Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919

271 Pages·2020·3.991 MB·English

by  Cal Winslow

RADICAL SEATTLE
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RADICAL SEATTLE
THE GENERAL STRIKE OF 1919
Cal Winslow
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Copyright © 2020 by Cal Winslow
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available from the publisher
ISBN paper: 978-158367-854-1
ISBN cloth: 978-1-58367-853-4
Typeset in Minion Pro and Cheddar Gothic Serif
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK
monthlyreview.org
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CONTENTS
Introduction
1. e Union’s Inspiration
2. Two Cities
3. e Timber Beast
4. Hold the Fort
5. A Union Town
6. Le, Right, and Center
7. e War at Home
8. Winter in Seattle
9. Five Days at Matter
10. Soldiers of Discontent
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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INTRODUCTION
“e past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”1 Our
story of revolution in Seattle looks back one hundred years to 1919 and
to a very different place indeed. Gone are Seattle’s Skid Road and the
mean waterfront streets where in times past seamen brawled and the
longshoremen struck the great ships. In their place shining towers of
glass and steel rule the skyline. Construction cranes are ubiquitous, and
developers contrive to belie gray skies and the drizzle that characterizes
the not-so-shining climate. ere are the poor, of course, and the
homeless who shelter in tents beneath the highways that suffocate wide
swathes of the city. ey worry the authorities, but the developers will
have the day. Meanwhile, massive ships from China wait in Elliott Bay to
unload, and tour boats head out to Alaska’s shrinking glaciers. e Great
Wheel amusement ride now towers over Pier 57. Two gigantic arenas
dominate the southern end of the waterfront. ere are tourists
everywhere. e football stadium is the prize of Microso cofounder,
the late Paul Allen, who obtained public funding for its construction.
e best seats in the house can sell for more than $1,000 and the
approaches are lined with upscale bistros and bars. Just south of Lake
Union, Allen’s Vulcan real estate company is transforming the city yet
again, this time at the behest of another tech firm, Amazon. Its new
headquarters will include a spherical glass house enclosing a miniature
rainforest. e “Emerald City,” as I write, has the fastest growing
population of any major urban area in the United States. e world’s
two richest men, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, reside here. Seattle flourishes;
it is an important place. But can we ask what sort of place? A stage set,
perhaps, for the new Gilded Age in which corporate wealth and vibrant
street life distract the eye from all manner of social contradictions.
Seattleites don’t mind the rain; in fact, they love the outdoors, rain or
shine. Public space, however, is at a premium and access to the city’s
beaches severely restricted. Tech workers take great pride in Seattle’s high
rating for livability, yet the cost of housing rises faster than even the Bay
Area. e traffic is oen unbearable.
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In 1919 John D. Rockefeller, titan of the last Gilded Age, was the
world’s richest man. A man of the East, the West was not foreign to him.
He helped underwrite the railroads that would tie Seattle and the Puget
Sound country to Wall Street and the financiers of the East Coast, even
to those of Europe. e “Interests,” that is, the city’s youthful
industrialists, lured Rockefeller into the Pacific Northwest. is in turn
inspired a speculative explosion; the Rockefeller name alone being
enough to incite swarms of bankers to follow the rails west in search of
wealth, though in timber not gold. Bezos is our twenty-first-century
titan, presiding over the trillion-dollar colossus Amazon, its name a
byword for low-wage, low-quality work. ree hundred fiy thousand
people work for Bezos, more than forty thousand in Seattle alone–just
recently beneficiaries of a raise to $15 an hour in one of the world’s most
expensive cities.
In 1919 timber dominated the economy of western Washington.
e vast stands of ancient cedar, western hemlock and Douglas fir would
buttress the silver and copper mines of the West, underpin its railroad
lines, and build its rapidly expanding cities, above all in California. e
midwestern lumberman George Weyerhaeuser would ascend to join
Rockefeller and his set in the era’s pantheon of wealth. e men in the
camps who felled these giant trees toiled twelve hours a day, seven days a
week. ey ate company food and slept in company shacks. Conditions
in the mills were neither easier nor safer than in the woods. It was a
world of giant saws, deadly belts, horrific noise, dust, smoke and fire.
When the heavy winter rains came, the lumberjacks wrapped up their
bindlestiffs and fled to Seattle. ere they would remain, sinking into
debt, until job sharks and lumbermen herded them back to the woods.
Seattle’s first settlers became timber men. e name Skid Road
recalls how in the 1850s logs were rolled down the city’s steep hills, in
the first instance to Henry Yesler’s sawmill on the shore. In 1919, the
Yesler mill was gone, but not Skid Road. Yesler Way was a backstreet
heaving with saloons, brothels, and flophouses. Skid Road became
synonymous with places the down-and-out gathered, places that were
rough and sometimes radical. e Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW) put down its roots in this quarter.
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Situated on a strip of land between Puget Sound—an inland sea off
the northern Pacific—and the freshwater Lake Washington, Seattle,
upon incorporation by the Washington Territorial legislature in 1869,
had just more than two thousand inhabitants. is figure would swell to
eighty thousand by the turn of the century. e warring railroads
brought more than one hundred thousand newcomers into the territory.
Two days closer than California to Vladivostok and the Asian markets,
Seattle became the main distribution hub for the northern Pacific Rim,
usurping San Francisco, its rival to the south. In addition to its
command of Washington’s forests and the great wheat belt of the
Palouse Steppe, Seattle also dominated the trade and fisheries of Alaska,
