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including spies and agents provocateurs in the seamen's ranks; the repeated use of
police, often in clearly provocative ways and sometimes with drawn fire arms;
physical attacks on militants by thugs; and the use, according to the MWIU, of
prostitutes to offer seamen bribes - had its effect Solidarity actions by the
broader workers' movement in Baltimore were almost non-existent, apart from
shipboard sympathy strikes, a few actions by a relative handful of longshoremen,
and a reputed solidarity strike by some clothing workers.     Nor was support
nationally of much help, for as the MWIU itself later pointed out,

There were no Centralized Bureaus in New York, Philadelphia, and other
Eastern ports. The seamen in these ports were not strongly organized,
either to enforce a bureau in their port or to give support to Baltimore.
Neither were all the ships calling into Baltimore strongly organized to refuse
to sail with any man who had not shipped through the Bureau. After a time
the shipowners were finally prepared to take advantage of these
weaknesses.. .^,

By the end of June the GSB was only a shadow of its former self and all seamen's
control over relief was lost. The Baltimore movement fell victim partly to being too
far out in front, both nationally and locally, and to it inability to bridge the chasm
that separated seamen from other segments of the local working class. The
Baltimore Soviet had not so much fallen as dissipated under intense pressure.
Much of the offensive by the government and the employers against the
Baltimore Soviet took place during the watershed event of the national maritime
movement of the early 1930s: the West Coast dock strike of 1934. Both the
government and the shipping companies had been openly worried that the
institutions created by the Baltimore seamen's union would spread to other ports,
and the West Coast strike, with its demands for centralized hiring halls, must have
reinforced their desire to crush the Baltimore Soviet. Conversely, the West Coast
strike so overshadowed the Baltimore movement that it may have weakened the
struggle to defend the Soviet; national maritime solidarity efforts, that may
otherwise have been directed toward Baltimore, were necessarily directed toward