Make no mistake: Inauguration Day on January 20 will bring protests. There will also be marches, rallies, and other acts of solidarity before and after the inauguration (see the Mercury’s Resistance and Solidarity calendar for more information). Portland’s streets will fill with angry, passionate people chanting chants and waving large signs. At times, for those involved, it may feel like a world-ending struggle—a sort of singular, apocalyptic moment. But this sort of activity is not new here. We’ve seen this before.
This town’s periodic disruptions of normalcy are, well, sort of normal for Portland. Mass actions in the streets have been part of life here for more than a century, and it would be impossible to name them all here. What follows is not at all a comprehensive list of Portland protests. It does not get into notable actions such as resistance to highways, the civil rights movement, and women’s suffrage (see Heather Arndt Anderson’s excellent feature “Fruit Punch and Rebel Girls,” Jan 8, 2014, about the Women’s Fruit Cannery Strike of 1913). Instead, we’re profiling three very different high-profile street actions that were impossible to ignore in Portland—and could serve as inspiration for protests to come.
Portland was built on shipping, an industry also responsible for producing some of the town’s worst jobs. In 1934, Portland’s longshoremen took to the streets to demand better hiring practices—and they won.
Michael Munk, author of The Portland Red Guide, is a historian of labor history and radicalism in Portland. He paints a bleak picture of life for longshoremen in the 1930s. According to Munk, longshoremen “were underpaid, overworked, and required to go to shape-ups [asking for employment each morning in a competitive atmosphere] to get a job, which usually meant bribing a foreman.”
JD Chandler, co-author of Portland on the Take, emphasizes that employment for longshoremen was ad hoc and capricious, with employers frequently blacklisting potential workers.
“If you were vocal about union support, you didn’t work,” Chandler says. “You’d show up in the morning and if you had the right connections and paid your bribes, you got to work. If you hadn’t, fuck you.”