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1. THE UNION’S INSPIRATION

On February 6, 1919, Seattle’s workers, all of them, struck. In doing so they literally took control of the city. They struck in support of shipyard workers, some thirty-five thousand, then in conflict with the city’s shipyard owners and the federal government’s US Shipping Board.

Seattle’s Central Labor Council (CLC), representing 110 unions, all affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and all craft unions, called the strike. They brought the city to a halt—a strange silence settled on the normally bustling streets, and on the waterfront where “nothing moved but the tide.”¹ The CLC’s Union Record reported sixty-five thousand union members on strike. It was a general strike, the first of its kind in the United States. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand working people participated.

The city’s authorities were rendered powerless—there was indeed no power that could challenge the workers. There were, of course, soldiers in the city and many more at nearby Camp Lewis, not to mention thousands of newly enlisted armed deputies, but to unleash these on a peaceful city? The regular police were reduced to onlookers; the generals hesitated.

Rank-and-file workers, union by union, elected the strike leadership, a strike committee. The strike committee elected an executive committee. Meeting virtually nonstop, they ensured the health, welfare, and safety of the city. Garbage was collected, the hospitals were supplied, babies got milk, and the people were fed, including some thirty thousand a day at the strikers’ kitchens.

The streets were safe, rarely safer, patrolled by an unarmed labor guard of workers. It was reported that crime abated. Nevertheless, the rich, those who could not or would not escape to Portland or California, armed themselves. The Seattle Star asked, “Under which flag?”–the red, white, and blue or the red. The mayor, Ole Hanson, knowing well that this was not the case, claimed the latter and warned that a revolution was underway. The AFL piled on, denouncing the strikers and sending emissaries by the hundreds.

The General Strike, however, was not a revolution. It was in support of the city’s shipyard workers. Still, never had there been anything quite like it, not in the United States. Moreover, these strikers left their jobs amid the great strike wave of the First World War years and an international crisis that in fact was in some places revolutionary—a crisis evolving in the shadow of revolution in Russia. It was no wonder, then, that revolution was in the air—terrifying some, inspiring others. Then, too, no one knew for certain just how far this strike might go. The strike was simple and straightforward for many, a powerful statement of solidarity and nothing more. But others did indeed want more: all-out victory for the shipyard workers, for example. Some wanted much more, but surely no one could know, not on that cold February morning, not with any certainty, just what lay ahead.

THE STRIKE EXPOSED A WIDENING CRISIS then confronting the working-class movement, in which Seattle would play a central role. At stake were not just shipyard issues but the nature of the labor movement as it existed. Its very form was challenged, as well as its values, actions, tactics, and goals, both long term and short. The fundamental issue was craft unionism versus industrial unions. Millions of workers seemed ready to abandon craft unions in favor of industrial unionism: unions organized by industry, not craft or job. Industrial unionism meant that the power of workers was in the workplace, not at the ballot box or in political action. It also reckoned that workers’ power would be expressed in the strike, including, for some, the general strike. This was the program of the IWW, the One Big Union (OBU) movement, in well-established organizations such as the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), and even among dissidents within the Socialist Party, which was founded as the embodiment of parliamentary democracy. This was anathema to the AFL’s leadership. Organized in 1886, the AFL insisted it alone could be the representative of American workers. Yet the rift had opened between even its most loyal affiliates; industrial unionism had become a current within the AFL itself.

Nowhere, perhaps, was this as true as in Seattle. Seattle’s trade unionists were in craft unions, some 120 of them, organized by the job and divided by lines of jurisdiction. The history of Seattle labor in those years was the struggle to change this. And surely to the dismay of the officers of the AFL’s national unions, it was in many ways successful. Its workers sought common contracts, common strikes, common conditions, and common politics. They insisted that the power of the strongest workers be available for the weakest. Thus, the sympathy strike, or at least the threat of it. In these years, the CLC routinely used this threat in bargaining. The national officers of the AFL supported craft unions with strict jurisdictional divides. They opposed sympathy strikes, denounced any discussion of the general strike, and considered IWW members to be dual unionists. Seattle, then, was different. In Seattle, the AFL’s red line of demarcation faded, obscuring the divides between Seattle’s AFL, its socialist leaders, the IWW, and an array of independent radicals and organizations. Strikes and sympathy strikes underpinned union power; inevitably, this included the general strike, putting its power, if only implicitly, on the table.

