THE STRIKE EXPOSED A WIDENING CRISIS then confronting the working-class movement, in which Seattle would play a central role. At stake were not just shipyard issues but the nature of the labor movement as it existed. Its very form was challenged, as well as its values, actions, tactics, and goals, both long term and short. The fundamental issue was craft unionism versus industrial unions. Millions of workers seemed ready to abandon craft unions in favor of industrial unionism: unions organized by industry, not craft or job. Industrial unionism meant that the power of workers was in the workplace, not at the ballot box or in political action. It also reckoned that workers’ power would be expressed in the strike, including, for some, the general strike. This was the program of the IWW, the One Big Union (OBU) movement, in well-established organizations such as the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), and even among dissidents within the Socialist Party, which was founded as the embodiment of parliamentary democracy. This was anathema to the AFL’s leadership. Organized in 1886, the AFL insisted it alone could be the representative of American workers. Yet the rift had opened between even its most loyal affiliates; industrial unionism had become a current within the AFL itself.
Nowhere, perhaps, was this as true as in Seattle. Seattle’s trade unionists were in craft unions, some 120 of them, organized by the job and divided by lines of jurisdiction. The history of Seattle labor in those years was the struggle to change this. And surely to the dismay of the officers of the AFL’s national unions, it was in many ways successful. Its workers sought common contracts, common strikes, common conditions, and common politics. They insisted that the power of the strongest workers be available for the weakest. Thus, the sympathy strike, or at least the threat of it. In these years, the CLC routinely used this threat in bargaining. The national officers of the AFL supported craft unions with strict jurisdictional divides. They opposed sympathy strikes, denounced any discussion of the general strike, and considered IWW members to be dual unionists. Seattle, then, was different. In Seattle, the AFL’s red line of demarcation faded, obscuring the divides between Seattle’s AFL, its socialist leaders, the IWW, and an array of independent radicals and organizations. Strikes and sympathy strikes underpinned union power; inevitably, this included the general strike, putting its power, if only implicitly, on the table.
In 1919, the movement to free Thomas Mooney came to a head. Mooney along with Fred Billings were San Francisco trade unionists framed in the aftermath of the deadly 1916 Preparedness Day bombing, and were serving life sentences. It was an international movement but in few places was it as inspired as in Seattle. “It lies within your power to get him [Mooney] out of there, but to do so you must exercise a power that you do not realize you possess,” roared Kate Sadler, speaking at a street meeting of thousands.2 The “power” she referred to was the general strike. Sadler was Seattle’s best-known Socialist, the workers’ Joan of Arc. She led some forty Seattle delegates to Chicago in January to attend a national labor convention addressing the Mooney issue. There, before one thousand delegates, Sadler would defy the conference leadership, appealing with her delegation for a May Day general strike to free Mooney.3 To no avail. The “reds” were defeated. There would be no general strike, and Mooney and Billings would remain imprisoned.
Whether the worker on the street in Seattle was indeed aware of the power alluded to by Sadler remains somewhat unclear, yet the returning delegates found the shipyard workers on strike and a movement that was itching for a fight. Seattle’s unions represented the city’s tens of thousands of workers, supported a daily, union-owned newspaper, the Union Record, and a score of cooperative enterprises: markets, butchers, barbers, and a laundry. Seattle was a closed-shop town, unique among American cities. On street corners, soap box orators abounded, as did socialist newsstands and newspapers. Sadler was far from the only incendiary. The Socialist Party, left-wing and working class, was entrenched in a workers’ movement that widely supported the idea of workers’ power. “I believe that 95% of us agree that the workers should control industry,” said Harry Ault, the editor of the Union Record.4
Seattle was also the regional center of the IWW. The Wobblies championed industrial unionism. It was for them foundational, the indispensable element in their outlook. Though always a minority, the Wobblies would everywhere shape the discussion of industrial unionism, in theory and practice, and of the general strike as well. Speaking in New York in 1911, Bill Haywood, the future IWW leader, then still a Socialist Party member, insisted that the question was “whether or not the general strike is an effective weapon for the working class.”5 He paid tribute to the Paris Commune, referred to the theorists of the movement, and apologized for not being a “better theorist” himself. Then Haywood turned his attention to Colorado, where he had been a miner, and the bitter experience at Cripple Creek. The workers there had not been “thoroughly organized.” That is, they were not organized in an industrial union and without industrial unionism, he said, the general strike was not possible: “I want to urge [this] upon the working class: to become so organized on the economic field that they can take hold of and hold the industries in which they are employed.” Political power, he argued, came through industrial organization. “The industrial organization is capable not only of the general strike, but prevents the capitalists from disfranchising the worker, it gives the vote to women. It re-enfranchises the black man and places the ballot in the hands of every boy and girl employed in a shop, makes them eligible to take part in the general strike, makes them eligible to legislate for themselves where they are most interested in changing conditions, namely in the place where they work.”6
Haywood and the IWW claimed the general strike as their own while denying any association with the strictly defined syndicalist tradition. Neither were they anarchists, let alone romantically attracted to fantasies of violence and martyrdom—though certainly they had their martyrs. Solidarity was their mantra, folded arms their power. The general strike was about workers’ power in the here and now, in the future as well, but beginning today. Haywood projected three types of general strike—a general strike in industry, a general strike in a community, and a national general strike—contending that each remained untried.
Still, in theory, the IWW insisted that the general strike was its ultimate weapon. The general strike was the instrument with which “the capitalist system will be overthrown.” Rarely more precise than this, the Wobblies believed that when the day came “control of industry would pass from the capitalists to the masses and the capitalists will vanish from the face of the earth.” The workers would then possess the machinery of production and distribution, enabling them to create “a new society without poverty, police, jails, armies, churches … blessed with freedom and abundance.”7 Haywood’s fixation, however, remained on the practical and immediate utility of the general strike to class struggle. He routinely referred to the question “[Is] the general strike an effective weapon for the working class?”—in the immediate sense, in the class struggle. In fact, simply the threat of a general strike terrified the authorities. In the 1910s, such threats were not unusual. They came mostly from the IWW, being issued, however, not as calls to storm the gates. On the contrary, they were responses to practical crises: how to win a strike or how to defend the organization. These strikes failed to materialize. Neither the threat to strike to keep the United States out of the war, nor the threats to strike to free Mooney and other political prisoners would be put to the test. The closest the IWW came to leading a general strike was during the 1917 timber strike in the Northwest. There some fifty thousand loggers and millhands struck for the eight-hour day and won. The full impact of this was considerable, certainly in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.
Seattle’s trade unionists lived through this strike and many more. They understood that the general strike—a potential weapon but not necessarily the ultimate one—was in their arsenal. The literature they read tells us this. They were aware of the Chartists and the Commune, the Belgian strikes, and the 1905 Russian strike. Six times between 1900 and 1918 the CLC voted in favor of a general strike—each time in disputes with the employers. Each time