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INTRODUCTION

“The 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. There are the poor, of course, and the homeless who shelter in tents beneath the highways that suffocate wide swathes of the city. They 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. The Great Wheel amusement ride now towers over Pier 57. Two gigantic arenas dominate the southern end of the waterfront. There are tourists everywhere. The football stadium is the prize of Microsoft cofounder, the late Paul Allen, who obtained public funding for its construction. The 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. The “Emerald City,” as I write, has the fastest growing population of any major urban area in the United States. The 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. The traffic is often unbearable.

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. The “Interests,” that is, the city’s youthful industrialists, lured Rockefeller into the Pacific Northwest. This 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. Three hundred fifty 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. The 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. The midwestern lumberman George Weyerhaeuser would ascend to join Rockefeller and his set in the era’s pantheon of wealth. The men in the camps who felled these giant trees toiled twelve hours a day, seven days a week. They 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. There they would remain, sinking into debt, until job sharks and lumbermen herded them back to the woods.

Seattle’s first settlers became timber men. The 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. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) put down its roots in this quarter.

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. This figure would swell to eighty thousand by the turn of the century. The 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. Then, 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. The 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. The 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. The tops of surrounding hills were lopped off or “regraded” for the benefit of developers. The 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 The 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.

The speed of this development was astonishing. It was uneven development and then some. In 1914, less than a half-century since the first non-indigenous peoples settled there, Seattle had become a modern industrial municipality of 300,000. The Smith Tower, completed that year, climbed thirty-eight stories above Pioneer Square—the tallest building west of the Mississippi River, we learned in school.

The region’s indigenous people, the Duwamish and Suquamish, were all but obliterated—murdered, ravaged by disease, and herded from their villages into impoverished reservations. The newcomers despised them, finding their way of life incomprehensible, their four thousand years of coexistence with the earth of little or no interest. This 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–The 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 The Nez Perce habitation was east of the mountains in the smoky Blue Range of Washington and northeastern Oregon. Their 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, left words defiant in their own way, and they have persisted, powerfully, and are widely recalled:

The 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.

The 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.

Today, as glaciers on Mount Rainier melt and the Sound’s salmon perish, these words seem prescient, even prophetic. They speak of another relationship with the earth, of another way of life. They 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. The Indians are said to have believed these missionaries were responsible for spreading deadly measles among their people. We did not learn that.

The 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. These 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. The railroad man and socialist icon Eugene Debs, imprisoned in 1895 in the aftermath 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. The 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 dream of a better world alive. It whetted appetites and stretched the imagination.

Seattle workers overwhelmingly supported the principle of industrial unions—the organization of workers by industry, not skill or craft. They looked for leadership to James Duncan, chair of the Seattle Central Labor Council (CLC) and a critic of the Industrial Workers of the World. He rejected its challenge to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) from the left. Still, he acknowledged the Wobblies as “pacesetters” and admired their commitment to working-class solidarity. Seattle’s Socialist Party members were also proponents of industrial unionism. They were a thorn in the side of the Party’s national officials, who supported Samuel Gompers, the conservative president of the craft-based AFL. The IWW had its base camp in Seattle and published its western newspaper, the Industrial Worker, there. In this setting, “two-card” workers—belonging simultaneously to an AFL affiliate and the IWW—were commonplace. They held the “AFL card for the job, and the IWW card for the principle.” In this environment, trade unionism, social democracy, and industrial unionism intermingled.

Sadly, the anti-Chinese movements of the 1880s remained a stain on class solidarity in the Northwest. Seventeen thousand Chinese workers had worked to bring the Northern Pacific Railroad to the coast. Some five thousand remained in western Washington, though anti-Asian riots in Tacoma in 1885 and Seattle in 1886 violently reduced their numbers. In the new century, Japanese immigrants replaced Chinese as Seattle’s largest minority. The relatively few black workers in Seattle, just one percent of the population, took what work they could, including as strikebreakers in the longshoremen’s strike of 1916.

