On the morning of June 21, 1935, at the Holmes-Eureka lumber mill in Eureka, a six-week-old strike by Humboldt County lumber workers came to a violent end. A riot broke out when a crowd of more than 200 pickets clashed with police and vigilantes attempting to clear the front gate. Tear gas, then firearms were used against stone-throwing strikers, killing three and wounding at least seven. More than 100 people were arrested for rioting, resisting an officer, and battery.

The Holmes-Eureka Massacre, as it later became known, is a forgotten chapter in the Great Northwest Lumber Strike of 1935. The strike was a failure for unions throughout the Northwest and a social disaster for the little town of Eureka. The strike and the riot that ended it were marked with violence and conspiracy that were brought to light by the trials of those arrested.

The sensational trials uncovered multiple conspiracies, cover-ups, secret groups and hired guns. And throughout it all the threats of Communism and Fascism were lurking in the background. In the end all defendants were acquitted, no conspiracy or cover-ups were ever proven and Eureka went back to business as usual. But a close look at events through surviving court records, newspaper archives, and eyewitness reports can yield an interesting story of labor’s struggle for acceptance in Humboldt County.

Since the 1880s unions came and went in Humboldt County, making only limited improvements in either wages or working conditions. The workforce was pacified by the “carrot and stick” approach taken by the industry leaders in the 1920s. Welfare capitalism in the form of improved living conditions provided the carrot, repression and victimization of labor leaders through violence and blacklisting served as the stick. Of Humboldt County workers in the 1920s, one unionist said, “It would take a Sherlock Holmes to find any militancy in these tame apes.”

In June 1933, Congress enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) to help the economy pull out of the depression. Section 7a of the NIRA stated in part:

That employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representation of their own choosing, and shall be free from interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor…

The basic concept of Section 7a was nothing new; the War Labor Board in 1917 had held to the same principles. Yet the psychological effect of the Roosevelt administration’s action, combined with a slight upturn in the economy, created a tremendous growth in labor unions.

In May of 1935, with newfound strength, the Lumber and Sawmill Workers local union in Humboldt County joined with other unions in a strike of the entire Northwest lumber industry. They upped their demands to conform with the demands created by union leaders earlier that year at a labor convention in Washington state. Demands included a wage increase, a shorter work week and union recognition.

The local union was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), headed by Harry Bridges, promised to support the strikers of Humboldt County because a year earlier the AFL had helped the ILA in their successful strike of the West Coast. A relationship of mutual assistance was thus established.

Mutual assistance among the mill owners had been established long before the 1935 strike. The five major mills were organized into the Redwood Association. Its members were Pacific Lumber, Hammond Lumber, Holmes-Eureka Lumber, Dolbeer and Carson Lumber, and the California Barrel Company. The domination of the local economy by the Redwood Association tended to promote cooperation from the police and an anti-union slant by the local newspapers. Several strikes had been put down by the Association in earlier years. However, the strike of 1935 was a part of the larger strike in the Northwest, supported by the longshoremen, and given tacit approval by the Roosevelt administration. Perhaps the possibility of a strike on a larger scale than had previously been seen prompted Hammond Lumber Company owner. Jay Hammond, to purchase $1,200 worth of tear gas equipment.

When the strike began on May 15, the Eureka Longshoremen stood by the lumber workers and refused to handle any lumber from the struck mills. The Cooks and Waiters Union, along with the Ladies Auxiliary of the Lumber and Sawmill Workers, set up a soup kitchen. The kitchen served several hundred people a day with donations from farmers, fishermen and small businesses. A few pickets appeared at all the struck mills, but usually one mill was singled out for mass picketing for a day or two. Several times strikers picketed the Antelope boat dock in Eureka, where workers commuted by ferry from Eureka to the Hammond mill across the bay in Samoa.