In 1919, the movement to free Thomas Mooney came to a head. Mooney along with Fred Billings were San Francisco trade unionists framed in the aftermath of the deadly 1916 Preparedness Day bombing, and were serving life sentences. It was an international movement but in few places was it as inspired as in Seattle. “It lies within your power to get him [Mooney] out of there, but to do so you must exercise a power that you do not realize you possess,” roared Kate Sadler, speaking at a street meeting of thousands.² The “power” she referred to was the general strike. Sadler was Seattle’s best-known Socialist, the workers’ Joan of Arc. She led some forty Seattle delegates to Chicago in January to attend a national labor convention addressing the Mooney issue. There, before one thousand delegates, Sadler would defy the conference leadership, appealing with her delegation for a May Day general strike to free Mooney.³ To no avail. The “reds” were defeated. There would be no general strike, and Mooney and Billings would remain imprisoned.

Whether the worker on the street in Seattle was indeed aware of the power alluded to by Sadler remains somewhat unclear, yet the returning delegates found the shipyard workers on strike and a movement that was itching for a fight. Seattle’s unions represented the city’s tens of thousands of workers, supported a daily, union-owned newspaper, the Union Record, and a score of cooperative enterprises: markets, butchers, barbers, and a laundry. Seattle was a closed-shop town, unique among American cities. On street corners, soap box orators abounded, as did socialist newsstands and newspapers. Sadler was far from the only incendiary. The Socialist Party, left-wing and working class, was entrenched in a workers’ movement that widely supported the idea of workers’ power. “I believe that 95% of us agree that the workers should control industry,” said Harry Ault, the editor of the Union Record.⁴

Seattle was also the regional center of the IWW. The Wobblies championed industrial unionism. It was for them foundational, the indispensable element in their outlook. Though always a minority, the Wobblies would everywhere shape the discussion of industrial unionism, in theory and practice, and of the general strike as well. Speaking in New York in 1911, Bill Haywood, the future IWW leader, then still a Socialist Party member, insisted that the question was “whether or not the general strike is an effective weapon for the working class.”⁵ He paid tribute to the Paris Commune, referred to the theorists of the movement, and apologized for not being a “better theorist” himself. Then Haywood turned his attention to Colorado, where he had been a miner, and the bitter experience at Cripple Creek. The workers there had not been “thoroughly organized.” That is, they were not organized in an industrial union and without industrial unionism, he said, the general strike was not possible: “I want to urge [this] upon the working class: to become so organized on the economic field that they can take hold of and hold the industries in which they are employed.” Political power, he argued, came through industrial organization. “The industrial organization is capable not only of the general strike, but prevents the capitalists from disfranchising the worker, it gives the vote to women. It re-enfranchises the black man and places the ballot in the hands of every boy and girl employed in a shop, makes them eligible to take part in the general strike, makes them eligible to legislate for themselves where they are most interested in changing conditions, namely in the place where they work.”⁶

Haywood and the IWW claimed the general strike as their own while denying any association with the strictly defined syndicalist tradition. Neither were they anarchists, let alone romantically attracted to fantasies of violence and martyrdom—though certainly they had their martyrs. Solidarity was their mantra, folded arms their power. The general strike was about workers’ power in the here and now, in the future as well, but beginning today. Haywood projected three types of general strike—a general strike in industry, a general strike in a community, and a national general strike—contending that each remained untried.

