The speed of this development was astonishing. It was uneven development and then some. In 1914, less than a half-century since the first non-indigenous peoples settled there, Seattle had become a modern industrial municipality of 300,000. The Smith Tower, completed that year, climbed thirty-eight stories above Pioneer Square—the tallest building west of the Mississippi River, we learned in school.
The region’s indigenous people, the Duwamish and Suquamish, were all but obliterated—murdered, ravaged by disease, and herded from their villages into impoverished reservations. The newcomers despised them, finding their way of life incomprehensible, their four thousand years of coexistence with the earth of little or no interest. This was the case throughout the West. Communal societies everywhere fell, lost forever, no matter how stubbornly these people might resist. In an 1853 article titled “Washington Territory–The Future,” the Olympia Columbian captured the spirit of the settlers: “Of the Indians now in our midst and around us in every direction, and in large numbers, but a miserable remnant will remain, and they, confined within such narrow limits as Government may allot to them in some obscure locality, will ultimately succeed in dragging out to a bitter end their wretched existence.”3 The Nez Perce habitation was east of the mountains in the smoky Blue Range of Washington and northeastern Oregon. Their Chief Joseph would instruct his fighters to shoot only at the officers, lest they exhaust a dwindling supply of ammunition—to no avail. Chased tirelessly by soldiers 1500 miles eastward from their homes in Washington and Oregon, Joseph surrendered in October 1877, both he and his people exhausted in the freezing early winter of Montana. Seattle was named for the Duwamish chief, Sealth, perhaps because he did not resist, at least not with arms. Sealth, however, a survivor, left words defiant in their own way, and they have persisted, powerfully, and are widely recalled:
The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood that unites one family.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
The earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it.
Treat the earth with respect so that it lasts for centuries to come
And is a place of wonder and beauty for our children.
Today, as glaciers on Mount Rainier melt and the Sound’s salmon perish, these words seem prescient, even prophetic. They speak of another relationship with the earth, of another way of life. They inspire people desperately in search of one. In school we learned little of this. Rather, we learned the story of the poor Whitmans, Marcus and Narcissa, killed in 1853 near Walla Walla. The Indians are said to have believed these missionaries were responsible for spreading deadly measles among their people. We did not learn that.
The irony is that scarcely had this blood dried when new settlers came to Puget Sound bringing communal dreams of their own, compacting all of history—hunter-gatherers to “scientific” socialists—into mere decades. In the 1880s and 1890s, anarchists, utopian socialists, idealists and free-thinkers founded “colonies—Home, Equality, Freeland, Burley. These were the outposts of what the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth believed would become the first socialist state, an alternative in the here and now to everything they hated about the industrial capitalism of the East. Harry Ault, editor of the Seattle Central Labor Council’s Union Record, spent his teenage years in Equality Colony, Skagit County, in a family of disenchanted Populists. The railroad man and socialist icon Eugene Debs, imprisoned in 1895 in the aftermath of the defeat of the Pullman Strike, became an advocate of colonization and the secretary of the Commonwealth. But not for long. He soon abandoned this position in favor of a more conventional socialism and became a founder of the Social Democratic Party, later the Socialist Party of America. The colonies would not endure, but the idea of Washington as a workingman’s paradise persisted. Debs would maintain his view that Washington would be the first socialist state. Many went to Washington with this in mind.
In truth, however, in the 1910s Seattle’s working-class communities were far from idyllic; the city’s industries were certainly not democratic. Ballard, “south of Yesler,” and the Rainier Valley were neighborhoods blighted by poor housing, threadbare amenities, and lack of access to the Sound, the green forests, and the great mountain ranges beyond—all that the city cherished, and still does. Shipyard life was brutal, with long days and longer weeks. Still, the experience of the cooperators and communards of Puget Sound and the high hopes of Debs kept the dream of a better world alive. It whetted appetites and stretched the imagination.
Seattle workers overwhelmingly supported the principle of industrial unions—the organization of workers by industry, not skill or craft. They looked for leadership to James Duncan, chair of the Seattle Central Labor Council (CLC) and a critic of the Industrial Workers of the World. He rejected its challenge to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) from the left. Still, he acknowledged the Wobblies as “pacesetters” and admired their commitment to working-class solidarity. Seattle’s Socialist Party members were also proponents of industrial unionism. They were a thorn in the side of the Party’s national officials, who supported Samuel Gompers, the conservative president of the craft-based AFL. The IWW had its base camp in Seattle and published its western newspaper, the Industrial Worker, there. In this setting, “two-card” workers—belonging simultaneously to an AFL affiliate and the IWW—were commonplace. They held the “AFL card for the job, and the IWW card for the principle.” In this environment, trade unionism, social democracy, and industrial unionism intermingled.
Sadly, the anti-Chinese movements of the 1880s remained a stain on class solidarity in the Northwest. Seventeen thousand Chinese workers had worked to bring the Northern Pacific Railroad to the coast. Some five thousand remained in western Washington, though anti-Asian riots in Tacoma in 1885 and Seattle in 1886 violently reduced their numbers. In the new century, Japanese immigrants replaced Chinese as Seattle’s largest minority. The relatively few black workers in Seattle, just one percent of the population, took what work they could, including as strikebreakers in the longshoremen’s strike of 1916.
The IWW opposed Chinese exclusion, and Seattle’s socialist movement included a strong current of anti-racism. Still, as late as 1917, the Seattle Daily Call reported striking butchers demanding a “white” cook. Alice Lord, talented organizer of the city’s women workers, above all its waitresses, was a committed exclusionist. Seattle’s most popular street speaker, however, the socialist firebrand Kate Sadler, was a scathing critic of Asian exclusion, above all when practiced by the unions. She was not alone. Anna Louise Strong, an advocate of child welfare, had been to Japan where she documented the plight of Japanese women workers. The Union Record insisted on the need “to break down racial barriers in the West.” When Harry Ault, editor of the Record, testified for the Seattle unions at a congressional hearing on Japanese immigration held in Tacoma, he opposed exclusion and the Japanese Land Act. The historian Katsutoshi Kurokawa wrote that Ault and Duncan had “little patience with racial prejudice.”4
Seattle’s workers rose in these years. It was a decade of intense, bitter conflict in the Pacific Northwest, by then widely known for strikes and radicalism. This ascent was far from steady. Seattle’s working class grew in fits and starts, building through fierce struggles, often interrupted.5 These conflicts, incessant in the timber camps and sawmills, bloody on the waterfront, outrageous in Everett,