Soon after the strike began, Eureka’s Mayor, Frank Sweasey, announced the formation of the “Committee of One Thousand.” The mayor said its mission would be to “guarantee the safety of the citizens and property owners of Eureka and Humboldt County during the strike.” He warned that “if outsiders come in to take over the strike we must be prepared.”

Another less publicized group called the “Humboldt Nationals” formed about a month before the strike. Its purpose was to directly assist the police when called out, which it did on at least two occasions. Members received training in riot control at a high school gymnasium from a former Army officer. Instructions included the use of wooden clubs made at the Hammond mill. Humboldt County Sheriff Arthur Ross attended the meetings, as did Hammond supervisory employees and the company lawyer. Sheriff Ross deputized most of the members of the “Nationals.” The total came to about three or four hundred.

Also allied with the police was a mysterious group of eleven men who arrived in Eureka one week before the riot and left the day after. They became known as the “G-men” because when asked about their business they claimed to be federal agents doing some type of secret work. Several of the G-men assisted the police in arresting strikers after the riot. Some union men said that the other G-men helped provoke a confrontation with the police the morning of the riot by throwing rocks and by building a barricade across the front gate of the mill. Eureka Police Chief George Littlefield claimed at the riot trial that their identity was unknown and said that, “All I know is a bunch of fellows offered their services and we needed plenty of help.” At the time of the trials the Western Worker wrote:

Strangely enough the police testified that though the strangers were around the police station for about a week and were with them on June 21st, they never inquired their names [sic] or what their business was. They denied that these men represented themselves as Federal agents. Strangest of all is the fact that unknown people can come into the city of Eureka, cooperate with the police department in arresting citizens of the town, carry firearms and use force and violence against the public and then disappear without the police department being able to tell who they were, where they came from, or what their names were.

The union was not ignorant of clandestine groups using violence to intimidate the strikers. As the strike grew longer, violent incidents occurred with more frequency. Fights between pickets and strike-breakers were reported almost daily. Union official Albert “Micky” Lima explained what was happening:

They (the lumber companies) brought these gun thugs in. The gun thugs were of a different breed. They were being used by companies in various parts of the country and probably were drawn from a pool somewhere. They had a bunch of guys that had fight training and they did a murderous job on some of our members.

Union members fought fire with fire. A “social squad” and an “educational squad” were formed. Lima described their duties:

So, the social squad would pal up with one of the guys and buy them drinks and be friendly with them, and the bartender would give them extra drinks to get them liquored up. Then they would leave and the social squad would say “well, good night, we’ll see you again. ” Then the educational squad would pick them up and really give them a working over. We put about four of them in the hospital, where they were really badly injured, not killed, but badly injured. After it happened to about four or five of them they all of a sudden left town.

On June 15, the Humboldt Times ran a headline that read, “All Quiet Along Strike Front.” The strike in Humboldt County and in the Northwest was going badly. Back on May 27, the Supreme Court had invalidated the NIRA. The ruling confused and demoralized the strikers. Without calling a vote, union leader Abe Muir settled the strike in Longview, Washington by what most workers saw as a sell-out. The union won only a 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half for overtime, without a wage increase or a closed shop agreement. As the strike went into its fifth week morale dropped for the strikers, and defeat seemed imminent.

The June 21 issue of the Humboldt Times (the Times was a morning paper so the article was probably written on the 20th) had an article, under the headline “Indications Grow that Longshore Work to Resume,” that reported a back-to-work movement by longshoremen was being restrained only by the personal intervention of union president Harry Bridges. The article reported that the Redwood Strike News ran a notice under the heading “Now or Never” that said leaders from the carpenters’ and longshoremen’s unions would arrive in Eureka the next day “for the purpose of seeing how many pickets we have out.” It went on to say, “These two men have got to be shown a strong picket line.” At an emergency meeting of the local union that night the strikers decided to concentrate pickets at one mill in order to shut it down completely. The choice of which mill to picket would not be announced until the next morning to prevent the information from reaching the authorities.