Still, in theory, the IWW insisted that the general strike was its ultimate weapon. The general strike was the instrument with which “the capitalist system will be overthrown.” Rarely more precise than this, the Wobblies believed that when the day came “control of industry would pass from the capitalists to the masses and the capitalists will vanish from the face of the earth.” The workers would then possess the machinery of production and distribution, enabling them to create “a new society without poverty, police, jails, armies, churches … blessed with freedom and abundance.”⁷ Haywood’s fixation, however, remained on the practical and immediate utility of the general strike to class struggle. He routinely referred to the question “[Is] the general strike an effective weapon for the working class?”—in the immediate sense, in the class struggle. In fact, simply the threat of a general strike terrified the authorities. In the 1910s, such threats were not unusual. They came mostly from the IWW, being issued, however, not as calls to storm the gates. On the contrary, they were responses to practical crises: how to win a strike or how to defend the organization. These strikes failed to materialize. Neither the threat to strike to keep the United States out of the war, nor the threats to strike to free Mooney and other political prisoners would be put to the test. The closest the IWW came to leading a general strike was during the 1917 timber strike in the Northwest. There some fifty thousand loggers and millhands struck for the eight-hour day and won. The full impact of this was considerable, certainly in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle’s trade unionists lived through this strike and many more. They understood that the general strike—a potential weapon but not necessarily the ultimate one—was in their arsenal. The literature they read tells us this. They were aware of the Chartists and the Commune, the Belgian strikes, and the 1905 Russian strike. Six times between 1900 and 1918 the CLC voted in favor of a general strike—each time in disputes with the employers. Each time settlements rendered the threat immaterial. The hysteria of the authorities aside, the CLC and the IWW understood strikes in terms of immediate, short-term reforms: the general strike in the woods began with demands for clean bedding, showers, and decent food in the logging camps, then the eight-hour day. This was the path to power, in both the short and long term; the new society would be built piecemeal in struggles in the shell of the old. The CLC’s view was much the same as the IWW’s, though the long term was longer. Was, then, the general strike an effective weapon? In the forests? Yes, it seemed. In Seattle? A strike going beyond a work stoppage, beyond a single industry, had never been tried in a city. Not until 1919. No one knew.

NOVEMBER 11, 1918. THE WAR WAS FINISHED. There were wild celebrations everywhere, in France, Britain, and the United States, spontaneous demonstrations of relief and happiness. Millions took to the streets of Paris and New York. In London, “a primitive jamboree” ensued, with crowds roaring, cheering, drinking, copulating in the shadows. In Brest, in Brittany, where the American soldiers first disembarked, the city was “wild with joy,” factory sirens howling, the ships’ whistles screaming in the harbor. The American soldiers still there were hugged and kissed. On November 7, the Seattle Star had pronounced, “War Is Over!” At once, people took to the streets. In the morning, the mayor was awakened to find the streets already filled, his planned proclamation of a “holiday” irrelevant. Makeshift bands appeared, people banging garbage can lids, lunch buckets, car horns blasting. Then came the sailors, ordered out to make the celebration official and properly patriotic. Then the shipyard owners closed the yards, foremen shepherded the men into the streets, swelling already huge crowds. The entire length of Second Avenue became gridlocked.

“The war to end all wars,” the patriotic papers repeated without a blush. Ten million lost in the slaughter on the Western Front, 36 million casualties. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were millions more dead, vast swathes of devastation, and the heart of the continent in ruins. New armies emerged, this time of scavengers and homeless, creatures without hope. The Seattle Star featured a half-page, triumphant Jesus, captioned “Peace on Earth.” Then came the mindless boastings of victory and babble about “sacred unions,” “homes for heroes,” and “democracy at full tilt.”

The workers of Seattle had never really supported the war, unless, of course, one reduces it to “supporting the troops,” the mantra in all wars. The Union Record’s response to the war’s end was rather more subdued. News from the front competed with accounts of “revolution” in Germany and the shortcomings of the wage awards promised to the shipyard workers.⁸ Still, workers celebrated, especially if it meant an end to long hours, short pay, and conscription, on the one hand, or charges of “sedition” and “criminal syndicalism,” the red squads, raids, prison sentencess on the other. The death toll was high: of the nearly five million Americans who served in the First World War, 116,000 were killed. The Battle of Meuse Argonne alone took the lives of 26,000.

The “peace,” however, was short-lived. The same day the Seattle Star cried out, “War Is Over!” it reported that sailors in Kiel, the home of the Kaiser’s high seas fleet, had seized the ships. “The crew of the dreadnoughts Kaiser and Schleswig mutinied and waved red flags yesterday morning. They arrested their officers, 20 of whom were shot…. The sailors threaten to blow up the ships if they are attacked.”⁹ Soldiers in the town’s garrison had joined them, and the city was effectively governed by a council of sailors, soldiers, and workmen. Thousands more were soon marching with red flags, and the revolt was spreading. There was street fighting in Hamburg, mutinies spreading. “Several garrisons in Holstein have deserted and are reported marching on Kiel, waving red flags.”¹⁰ The revolution in the West, it seemed, had begun.

