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