Seattle early became an industrial city, but not a mill town—a city in the West, but not of it. Two thousand miles from Chicago; rail connection was completed in 1893, but trains were slow, the stops many. By ship, travel was even slower; San Francisco, 900 miles away, was reached only by sea. Travelers in the Puget Sound Basin seem to have preferred travel by sea; a “mosquito” fleet of steamers plied the Sound. Obstacles, to be sure—yet as elsewhere in the West obstacles had to be overcome, the aggressive capitalism of the new century, aggressive, dominant, thrived on such obstacles. The railroads opened the “wide open spaces” and would continue to do so; free land was promised on the final frontier, but ranchers and farmers all too often became collateral damage. The object was not a new “garden,” but rather access to and exploitation of the West’s wealth: the silver and gold of California, the copper of Arizona and Montana, coal in Colorado, the immeasurable forest land of the Pacific Northwest. The robber barons like James J. Hill, the “Empire Builder” and president of the Great Northern Railroad, were agents of an empire conceived in the East, financed by eastern, often European bankers, and savored in the East. Globalism was already a fact, isolation was spatial at best. Whatever westerners may have wanted, they got capitalism; its imperatives and its booms and busts in the East shaped their lives, however far they might have been from New York City and Washington, DC.
The East meant the big banks, Wall Street, capitalism and capitalist catastrophes. The Depression of 1893 was the worst ever at that time: five hundred banks closed and thousands of businesses failed. Railroads, including the Northern Pacific, Union Pacific, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, slipped into bankruptcy. Thousands of farmers lost their land. The cities teemed with the jobless, as the unemployment rate rose to 20 percent (and even higher in the great cities). There were protests and strikes. Jacob Coxey led a march of jobless (Coxey’s Army) from Ohio on Washington, DC, demanding the government create work. Copycat marches, often composed of railroad workers, set off from Seattle and Tacoma; with Washington, DC, far in the distance, they attacked railroad centers and yards. The Populist Party soared in 1892, then crashed in disillusionment with the defeat of William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Federal soldiers routed the workers in the Pullman Strike, the great railroad strike of 1894; more workers became unemployed and the blacklist ubiquitous.
Debs, the railroad worker who led the great strike, was jailed in federal prison at Woodstock, just west of Chicago. There he took the time to read. Victor Berger, the Milwaukee socialist, is said to have introduced him to the writings of Karl Marx, giving him a copy of Capital which he found dull, preferring the German socialist Karl Kautsky. Of his many visitors, Kier Hardy, the Scottish socialist and founder of the Labour Party, seems to have most impressed him. “Debs did not learn much in jail,” his biographer Ray Ginger wrote. “He could only learn by actively taking part in the battles of the outside world. When that form of activity was denied him, his entire method of educating himself came to pieces, and it was useless to give him books.”31
Voters in Washington State supported Bryan for president; more important, they elected the Populist John Rogers as governor. The Populists campaigned for free schoolbooks, state aid to education, women’s suffrage, and direct election of US senators, all of which enhanced the idea of the state as a haven in a hostile nation, a colony in “working man’s country.” Thus, new settlers arrived—blacklisted railroad workers, redundant coal miners, wheat farmers in despair—fleeing bankruptcy and eviction. Some were the followers of the new utopianism of the era, inspired by Laurence Gronlund’s The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). Others had read Robert Owen, the Welsh textile manufacturer and founder of utopian socialism, or followed William Morris, the English designer and revolutionary socialist, author of News from Nowhere. The Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth promoted establishing settlements in Washington, as did Debs, though he soon rejected this idea. The Brotherhood inspired half a dozen “colonies” in Puget Sound Country, all socialist to some degree: the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony on the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Equality in the Skagit Valley, Burley on the Kitsap Peninsula, Glennis near Eatonville, Freeland on Whidbey Island, and Home, an anarchist settlement, on the Longbranch Peninsula.32
Social relations in the colonies varied, as did the meaning of socialism. However, they were not merely back-to-the land settlements; however isolated, the colonists remained engaged. The first institutions everywhere, shelter aside, were the post office, the print shop, and the newspaper office. At Burley, they published The Cooperator; at Equality, Industrial Freedom and the Young Socialist; at Port Angeles, the New Light; at Home, the Agitator and Discontent; at Freeland, the Whidbey Islander. All the colonists championed equality, democracy, and socialism. All colonists were to work, though again how this was managed varied. None were to be poor. And there would be no government, no police, no church.33
The utopians have received a bad press, from the left as much as anywhere. The truth is they suffered quarrels and disagreements, their visions often seem fantasies, and they didn’t last forever. Yet they are not without interest, certainly not in the history of the Seattle General Strike and its participants, who were often themselves disparaged as utopian. The colonists of Puget Sound rejected with their feet the notion that “there is no alternative” and did so in real time. They had the courage to question society and its most basic values, to imagine alternatives to the wretchedness of the present. And they were not mere spectators. They attempted to merge the world of the dream with the world of reality.34
This history never really died, nor did the idea that the Northwest was special ever entirely disappear, though the central idea of winning the country’s workers to ideal communities was pressed in vain. They, with Debs, turned instead to socialism and socialist organizations, by that time well established both as an international movement and as a current in the farms and factories of Washington. Seattle’s socialism is said to have been born in 1900 with Dr. Herman Titus as its founder.35 A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and a Baptist preacher for several years, Titus settled in Seattle where he became a Skid Road social worker. There he read Capital, was persuaded, then founded his own paper, the Socialist. His wife, Hattie, managed a small hotel, a hangout for radicals. In 1906, Titus and Hattie joined the young Alfred Wagenknecht and Hulet Wells to lead the first of the West’s free-speech fights. They took to soapboxes on the city’s busiest street corners, holding forth on socialism and the issues of the day. They drew large crowds, disrupting commerce and traffic, repeatedly facing arrest. Titus himself was jailed six times. Imprisoned, they refused to work on the chain gangs, agitated the other prisoners, and exposed the foul prison conditions, forcing the Health Department to close the jail down. Juries refused to convict them.
Seattle socialists, as elsewhere, struggled; they stumbled into blind alleys and suffered foolish fractures and discord. Nevertheless, they grew in these years, both in numbers and in their presence in the working-class movement. By 1910, Seattle had become one of the Socialist Party’s strongholds—Debs would win a million votes in the 1912 presidential elections. Still, Seattle remained special, even singular. Kate Sadler was not just a unique individual. Importantly, she brought to light the spirit of the Seattle workers’ movement as it rose. This movement—militant, egalitarian, and deeply humane—did not emerge spontaneously. Rather, it was the creation of years of sustained work and sacrifice, often at great personal cost, by an exceptional group of socialists and trade unionists—Sadler perhaps foremost among them. She did not make this movement, of course. She was just one in this collective of gifted organizers and orators. Movements of thousands are the creations not of individuals but of communities. Rather she was the product of her relationship with the workers’ movement. Indeed, we never hear of Sadler except in relation to workers—their meetings, their strikes, the struggles in their lives. She had the rare qualities of a true mass leader, the ability to address the workers’ most pressing needs without losing sight of theory, in this case her vision of the socialist society to come. Her life was rooted in working-class struggle; this experience shaped her outlook, as it did the workers,’ and ultimately, that of their class.
The making of Seattle’s working