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2. TWO CITIES

Seattle was both a boomtown and a radical center in the war years. The economic panic of 1907 was past, as was the recession of 1913–14. The city was by 1914 structurally complete. The city center was in place. To accomplish this, the tops of hills were literally chopped off, regraded for the benefit of the developers, with millions of tons of earth sluiced into Elliott Bay.

The construction of the ship canal that would connect Puget Sound with Lake Washington was underway. The Smith Tower was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. Seattle’s well-to-do inhabited leafy boulevards. They boasted a flourishing cultural life and founded a fine university. City planners foresaw an economic base that was diverse and with a large middle class. The politicians and their newspapers might feud about what to do with the infamous Skid Road and its flophouses, saloons, cheap booze, and brothels, but Seattle remained staunchly progressive. It supported women’s suffrage, prohibition of alcohol (sales and manufacturing, but not consumption), cooperatives, municipal ownership, and growth. Its population had surpassed 300,000 when the war broke out.

Above all, Seattle had its port. More, its new municipal piers, equipped with gantry cranes (huge, moving cranes, a type still used on container terminals today) that were among the finest in the nation. And Seattle was two days closer to Vladivostok and the Asian markets than San Francisco. It was the “gateway to Alaska.” Terminal space was abundant, wharfage and warehouse rates were cheap. In 1914, the Panama Canal opened, ensuring the city its place in world trade. By the war’s end, Seattle would surpass San Francisco as the West Coast’s leading port. Unlike other Puget Sound cities, it was not a mill town except for the shingle mills of Ballard, an adjacent small city annexed in 1907. Shipbuilding, always subject to economic booms and busts, exploded during the war. “Where only yesterday lay miles of empty tidelands,” wrote the young radical Joseph Pass, “today monster yards are laboring day and night, giving birth to vessels of steel and wood.”¹ Its yards would deliver more ships to the nation’s fleets than any other single port. In 1917, Seattle had 1,300 manufacturing plants employing fifty thousand workers. Of these, thirty thousand were shipyard workers. In Tacoma, thirty miles south, there were fifteen thousand more.

Seattle, then, was an industrial city. Its unions were clean, not run by gangsters. It did not have a dominant political machine or bootleggers of any importance. Still, the city could be a tough place. “The Metal Trades, which dominated the Seattle labor movement and the Central Labor Council, were composed of a rough lot of men … torrid oaths and profanity prevailed” wrote a contemporary historian. “Men came out covered in soot and red paint, exhausted from wielding thundering riveting guns. Every day or so some unlucky shipyard worker would be carried out in the dead wagon.” Its trades, then, were no less dangerous than elsewhere.

Seattle became a center for these loggers in winter, when rains made work in the woods impossible. The state’s loggers, “hardworking, hard fighting, hard drinking,” fled the woods to Skid Road. Their boots and bindlestiffs made them unwelcome almost every place else. In some years there were as many as ten thousand. There they might stay until poverty forced them back into the woods, often in debt, at the mercy of the job sharks and lumber men.

Seattle was founded in 1860. It was just one of several outposts on the Sound. The Territorial Assembly incorporated Seattle in 1865, unincorporated it in 1867, and then reincorporated it in 1869. The city survived the early booms and busts of the timber industry. Shamefully, it participated in the ethnic cleansing. After the anti-Chinese riots of 1885–86, the Chinese population, driven from both Seattle and Tacoma, was reduced to less than 4 percent of the population. In 1889, the Great Fire razed the central business district. The nationwide depression of 1893 was devastating in Seattle, leading to a run on the banks, foreclosures, and plummeting land values. Some residents simply fled, taking with them whatever they could. Seattle’s city treasurer, Adolph Krug, escaped to Canada, taking with him $225,000 in public funds. The president of the Buckley State Bank of Tacoma left with $30,000.