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

Seen this way, the General Strike represented the highest point in a longer process of socialist and working-class organization. In a range of workplace struggles and political battles, working people built an infrastructure for radical politics. Seattle’s workers became a class and were conscious of this. They became political actors in their own right. This book, then, is not just a description of the heady days of February 1919; it is also an attempt to recover the decade-long making of the collective capable of launching one of America’s most gripping strikes.

IN WHAT FOLLOWS, IT WILL NOT BE DIFFICULT to detect the influence of my mentor, Edward Thompson, author of the magnificent Making of the English Working Class, a masterpiece still in uninterrupted print after more than fifty years. I make no apologies for this. I was lucky enough to experience, first from a distance, then firsthand, the shock waves this work sent through the polite smoking rooms of universities in the sixties, permanently changing the academic landscape of that epoch. The Making was about class and class consciousness, as well as how debilitating and disarming the ideology of classlessness—“we’re all middle class”—was then, and still is. In place of “great men” and Whig historiography, the work offered history from below and unashamedly celebratory, partisan accounts in “the long tenacious revolutionary tradition of the British commoner.”⁷ Here, I am especially reminded of Thompson’s much-quoted preface and stated mission: rescuing his subjects from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”⁸ Seattle’s workers built one of the great movements in our history, their achievement rarely matched. However, not just mainstream scholars but also leftist writers customarily belittle the movement and above all the General Strike itself. Time and again, one sees these workers described as “naïve” and “self-destructive” and of their great strike as a “blunder” or “disaster”—at best, more generously, as casualties of history, not its makers.⁹

I think that this disparagement is deeply mistaken. Few felt this way at the time, certainly not Anna Louise Strong and her comrades at the Union Record, not those in the Labor Temple, nor those in socialist and IWW circles. At a minimum, the strike answered the IWW’s Bill Haywood’s question, “Is the general strike an effective weapon for the working class?” with a resounding yes.¹⁰ On the far side of the continent, the New York Call pronounced the Seattle strike “a forecast of the fall of the Capitalist system.”¹¹

The truth is that the Seattle General Strike terrified Seattle’s authorities, sending shivers through the nation’s bourgeoisie—in February and in the days and months that followed. The city’s mayor, Ole Hanson, may have been a fool. It’s not clear how many people really believed his bluster, his claim to have all but single-handedly defeated “Bolshevism” in Seattle. But certainly the authorities encouraged him. The Seattle papers’ invention of the revolution and its utter demise was not simply wrong. They wanted the strike—revolutionary or not, real or imagined—dead, buried and forgotten, and did their best to see that it was. So did the Wilson government, and so did the American Federation of Labor. They feared the workers’ movement, above all its rank and file, its immigrants, its rebellious women, its blacks and Mexicans, and its general strikes to come (as one did in Winnipeg). In those years, the workers’ challenge to industrial capitalism was unparalleled. Thus, in Seattle, workers confronted a “red scare” before the Red Scare, and a campaign to discredit the strike and its organizations, to belittle its leaders, and to erase the event entirely from history.

Finally, a note on the strike’s aftermath. The retreat of radicalism in Seattle and the Northwest was neither immediate nor total. It began with the shattering of the IWW, the splintering and demise of the Socialist Party, and the employers’ counterrevolution—the anti-union “American Plan.” In Seattle itself, the Emergency Fleet Corporation cancelled orders for new vessels, forcing thousands of shipyard workers into unemployment just as demobilization was at its peak. It was deindustrialization with a sharp political edge. The Waterfront Employers’ Association fought to reintroduce the open shop. The depression of 1920–1921 came early to Seattle and lasted longer than in other places. But working-class radicalism didn’t die. The General Strike and IWW militancy lived on, if underground, in the vivid recollections of old Wobblies and in the battles of young socialists in the 1930s. This legacy laid the foundation for Washington’s Cooperative Commonwealth movement, which, allied with the Democrats, brought a progressive alliance to power in Olympia and elected the communist Hugh DeLacy to Congress in 1944. In governing circles, the strike wasn’t forgotten. In 1936 FDR’s postmaster general, James Farley, would ironically raise a glass to “the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington.”