In the winter of 1918, much of Seattle—the schools and most public places—was closed, as a result of Spanish influenza. Fifteen hundred were dead already; it was unclear if the epidemic had ended. Still, the first loggers were drifting back. They joined others—wandering, homeless men on the city’s mean streets, waiting for work to resume. This was ordinary in Seattle’s winter. Now, however, newcomers appeared, some still in uniform, wanting work. The Union Record reported that peace abroad was bringing hunger at home. A union representative from the Metal Trades Council told reporters that he had been approached “by 15 soldiers in just one night, all for bed and board.”¹¹

The paper foresaw unemployment and “bread lines coming.” “It looks as if that move for the six-hour day or even the four-hour day, in order to pass the jobs around, may be needed in a hurry, right here in Seattle.”¹² The Machinists of Hope Lodge responded by ruling that “no member shall under any circumstances be allowed to work more than eight hours during a current work day, or more than 44 hours in a working week.” They proposed “a shortening of the work day policy as palliative to unemployment, for civilians and discharged service men alike, as a result of the large number of men suddenly thrown on the labor market.” The Lodge also adopted “a clause for their new working agreements providing that when conditions arise in any plant whereby men are to be laid off, that instead of reducing the force, the hours be reduced to six hours per day, five days a week.” The Lodge also instructed members that “they must accept employment only through the union offices so that the disgraceful features of the ‘job hunting’ to which American working men have been submitted may be eliminated as far as possible.”¹³

The shipyards, the core of Seattle’s economy, nevertheless still seemed to prosper. The Star’s lead headline read, “American Shipbuilding Will Continue, Declares Schwab.”¹⁴ Charles Schwab, the head of Bethlehem Steel, who had been charged but not convicted of war profiteering, was viciously anti-union. President Wilson appointed him Director General of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, its board given wartime control of all shipbuilding in the United States. Seattle’s shipyard workers had chafed under his wartime regime, and the high cost of living became the issue. Thus, the killing in Europe, most of it, had not been finished a month before the Metal Trades Council, representing the shipyard unions, took a strike vote. Members overwhelmingly rejected the pay “awards” (salary adjustments) of both the shipyard owners and the wartime Emergency Shipping Board. Their demands were for wage increases and for raising the pay of the least skilled to reduce inequality in the yards. They were not alone; across the country workers believed they had sacrificed for the cause of war, but that the “high cost of living” had been an unfair burden. The demand everywhere was for wage increases. Real enough in itself, the demand was also an indication of deeper frustrations and dissatisfactions. The strike wave of the war years—an epidemic of strikes—was both national and international, inspired in part by syndicalism, the new workplace radicalism. Seattle was at once a strike center and a radical center, a stronghold of working-class socialism with a vision of a better world. Mocking Wilson and the local “interests,” Seattle’s workers called for self-determination and democracy at home.

The Union Record thrived in this setting. Seattle’s workers, informed by the paper, made the rebellions abroad their rebellions: London’s dockers, laborers in Buenos Aires, the “Golden Triangle” of revolt in Italy—Turin, Milan, Genoa—where the young Antonio Gramsci urged the creation of workers’ councils. It brought news from the Red Clyde in Scotland and its shop stewards’ movement. John Maclean and Willie Gallagher became well-known figures: Maclean the revolutionary socialist and Gallagher the worker who “never had a salary, never had expenses paid by the movement … the skilled brass finisher who has always worked at his trade when he wasn’t in jail.”¹⁵ Then came the Soviets in Budapest, insurrection in Bavaria, and the German revolution. On December 27, 1919, an article from Berlin opened: “Wives and sweethearts of the mutinous sailors have seized rifles and joined in defense of the royal palace against the loyal guard.”¹⁶ The ordeals of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg would be featured on the Union Record’s front pages as, alas, were their deaths.¹⁷ It ran news from Johannesburg and Mexico and Winnipeg. Closer to home, it warned readers, “Southerners Plan Terror Against Negro.”¹⁸

