437

local ISU, along with the related AFL Eastern and Gulf Coast Sailors Association,
joined the Steamship Trade Association of Baltimore and six major shipping
corporations in getting a temporary injunction against the strike. And there were
many claims that the ISU sent out its own goon squads against strikers. 3

The national AFL and its unions were no more sympathetic to the seamen,
for it rejected their claims at its national convention in Tampa, deciding that the
ISU contracts with the shippers had to be upheld, and branded the walkout an
"outlaw strike." In fact, the AFL had been supporting the ISU leadership against its
rank-and-file insurgency for some time. At the May 1936 convention of the
Maryland-District of Columbia Federation of Labor (the one that rejected a ban on
trade-union Jim Crow and quashed a resolution supporting the CIO) passed a
resolution noting claiming that the ISU rank and filers were a bunch of former
MWIUers and Communists, and approving of the local leadership's attempts "to
purge their membership of proven Red termites.   4

The rank-and-file seamen countered by, in turn, denouncing the AFL
leadership forces as reactionaries who were cooperating with the bosses in
advancing the open shop, and by building their own base of support in the wider
Baltimore community. In the latter effort, they succeed in winning allies from
quarters that kept their distance during the Seamen's Soviet two and a half years
before. By late 1936, the shift to the Popular Front, which mandated broad left-
wing and progressive unity, was complete, and members of Baltimore's Socialist
and social liberal circles were by then open, as they had not been previously, to the
appeal for solidarity from the left-wing and Communist leadership of the seamen.
Socialist matriarch, Elisabeth Oilman, became a fervent supporter of the rank-and-
file seamen, and, under her leadership, a citizens' committee was formed to support
the strike and provide the strikers with food and clothing. Prominent members of
the committee included James Blackwell of the CIO and the PUL, Lloyd Leigh of