MYNORTHWEST NEWS

McNeil Island inmate: From the Big House to the White House

May 1, 2019, 6:28 AM | Updated: 9:49 am

Vincent Hallinan supporters...

Supporters of presidential candidate Vincent Hallinan greeted him at the Steilacoom Boat Dock on August 17, 1952 when he was released after serving time at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. (UW Special Collections)

(UW Special Collections)

The list of Washingtonians who’ve made serious runs for the White House is pretty short.

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There’s current governor Jay Inslee, of course, who has set his sights on 2020, and back in the 1970s, there was Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson. But there’s at least one more temporary resident of the Evergreen State who was his party’s nominee for Commander in Chief way back in 1952.

But first, this is really a story about two men.

One is an attorney from San Francisco named Vincent Hallinan. Hallinan was nominated by the Progressive Party to run for president in 1952 while living in the state of Washington. His vice-presidential running mate was Mrs. Charlotta Bass, who newspapers at the time described as a “New York Negro and former editor-publisher.”

What’s odd about this story is that when he was officially nominated at the Progressive Party’s convention in Chicago on July 5, 1952, Vincent Hallinan was serving time as an inmate at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, the former prison in Puget Sound west of Steilacoom.

Hallinan’s greatest claim to fame — and the main reason he went to prison — was because he had worked as a defense attorney for legendary West Coast labor leader Harry Bridges of the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in an infamous federal trial.

And that’s why Harry Bridges is the second person this story is about.

According to many labor historians, it’s hard to overstate Harry Bridges’ impact in West Coast port cities in terms of labor organizing, from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Harvey Schwartz is a labor historian and is curator of the ILWU Oral History Collection.

While Schwartz says that Harry Bridges emerged from the 1934 waterfront strike as a natural leader, and that he captured the hearts and minds of workers and their families up and down the West Coast, he agrees that Bridges isn’t as well known as he was in the past.

In the past, could Harry Bridges, described as incorruptible and committed to democratic principles and ideals, have been called a folk hero?

“Oh, for sure, definitely — there’s no question,” said Schwartz earlier this week from his home in the Bay Area. “And he still is to older generations of people, and to many, many working people who still know about him. I mean, they’re still around, but, by and large, they tend to be an older group of people.”

Harry Bridges came to the fore during that 1934 waterfront strike, and ultimately rose to become head of the ILWU. But, according to some accounts, he was dogged by the business community and by the federal government, who suspected Bridges of being a Communist.

Bridges, who was originally from Australia, faced multiple immigration hearings and related legal proceedings beginning in 1939 and lasting to the early 1950s.

Robert Cherny is an author and retired history professor. He began researching Harry Bridges decades ago, and in the 1980s interviewed both Bridges and Vincent Hallinan for a Bridges biography he’s recently began working on again.

“[FBI director J. Edgar] Hoover took this as one of his personal crusades, to get Harry Bridges,” Cherny said earlier this week. “I’ve read through that whole FBI file. Nowhere did they find documentary evidence that Bridges was a [Communist] Party member. They found some people who testified that they had seen him or heard say things, or seen him do things that they thought proved he was a party member, but it was all contested testimony.”

“Nonetheless, when he was brought to an immigration hearing, the hearing officer found against him in 1941,” Cherny said. “It was then appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, and in 1945 [the Supreme Court] threw out the findings and [Harry Bridges] became a citizen.”

Cherny says that by the time of yet another federal immigration trial in San Francisco in November 1949, Bridges and his co-defendants, union officers Henry Schmidt and Bob Robertson, decided they needed a new strategy – particular in light of the “Red Scare” that was taking hold of parts of the United States and much of American culture in the late 1940s.

“‘We need to find a lawyer who has never been associated with the Communist Party,'” Cherny said, describing the new approach that the three men and their supporters took. “’We need to find a lawyer with a very sterling reputation, who’s not going to be treated [as a suspected Communist] by a judge.’”

And that’s where future presidential candidate Vincent Hallinan enters the picture.

“Vincent Hallinan, at the time, was probably the leading criminal lawyer in San Francisco,” Cherny said. “So they turned to Hallinan, and asked Hallinan to defend Bridges in this new case, and Hallinan agreed.”

Cherny says that when the trial started, Vincent Hallinan gave a long opening statement, lasting a day and a half. Judge George Bernard Harris told him to stop several times and the prosecution complained, but Hallinan just kept talking, sharing what he saw as critical context for understanding why Harry Bridges had been targeted by the federal government since the mid 1930s.

