A new novel written by Herb Mills before he passed away and co-edited by historian Peter Cole. Presente isn’t just a political thriller, it preserves radical history that might otherwise have been “lost.” Courtesy Marc Nelson.
This piece is a response to our call for submissions on U.S. Intervention in Latin America and on Histories of Political Protest in the U.S. For our submission guidelines, click here.
In late 1980, mere weeks after Ronald Reagan’s election as President, a dockworker discovered a huge cache of U.S. weapons sitting on a San Francisco pier. The military supplies were slated for shipment to El Salvador, a country descending into a vicious civil war. This worker quickly notified Herb Mills, a leader in Local 10, the Bay Area branch of the International Longshoreman’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU).[1] Mills leaped into action, building a coalition to prevent these weapons from being shipped. In the words of Harry Bridges, long-time and legendary president of the ILWU, “Interfere with the foreign policy of the country? Sure as hell! That’s our job, that’s our privilege, that’s our right, that’s our duty.”[2] Mills did not always agree with Bridges, but there was no daylight between them when it came to the right of working people to insert their views into global affairs.
A working-class militant, Mills was also an intellectual who thought, researched, and wrote about his industry and union. Mostly he wrote analytical articles but Mills’s first book, Presente: A Dockworker Story, describes his union’s Salvadoran activism, albeit as a novel. His decision to write a lightly fictionalized history was a gambit to expand his readership, but Presente also speaks to issues regarding sources with which all historians contend.
The ILWU and especially Local 10—the union’s progressive branch—possess a long history of direct-action tactics, including work stoppages, to insert themselves and their views into global politics. In 1935, for example, San Francisco dockworkers refused to load supplies for fascist Italy after it invaded Ethiopia. In the late 1930s and 1940, in tandem with Chinese Americans, dockworkers in multiple Pacific Coast ports would not load cargo for imperial Japan after its brazen invasion of China. In 1962, 1976–1977, and for ten days in 1984, Local 10 members boycotted cargo from South Africa to protest its racist apartheid regime. In 1978, San Francisco dockworkers refused to load U.S.-made weapons intended for Augusto Pinochet’s military regime in Chile, which, with support from the Central Intelligence Agency, had seized power in a 1973 coup d’etat that overthrew the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.
So, too, in 1980, when Mills and the ILWU organized to boycott loading any U.S. weapons for the Salvadoran military regime. The union asserted that to do so would violate its commitment to human rights since the supplies were intended for the murderous Salvadoran junta. Earlier in 1980, the military junta murdered El Salvador’s Archbishop Óscar Romero, who had been a staunch defender of peace and democracy, and brutally executed four American churchwomen. Refusing to move this cargo, however, would violate the dockworkers’ contract since they generally didn’t get to decide what they loaded and unloaded. Mills knew the union needed to strategize and build popular support for its controversial stance.
“Members of the Bay Area Salvadoran community joined in ecumenical service held at Local 10 headquarters December 22 to demonstrate support for the ILWU boycott of military cargo to El Salvador.” Caption from ILWU Dispatcher, Jan. 9, 1981, p. 2. Photo by Pat Gouvdis. Permission ILWU.
Over several months, Mills and the ILWU built a coalition with many social justice–oriented religious groups, locally as well as up and down the Pacific Coast and beyond. The union also coordinated with the Bay Area’s small but growing Salvadoran community. The ILWU held a press conference at which ILWU International President Jimmy Herman declared: “Our hope is that by dramatizing this tragic situation, and by refusing to any longer be part of it, we can, in some small way, assist in ending this nightmare, and in restoring security and freedom to the Salvadoran people.”[3] In addition, Local 10 held a dramatic meeting, more akin to a religious service, at its hall, replete with many Catholic and other religious leaders; they read the names of many Salvadorans who already had been murdered by the junta. In keeping with a tradition among Latin American activists, after each name all those gathered shouted the Spanish word, “Presente!” The word means much more than merely “present”—more like that the fallen person was remembered and remained alive in spirit.
