RADICAL SEATTLE
RADICAL SEATTLE
THE GENERAL STRIKE OF 1919
Cal Winslow
Copyright © 2020 by Cal Winslow
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available from the publisher
ISBN paper: 978-158367-854-1
ISBN cloth: 978-1-58367-853-4
Typeset in Minion Pro and Cheddar Gothic Serif
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK
5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
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