Harry Bridges, Australian-born leader of the West Coast longshoremen's union, alternately damned as an alien Communist and praised as a dynamic chief of wartime labor, will speak in Emerson D tomorrow night at 8 o'clock. Under the auspices of the Liberal Union and the Harvard Teachers Union, the talk will be on "Labor and the War."

American Legion protests that Bridges would desecrate November 11, were met by the statement that the talk was in no way an Armistice Day address. The University took no action and the speech will go on as scheduled. Bridges, who is attending a luncheon in his honor tomorrow, will be in town for the CIO convention.

Case Near Supreme Court

The chain of events which brings Bridges to his present position, waiting for the California court decision which, appealed, will send his case on to the Supreme Court, is one of long conflict.

Bridges arrived in the United States in 1920, at the age of 20. After the bloody dockyard strikes of 1934, the Communist charges began to pour in, and in 1936 Bridges was exonerated from those charges by the Department of Labor. Then in 1938 a special commission under Dean Landis of the Law School decided that he was not deportable. His methods, Landis said, were not "other than those that the framework of democratic and constitutional government permits."

Again Cleared

But the case was reopened and the Board of Immigration Appeals cleared him this time. Bridges went ahead with his work and the job his longshoremen did in expediting Pacific shipping was praised by admirals, shipbuilders, and the O.W.I. Attorney-General Biddle's decree, which had been expected to confirm the Board's decision as precedent indicated, suddenly reversed the situation, and Bridges, as of today, is deportable.