in 1915, Robert Bridges staked out a series of rather radical positions: he defied a Supreme Court order to stop selling low-priced ice to fishermen, stood firm on the "closed shop" policy, and opposed U.S. entry into the War to the extent that he forbade Port employees from participating in a 1916 Preparedness Parade. Up until shortly before U.S. entry into the War, he generally got his way, but in March 1917 several proposals of his were defeated at the polls. Remsberg was defeated for reelection in 1918, and Bridges found himself distinctly in the minority on an increasingly conservative Commission. He resigned his seat in August 1919. His continued activist career (including a run for governor) was cut short by his death on December 21, 1921. The new commissioners—W.S. Lincoln, George B. Lamping, and now-former mayor Cotterill—took the Port in a very different direction: wharf rates were raised to the same range as the private dock companies, port land was leased to private companies to build terminals, and the "closed shop" era ended; after a series of futile strikes, a company union and hiring hall was established (although, unlike many other facilities, the Port never attempted to prevent individual International Longshoremen's Association—ILA—members from hiring on). It would be over a decade later, amidst the Great Depression, before the Port facilities truly unionized again. The commission's conservative politics through the 1920s turned in a more mixed direction in the first years of the Depression. It favored pay cuts over layoffs, increased its advertising in the American Midwest and in Asia, and for a time maintained labor peace by continuing to pay union scale to stevedores and longshoremen. Still, once the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act triggered retaliation by other countries and a general decline in international trade, revenues declined even further, and a series of elections between 1932 and 1934 swept in an entirely new Commission whose campaign pledges of austerity ultimately amounted to smaller changes than might have been imagined: decreasing direct operations and leasing out more Port facilities. Around this time, the Port was rocked by scandal: it turned out that since 1920, Port Auditor Matt Gormley, Cotterill's brother-in-law, had been making small, informal loans of Port funds to Port employees. Gormley, who killed himself as soon as the scandal broke, appears never to have personally profited from these schemes, although some other Port officials almost certainly did, and Gormley