Seen this way, the General Strike represented the highest point in a longer process of socialist and working-class organization. In a range of workplace struggles and political battles, working people built an infrastructure for radical politics. Seattle’s workers became a class and were conscious of this. They became political actors in their own right. This book, then, is not just a description of the heady days of February 1919; it is also an attempt to recover the decade-long making of the collective capable of launching one of America’s most gripping strikes.
IN WHAT FOLLOWS, IT WILL NOT BE DIFFICULT to detect the influence of my mentor, Edward Thompson, author of the magnificent Making of the English Working Class, a masterpiece still in uninterrupted print after more than fifty years. I make no apologies for this. I was lucky enough to experience, first from a distance, then firsthand, the shock waves this work sent through the polite smoking rooms of universities in the sixties, permanently changing the academic landscape of that epoch. The Making was about class and class consciousness, as well as how debilitating and disarming the ideology of classlessness—“we’re all middle class”—was then, and still is. In place of “great men” and Whig historiography, the work offered history from below and unashamedly celebratory, partisan accounts in “the long tenacious revolutionary tradition of the British commoner.”7 Here, I am especially reminded of Thompson’s much-quoted preface and stated mission: rescuing his subjects from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”8 Seattle’s workers built one of the great movements in our history, their achievement rarely matched. However, not just mainstream scholars but also leftist writers customarily belittle the movement and above all the General Strike itself. Time and again, one sees these workers described as “naïve” and “self-destructive” and of their great strike as a “blunder” or “disaster”—at best, more generously, as casualties of history, not its makers.9
I think that this disparagement is deeply mistaken. Few felt this way at the time, certainly not Anna Louise Strong and her comrades at the Union Record, not those in the Labor Temple, nor those in socialist and IWW circles. At a minimum, the strike answered the IWW’s Bill Haywood’s question, “Is the general strike an effective weapon for the working class?” with a resounding yes.10 On the far side of the continent, the New York Call pronounced the Seattle strike “a forecast of the fall of the Capitalist system.”11
The truth is that the Seattle General Strike terrified Seattle’s authorities, sending shivers through the nation’s bourgeoisie—in February and in the days and months that followed. The city’s mayor, Ole Hanson, may have been a fool. It’s not clear how many people really believed his bluster, his claim to have all but single-handedly defeated “Bolshevism” in Seattle. But certainly the authorities encouraged him. The Seattle papers’ invention of the revolution and its utter demise was not simply wrong. They wanted the strike—revolutionary or not, real or imagined—dead, buried and forgotten, and did their best to see that it was. So did the Wilson government, and so did the American Federation of Labor. They feared the workers’ movement, above all its rank and file, its immigrants, its rebellious women, its blacks and Mexicans, and its general strikes to come (as one did in Winnipeg). In those years, the workers’ challenge to industrial capitalism was unparalleled. Thus, in Seattle, workers confronted a “red scare” before the Red Scare, and a campaign to discredit the strike and its organizations, to belittle its leaders, and to erase the event entirely from history.
Finally, a note on the strike’s aftermath. The retreat of radicalism in Seattle and the Northwest was neither immediate nor total. It began with the shattering of the IWW, the splintering and demise of the Socialist Party, and the employers’ counterrevolution—the anti-union “American Plan.” In Seattle itself, the Emergency Fleet Corporation cancelled orders for new vessels, forcing thousands of shipyard workers into unemployment just as demobilization was at its peak. It was deindustrialization with a sharp political edge. The Waterfront Employers’ Association fought to reintroduce the open shop. The depression of 1920–1921 came early to Seattle and lasted longer than in other places. But working-class radicalism didn’t die. The General Strike and IWW militancy lived on, if underground, in the vivid recollections of old Wobblies and in the battles of young socialists in the 1930s. This legacy laid the foundation for Washington’s Cooperative Commonwealth movement, which, allied with the Democrats, brought a progressive alliance to power in Olympia and elected the communist Hugh DeLacy to Congress in 1944. In governing circles, the strike wasn’t forgotten. In 1936 FDR’s postmaster general, James Farley, would ironically raise a glass to “the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington.”
Working-class radicalism lived on in our house in Holly Park, a public housing project in Seattle’s south end. With Yesler Terrace, Holly Park was integrated, the first such public projects in the country. My parents were children in the Great Depression. My father spent his teenage years fleeing landlords and bill collectors in the tow of a jobless father. He attended Garfield High School. On graduating, he joined the Army Air Corps. My mother went to Franklin, then became a wartime telephone operator. Her worst moment was when, as a child in 1942, her Japanese classmates failed to appear one morning. Internment meant empty chairs, friends gone forever. My father returned home to work as an Alaskan fisherman and sheet metal worker, then as a union organizer. Both were activists in the Democrats’ solid South End, where party loyalists, supporters of the Washington Commonwealth Federation and Communists collaborated in a much-revived labor movement and broad left.
As a child, I learned that one never crosses a picket line. I was quite at home in the Labor Temple. I knew what Teamster goons were. My father once returned home badly beaten by some of “Dave Beck’s boys.” I knew all the words to the songs on the Talking Union recording.12 More to the point, I learned about the IWW—Wobblies—and the General Strike then, vividly, about Centralia. It wasn’t a pilgrimage, we were just visiting friends in Centralia. My father wanted to see “Hangman’s Bridge,” and I went along for the ride. The lynching of the Wobbly Wesley Everest was a singularly gruesome lesson for a child of seven.
I am not sure how many children there were like me. There must have been many. McCarthyism, however, hit hard in Seattle and Washington State. Its local manifestation, the Canwell Committee, headed by the right-wing legislator Albert Canwell of Spokane, wreaked havoc on the left. It targeted Communists, but also the Commonwealth Federation, the longshoremen’s union, the University of Washington, and more. On July 19, 1948, the Camwell Committee convened five days of hearings at the university in a vicious witchhunt. In the end, six tenured faculty members received sanctions from the university and three lost their jobs; the university’s reputation, rightly, was sullied.
My father continued to work in the union and my mother coordinated the statewide fight against right-to-work legislation. We detested the Weyerhaeusers. As environmentalists before the movement got going, we held them responsible for the devastation inflicted on our forests—so evident in trips to the mountains or drives to the ocean beaches. But politics receded, except in national elections. We supported Stevenson. My mom kept the faith or regained it. As a single parent in the sixties, she opposed the Vietnam War, joined up with feminists at work, and supported her rebellious kids.
My school friends were all working class, the children of bakers, barbers, pipe fitters, carpenters, and railroad clerks—but they seem to have known nothing of the great strikes of the past. I’m still not certain why. They were not mentioned in our textbooks. What little we learned of history focused on the Oregon Trail, the so-called Indian Wars, the First World War, then the new war with communism.