It was not until the emergence of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that the history of labor returned to the fore. However, this reappearance, often rather crude, arrived in what had become a bitterly contested terrain. If a victory, it was Pyrrhic. In the summer of 1969, SDS imploded, and the US student movement collapsed.
In response, disheartened but not defeated, I joined the doctoral program at Warwick University in England, there to study with Thompson. I wanted to learn history from below, especially working-class history from below. I wanted a way to understand US working-class history, in a period when it seemed incorrigibly conservative. US labor history was taken seriously at Warwick. Thompson, that year, was joined by IWW historian Melvyn Dubofsky, as a visiting professor. The Warwick experience was interesting not only because of the professors, however. We, the students of Thompson, were nearly all activists, socialists as well, belonging to a generation marked by upward mobility but often with working-class origins. This was an identity for which we were prized at Warwick. It was a highly unusual experience for a student from the United States, to be recognized as working class not as an identity denied but as a positive identity. This reawakened my own history. There, at Warwick’s Center for the Study of Social History, working-class history was elevated, and deep excavations were undertaken with zeal. As a result, it was the rare student indeed with no knowledge of Big Bill Haywood or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Today, happily, the same can be said of this country’s labor studies centers, including the thriving programs at the University of Washington.
During the Second World War, Seattle was transformed into “Jet City.” The Boeing bombers—the B-17s, B-29s and B-47s, as well as the B-52s of Dr. Strangelove fame—which rained destruction from the skies on Japan and Occupied Europe and then on Korea, were constructed in a sprawling plant backing on to the Duwamish River and another in Renton, together employing as many as forty-five thousand people. When government orders began to dry up in the mid-1950s, the company invested heavily in passenger jet airliners to escape what executives nervously referred as to “the peace problem.”13 The success of the 707 and 737 made Seattle all but a company town. The sudden termination of the postwar boom in 1971 therefore came as a shock. Boeing slashed its production workforce from 85,000 to 20,000 and unemployment climbed to 14 percent, the highest rate in the country.
A three-decade tech boom, however, beginning in the mid-1980s with Microsoft’s expansion in the suburb of Redmond, fifteen miles to the northeast, has erased the decline of 1971 too from memory. Amazon presently employs thousands in the city—spread across three dozen sites—and occupies more office space than the next forty largest companies combined. It has used this leverage to block a municipal employment tax intended to raise funds for affordable housing. The company congratulates itself for investing in its hometown, yet five-sixths of the $668 million poured into infrastructure improvements around its South Lake Union campus has come from the public purse—such is the fine print in today’s “gospel of wealth.”14 There are now gated suburbs in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, once the habitat of the IWW loggers. The Port of Seattle still thrives, but the old labor gangs upon which the waterfront’s solidarity was constructed have been replaced by crane operators and truck drivers, far fewer in number, though still occupying strategic positions in global commodity chains.
Does anything of 1919 endure? Is there an inheritance? In the time since then there have been moments containing glimpses of this older history, as well as potentially offering something new. Eight decades after the General Strike, a rare alliance of blue-collar workers, environmentalists, and other alter-globalization activists—the “Teamsters and Turtles”—disrupted the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle, temporarily overwhelming the police and cutting off the convention center from the rest of the city. Steelworkers marched on the waterfront. Defying curfews, orders to evacuate, and the imposition of a fifty-block “no protest zone” in the downtown district—edicts that the Seattle and King County police, Washington National Guard and US military enforced with tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and baton blows—the protesters forced the WTO to adjourn in confusion, cancelling Clinton’s gala address.15 Yes, there is an inheritance well worth celebrating this centenary year, a year begun with the massive strike of Los Angeles teachers. The workers of 1919 were brazen and courageous, and then some. They were defiant even in the face of the cruelest measures taken against them, mass incarceration, deportation, and murder. If their rule over Seattle lasted only five days, they were five days that mattered, five days well worth remembering.
—MENDOCINO, CALIFORNIA
1. THE UNION’S INSPIRATION
On February 6, 1919, Seattle’s workers, all of them, struck. In doing so they literally took control of the city. They struck in support of shipyard workers, some thirty-five thousand, then in conflict with the city’s shipyard owners and the federal government’s US Shipping Board.
Seattle’s Central Labor Council (CLC), representing 110 unions, all affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and all craft unions, called the strike. They brought the city to a halt—a strange silence settled on the normally bustling streets, and on the waterfront where “nothing moved but the tide.”1 The CLC’s Union Record reported sixty-five thousand union members on strike. It was a general strike, the first of its kind in the United States. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand working people participated.
The city’s authorities were rendered powerless—there was indeed no power that could challenge the workers. There were, of course, soldiers in the city and many more at nearby Camp Lewis, not to mention thousands of newly enlisted armed deputies, but to unleash these on a peaceful city? The regular police were reduced to onlookers; the generals hesitated.
Rank-and-file workers, union by union, elected the strike leadership, a strike committee. The strike committee elected an executive committee. Meeting virtually nonstop, they ensured the health, welfare, and safety of the city. Garbage was collected, the hospitals were supplied, babies got milk, and the people were fed, including some thirty thousand a day at the strikers’ kitchens.
The streets were safe, rarely safer, patrolled by an unarmed labor guard of workers. It was reported that crime abated. Nevertheless, the rich, those who could not or would not escape to Portland or California, armed themselves. The Seattle Star asked, “Under which flag?”–the red, white, and blue or the red. The mayor, Ole Hanson, knowing well that this was not the case, claimed the latter and warned that a revolution was underway. The AFL piled on, denouncing the strikers and sending emissaries by the hundreds.
The General Strike, however, was not a revolution. It was in support of the city’s shipyard workers. Still, never had there been anything quite like it, not in the United States. Moreover, these strikers left their jobs amid the great strike wave of the First World War years and an international crisis that in fact was in some places revolutionary—a crisis evolving in the shadow of revolution in Russia. It was