Working-class radicalism lived on in our house in Holly Park, a public housing project in Seattle’s south end. With Yesler Terrace, Holly Park was integrated, the first such public projects in the country. My parents were children in the Great Depression. My father spent his teenage years fleeing landlords and bill collectors in the tow of a jobless father. He attended Garfield High School. On graduating, he joined the Army Air Corps. My mother went to Franklin, then became a wartime telephone operator. Her worst moment was when, as a child in 1942, her Japanese classmates failed to appear one morning. Internment meant empty chairs, friends gone forever. My father returned home to work as an Alaskan fisherman and sheet metal worker, then as a union organizer. Both were activists in the Democrats’ solid South End, where party loyalists, supporters of the Washington Commonwealth Federation and Communists collaborated in a much-revived labor movement and broad left.

As a child, I learned that one never crosses a picket line. I was quite at home in the Labor Temple. I knew what Teamster goons were. My father once returned home badly beaten by some of “Dave Beck’s boys.” I knew all the words to the songs on the Talking Union recording.¹² More to the point, I learned about the IWW—Wobblies—and the General Strike then, vividly, about Centralia. It wasn’t a pilgrimage, we were just visiting friends in Centralia. My father wanted to see “Hangman’s Bridge,” and I went along for the ride. The lynching of the Wobbly Wesley Everest was a singularly gruesome lesson for a child of seven.

I am not sure how many children there were like me. There must have been many. McCarthyism, however, hit hard in Seattle and Washington State. Its local manifestation, the Canwell Committee, headed by the right-wing legislator Albert Canwell of Spokane, wreaked havoc on the left. It targeted Communists, but also the Commonwealth Federation, the longshoremen’s union, the University of Washington, and more. On July 19, 1948, the Camwell Committee convened five days of hearings at the university in a vicious witchhunt. In the end, six tenured faculty members received sanctions from the university and three lost their jobs; the university’s reputation, rightly, was sullied.

My father continued to work in the union and my mother coordinated the statewide fight against right-to-work legislation. We detested the Weyerhaeusers. As environmentalists before the movement got going, we held them responsible for the devastation inflicted on our forests—so evident in trips to the mountains or drives to the ocean beaches. But politics receded, except in national elections. We supported Stevenson. My mom kept the faith or regained it. As a single parent in the sixties, she opposed the Vietnam War, joined up with feminists at work, and supported her rebellious kids.

My school friends were all working class, the children of bakers, barbers, pipe fitters, carpenters, and railroad clerks—but they seem to have known nothing of the great strikes of the past. I’m still not certain why. They were not mentioned in our textbooks. What little we learned of history focused on the Oregon Trail, the so-called Indian Wars, the First World War, then the new war with communism. Much, to say the least, was lost.

The thoughtful editors at New Left Review were right to suggest, when I published a version of chapter 6 of this book in their journal, that here archaeology and considerable excavation was called for. The Seattle story had indeed been buried, lost in United States memory. I started college at Antioch in the early sixties when it was perhaps the most radical college in the country. One spring, I lived in Corey Hall (Corey was a pseudonym of Louis Fraina, a founder of US communism, though at the time this was known to only a few of us). The young radicals at Antioch, like the new movements nationally, knew little of the socialist tradition. Antioch’s curriculum was rather traditional, despite its radical reputation. In the history department, for example, we studied the muckrakers and reforms of the 1910s. They certainly were not unrelated to the workers’ movements. We might discover this but only if we searched. We studied the French Revolution, but there also, to capture its relevance, we had to read between the lines, which we could do and did. So, we became radicals outside the classroom. The activists at Antioch were educated by and in the South’s civil rights movement, then the antiwar movement. It was not the Lawrence Strike that moved us, nor the Everett massacre, but rather Greensboro, North Carolina; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; and Philadelphia, Mississippi. But this came with a cost.