In the United States, rebellion emerged in crises on several fronts, including the strike wave. It began early in the decade, accelerated in the war years, then reached its peak in 1919. In 1917, more than six million workdays were lost to strikes. The metal workers led the first strikes, then the shipbuilders (separate from metal workers), coal miners, copper miners, textile and timber workers followed. Sixty-seven of the strikes in 1917 involved more than ten thousand workers per strike; one-sixth of lost workdays were due to strikes led by the IWW. The latter included strikes in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, in the Butte, Montana, and Arizona copper mines, in the Mesabi Range and on Philadelphia’s docks.

The year 1919 was the high point in the decade, beginning with the victory of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers-winning the 44-hour week plus wage increases. In New York, impatient marine workers waited for “the findings of the War Labor Board,” comfortable that “at a day’s notice they can tie up the whole vast traffic of New York Harbor.”¹⁹ In January 17,000 struck, the first of four harbor strikes that year; the longest, by longshoremen, shut down the harbor for six weeks in the fall. The Lawrence Textile workers walked out in January and held out until victory in May. The Cleveland Cloak Makers struck. Cincinnati clothing workers, teachers, library workers, office workers, telephone workers, and the Boston police also struck. In one of the largest strikes ever, 350,000 steelworkers shut down basic steel, unleashing an unprecedented reign of terror in retaliation. In Pittsburgh, the Interchurch World Movement discovered that Slavic steel workers were radicals. In West Virginia, coal miners were “insurrectionary”; their 1919 strike carried on into the next decade, culminating in an armed assault on Blair Mountain.

In the streets, there were food riots in New York City; in Cleveland the May Day rally turned into a day-long battle with police and vigilantes; looters took advantage of the police strike in Boston.²⁰ The Mooney movement, aimed at freeing jailed San Francisco labor leaders, estimated that as many as one million workers participated that summer in strikes and demonstrations demanding their release.

The summer of 1919 also remains a time of national shame, of gruesome episodes in the oppression of black people. Alas, far from glorious, the “Red” in the “Red Summer” refers to blood, black blood, not revolution. At year’s end, authorities could identify at least forty localities as sites of “race riots.” More like pogroms, they were outbursts of mob violence in which whites, alleging offenses, attacked black individuals, black neighborhoods, especially returning black soldiers, and black workers. In that summer, some forty-three African-American men were reported to have been lynched—hanged, shot, some burned alive. The violence accompanied and impelled the Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of southern blacks—500,000 to the North, more to southern and border cities. Most sought to take advantage of wartime labor shortages and to escape the misery of the Jim Crow and sharecropping South.

Chicago was a major destination for blacks migrating north. It was a vast concentration of industry and commerce, the nation’s second-largest city, with a population approaching three million. The black population on the city’s crowded South Side had doubled in the war years, challenging racial boundaries and workplace segregation. On a hot summer Sunday, Eugene Williams, a black teenager, swimming in Lake Michigan, was alleged to have crossed into whites-only waters; he was attacked by rock-throwing whites and drowned. Fighting followed, spreading into the South Side neighborhoods. Individual blacks were attacked, sometimes whites. White mobs roamed through black neighborhoods, torching houses, businesses, and churches. By the time, belatedly, the Illinois Militia arrived, twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites had been killed, while five hundred people, the majority black, had been wounded, and one thousand black families were left homeless. Wilson, the Bureau of Investigation, and the Red Squads were alarmed, but not by white violence. Wilson himself believed that returning black soldiers were “conveying Bolshevism.” Whites, overwhelmingly, were appalled by demands for racial equality, union rights, and self-defense, linking these to the general unrest.²¹

