Shanghaiing Days: The Thrilling account of 19th Century Hell-Ships, Bucko Mates and Masters, and Dangerous Ports-of-Call from San Francisco to Singapore

by Richard Dillon

  President Wilson, like his predecessor, Taft, was bothered by the provisos of the bill (now passed by the House) which held that treaties in conflict with the bill should be abrogated. Wilson, seeking a route out of his quandary, asked William Jennings Bryan for advice. Luckily for Furuseth and American seamen, the Princetonian did not take Bryan’s advice—a pocket veto. Instead, just one hour before adjournment, he signed it. He wrote Newton D. Baker, “I finally determined to sign it because it seemed the only chance to get something like justice to a class of workmen who have been too much neglected by our laws.”

  Shortly thereafter, the new order of things was realized across the Pacific in Shanghai. The captain of the Ecuador watched a free-for-all among his new “forecastle freemen” on deck. When it was suggested that he quell the riot, he pushed his cap back on his head and answered sadly, “Under the new law, I dare not lay a hand on one of my crew. Under former conditions, I would be down there with a belaying pin. As it is, I am helpless.”

  The rest of Furuseth’s life was an anticlimax. The hawk-nosed idealist kept on fighting the good fight in Washington from his tiny, bare, $30-a-month room in the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. But in the 1920s and 1930s he was out of step—too conservative, too old-fashioned. He did not understand the tacks his union took. During the Great Depression, the bloody 1934 Waterfront Strike broke in San Francisco. He opposed it and when he tried to speak to the SUP he was booed and hooted at by the very men who should have fallen on their knees to thank God for creating Andy Furuseth in faraway Romedal in 1854.

  Old Andy died January 22, 1938, as penniless as when he’d jumped ship in Frisco almost sixty years before. He was embittered by the Depression, the Communists and other leftists who, he thought, had permanently wrecked the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. His body lay in state in the Department of Labor in Washington, an honor never before accorded a labor leader. His remains were cremated, according to his wishes, and placed aboard the S.S. Schoharie at Savannah on March 12, 1938. He wanted to be buried at sea, in his own words, “as far from land as possible.” The Schoharie was hove to approximately halfway between the United States and England. Before Captain Thomas F. Webb consigned his ashes to the deep he read a prayer to the entire crew he had assembled, prefacing it with this statement:

  “Fellow shipmates, we are assembled here to execute the wish of Andrew Furuseth, an unselfish worker for the betterment of seamen, who through legal means has done more to secure improved conditions under which you work than any other man.”

  Furuseth has been called a fanatic, even a crank, as well as a saint. Certainly he lived “a life of self-deprivation and Spartan simplicity,” as John L. Lewis recalled. But the important thing about Old Andy was his compassion. In a world brimful with cruelty and avarice, how rare is that commodity, compassion for one’s fellow man. Few men in history ever gave so much of themselves for others as “the Old Man.” La Follette, knowing how Andy never asked for or took a dime for himself beyond just enough to keep himself alive, asked Furuseth once, “When you can no longer work, what provisions have you made for old age?” Furuseth’s seamy, leathery face smoothed into something like a sad smile before he answered, “I have no provisions for old age. When my work is finished, I hope to be finished.”

  On March 6, 1915, Senator Robert La Follette wired the SUP in San Francisco the following message, which in just 120 words, tells the importance of Andrew Furuseth in the social history of the United States: “As you meet to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of your organization, I rejoice that in the Providence of God I am permitted at last to hail you as free men under the Constitution of our country. The Fourth of March, 1915, is your emancipation day. The act approved by President Wilson makes America sacred soil, and the Thirteenth Amendment finally becomes a covenant of refuge for the seamen of the world. In the years to come, as you commemorate this great event, you should dedicate a part of the service to the memory of Andrew Furuseth.

  “Except for his intelligent, courageous and unswerving devotion to your cause for twenty-one years, you would be bondsmen, instead of freemen, today.”