Radical Seattle
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On a grey winter morning in Seattle, in February 1919, 110 local unions shut down the entire city. Shut it down and took it over, rendering the authorities helpless. For five days, workers from all trades and sectors – streetcar drivers, telephone operators, musicians, miners, loggers, shipyard workers – fed the people, ensured that babies had milk, that the sick were cared for. They did this with without police – and they kept the peace themselves. This had never happened before in the United States and has not happened since. Those five days became known as the General Strike of Seattle. Chances are you’ve never heard of it. In Radical Seattle , Cal Winslow explains why.Winslow describes how Seattle’s General Strike was actually the high point in a long process of early twentieth century socialist and working-class organization, when everyday people built a viable political infrastructure that seemed, to governments and corporate bosses, radical – even “Bolshevik.” Drawing from original research, Winslow depicts a process that, in struggle, fused the celebrated itinerants of the West with the workers of a modern industrial city. But this book is not only an account of the heady days of February 1919; it is also about the making of a class capable of launching one of America’s most gripping strikes – what E.P. Thompson once referred to as «the long tenacious revolutionary tradition of the common people.» Reading this book might increase the chance that something like this could happen again – possibly in the place where you live.
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RADICAL SEATTLE
THE GENERAL STRIKE OF 1919
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The IWW opposed Chinese exclusion, and Seattle’s socialist movement included a strong current of anti-racism. Still, as late as 1917, the Seattle Daily Call reported striking butchers demanding a “white” cook. Alice Lord, talented organizer of the city’s women workers, above all its waitresses, was a committed exclusionist. Seattle’s most popular street speaker, however, the socialist firebrand Kate Sadler, was a scathing critic of Asian exclusion, above all when practiced by the unions. She was not alone. Anna Louise Strong, an advocate of child welfare, had been to Japan where she documented the plight of Japanese women workers. The Union Record insisted on the need “to break down racial barriers in the West.” When Harry Ault, editor of the Record, testified for the Seattle unions at a congressional hearing on Japanese immigration held in Tacoma, he opposed exclusion and the Japanese Land Act. The historian Katsutoshi Kurokawa wrote that Ault and Duncan had “little patience with racial prejudice.”4
Seattle’s workers rose in these years. It was a decade of intense, bitter conflict in the Pacific Northwest, by then widely known for strikes and radicalism. This ascent was far from steady. Seattle’s working class grew in fits and starts, building through fierce struggles, often interrupted.5 These conflicts, incessant in the timber camps and sawmills, bloody on the waterfront, outrageous in Everett, were commonplace in the movement and made Seattle a union town—a city where workers could imagine themselves running industry. Seattle’s working people, women and men, in unions or not, its families and communities, became class conscious in these years. This development cannot be understood as an isolated event. The General Strike of 1919 makes no sense if extracted from history, or from its environment; no sense if understood as simply an episode, limited to a week or perhaps a month. “Studying a single event,” the late historian Herbert Gutman argued, “cannot answer the basic questions, not even the general strike…. We need the background, of the discontent of working people in the Pacific Northwest as well as of the Seattle social and economic structure…. Only then [can we understand why] in that era a general strike occurred only in Seattle and indigenous radicalism hung on so tenaciously.”6
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