Wilson and his advisers were, in their way, quite correct. This was also the time of Harlem’s “New Negro” and of a resurgence of “fierce race consciousness” and internationalism.²² Black workers, with courage and pride, were opening a new chapter in their history by fighting back—in Omaha, Washington, and Chicago. Soap-box socialists Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph joined W. E. B. Du Bois in believing that “we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land. ‘We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting’.”²³ Owen and Randolph opposed the war and supported the Russian Revolution, urging blacks to organize themselves. They produced the Messenger and collaborated with Max and Crystal Eastman at the Liberator and with other Greenwich Village radicals. Their goal was to raise class consciousness among black workers by connecting the cause of black freedom to class struggle. Military intelligence considered the Messenger “the most dangerous of all the Negro publications.”²⁴ James Weldon Johnson was a New York writer, a figure in the Harlem Renaissance and a leader of the NAACP. He reported that it was the most widely read of all the radical publications in New York. In the summer of 1919, the Messenger claimed 33,000 Negro workers and a few thousand whites as readers and urged them to join the IWW, “a revolutionary organization that draws no race, creed, color or sex line.”²⁵

SEATTLE’S REBELS, LEFT, RIGHT, AND CENTER, had little use for the East, seeing the cities there as venal, slum-ridden sites of child labor, wretched working conditions, and ecological disaster. James Duncan, the CLC secretary and the architect of industrial unionism in Seattle, expressed sympathy for the workers of the East but believed they were backward, and their unions relics. He suspected it might take years for them to catch up. The West was the future.

Kate Sadler, no “Easterner,” flourished in this West. She was born in poverty in Scotland, where she “learned socialism at her father’s knee.” In the United States, she came first to Philadelphia, where she worked as a domestic. There she met Sam Sadler, the longshoremen’s future leader, and in 1909 they moved west, settling in Seattle. In the decade that followed, Sadler worked tirelessly to build the Socialist Party. Harvey O’Connor, the historian of Seattle’s rebels, considered her “a peerless socialist orator,” on the level with Kate Richards O’Hare and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.²⁶ Sadler was Seattle’s representative to the Socialist Party’s National Committee, but she rarely returned east; her commitment was to the workers of Seattle and its hinterland. Here, she supported workers whenever called, as long as someone could pay expenses. Sadler was as well known in the mining camps and mill towns as in the Puget Sound cities. She was also the featured guest at Colville’s 1916 socialist “encampment,” a weekend educational event in the tiny mining and timber town in Washington’s far northeast corner. “Kate Sadler,” they announced, welcoming her, “is one of the great socialist women of the nation…. She is known throughout the length and breadth of Washington as a fearless champion of the working class. A veritable reincarnation of Joan of Arc, Kate Sadler’s splendidly fiery eloquence inspires hope, kindles courage, arouses enthusiasm among the workers wherever she is heard.” Organizers promoted her as “full to overflowing with what Debs so aptly calls ‘the fine spirit of revolt.’ We especially invite the women and the young people to hear her. You will never regret it.”²⁷ A 1917 report from Everett recounts her giving an “inspiring lecture,” speaking on the “War Crisis” to a large, outdoor crowd: “In spite of the fact that the weather was cold, the crowd stayed with the meeting until it was adjourned.”²⁸ Other accounts find her in Sumas on the Canadian border, in Liberty, a mining camp in the Cascades, and in Pierce County’s coal camps. At Butte’s metal mine workers’ June picnic in 1919, “the event of the day [was] an address by Kate Sadler of Seattle, labor’s gifted woman orator, who [talked about] world happenings and their relation to the working class.”²⁹ O’Connor wrote that “when workers called for help, in strikes, jailings, free speech struggles, Kate came. Kate the fearless one…. The police, of course, knew her, [but] always hesitated to drag her off the soapbox, for the workers formed an iron ring, daring them to touch our Kate.”³⁰

Seattle was different, many thought better, a belief not uncommon in the West at the time, but in Seattle the difference was connected to its workers and their movements. Seattle’s white settlers brought with them the ideas of the times—Manifest Destiny, US exceptionalism, the “White Man’s Burden,” and Empire—though, as elsewhere, these ideas were contested. Seattle sits in the far northwestern corner of the nation, barricaded to the east by the Cascade Range beneath its magnificent yet ominous volcanic peaks, sheltered from the sea on the west by the Olympic range. Seattle in 1919 was, to be sure, a western city, sitting on the far edge of the continent, the end of the line, the sea the “last” frontier. It was surrounded by the vast rural West, with all the accompanying myth, but it was not home to cowboys, nor prospectors—if people came looking for gold, it was in Alaska.

