442

Committees were assigned to visit all the principal department heads,
including the White House.

This march to Washington was, of course, an old MWIU tactic writ

In the end, the 100-Day Strike (which actually lasted only 87 days), with the
ranks of the strikers thinning, had to be called off by the seamen themselves. When
the New York resolution to end the strike was circulated to Atlantic and Gulf ports,
militants in some ports argued long and hard to hold out. In Baltimore, though,
agreement with the resolution was reached rapidly. Although the strike did not
result in any new agreements with shipping companies, Baltimore strikers in no way
regarded the strike as lost. They claimed a scattering of wage and working
condition gains, success in helping to beat union busting on the West Coast, greater
unity between marine workers on the three coasts, advances in democratizing the
ISU, new ties to local officers unions, and possible concessions on the provisions of
the Copeland Act.26

Some of these claims may have been overly optimistic - the concessions on
the fink books, for example, were not forthcoming, and about six weeks later three
Baltimore seamen, represented by Baltimore attorney I. Duke Avnct, sued to
enjoin their distribution. But the seamen in Baltimore and other ports did emerge
from the strike greatly strengthened, with an experienced core of rank and filers
and a tested leadership in almost every port. When, in May 1937, the seamen's
rank-and-file movement metamorphosed into the National Maritime Union, CIO,
with New York's Joseph Curran as its president, the Baltimore movement
transformed into a powerful NMU local, headed by Pat Whalen, who emerged as
the central leader of the 100-Day Strike. Both Whalen and the local NMU were
destined to play key roles in the subsequent construction of the Baltimore CIO.27

By the end of the seamen's 100-Day Strike in late January 1937, working-