Today in Labor History May 7, 1907: Bloody Tuesday occurred in San Francisco. The Street Car workers were among the most militant workers in the city and San Francisco, one of the strongest labor cities in the country. The mayor, Eugene Schmitz, and two city supervisors were from the Union Labor Party. San Francisco workers, particularly the streetcar union, had struck in five of the six years from 1902 to 1907. Capitalists were fed up with the power of the city’s unions and wanted to crush them once and for all. Led by Rudolph Spreckels (the sugar magnate), the bosses hired the Burns Detective agency to undermine the political establishment. They did this by exposing the corruption of the mayor and the board of supervisors. However, the violence started when scabs tried to run the streetcars, resulting in an exchange of gunfire between union men and scabs.

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