By chance, gold was discovered in the Yukon Territories in 1896. Next year, the arrival of the SS Portland from Alaska, carrying sixty-eight miners and “one ton of gold,” transformed Seattle. It was estimated that as many as 100,000 men (plus a few women) passed through Seattle on their way to Alaska and the Klondike. Only a fraction of this number would become actual prospectors. Far fewer became rich. However, in Seattle, every business prospered, and real estate values soared. “Anyone who owned or could lease a ship, no matter how old, no matter how unsea-worthy, could find passengers. One captain hitched up a series of rafts, loaded two hundred passengers and a herd of cattle.”² The merchants outfitted would-be mining men, then refitted them. The banks financed whatever they could, offering cash to those who returned gold. Salmon canners fed the hordes, beginning the deadly onslaught on the species.

Seattle in those years was recast. An essentially Wild West frontier town became the progressive regional center of the 1910s. This occurred remarkably fast, but not evenly. Seattle would never become a boss-driven urban catastrophe of the kind revealed by the work of the turn-of-the-century muckrakers, including Lincoln Steffens’s pathbreaking account The Shame of the Cities.³ Shipbuilding and associated industries thrived, but none did better than the saloons and brothels on Skid Road. With thousands of single men pouring into the city, men with money to spend and time to kill, prostitution thrived. There were more saloons in the business district than there were restaurants or dry-goods stores. The city’s Hillside Improvement Company would, at one point, purchase several acres for a “model red-light district”; it would include a 500-room brothel, the biggest in the world. Seattle, at least in Skid Road and its environs, became an “open town” where easy money abounded.⁴ Certainly, then, there was enough to be ashamed of. Seattle’s political battles in the decade were framed by Skid Road and what to do about it. In these struggles, the working-class movement, although most often siding with the progressives, found itself increasingly isolated.

Ironically, it was the infusion of gold-rush wealth that underwrote this transformation and shaped economic development. It created the basis for a diversified economy. Seattle would not become a single-industry, company town (not until the 1950s anyway). James E. Casey founded United Parcel Service in 1907. William Boeing founded his corporation in 1910. The new wealth also shaped the city’s class system. It gave Seattle’s professional classes independence from the timber employers, railroad men and their like, the masters of the frontier economy. It also underlay the politics of municipal reform and enterprise, efficiency in government and management, and moral virtue. These were all in line with the national progressive movement. Then, too, it created the structures of a class system that had more in common with the industrial centers of the East than the company towns of the frontier West. Its population, diverse in occupation, skill, gender and national origin, was overwhelmingly comprised of industrial wage workers.

Seattle’s progressive middle class pursued a “beautiful city,” free from the vice and corruption of the East. It supported planning, municipal ownership, provision for health, education, and the future. The feminists of the movement, the middle class “club women,” suffragists, social workers, and others worked to improve the conditions of the city’s poorest, children, single mothers, the elderly. They supported prohibition and sought relief for women workers, campaigning with labor for the eight-hour day for women. The civic planners’ public projects won working-class support. The labor movement opposed private ownership of utilities and public facilities, including the port, associating the direct rule of the wealthy, the “Interests” as they were called, with corruption. Socialists too, including the remnants of nineteenth-century Populists, supported the programs of the reformers. However, they also held fast to a vision of another world. Overall, organized labor’s policy in city politics was one of picking and choosing. It supported women’s suffrage and measures making the city more democratic but was against prohibition—the latter increasingly an important issue for the middle classes.

In Seattle, legislation supporting “direct democracy,” including the initiative, the referendum, and recall, and opposition to the ward system, helped clear the path for social reform. It reinforced the movement for clean government. This latter was essential if women, whose votes would threaten the vice economy, were to obtain the vote. Its antithesis, in the wings, was the wide-open city run by saloonkeepers and gangsters, which was the scourge of reformers everywhere.⁵ These reforms in place, the state legislature in 1909 put a referendum on the ballot amending the state constitution by granting votes for women. It passed in every county, two to one. The victory of the women reinvigorated the anti-saloon movement, a cause that vexed Seattle’s progressive politics in the run-up to war. The labor movement was divided. James Duncan, the longtime leader of Seattle’s Central Labor Council, was a teetotaler, but there was the issue of personal liberty and “the working man’s right to whiskey,” as Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow once argued in a Seattle lecture. Booze, some argued, was a long-standing masculine prerogative; it was also relief from the exhaustion of a day’s toil. There was the worry that enforcement would be punitive and class-biased (which turned out to be the case).