its economy boosted by the influx of prospectors during the Klondike
Gold Rush. en, there were jobs in the distributive and wholesale
trades, as well as shipbuilding, attracting migrants fleeing slums,
unemployment, and poverty in the East—blacklisted railroad workers,
unemployed miners, famished wheat farmers. When the mayor of Butte,
the working-class battleground in Montana, visited Seattle in 1919, he
recognized large numbers of ex-copper miners working in its shipyards.
Seattle’s well-to-do were diverse: merchants, shipbuilders, bankers,
businessmen of all sorts and their families. e Weyerhaeusers would
settle in nearby Tacoma. In Seattle, the rich businessmen lived away from
Skid Road on the leafy boulevards of First and Capitol Hills, along
Magnolia Bluff, overlooking the lake in Madrona and Washington Park.
e politicians and their newspapers might feud about what to do with
the infamous Skid Road, but Seattle was staunchly progressive,
embracing women’s suffrage, prohibition, cooperatives, municipal
ownership, and growth. e tops of surrounding hills were lopped off or
“regraded” for the benefit of developers. e neighboring town of
Ballard was annexed in 1907 and the harbor municipalized four years
later—a blow to the big railway and shipping interests struck on behalf
of small manufacturers, minor shipping lines, and farmers anxious to
force down rates.2 e new Port of Seattle developed the best waterfront
facilities in the country, including the sort of moving gantry crane still
used in container terminals today.
e speed of this development was astonishing. It was uneven
development and then some. In 1914, less than a half-century since the
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first non-indigenous peoples settled there, Seattle had become a modern
industrial municipality of 300,000. e Smith Tower, completed that
year, climbed thirty-eight stories above Pioneer Square—the tallest
building west of the Mississippi River, we learned in school.
e region’s indigenous people, the Duwamish and Suquamish, were
all but obliterated—murdered, ravaged by disease, and herded from
their villages into impoverished reservations. e newcomers despised
them, finding their way of life incomprehensible, their four thousand
years of coexistence with the earth of little or no interest. is was the
case throughout the West. Communal societies everywhere fell, lost
forever, no matter how stubbornly these people might resist. In an 1853
article titled “Washington Territory–e Future,” the Olympia
Columbian captured the spirit of the settlers: “Of the Indians now in our
midst and around us in every direction, and in large numbers, but a
miserable remnant will remain, and they, confined within such narrow
limits as Government may allot to them in some obscure locality, will
ultimately succeed in dragging out to a bitter end their wretched
existence.”3 e Nez Perce habitation was east of the mountains in the
smoky Blue Range of Washington and northeastern Oregon. eir
Chief Joseph would instruct his fighters to shoot only at the officers, lest
they exhaust a dwindling supply of ammunition—to no avail. Chased
tirelessly by soldiers 1500 miles eastward from their homes in
Washington and Oregon, Joseph surrendered in October 1877, both he
and his people exhausted in the freezing early winter of Montana. Seattle
was named for the Duwamish chief, Sealth, perhaps because he did not
resist, at least not with arms. Sealth, however, a survivor, le words
defiant in their own way, and they have persisted, powerfully, and are
widely recalled:
e earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood that unites one family.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
e earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it.
Treat the earth with respect so that it lasts for centuries to come
And is a place of wonder and beauty for our children.
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Today, as glaciers on Mount Rainier melt and the Sound’s salmon
perish, these words seem prescient, even prophetic. ey speak of
another relationship with the earth, of another way of life. ey inspire
people desperately in search of one. In school we learned little of this.
Rather, we learned the story of the poor Whitmans, Marcus and
Narcissa, killed in 1853 near Walla Walla. e Indians are said to have
believed these missionaries were responsible for spreading deadly measles
among their people. We did not learn that.
e irony is that scarcely had this blood dried when new settlers
came to Puget Sound bringing communal dreams of their own,
compacting all of history—hunter-gatherers to “scientific” socialists—
into mere decades. In the 1880s and 1890s, anarchists, utopian socialists,
idealists and free-thinkers founded “colonies—Home, Equality,
Freeland, Burley. ese were the outposts of what the Brotherhood of
the Cooperative Commonwealth believed would become the first
socialist state, an alternative in the here and now to everything they
hated about the industrial capitalism of the East. Harry Ault, editor of
the Seattle Central Labor Council’s Union Record, spent his teenage
years in Equality Colony, Skagit County, in a family of disenchanted
Populists. e railroad man and socialist icon Eugene Debs, imprisoned
in 1895 in the aermath of the defeat of the Pullman Strike, became an
advocate of colonization and the secretary of the Commonwealth. But
not for long. He soon abandoned this position in favor of a more
conventional socialism and became a founder of the Social Democratic
Party, later the Socialist Party of America. e colonies would not
endure, but the idea of Washington as a workingman’s paradise persisted.
Debs would maintain his view that Washington would be the first
socialist state. Many went to Washington with this in mind.
In truth, however, in the 1910s Seattle’s working-class communities
were far from idyllic; the city’s industries were certainly not democratic.
Ballard, “south of Yesler,” and the Rainier Valley were neighborhoods
blighted by poor housing, threadbare amenities, and lack of access to the
Sound, the green forests, and the great mountain ranges beyond—all
that the city cherished, and still does. Shipyard life was brutal, with long
days and longer weeks. Still, the experience of the cooperators and
communards of Puget Sound and the high hopes of Debs kept the
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