Show #112 Hour 1 | January 09, 2016 | Moving beyond familiar accounts of politics, celebrity engineers, and designers, Building the Golden Gate Bridge: A Worker’s Oral History by Harvey Schwartz gives the voices of the workers themselves center stage. The survivors vividly recall the hardships, hazards, and victories of constructing the landmark span during the Great Depression.
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Harvey Schwartz has compiled oral histories of nine Golden Gate Bridge workers. Their powerful recollections chronicle the technical details of construction, the grueling physical conditions they endured, the small pleasures they enjoyed, and the gruesome accidents some workers suffered. The result is an evocation of working-class life and culture in a bygone era. Schwartz also features women: two nurses who cared for the injured and tolerated their antics, the wife of one 1930s builder, and an African American iron worker who toiled on the bridge in later years. All these powerful stories are accompanied by stunning photographs of the bridge under construction. An homage to both the American worker and the quintessential San Francisco landmark, Building the Golden Gate Bridge expands our understanding of Depression-era labor and California history and makes a unique contribution to the literature of this iconic span. He’s also written Schwartz is also the author of Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU and The march inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934-1938.
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