The year 1919 was the high point in the decade, beginning with the victory of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers-winning the 44-hour week plus wage increases. In New York, impatient marine workers waited for “the findings of the War Labor Board,” comfortable that “at a day’s notice they can tie up the whole vast traffic of New York Harbor.”19 In January 17,000 struck, the first of four harbor strikes that year; the longest, by longshoremen, shut down the harbor for six weeks in the fall. The Lawrence Textile workers walked out in January and held out until victory in May. The Cleveland Cloak Makers struck. Cincinnati clothing workers, teachers, library workers, office workers, telephone workers, and the Boston police also struck. In one of the largest strikes ever, 350,000 steelworkers shut down basic steel, unleashing an unprecedented reign of terror in retaliation. In Pittsburgh, the Interchurch World Movement discovered that Slavic steel workers were radicals. In West Virginia, coal miners were “insurrectionary”; their 1919 strike carried on into the next decade, culminating in an armed assault on Blair Mountain.
In the streets, there were food riots in New York City; in Cleveland the May Day rally turned into a day-long battle with police and vigilantes; looters took advantage of the police strike in Boston.20 The Mooney movement, aimed at freeing jailed San Francisco labor leaders, estimated that as many as one million workers participated that summer in strikes and demonstrations demanding their release.
The summer of 1919 also remains a time of national shame, of gruesome episodes in the oppression of black people. Alas, far from glorious, the “Red” in the “Red Summer” refers to blood, black blood, not revolution. At year’s end, authorities could identify at least forty localities as sites of “race riots.” More like pogroms, they were outbursts of mob violence in which whites, alleging offenses, attacked black individuals, black neighborhoods, especially returning black soldiers, and black workers. In that summer, some forty-three African-American men were reported to have been lynched—hanged, shot, some burned alive. The violence accompanied and impelled the Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of southern blacks—500,000 to the North, more to southern and border cities. Most sought to take advantage of wartime labor shortages and to escape the misery of the Jim Crow and sharecropping South.
Chicago was a major destination for blacks migrating north. It was a vast concentration of industry and commerce, the nation’s second-largest city, with a population approaching three million. The black population on the city’s crowded South Side had doubled in the war years, challenging racial boundaries and workplace segregation. On a hot summer Sunday, Eugene Williams, a black teenager, swimming in Lake Michigan, was alleged to have crossed into whites-only waters; he was attacked by rock-throwing whites and drowned. Fighting followed, spreading into the South Side neighborhoods. Individual blacks were attacked, sometimes whites. White mobs roamed through black neighborhoods, torching houses, businesses, and churches. By the time, belatedly, the Illinois Militia arrived, twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites had been killed, while five hundred people, the majority black, had been wounded, and one thousand black families were left homeless. Wilson, the Bureau of Investigation, and the Red Squads were alarmed, but not by white violence. Wilson himself believed that returning black soldiers were “conveying Bolshevism.” Whites, overwhelmingly, were appalled by demands for racial equality, union rights, and self-defense, linking these to the general unrest.21
Wilson and his advisers were, in their way, quite correct. This was also the time of Harlem’s “New Negro” and of a resurgence of “fierce race consciousness” and internationalism.22 Black workers, with courage and pride, were opening a new chapter in their history by fighting back—in Omaha, Washington, and Chicago. Soap-box socialists Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph joined W. E. B. Du Bois in believing that “we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land. ‘We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting’.”23 Owen and Randolph opposed the war and supported the Russian Revolution, urging blacks to organize themselves. They produced the Messenger and collaborated with Max and Crystal Eastman at the Liberator and with other Greenwich Village radicals. Their goal was to raise class consciousness among black workers by connecting the cause of black freedom to class struggle. Military intelligence considered the Messenger “the most dangerous of all the Negro publications.”24 James Weldon Johnson was a New York writer, a figure in the Harlem Renaissance and a leader of the NAACP. He reported that it was the most widely read of all the radical publications in New York. In the summer of 1919, the Messenger claimed 33,000 Negro workers and a few thousand whites as readers and urged them to join the IWW, “a revolutionary organization that draws no race, creed, color or sex line.”25
SEATTLE’S REBELS, LEFT, RIGHT, AND CENTER, had little use for the East, seeing the cities there as venal, slum-ridden sites of child labor, wretched working conditions, and ecological disaster. James Duncan, the CLC secretary and the architect of industrial unionism in Seattle, expressed sympathy for the workers of the East but believed they were backward, and their unions relics. He suspected it might take years for them to catch up. The West was the future.
Kate Sadler, no “Easterner,” flourished in this West. She was born in poverty in Scotland, where she “learned socialism at her father’s knee.” In the United States, she came first to Philadelphia, where she worked as a domestic. There she met Sam Sadler, the longshoremen’s future leader, and in 1909 they moved west, settling in Seattle. In the decade that followed, Sadler worked tirelessly to build the Socialist Party. Harvey O’Connor, the historian of Seattle’s rebels, considered her “a peerless socialist orator,” on the level with Kate Richards O’Hare and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.26 Sadler was Seattle’s representative to the Socialist Party’s National Committee, but she rarely returned east; her commitment was to the workers of Seattle and its hinterland. Here, she supported workers whenever called, as long as someone could pay expenses. Sadler was as well known in the mining camps and mill towns as in the Puget Sound cities. She was also the featured guest at Colville’s 1916 socialist “encampment,” a weekend educational event in the tiny mining and timber town in Washington’s far northeast corner. “Kate Sadler,” they announced, welcoming her, “is one of the great socialist women of the nation…. She is known throughout the length and breadth of Washington as a fearless champion of the working class. A veritable reincarnation of Joan of Arc, Kate Sadler’s splendidly fiery eloquence inspires hope, kindles courage, arouses enthusiasm among the workers wherever she is heard.” Organizers promoted her as “full to overflowing with what Debs so aptly calls ‘the fine spirit of revolt.’ We especially invite the women and the young people to hear her. You will never regret it.”27 A 1917 report from Everett recounts her giving an “inspiring lecture,” speaking on the “War Crisis” to a large, outdoor crowd: “In spite of the fact that the weather was cold, the crowd stayed with the meeting until it was adjourned.”28 Other accounts find her in Sumas on the Canadian border, in Liberty, a mining camp in the Cascades, and in Pierce County’s coal camps. At Butte’s metal mine workers’ June picnic in 1919, “the event of the day [was] an address by Kate Sadler of Seattle, labor’s gifted woman orator, who [talked about] world happenings and their relation to the working class.”29 O’Connor wrote that “when workers called for help, in strikes, jailings, free speech struggles, Kate came. Kate the fearless one…. The police, of course, knew her, [but] always hesitated to drag her off the soapbox, for the workers formed an iron ring, daring them to touch our Kate.”30
Seattle was different, many thought better, a belief not uncommon in the West at the time, but in Seattle the difference was connected to its workers and their movements. Seattle’s white settlers brought with them the ideas of the times—Manifest Destiny, US exceptionalism, the “White Man’s Burden,” and Empire—though, as elsewhere, these ideas were contested. Seattle sits in the far northwestern corner of the nation, barricaded to the east by the Cascade Range beneath its magnificent yet ominous volcanic peaks, sheltered from the sea on the west by the Olympic range. Seattle in 1919 was, to be sure, a western city, sitting on the