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
3. THE TIMBER BEAST
Seattle was an island in a still immeasurable sea of timber. The Pacific coastal forests were estimated to contain nearly two-thirds of the timber in the country, and the Washington State forests accounted for the largest part of these. Washington had the greatest concentration of softwood trees in the world.1
Forests blanketed the lower slopes of the Cascades, the southern and western sides of the Olympic Mountains and the uplands in the southwestern corner of the state. On the coast itself moss-laden cedars anchored the earth’s last-standing temperate rain forests. The region’s prevailing northwesterly winds swept in from the Pacific to meet first the coastal ranges, then the Cascades. Together they wrung rain from moisture-laden air down upon a unique region. This is the wettest area of the country, and the great conifer forests thrived in it. The climate’s year-round precipitation, including during