Seattle early became an industrial city, but not a mill town—a city in the West, but not of it. Two thousand miles from Chicago; rail connection was completed in 1893, but trains were slow, the stops many. By ship, travel was even slower; San Francisco, 900 miles away, was reached only by sea. Travelers in the Puget Sound Basin seem to have preferred travel by sea; a “mosquito” fleet of steamers plied the Sound. Obstacles, to be sure—yet as elsewhere in the West obstacles had to be overcome, the aggressive capitalism of the new century, aggressive, dominant, thrived on such obstacles. The railroads opened the “wide open spaces” and would continue to do so; free land was promised on the final frontier, but ranchers and farmers all too often became collateral damage. The object was not a new “garden,” but rather access to and exploitation of the West’s wealth: the silver and gold of California, the copper of Arizona and Montana, coal in Colorado, the immeasurable forest land of the Pacific Northwest. The robber barons like James J. Hill, the “Empire Builder” and president of the Great Northern Railroad, were agents of an empire conceived in the East, financed by eastern, often European bankers, and savored in the East. Globalism was already a fact, isolation was spatial at best. Whatever westerners may have wanted, they got capitalism; its imperatives and its booms and busts in the East shaped their lives, however far they might have been from New York City and Washington, DC.

The East meant the big banks, Wall Street, capitalism and capitalist catastrophes. The Depression of 1893 was the worst ever at that time: five hundred banks closed and thousands of businesses failed. Railroads, including the Northern Pacific, Union Pacific, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, slipped into bankruptcy. Thousands of farmers lost their land. The cities teemed with the jobless, as the unemployment rate rose to 20 percent (and even higher in the great cities). There were protests and strikes. Jacob Coxey led a march of jobless (Coxey’s Army) from Ohio on Washington, DC, demanding the government create work. Copycat marches, often composed of railroad workers, set off from Seattle and Tacoma; with Washington, DC, far in the distance, they attacked railroad centers and yards. The Populist Party soared in 1892, then crashed in disillusionment with the defeat of William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Federal soldiers routed the workers in the Pullman Strike, the great railroad strike of 1894; more workers became unemployed and the blacklist ubiquitous.

Debs, the railroad worker who led the great strike, was jailed in federal prison at Woodstock, just west of Chicago. There he took the time to read. Victor Berger, the Milwaukee socialist, is said to have introduced him to the writings of Karl Marx, giving him a copy of Capital which he found dull, preferring the German socialist Karl Kautsky. Of his many visitors, Kier Hardy, the Scottish socialist and founder of the Labour Party, seems to have most impressed him. “Debs did not learn much in jail,” his biographer Ray Ginger wrote. “He could only learn by actively taking part in the battles of the outside world. When that form of activity was denied him, his entire method of educating himself came to pieces, and it was useless to give him books.”³¹

Voters in Washington State supported Bryan for president; more important, they elected the Populist John Rogers as governor. The Populists campaigned for free schoolbooks, state aid to education, women’s suffrage, and direct election of US senators, all of which enhanced the idea of the state as a haven in a hostile nation, a colony in “working man’s country.” Thus, new settlers arrived—blacklisted railroad workers, redundant coal miners, wheat farmers in despair—fleeing bankruptcy and eviction. Some were the followers of the new utopianism of the era, inspired by Laurence Gronlund’s The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). Others had read Robert Owen, the Welsh textile manufacturer and founder of utopian socialism, or followed William Morris, the English designer and revolutionary socialist, author of News from Nowhere. The Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth promoted establishing settlements in Washington, as did Debs, though he soon rejected this idea. The Brotherhood inspired half a dozen “colonies” in Puget Sound Country, all socialist to some degree: the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony on the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Equality in the Skagit Valley, Burley on the Kitsap Peninsula, Glennis near Eatonville, Freeland on Whidbey Island, and Home, an anarchist settlement, on the Longbranch Peninsula.³²