“At some point, the judge told Hallinan that he would be found in contempt if he continued and [he would be] sent to jail right away,” Cherny said. “At which point, Bridges said, ‘There isn’t anyone else who can defend me, so I won’t be getting a fair trial if you do this.’”

Judge Harris relented, and let Hallinan stay on the case and remain in the courtroom. But, once the trial was over, Harry Bridges, Henry Schmidt, and Bob Robertson were found guilty (though the case would ultimately be overturned). However, Vincent Hallinan was found in contempt of court, and sentenced to six months at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary.

Hallinan appealed his sentence, and assumed he would never have to do any time in prison. While awaiting a formal decision, Hallinan traveled around the United States and to London on behalf of the ILWU giving talks about what had happened to Harry Bridges during what Hallinan believed was a flawed trial.

In January 1952, Hallinan was pulled from a northbound passenger train by federal authorities at the border crossing at Blaine, Washington, and prevented from attending a meeting of the International Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union in Vancouver, BC. Folk singer and activist Paul Robeson was also detained that same day at Blaine while attempting to cross by private car, and, he, too, was prevented from attending the same union gathering.

In his biography published in the early 1960s, Hallinan wrote that the Bridges trial and all that was going on in the world in the early 1950s – including the Red Scare and the Korean War – turned him into a “complete socialist.” This, Hallinan wrote, led to his agreeing to become the presidential candidate for the Progressive Party in 1952.

Four years earlier, the Progressive Party and candidate Henry Wallace had garnered 1.5 million votes in the 1948 presidential election, but Wallace had parted ways with the Progressives over their opposition to the Korean War.

Shortly after becoming the nominee, Hallinan learned his appeal had failed. He reported to the Steilacoom Boat Dock in early April 1952 and went to prison on McNeil Island. While he was there, his wife and two oldest sons campaigned for him around the country.

Good behavior and working at McNeil Island’s honor farm meant a shortened sentence for Hallinan, and on August 17, 1952, he was released from prison and taken across the Sound to the Steilacoom Boat Dock.

On hand to greet the candidate were perhaps as many as a few hundred members of Washington’s chapter of the Progressive Party. The supporters had caravaned by yacht and car from Seattle, and several stood on the dock waving handmade political signs – “From the Big House to the White House” – and cheering for Hallinan.

Also there that day on the dock was C.B. Baldwin, the national Progressive Party campaign manager. Adding to the festive atmosphere was a band playing Irish music.

From Steilacoom, it was home to San Francisco, and then on to Chicago, where the Associated Press reported that “[t]he California lawyer opened his campaign here with a television network speech in which he asserted that the Progressive Party is the only genuine party of peace.”

Hallinan told the Chicago audience that “the bipartisan program of the Republicans and Democrats is leading American down the road to a bigger, deadlier war.”

Hallinan’s campaign culminated with a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York a few days before the election on November 4.

When it was all over, Republican Dwight Eisenhower and running mate Richard Nixon had won in a landslide with 34 million votes. The Democratic candidates Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman came in second with 27 million votes.

And in third place? Vincent Hallinan and Charlotta Bass with 140,000 votes.

Robert Cherny says that Harry Bridges and Vincent Hallinan kept in touch over the next several decades, and it was Bridges who helped arranged for Cherny’s meeting with Hallinan for an interview back in the 1980s.

From what both Harvey Schwartz and Robert Cherny say, it seems that there was mutual respect between the legendary labor leader and the radicalized-attorney-turned-one-time-presidential-candidate.

Cherny chuckled when he shared words of praise that Hallinan had for Bridges, when Hallinan sat down with Cherny decades ago.

“This is a quote now from Hallinan,” Cherny said, reading from his notes, “‘He is one of the most sensible and honorable people I have ever met, this man is absolutely proof against any kind of corruption. The only person I’ve met and know that I compare with him, and I told him this one time, was Fidel Castro.’”

While Vincent Hallinan never ran for president again, he did return to McNeil Island in January 1954 following a conviction for tax evasion. Hallinan believed that he, like Bridges, had been targeted by the federal government. He served 14 months of an 18-month sentence, and was released from McNeil, for the second and final time, in March 1955.

McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary closed in 1976. The Washington State Special Commitment Center has operated there since 1998.

Vincent Hallinan died in San Francisco in October 1992; he was 95 years old. Harry Bridges had passed away two years prior, also in San Francisco. He was 90. The Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington was dedicated in his memory on the centennial of Bridges’ birth in 2001.

The Progressive Party has not been heard from since 1952.

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McNeil Island inmate: From the Big House to the White House