While the ILWU successfully stopped a military shipment with its dramatic Salvadoran action—which remains almost entirely unknown—U.S. foreign policy did not change. Indeed, as soon as Reagan was inaugurated, he enacted a much more aggressive foreign policy. Arguably nowhere was this more clear than in Central America, particularly in El Salvador, which suffered from another dozen years of internal war that killed over 75,000 civilians. U.S. weapons and bullets were responsible for many of those killed and injured.
Some ILWU campaigns were more successful. In 1978, the ILWU refused to help deliver U.S. weapons to fascist Chile; eventually the Jimmy Carter administration, under pressure from the ILWU and with many supporters in Congress, stopped providing all military aid to Pinochet. In its boycotts of South African cargo, the ILWU joined an ever-growing, worldwide network of activists committed to fighting apartheid—which is to say, fascism and racism. Apartheid South Africa fell in the 1990s in part due to the global movement against it.
While transport workers specifically are located at pivotal “choke points” in the global economy, giving them the power to interrupt the flow of trade and, literally, the world economy, many types of workers can and have engaged in similar actions. In the early 1970s, for example, the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement organized to prevent the U.S.-based corporation from selling cameras and film to the South African government, which used Kodaks for the notorious passbooks required for all non-white residents. In Ireland in 1984, Mary Manning and other clerks at the Dunnes supermarket chain refused to check out customers buying South African products. In 2019, workers at Wayfair walked off their jobs and rallied to prevent their company from selling furniture to the U.S. Border Police, which used Wayfair products in detention centers for migrants. This form of “labor internationalism” still operates on the high seas and across the world. Not only is this history politically relevant, but it is also wildly unknown. Mills aspired to change that reality.
Herb Mills and a fellow dockworker in the hold of a ship. Photographer unknown, c. 1980. Permission Rebecca Mills.
In 2024, Herb Mills’s novel was published posthumously as Presente: A Dockworker Story, a lightly fictionalized political thriller about his union’s refusal to load weapons for El Salvador. The book is written as a diary by a leader in ILWU Local 10—who, really, is Mills himself. Set in December 1980, right after Reagan’s election but before his inauguration, one of Mills’s fellow dockworkers discovers that weapons are being staged on a San Francisco pier for shipment to El Salvador. In the novel, as in real life, an anti-communist military junta had already unleashed mass violence against the Salvadoran working-class and peasantry, which organized in response as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Over the course of an action-packed month, the protagonist helps forge a broad coalition to provide moral support and political cover for the dockworkers’ plan to refuse loading those weapons.
Mills passed away in 2018, but he had begun writing this novel several decades before. Unlike most (working-class) people, Mills devoted some of his retirement years to writing this part of his life story. Quite atypically, he did so as a novel, for he believed that far more people might read—and, thus, learn—about unions and solidarity if he delivered the message through fiction.
I came to know Mills in the 2010s, the final decade of his long life, while conducting research for Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. Among other topics that drew me to his union, I was especially intrigued by the anti-apartheid activism of ILWU Local 10, the longest, most extensive campaign of any U.S. union in solidarity with the freedom struggle of Black South Africans.[4] Mills proved to be an incredible source of information for that and many other aspects of my book.
As he settled into his eighties, Mills made a most unusual request of me: to cut down and edit his novel—which I had not known existed—and get it published! Being busy with my own projects and having zero experience writing fiction, I hesitated before agreeing. Most fortunately, I was joined in this effort by Rebecca Mills, who had several children with Herb and had vowed to get Herb’s book published, along with Tim Sheard, publisher of Hard Ball Press. In so doing, this historian learned a never-before documented piece of history that involved Mills and his union. Indeed, none of the chapters in the ILWU’s history of solidarity boycotts had been really examined until I started doing so, although in and around the union some stories were passed down by word of mouth.