On November 3, 1914, Washington’s voters approved a measure prohibiting the manufacture and sale (although not the consumption) of liquor statewide. Washington women had gained the right to vote in 1910, and their votes contributed to passing the initiative. City people in Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane opposed prohibition, whereas small-town and rural people were in favor. The prohibitionists drew upon what were believed to be longstanding middle-class American values—values rooted in a rural, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon countryside. “Where else shall we look,” asked an editorial in a prohibitionist paper, “but to the farmer to counteract the venality and corruption of the slums of our cities’ populations, that seem to be so rapidly increasing by the aggregation of alien voters, anarchist and saloon influences?”⁶ Still, reasonable people supported the case against the saloon. Drunks and the liquor traffic were undoubtedly causes of “alcohol-related crime, delinquency, poverty, prostitution, disease and political corruption.”⁷ There were fanatics in the field, none perhaps so inflamed as the Reverend Mark Matthews, the Presbyterian minister who led the city’s fundamentalists in the crusade against the saloon. “The liquor traffic is the most fiendish, corrupt and hell-soaked institution that ever crawled out of the slime of the eternal pit,” he claimed. “It is the open sore of this land.”⁸ Matthews’s congregation, ten thousand strong, was among the largest in the country. With his followers, Matthews raided red-light district establishments, exposed politicians, and offered a preview of the “citizen’s arrest.”⁹

In the 1910 elections, the lawyer Hiram Gill was elected mayor. Gill campaigned promising a “wide-open town.” He was supported by Alden Blethen, the flag-waving owner of the Seattle Times. Gill believed “in letting people alone”; if a “man wanted to go to hell … [he] was unwilling to set up roadblocks.”¹⁰ Gill made his fortune representing brothel keepers and saloon owners; as a city councilman he opposed municipal ownership, taxes for city projects, and labor unions. Blethen agreed, believing that the saloons and brothels were essential in maintaining the Alaska and maritime trade. Downtown bankers and property owners profited, securing income both legally and illegally. Gill promised that the saloon and brothel district would be contained. He fulfilled this promise, according to a McClure’s magazine’s reporter, by giving the “vice concessioners” an “almost legal status.” Gill wanted a sheriff who knew how to run such an area and found one in Charles Wappenstein who imposed a semi-official shakedown: his police kept close watch on the city’s estimated five hundred prostitutes, with Wappenstein to be paid $10 a month by each. McClure’s, then the flagship of the muckraking press, reported, “The city seemed to have been transformed almost magically into one great gambling hell…. No American city has ever seen anything comparable with it.”¹¹ Gill did not keep his promise to confine saloons to the restricted area. The city’s streets, the cafes, even the better hotels, were still crowded with prostitutes. The old conditions were as prevalent as before, and it was chiefly new arrivals who populated the restricted area.

This provoked the city’s middle classes and reformers, who circulated a recall petition. As a result, an election was held in February 1919 in which Gill lost. Women, having obtained the vote three months earlier, no doubt contributed heavily to his defeat, with an estimated 20,000 of 23.000 registered women voting. The recall itself was a result of the recent reforms. Gill was the first US mayor to be subjected to one. An angry Blethen defended both Gill and his sheriff, Wappenstein, the latter having provided him with a free personal bodyguard. Blethen survived the episode, but Wappenstein was sent to the state penitentiary at Walla Walla.

Despite the opposition of Gill and the industrialists, the reformers succeeded in creating a municipal port, founded in September 1911. They followed up with projects at Harbor Island, the construction of the Fisherman’s Terminal, and the completion of the Ship Canal, a waterway that would eventually connect Lake Washington with the Sound. The Klondike wealth underwrote these municipal projects. But these would be the progressives’ last great achievements, the high point of public works in Seattle. Private construction flourished too, but not, of course, according to an overall plan.¹²