In the morning, after going to the union hall, a small group of pickets went to the Antelope boat landing in an effort to lure the police to that location while the real demonstration would be going on across town at the Holmes-Eureka mill. Pickets began arriving at the mill shortly after 6 a.m. Some workers, arriving about the same time, drove past the pickets or turned around and went home. The mill was located on what is now the Bayshore Mall in south Eureka on Highway 101. The front gate was located directly across the highway from the bluffs on which Fort Humboldt Historical Park is located. From that location spectators watched the group of pickets grow to 200 by 6:30.

Strikers jeered the watchmen and guards at the gate and someone placed boards, torn up from the boardwalk, across the gate to form a barricade. Someone threw stones at the cars of one or two strikebreakers. At 6:45 a man arrived by car to relieve one of the watchmen at the gate. He tried to drive his car through the pickets but the crowd of union men picked up the car and turned it around. He drove to the police station to get help. A short time later several police cars arrived. Several witnesses from the bluffs across the highway said that when pickets blocked Police Chief Littlefield’s car, he got out and started shouting, “Who’s going to stop me?” while firing his pistol into the ground.

From another police car an officer fired a tear gas rifle into the crowd. The police were equipped with both long and short-range tear gas shells. But it seems probable that the officer mixed up the shells and unfortunately fired a long-range shell when he really only intended to fire a short-range one. The fateful shell struck a woman picket in the back and knocked her to the ground bleeding. Micky Lima described what happened:

When the police arrived we decided to pull the picket line because the situation looked very dangerous. We ordered everybody to move away from the picket line and the pickets were in the process of leaving … if they [the police] had just waited we would have been gone in five minutes …

Then a couple of these guys began to fire. They were firing tear gas bombs out of a rifle, like a sawed-off shotgun type of rig. One woman who was picketing, who was behind me, let out a scream and went down in a heap. I ran back to her thinking she had been shot with a shotgun. I reached beneath her and thought I could feel blood running out. Well, she was bleeding but because I was convinced that it was a shotgun, I imagined that it was much worse than it was. I yelled back to a number of guys and they started back towards me. I yelled that they shot her in the back with a shotgun and yelled for somebody to get a car. Then quite a number of pickets came running back and finally they said, “Let’s get the bastards.”

We charged the police and that’s when they took a dumping, including Littlefield, the Chief of the Police.

The “dumping” Littlefield and other officers received consisted of being disarmed and beaten with their own nightsticks and pistols. One picket who fought with the police later drove two injured policemen to the hospital in their own police car. Police on the street and vigilantes inside the gate fired pistols and shotguns into the crowd. The strikers fought back by throwing rocks and chunks of concrete. A tear gas shell or grenade went off inside a police car and the car had to be abandoned at the scene. One officer in a patrol car, besieged by the crowd, fired his revolver through the windshield till the gun was emptied. He then drove off to find someone to operate the machine gun he had in the back of his car. He returned with Ernest Watkins, a Holmes-Eureka employee who knew how to fire the weapon. Watkins only managed to fire a few rounds before the machine gun jammed.

Nine or ten strikers were shot. One died at the scene, another two days later, and the third died after nineteen days. One wounded man had to have his leg amputated. The County Hospital filled with victims of gunshots and tear gas. Many who feared arrest were treated at home. Five police officers received medical treatment at the hospital and were released later that morning.

The police, with the assistance of vigilantes, made arrests that day; by evening 114 were in jail. Authorities banned the sale of liquor and that afternoon Chief Littlefield ordered the fire department to burn down the encampments of unemployed, homeless men known as the “hobo jungles.” The Humboldt Times described one of the areas as a “rendezvous of tramps and a hot bed of radicals.” The Governor ordered the local company of the National Guard to be on alert.

Several persons were jailed when the police raided the union soup kitchen. The Finnish Federation Hall was also raided by the police and vigilantes who arrested the janitor and his son. The Humboldt Times reported a “secret door” behind which police discovered old clothes “for needy radicals who come to the city,” and “pistols of many makes, daggers, knives, billy clubs and communistic literature.”