Of course, there are numerous reasons such history generally is not documented. For one, historians have great difficulty doing our job when there are no or few primary sources. Today, it may seem we have too much information, but many events of earlier times, even in the 20th century, simply were not documented. Not every, indeed not most, events are covered by the media—journalism, famously, being the first draft of history. This task, which historians are quite familiar with, proves even more challenging when the subject involves radical ideas and actions that were controversial or potentially illegal. This may explain why, other than one issue of the union’s own newspaper and its records, there is almost zero documentation and no scholarly or public writing about this chapter of the union’s history.
Historians of the recent past, like myself, are sometimes fortunate enough to interview our subjects, which can be one way to get around the problem of insufficient sources. Apart from interviews, some activists also save their papers, pass them down to family or comrades, or donate them to an archive or library, which can be another source for these histories.
Sometimes radicals even share their stories and archives with historians, as Amy Sonnie and James Tracy describe in their book, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times. Mills did the same: he curated his own papers in his retirement and, with the help of someone with the technical know-how, created and paid for his own website, with many of his writings on longshoring and the ILWU. Not only that, Mike Miller, Mills’s best friend and a community organizer with sixty years of student and civil rights activism experience, edited a book that brought together many of Mills’s writings, along with framing essays from friends, activists, and scholars.
Another reason some history does not get recorded is that activists are understandably concerned their actions might get them into trouble or imprisoned—even killed. When I interviewed one Local 10 radical who opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam, he shared a little information but categorically refused to provide any details. He chose—literally—to take that history to the grave. Quite possibly, that piece of history will cease to exist, which is to say it will be forgotten once all the actors pass away.
Joining in singing ‘We shall overcome’ at the conclusion of ecumenical service held at Local 10 to commemorate the ILWU’s refusal to load military cargo are, from left: the first person is not identified; ILWU International President Jimmy Herman; Local 10 Secretary-Treasurer Herb Mills; Rev. George Crespin, Chancellor of the Oakland Diocese; Rev. Victor Wei, executive officer of the Episcopal Diocese of California; Rev. Tony Ubalde, representing the United Methodist Church; and Rev. Gustav Schultz of the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches.” ILWU Dispatcher, Jan. 9, 1981, p. 2. Photo by Pat Gouvdis. Permission ILWU.
To the great good fortune of historians and the wider public, Mills understood that (t)his history mattered, both to document what happened but also as a blueprint. Mills hoped that readers of Presente would become more knowledgeable about and supportive of unions and perhaps even take stances in their own workplaces on behalf of freedom struggles, be they nearby or far away.
Mills’s novel recovers history that otherwise might have been “lost.” In so doing, Presente shines a light on issues that historians must consider regardless of their subject, and simultaneously speaks to two clichés about writing history: First, that truth is stranger than fiction; few people are aware that workers occasionally have stopped work to shape global politics. Second, that fiction can be “more true” than non-fiction, for many appreciate that fiction has the potential to capture real life more effectively than non-fiction. In refashioning history, Presente demonstrates how to both “save” history and use it.
Peter Cole is professor of history at Western Illinois University and a research associate in the Society, Work, and Politics Institute at the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa). He is the author of Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (2018), winner of the Philip Taft Labor History Book Prize, among other books. He co-edited Presente: A Dockworker Story with Matthew Tallon.
[1] In 1997, the union voted to de-gender its name to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
[2] “Harry Bridges,” prod. and dir. Jack Sameth (episode of Bill Moyers Journal, ex. prod. Jerome Toobin), WNET (PBS, Jan. 29, 1974).
[3] ILWU Dispatcher, Jan. 6, 1981, p. 1.
[4] Similarly, Durban dockers refused to unload weapons from a Chinese vessel in 2008, because those weapons were intended for neighboring Zimbabwe, whose long-time leader Robert Mugabe was in the midst of a violent, ultimately successful, effort to remain in power.
