Bridges Urges Unity In "A Bigger Battle"

"If there are any private fights they must be put on the shelf until the big battle is over" was the way Harry Bridges, the allegedly "red" leader of the strategically crucial West Coast longshoremen, summed up his stand on the stormy conflict that has raged over his proposed deportation by Attorney General Biddle.

The appeal for unity came in a speech directed at an overflow crowd in Emerson D last night under the auspices of the Liberal Union and the Harvard Teachers' Union.

Attaching little importance to himself as "just a pretty good longshoreman," Bridges vigorously attacked what he termed the "Biddle yardstick for arbitrarily measuring how good a patriot a man is." He appealed directly to the heterogenous Harvard-Radcliffe-Cambridge audience for support of the nation's labor leaders, who he claimed are up to their necks in the war effort, against "sniping attacks" from short-sighted anti-laborites.

Reply to American Legion

Mentioning no names, but probably referring to the American Legion's assertion that his speech would transgress on the sanctity of Armistice Day, Bridges exploded: "I have get larger and more threatening enemies than those people. Moreover, I was in the last war before them and stayed in it longer. It is a serious thing to impugn a person's patriotism unless you've got the facts to support the charge."

Proud of the pre-war anti-Axis record of his West Coast longshoremen's union, the labor leader expressed regret only that the union voted a proposal to anticipate the scrap metal embarge against Japan on their own initiative. If his union had tied up shipments to Tokio in the single week before the government embargo took effect, he explained remorsefully, as much essential metal as has been collected in all the nation's scrap drives would have remained on this side of the Pacific.

Elaborating on the all-out part that his followers are taking in the winning of the war, Bridges emphasized that "the question of whether they cat or not has been subordinated to the aim of final victory."