current Occupy movement, and Wednesday’s demonstration, hark back to the 1946 event in several ways.

Signs used by union members during that era depicted a clenched fist — which was used to great effect by the Black Panthers in the late '60s — a symbol that has shown up again in signs used by members of the Occupy movement according to Rene de Guzman, senior curator at Oakland Museum of California. 

Rhomberg noted that the "the illegitimate use of police power" brought the unions together in ’46, just as the tear gassing and violence of Oct. 25 brought the nation’s attention to Oakland. More generally, Louise Pubols, chief curator of history at the Oakland Museum of California, said the feeling that institutions aren’t responding to the people’s will is a sentiment shared by the protests of the ‘40s and today.

“Both arise out of the conditions of Oakland,” she said, “In the case of the General Strike of ’46, it was a sort of occupy movement — the people who were going on strike did not control the power structure, did not control the city government."

Pubols also pointed out that the current protest is “more symbolic,” because unions and labor laws are weaker today than they were in the '40s. Plus, she said, there is some confusion, even within the movement, about who the strike is targeting: big banks or local politicians?

The Occupy movement “came out of Wall Street, the bigger institutions of Wall Street,” she said. “Oakland is not a place that is home to those things.”

But even if the protesters take different tactics from those of the union-driven actions of the past, Oakland's issues — economic inequality, political frustration — remain all too familiar.

"You have to understand that there were a whole generation of Americans coming out of the Great Depression, World War II, and their demand was economic enfranchisement and to be part of the political community," Rhomberg said. "Now we are at the other end of that era.”

Correction: An earlier version of story garbled a sentence, implying that labor movement protest imagery was inspired by the Black Panthers instead of vice versa.