“Wrestling order out of chaos is the order of the municipal day,” claimed the reformers. They circulated calls for a comprehensive plan, one that envisioned a “City Sensible” or “City Beautiful.”¹³ In September 1911, Virgil Bogue, nationally known as a successful city planner and a friend of F. L. Olmsted, the landscape architect, was selected to develop a “Plan for Seattle.” Bogue revived the Olmsted Plan for Seattle Parks of 1903, though emphasizing efficiency over beauty more than Olmsted had.¹⁴ He proposed a massive new civic center—“more European than New York, beaux-arts” in design—to be built on the soon-to-be-completed Denny regrade. In addition, he envisioned an adjacent railroad station, a system of wide, freewheeling roads radiating out from the city’s center, a rail link to Kirkland (via a tunnel through Lake Washington), a subway system, and thousands of acres of city parks, including all of Mercer Island, the 4,000-acre island in Lake Washington. All three Seattle dailies and the wealthy opposed the project. The labor movement supported the plan, though not, it seemed, with enthusiasm. It offered little for the growing working-class neighborhoods of the Rainier Valley or for industrial enclaves like Ballard. Alas, it was defeated, clearing the way for the future “Freeway Bridge,” the bifurcation of the city by I-5, and Seattle’s traffic nightmares of today.

Gill’s best-known opponent and eventual successor was George Cotterill, a surveyor and civil engineer born in England and working in Seattle as an engineer. Blethen attacked him as a foreigner. A nominally nonpartisan candidate for mayor, he was effectively a Democrat. Cotterill supported public ownership of utilities and public control of the port. His heart, however, was in the prohibitionist movement, a movement becoming more conservative over time. His parents had been members of the United Kingdom Temperance Alliance. As a child, he attended the Band of Hope, a school for temperance education.

The Potlatch Riot of 1913 all but ended his political career. The Potlatch Days Festival, an annual Seattle event, was named for Northwest Coast Indian gift-giving feasts, which were banned in Canada and “discouraged” in Washington, DC. It culminated that July in a riot. The origins of the episode lay in ugly reports by Blethen in the Seattle Times that a woman soapboxer on Washington Street near Occidental Avenue, when heckled by soldiers, had “insulted their uniforms.” This provoked fistfights; the soldiers regrouped and reinforced, then attacked. Soldiers and sailors, supported by a large mob, looted and burned the IWW and Socialist Party offices. It was a dark preview of things to come. Cotterill responded by shutting saloons, closing the Seattle Times, and banning street speakers. Judge John Humphries, Blethen’s good friend, blocked these orders, but Cotterill followed up with a campaign to clean up Skid Road; thousands were arrested, alarming all sides. Cotterill supported police raids on hotels and cafes without warrants. He vetoed efforts to spell out police powers. Critics pointed to 17,078 arrests made without warrants in 1912 (5,699 of these dismissed in court) as well as to attacks on free speech and assembly. Police could dictate when, where, and what meetings could be held. They also seized printing presses and papers, and arbitrarily closed businesses. Gill, returned as mayor in 1916. Now “reformed,” he shocked “respectable” people by sympathizing with the workers massacred in Everett.

The Municipal League, the voice of progressive reform in Seattle, had been organized in 1910, primarily in opposition to the downtown elites. The unions joined the League in supporting electoral reform and municipal ownership of the docks, the electric company, streetcars, public markets, and laundries, even if these demands fell short of the unions’ core goals of workers’ control, social ownership of production, international solidarity, and, of course, opposition to war. Collaboration between liberals and labor only went so far, however. The state’s socialists contested city elections from the left; in the 1912 elections, Hulet Wells, an editor of the weekly Socialist Voice, ran on a platform of jobs for the unemployed. Wells, the son of Canadian farmers, crossed the border frequently as a youth, working as a farmhand. He spent two years with his father in the Klondike, then worked as an itinerant laborer, a logger, and a shingle weaver before entering the University of Washington in 1905 to study law. His mission: “I do not pretend to represent anyone but the working man and have been a working man all my life and understand their problems.” His vision included improving the shacks that crowded Ballard’s shingle mills; the tiny, cheap working-class homes of the South End rarely appeared as problems for the city’s reformers. Neither did poor services, overcrowded schools, or severe limitations in the viewshed. Slums, went the well-worn banality, were eastern.