The Humboldt Standard ran a photograph of the weapons mounted on a board and displayed by a policeman. The caption above the picture read, “Police seize ‘baby arsenal’ here.” In reality the “arsenal” and the old clothes found behind the “secret door” were stage props used for amateur theatrical productions at the hall. The “communistic literature” was a certificate signed by the chairman of the All Russian Famine Relief Committee thanking the Finns for their contributions. The press never made a correction of the false information. Later, during the trials of the arrested strikers that summer, the Finns took advantage of all the attention and displayed their “arsenal” of fake guns and rubber knives in front of the courthouse.

To defend the strikers in court the cash-strapped union accepted the free services of three out-of-town lawyers, one from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and two from the International Labor Defense (ILD).

Frequent clashes between the prosecution and the defense kept the courtroom packed with spectators. At one point a fist fight nearly erupted between the attorneys. Leo Gallagher, the attorney for the defense, always maintained that the “G-men” had been imported to break the strike and the riot was staged by the lumber companies. Once he said, “Funny thing that there is always plenty of money to buy tear gas but none to buy milk for babies.” Prosecutor Bradford suggested that Gallagher “secure a soap box on Second Street” in order to make speeches. At one point the presiding judge exclaimed in frustration, “You lawyers give a man a headache.”

The evidence of illegal activities by the “G-men” and the Humboldt Nationals, both of whom worked closely with the police, gave credence to Gallagher’s concluding remarks at the second trial. He accused the police of creating a “trumped-up story to protect their own stupidity,” and he said that police officers were “the paid agents of the lumber barons, killers of fleeing workers, perjurers, and witnesses who lied to protect each other.”

Despite Bradford’s efforts, he achieved no convictions of twelve defendants in three separate trials. On September 26, Eureka’s mayor and police chief met with the district attorney and deputy district attorney and decided to drop all charges against the remaining defendants. The Humboldt Standard reported that day:

During the three trials the entire superior court jury box was exhausted and 145 special veniremen were called by Coroner Lloyd Wallace. The apparent willingness of jurors to serve in the trial and the inability to reach a verdict led the county and city officials to abandon further prosecution of the cases, it was indicated.

The key testimony that prevented Bradford from attaining any convictions came from impartial witnesses who lived in the Fort Humboldt area. Several of them said everything had been peaceful until a shot from a police tear gas gun struck a woman picket and sparked the riot. The juries believed the police had started the trouble and the strikers were only defending themselves, mostly by throwing rocks, against police and vigilantes who were armed with guns and tear gas.

Gallagher’s charges of conspiracy, premeditated violence, and cover-ups on the part of the authorities probably did little to exonerate the strikers. However, his strategy of accusing the authorities of misconduct put Bradford on the defensive. A by-product of the courtroom battle was the illumination of events that would otherwise have remained in the shadows. Those events add up to the single most deadly episode of the Great Northwest Lumber Strike of 1935 — the Holmes-Eureka Massacre.

Bibliography - Primary Sources

• Humboldt Superior Court Criminal Index no. 1854, 1853, 1856, 1858. Humboldt County Courthouse Eureka, CA.
• Humboldt Standard, Eureka, CA. 9 May 1934, MaySeptember 1935.
• The Humboldt Times, Eureka, CA. May-September 1935. International Labor Defense Membership Booklet. New York: 1938.
• Lima, Albert. Transcript of interview October 10, 1977 Humboldt Room, Humboldt State University.
• St. Peter, Clara. Notes taken at National Labor Relations Board hearings Eureka, CA 1938. Humboldt Room, Humboldt State University.
• United States Congress. Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor. Senate Report no. 6. 76th Cong. 1st sess. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1937.
• Western Worker, San Francisco, CA. July-September 1935.

###

The story above is from the Winter 1995 issue of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.