Social relations in the colonies varied, as did the meaning of socialism. However, they were not merely back-to-the land settlements; however isolated, the colonists remained engaged. The first institutions everywhere, shelter aside, were the post office, the print shop, and the newspaper office. At Burley, they published The Cooperator; at Equality, Industrial Freedom and the Young Socialist; at Port Angeles, the New Light; at Home, the Agitator and Discontent; at Freeland, the Whidbey Islander. All the colonists championed equality, democracy, and socialism. All colonists were to work, though again how this was managed varied. None were to be poor. And there would be no government, no police, no church.³³

The utopians have received a bad press, from the left as much as anywhere. The truth is they suffered quarrels and disagreements, their visions often seem fantasies, and they didn’t last forever. Yet they are not without interest, certainly not in the history of the Seattle General Strike and its participants, who were often themselves disparaged as utopian. The colonists of Puget Sound rejected with their feet the notion that “there is no alternative” and did so in real time. They had the courage to question society and its most basic values, to imagine alternatives to the wretchedness of the present. And they were not mere spectators. They attempted to merge the world of the dream with the world of reality.³⁴

This history never really died, nor did the idea that the Northwest was special ever entirely disappear, though the central idea of winning the country’s workers to ideal communities was pressed in vain. They, with Debs, turned instead to socialism and socialist organizations, by that time well established both as an international movement and as a current in the farms and factories of Washington. Seattle’s socialism is said to have been born in 1900 with Dr. Herman Titus as its founder.³⁵ A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and a Baptist preacher for several years, Titus settled in Seattle where he became a Skid Road social worker. There he read Capital, was persuaded, then founded his own paper, the Socialist. His wife, Hattie, managed a small hotel, a hangout for radicals. In 1906, Titus and Hattie joined the young Alfred Wagenknecht and Hulet Wells to lead the first of the West’s free-speech fights. They took to soapboxes on the city’s busiest street corners, holding forth on socialism and the issues of the day. They drew large crowds, disrupting commerce and traffic, repeatedly facing arrest. Titus himself was jailed six times. Imprisoned, they refused to work on the chain gangs, agitated the other prisoners, and exposed the foul prison conditions, forcing the Health Department to close the jail down. Juries refused to convict them.

Seattle socialists, as elsewhere, struggled; they stumbled into blind alleys and suffered foolish fractures and discord. Nevertheless, they grew in these years, both in numbers and in their presence in the working-class movement. By 1910, Seattle had become one of the Socialist Party’s strongholds—Debs would win a million votes in the 1912 presidential elections. Still, Seattle remained special, even singular. Kate Sadler was not just a unique individual. Importantly, she brought to light the spirit of the Seattle workers’ movement as it rose. This movement—militant, egalitarian, and deeply humane—did not emerge spontaneously. Rather, it was the creation of years of sustained work and sacrifice, often at great personal cost, by an exceptional group of socialists and trade unionists—Sadler perhaps foremost among them. She did not make this movement, of course. She was just one in this collective of gifted organizers and orators. Movements of thousands are the creations not of individuals but of communities. Rather she was the product of her relationship with the workers’ movement. Indeed, we never hear of Sadler except in relation to workers—their meetings, their strikes, the struggles in their lives. She had the rare qualities of a true mass leader, the ability to address the workers’ most pressing needs without losing sight of theory, in this case her vision of the socialist society to come. Her life was rooted in working-class struggle; this experience shaped her outlook, as it did the workers,’ and ultimately, that of their class.

The making of Seattle’s working class, then, involved the relationships and the experience of workers themselves—with one another, with the authorities, with the employers and their press, and with the police. These were historical relationships in a process. The story of the great General Strike of 1919 and why it occurred in Seattle and nowhere else can only be understood with this in mind. The challenge is to expand our field of vision in time, stretching it both backwards and into the future, and geographically not contract it. We have to consider the roots of the strike, to follow the development of a movement, to see this historical moment in context. And this is well worth doing, all the more so as it happened one hundred years ago, far from the strategic centers, isolated from revolutionary strongholds, on the very edge, hidden in the shadow of rain forests, in the gray morning light of the Sound. Much of the Seattle story is forgotten. However regrettable, this is understandable. What is not understandable is that when people refer to the history of the General Strike, it is often as something insignificant or peripheral, simply a blip on the graph of lost causes—or worse, condescendingly corrected to make it fit into more acceptable narratives.