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capitulated.
The MWIU saw the Diamond Cement strike as an important victory, as a
vindication of its approach of militant, carefully planned action, backed up by
appeals to working-class solidarity, and as a key step in its base-building efforts in
the port of Baltimore. Despite the success, the Baltimore MWIU made a revealing
self-criticism of aspects of its strike leadership. First, the union felt it had
underestimated the potential militancy among the longshoremen in the ILA and,
while the longshoremen concerned did support the strike at the MWIU's behest, no
demands directly concerning the longshoremen were raised and there was no
"systematic exposure of ILA officials." The MWIU aspired to be a union of all
maritime workers, on shore and off, but in the past it had been unable to recruit or
influence non-seamen in Baltimore; now it saw an opportunity to spread its base.
The second self-criticism was that the union had, during its three days of
preparation for the strike, not done enough planning to pull other ships out in
solidarity with the strikers, and its efforts in this regard came too late and were
weak. Thirdly, the union felt its most serious mistake was that after the strike was
called the POC took over all leadership of the strike and the strike committee of
Diamond Cement's crew simply disappeared: The strike became a strike of the
Union as a whole and not of the crew of the 'Diamond Cement/"
By late 1933, the nation-wide National Recovery Act (NRA) strike wave,
precipitated by the pent up anger over the suffering caused by the depression, and
by rising expectations stimulated by the pro-labor provisions of the Roosevelt
administration's National Recovery Act was in full swing. The Baltimore MWIU
entered a new stage of development. In December, the national M WIU's Marine
Workers Voice proclaimed (with possible exaggeration) that there had been more
ship strikes in the previous month than in the previous decade. The national union
had decided to concentrate its energies and, working from the strategic perspective
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