Then the renewal of industrial conflict further undermined labor’s relationship with liberalism. The Municipal League supported the open shop, as did the employers’ new management schemes, their efficiency experts, and scientific managers. In Seattle, this was personified by Carlton Parker, a University of Washington professor, author of The Casual Laborer and Other Essays, and his sponsor, Henry Suzzallo, the university’s president. Parker investigated migrant camps and casual laborers in California. This led employers to worry that he was pro-IWW, yet this was far from the case. In his brief tenure at the university, Parker collaborated with the reactionary New York leadership of the national longshoreman’s union (the International Longshoreman’s Association, ILA) and J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the Bureau of Investigation, in their efforts to rid Seattle’s docks of the IWW and maintain the open shop on the waterfront. Suzzallo, equally anti-IWW, became a leading proponent of the war as well as a fierce critic of the General Strike. This was progressivism in crisis.

The IWW, champions of “anarchists and aliens” that they were, excoriated the Skid Roads of the West, yet these were their urban terrain, their point of contact with the bums and the hobos, the homeless migrants. In the Northwest, the loggers fled from the forests in the rainiest season. This meant men had no alternative but Skid Road, its saloons, its flophouses, its job sharks, and cops on the take. The Wobblies were appalled by the raw exploitation of men and women in these places. They disapproved, if not in the lurid language of McClure’s or with the moral sanctimony of the ministers, then in the lexicon of class war and industrial socialism and with a sympathy and solidarity not found elsewhere. Cotterill’s “cleanups” targeted not just saloon owners but also the bums and hobos, the people celebrated by the IWW. The action, then, moved increasingly from City Hall and the pulpits into the streets. The street speakers on their soapboxes were the people’s voice, their connection with the movement, and their “universities of the streets.” Another hotspot was the Great Hall at the Labor Temple, the place where Seattle labor gathered, including socialists and IWW “two-card men”—workers simultaneously members of the IWW and the AFL—to debate and set policy under the watchful eyes of the rank and file, packed into rowdy and highly politicized galleries.

Seattle was “divided into two hostile camps,” wrote Anna Louise Strong: “Good business men of the city and the women of the upper strata, ‘our best people,’” on the one side, and “the invading host, the lowest of the low, about whom nothing too bad could be said, destroyers of everything good, jailbirds and criminals,” on the other.¹⁵ Class lines were hardening. The Everett events would embitter working-class people; the prospects of the timber strike heartened them. On the city’s streets, the fight for the closed shop escalated, and class consciousness was surging. People had to choose sides.

Strong, with a PhD from the University of Chicago, came to Seattle well-grounded in the progressive movements of the times. She had been close to Roger Baldwin, future founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and had worked with and remained friends with Florence Kelley, the child welfare advocate and a future founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Strong too became an advocate of child welfare. She organized an exhibit on the topic—an outgrowth of child labor legislation—focusing on hygiene, recreation, and education. She toured with the exhibition in the United States and abroad, bringing it to Seattle in May 1914, where it was seen by forty thousand people.

Her father was Rev. Sidney Strong, the best-known progressive minister in Seattle, pro-labor and a founder of the Municipal League. His estrangement began with supporting the strikers in the forests. He became a central figure in the middle-class antiwar movement, and hosted an anti-conscription conference. The meeting was broken up by police, with their attempt to arrest Kate Sadler provoking a “near riot.”¹⁶ This led to Reverend Strong’s expulsion from the League and the demand that he be jailed and removed from the Seattle Ministerial Federation. It was claimed that he had once compared IWW members to the early Christians. The League, once the bastion of reformers, now found itself defending the war at home. The League also expelled Robert Bridges, the elected chair of the Port Commission. Bridges became a Seattle Port Commissioner when the Commission was formed in 1911. He was a leading fighter for municipal ownership of the port. Bridges, however, had always been far from a typical League member. In Scotland, he had been a coal miner. Bridges tried farming in the United States, then union organizing in the Black Diamond coal mines of southern King County. He was progressive but pro-labor. His opposition to the scheme to privatize the port’s Harbor Island brought the enmity of the “Interests.” Bridges opposed the military buildup by not allowing Port of Seattle employees to march in the “Preparedness Day” parade.

