Herb Mills

Herb Mills, 1931 - 2018Herb Mills was on his way to a PhD and career at a major university as a brilliant political theorist when he dropped out of the University of California and became a longshoreman, and a member of the independent International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), long known for its militancy and radical program, and its President Harry Bridges who on four separate occasions the United States government sought (unsuccessfully) to deport because of his alleged membership in the Communist Party.At Berkeley, Herb was an important early 1960s leader in the emerging northern student movement, whose birthplace was in many ways there. Representing the student movement, he travelled nationally to speak against the House Un-American Activities Committee's campaign to make the student movement a Communist plot. In ILWU, Herb rose from the rank-and-file to become a shop steward, chair of the steward's council, business agent and secretary-treasurer of Local 10. He was a delegate to the coast-wide contract negotiating committee, strategist of ILWU's successful effort to stop U.S. arms shipments to the dictatorship in El Salvador, and similarly conceived the plan that saved South Korean leader and later elected president Kim Dae Jung from the military dictatorship's plan to execute him. (Kim invited Herb as his guest to the inauguration.) Within the union, Herb became a major Bridges' and Mechanization & Modernization (M&M) Agreement critic because it undermined the solidarity of the union. Herb wrote extensively about his longshore work and the union. He engaged in four-days of interviews with Harvey Schwartz, ILWU oral historian. He was the key consultant to The Smithsonian's longshoring exhibit in its permanent Transportation Section. He took a break for a year and completed his PhD on Deuel Vocational Institute, a prison near the Bay Area. Herb was the engaged father of two daughters and a son, an actor, and my best friend for 60 years. This book is a tribute to him. While I'm the editor, it expresses the collective effort of many.--Mike Miller, Editor