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