It was not until the emergence of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that the history of labor returned to the fore. However, this reappearance, often rather crude, arrived in what had become a bitterly contested terrain. If a victory, it was Pyrrhic. In the summer of 1969, SDS imploded, and the US student movement collapsed.

In response, disheartened but not defeated, I joined the doctoral program at Warwick University in England, there to study with Thompson. I wanted to learn history from below, especially working-class history from below. I wanted a way to understand US working-class history, in a period when it seemed incorrigibly conservative. US labor history was taken seriously at Warwick. Thompson, that year, was joined by IWW historian Melvyn Dubofsky, as a visiting professor. The Warwick experience was interesting not only because of the professors, however. We, the students of Thompson, were nearly all activists, socialists as well, belonging to a generation marked by upward mobility but often with working-class origins. This was an identity for which we were prized at Warwick. It was a highly unusual experience for a student from the United States, to be recognized as working class not as an identity denied but as a positive identity. This reawakened my own history. There, at Warwick’s Center for the Study of Social History, working-class history was elevated, and deep excavations were undertaken with zeal. As a result, it was the rare student indeed with no knowledge of Big Bill Haywood or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Today, happily, the same can be said of this country’s labor studies centers, including the thriving programs at the University of Washington.

During the Second World War, Seattle was transformed into “Jet City.” The Boeing bombers—the B-17s, B-29s and B-47s, as well as the B-52s of Dr. Strangelove fame—which rained destruction from the skies on Japan and Occupied Europe and then on Korea, were constructed in a sprawling plant backing on to the Duwamish River and another in Renton, together employing as many as forty-five thousand people. When government orders began to dry up in the mid-1950s, the company invested heavily in passenger jet airliners to escape what executives nervously referred as to “the peace problem.”¹³ The success of the 707 and 737 made Seattle all but a company town. The sudden termination of the postwar boom in 1971 therefore came as a shock. Boeing slashed its production workforce from 85,000 to 20,000 and unemployment climbed to 14 percent, the highest rate in the country.

A three-decade tech boom, however, beginning in the mid-1980s with Microsoft’s expansion in the suburb of Redmond, fifteen miles to the northeast, has erased the decline of 1971 too from memory. Amazon presently employs thousands in the city—spread across three dozen sites—and occupies more office space than the next forty largest companies combined. It has used this leverage to block a municipal employment tax intended to raise funds for affordable housing. The company congratulates itself for investing in its hometown, yet five-sixths of the $668 million poured into infrastructure improvements around its South Lake Union campus has come from the public purse—such is the fine print in today’s “gospel of wealth.”¹⁴ There are now gated suburbs in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, once the habitat of the IWW loggers. The Port of Seattle still thrives, but the old labor gangs upon which the waterfront’s solidarity was constructed have been replaced by crane operators and truck drivers, far fewer in number, though still occupying strategic positions in global commodity chains.

Does anything of 1919 endure? Is there an inheritance? In the time since then there have been moments containing glimpses of this older history, as well as potentially offering something new. Eight decades after the General Strike, a rare alliance of blue-collar workers, environmentalists, and other alter-globalization activists—the “Teamsters and Turtles”—disrupted the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle, temporarily overwhelming the police and cutting off the convention center from the rest of the city. Steelworkers marched on the waterfront. Defying curfews, orders to evacuate, and the imposition of a fifty-block “no protest zone” in the downtown district—edicts that the Seattle and King County police, Washington National Guard and US military enforced with tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and baton blows—the protesters forced the WTO to adjourn in confusion, cancelling Clinton’s gala address.¹⁵ Yes, there is an inheritance well worth celebrating this centenary year, a year begun with the massive strike of Los Angeles teachers. The workers of 1919 were brazen and courageous, and then some. They were defiant even in the face of the cruelest measures taken against them, mass incarceration, deportation, and murder. If their rule over Seattle lasted only five days, they were five days that mattered, five days well worth remembering.

—MENDOCINO, CALIFORNIA