“I WENT DOWN TO THE [IWW] HALL,” Strong wrote, then a fledgling reporter, “I went because I wanted to know the truth.” There, she found herself embarrassed. “It is down in the part of town where respectable women seldom go—except to hurry through to the railroad station … a district where poverty has robbed even vice of its concealments.”¹⁷ The hall was up a narrow staircase, above a movie theater. She was met there by “a kindly, motherly-looking woman” who introduced her to the others present.¹⁸ She wondered why they had not opted for a better location, suspecting that this place was chosen “because they want to reach these unskilled workers, these wandering men who come into town from the harvest, who sleep in fifteen cent ‘flops’ and eat in cheap joints, and wear calks in their shoes that would hurt the floors of a decent place.”¹⁹ She learned they had no choice: alternative quarters were unavailable, the “good business men” elsewhere being unwilling to rent to them. Strong met IWW leaders: Red Doran, the organizer, Herbert Mahler who “handled the finances,” and James Thompson, the leader of the loggers. Thompson told her, “We are going to have a revolution … the labor process [will] take on the cooperative form, and the tools of production become social … social ownership…. [The] things that are used collectively should be owned collectively … this is the irresistible force to the people of the twentieth century.” She met workers, all migrants, and most young. One was an eighteen-year-old from a North Dakota farm who followed the harvest west, did haying in Montana, returned to Minneapolis, where he spent nine days in the hospital with tonsillitis, then went to Spokane and Wenatchee for apple picking, finally going to Seattle, where he would work on the waterfront occasionally, waiting for summer.²⁰ Another named Savery was a logger. He was “slow of speech and understanding, but sure and unhurried in every movement,” wrote Strong. Savery was a Russian who had come to Montreal when he was two. His people died when he was seven, and he went to work for a French farmer. Savery left the farm at age twelve; he had done mostly common labor. Since he “grew up big enough to handle logs [he worked] in the woods.” He joined the IWW, “to better my conditions.”²¹

Strong reckoned there were three and a half million such men in the country, not counting seven million more unskilled laborers who drifted in and out of casual work, including tens of thousands in the Pacific Northwest. She quoted a US Department of Labor report claiming that “over a tenth of the people in the United States are in the ranks of unskilled labor, frequently changing jobs.” These were men, she believed, “who would never have a home of their own, men who follow the harvest or work in the mines or the woods, men who live from day to day, almost hour to hour, men who sleep in the fifteen-cent flops and to whom a woman, and children, and a room or two for a family, is, and will always remain, a bitter, impossible dream.”²²

In these years Seattle’s labor movement shifted steadily leftward; the experience of the past decade had been one of recurrent recession, unemployment, lost wages, and the struggle to recover. At the end of 1913, unemployment had reached 30,000 statewide. Seattle’s jobless were joined by the refugees of seasonal employment: agriculture, logging, fishing, and canning. The city converted a former hospital into the “Liberty Hotel,” a haven for the unemployed. Women, however, were not allowed. Even Seattle’s settled workers often survived through seasonal work on the waterfront, in the shipyards and canneries, and in related occupations. The economy would recover, however, and the recuperation continued throughout the war years. The world’s longest dock was completed on Elliot Bay at Smith Cove and a 1,500-foot wharf was under construction. Salmon canning flourished, as did flour exporting and the Alaska trade. Then, the war brought large-scale manufacturing, primarily shipbuilding, which in turn stimulated foundries, boiler-making, metalworking, transport and services, sales, restaurants, and personal services. The demand for timber and timber products increased, even as steel ships replaced wooden ones. The chronic housing shortage eased, as home construction boomed.

