When clubs were trumps on the waterfront, the cops bashed heads and smiled about it like circus fakers. The bashees were strikers who asked for porridge in their bowls. The blood-specked cobblestones of the Embarcadero were littered with the beat-up bodies. This led to a General Strike that shut down the town. The leader of the General Strike was Harry Bridges -- a Red, an alien and a troublemaker.

What a difference 67 years makes. Harry Bridges, the troublemaker who organized the historic 1934 General Strike in San Francisco, was celebrated Saturday as an iconic hero. A plaza in front of the Ferry Building was dedicated in his name by Mayor Willie Brown. And the cops who used to beat up longshoremen escorted ILWU members, in their rank-and-file uniform of white caps, hickory work shorts and black jeans, in a memorial march down the Embarcadero,

The white-caps were back on the waterfront in honor of the 100th anniversary of Bridges' Red, alien, troublemaking birth.

There haven't been that many white-caps together on the waterfront in quite a while. The cargo business went to Oakland long ago, and Local 2 representing waiters and tourist industry workers has more members on the waterfront than Bridges' old Local 10 of the ILWU.

But the spirit of labor-militancy-past walked the waterfront Saturday as those several hundred white-hats marched from the Ferry Building, its proud tower mugged in a retrofit shroud, to Fisherman's Wharf.

Marchers were reading copies of the former Communist Party paper, the People' World -- not exactly a hot newsstand checkout item in San Francisco anymore -- and recalling the grand old days of class struggle when the town had both bite and backbone. It was a time of class warfare in San Francisco with citizen vigilantes and scab strike breakers and Red-scare blood-lust headlines in the city's daily newspapers.

What was recalled along the march was Bridges' seminal role as perhaps the first San Francisco internationalist. He presciently in 1936 led the ILWU in refusing to load scrap iron aboard ships going to Japan.

He was one of the first union leaders to speak out against the Vietnam War, which led to a tumultuous beef with the old guard AFL-CIO cold warriors who supported the war.

Willie Brown touched on Bridges' universalist viewpoint when he recalled how Bridges led the way to integrate the once- lily-white maritime unions. But there was more history beneath the facts: The shipowners in 1934 when the maritime workers asked for a decent day's wage and working conditions looked to blacks, who they previously would not deign to hire, as strike breakers.

Bridges, with the wisdom of the radical, went to the black churches in the Western Addition and the Bayview and prayed with the congregations not to join the ranks of the strike breakers. He promised them that if the strike were successful blacks would be welcomed as full brothers in the ILWU and in waterfront jobs.

They heard his plea, and Bridges kept his promise.

The ILWU of Harry Bridges was not even arguably the most progressive labor and social institution in the United States during the Cold War years.

He was Red-baited to hell's outer regions for his now liberal efforts. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy described the relentless efforts of shipowners and McCarthyism opinion mongers to deport Australian-born Bridges as "Un-American" as "a monument of man's intolerance to man."

This historical box score was evened a bit Saturday with the return of the white-caps marching on the Embarcadero -- without stepping in their own blood and with cops on bicycles protecting them from traffic instead of beating them on the head.