The year 1912 marked the beginning of the great strike wave. The ratio of strike participants to the total labor force grew higher than it had ever been before.²³ Skilled workers struck to make up for what had been lost in the Depression years. Unskilled workers fought in a vain attempt just to catch up. Workers everywhere struck for higher wages, in the face of a steadily rising cost of living. The IWW participated in these strikes, always as a minority but never as isolated as its critics claimed. Its litany of appeals—for the downtrodden, direct action, trade union democracy, working-class solidarity, and big changes in the world—were widely heard, very much part of the scene. In the long summer of 1917, the number of strikes in the United States outran those of earlier years. Solidarity became the workers’ watchword, and in working-class neighborhoods life could become unbearable for scabs. Large funeral processions for slain workers became commonplace, and entire families joined in workplace struggles.²⁴ Seattle was no exception to this nationwide surge in workers’ struggles.²⁵ When the US Commission on Industrial Relations met in the city for five days of hearings, John R. Commons, Wisconsin’s labor specialist, observed that in Seattle there was “more bitter feeling between employers and employees than in any other city in the United States.”²⁶ As the power of the labor movement increased, workers focused on fighting for the closed shop—abhorrent to employers large and small. In Seattle, the CLC sought to make the closed shop universal. The advantage of the closed shop was that unions did not have to continually recruit new employees to maintain their presence. Most employers resisted any form of organized labor, and they especially opposed the closed shop. They revived the open shop campaigns of the first years of the century, often with the addition of a jingoistic “Americanism” and supporters such as Presbyterian minister Mark Matthews. They sought to outlaw the closed shop, as well as boycotts and sympathy strikes. In this effort, countrywide employers’ organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) were joined by regional employers’ associations and local Chambers of Commerce. On the West Coast, the shipping interests fought hard to keep trade unions off the docks, while the lumber businessmen worked to keep unions out of the mills.

The long, bitter Teamsters’ strike of June 1913 to March 1914 began as a dispute with the Globe Transfer Company, but it quickly became citywide and combative. The drivers of Teamsters’ Local 174 struck for wages. The employers resisted, and the conflict significantly disrupted the city’s business. The union drivers discouraged the strikebreakers that the employers had engaged, who more often than not voluntarily returned to the barns. There was picket-line violence, however, and the violence escalated when the King County Sheriff began deputizing professional strikebreakers from nearby towns. The company-friendly Judge Humphreys was asked for an injunction limiting picketing, and he delivered. With the strike at an impasse, the Washington Employers Association took direct control of negotiations and imposed the open shop. Four thousand gathered at the Dreamland Rink to protest but to no avail. The police began arresting picketers, and the strike collapsed.

This outcome was a clear but costly victory for the Employers Association. One by one, the owners eventually settled with the union, and the arrested strikers were acquitted. These years saw the emergence of class consciousness, even among the skilled and better paid workers, who undoubtedly felt their job security and living standards were threatened by the open shop campaign.²⁷ Union growth and the accompanying threats to the employers’ prerogatives exacerbated the growing ambivalence of the middle-class progressives. They supported reform in general, but when the Municipal League reported in its organ News on the longshoremen’s strike and lockout of 1916, it showed its hand. The report claimed that blame for the violence and wharf fires could be attributed equally to both sides. Yet it asked only that longshoremen cease such activity, making no such request of the Waterfront Employers Association.²⁸

There followed strikes of miners, waitresses, streetcar drivers, shipyard workers, laundry workers, and longshoremen. These were all contested, but backed by the CLC, they were mostly won. At the same time, a feminist women workers’ movement emerged within the larger Seattle working-class movement. Organized in 1911, the Seattle Women’s Union Card and Label League (SWUCLL) grew through the war years, assuming an increasingly important role in the labor movement. According to historian Maurine Greenwald, the SWUCLL’s work was multifaceted: members promoted or challenged labor movement policies, encouraged consumers to purchase only union-label goods, discussed writings, attended lectures by well-known women activists, worked with middle-class club women, and responded to changing economic conditions. Label League activists came to identify themselves as “houseworkers” and women workers in the home, who wanted to liberate women from confinement to the household.²⁹ Greenwald also writes that the SWUCLL “had a membership of five hundred women, including most of the working-class female activists in the city.”³⁰ It supported the strike at and subsequent boycott of Seattle’s then largest department store, the Bon Marché, leading to the recognition of the Retail Clerks Union.³¹ The SWUCLL often took the initiative in labor’s political campaigns, organizing in favor of the initiative and the referendum. It led the 1914 campaign for a universal eight-hour day and was a driving force in organizing parades and demonstrations, recruiting Mother Jones to lead the Workers’ Memorial Day March of May 30, 1914.³²