2. TWO CITIES
Seattle was both a boomtown and a radical center in the war years. The economic panic of 1907 was past, as was the recession of 1913–14. The city was by 1914 structurally complete. The city center was in place. To accomplish this, the tops of hills were literally chopped off, regraded for the benefit of the developers, with millions of tons of earth sluiced into Elliott Bay.
The construction of the ship canal that would connect Puget Sound with Lake Washington was underway. The Smith Tower was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. Seattle’s well-to-do inhabited leafy boulevards. They boasted a flourishing cultural life and founded a fine university. City planners foresaw an economic base that was diverse and with a large middle class. The politicians and their newspapers might feud about what to do with the infamous Skid Road and its flophouses, saloons, cheap booze, and brothels, but Seattle remained staunchly progressive. It supported women’s suffrage, prohibition of alcohol (sales and manufacturing, but not consumption), cooperatives, municipal ownership, and growth. Its population had surpassed 300,000 when the war broke out.
Above all, Seattle had its port. More, its new municipal piers, equipped with gantry cranes (huge, moving cranes, a type still used on container terminals today) that were among the finest in the nation. And Seattle was two days closer to Vladivostok and the Asian markets than San Francisco. It was the “gateway to Alaska.” Terminal space was abundant, wharfage and warehouse rates were cheap. In 1914, the Panama Canal opened, ensuring the city its place in world trade. By the war’s end, Seattle would surpass San Francisco as the West Coast’s leading port. Unlike other Puget Sound cities, it was not a mill town except for the shingle mills of Ballard, an adjacent small city annexed in 1907. Shipbuilding, always subject to economic booms and busts, exploded during the war. “Where only yesterday lay miles of empty tidelands,” wrote the young radical Joseph Pass, “today monster yards are laboring day and night, giving birth to vessels of steel and wood.”1 Its yards would deliver more ships to the nation’s fleets than any other single port. In 1917, Seattle had 1,300 manufacturing plants employing fifty thousand workers. Of these, thirty thousand were shipyard workers. In Tacoma, thirty miles south, there were fifteen thousand more.
Seattle, then, was an industrial city. Its unions were clean, not run by gangsters. It did not have a dominant political machine or bootleggers of any importance. Still, the city could be a tough place. “The Metal Trades, which dominated the Seattle labor movement and the Central Labor Council, were composed of a rough lot of men … torrid oaths and profanity prevailed” wrote a contemporary historian. “Men came out covered in soot and red paint, exhausted from wielding thundering riveting guns. Every day or so some unlucky shipyard worker would be carried out in the dead wagon.” Its trades, then, were no less dangerous than elsewhere.
Seattle became a center for these loggers in winter, when rains made work in the woods impossible. The state’s loggers, “hardworking, hard fighting, hard drinking,” fled the woods to Skid Road. Their boots and bindlestiffs made them unwelcome almost every place else. In some years there were as many as ten thousand. There they might stay until poverty forced them back into the woods, often in debt, at the mercy of the job sharks and lumber men.
Seattle was founded in 1860. It was just one of several outposts on the Sound. The Territorial Assembly incorporated Seattle in 1865, unincorporated it in 1867, and then reincorporated it in 1869. The city survived the early booms and busts of the timber industry. Shamefully, it participated in the ethnic cleansing. After the anti-Chinese riots of 1885–86, the Chinese population, driven from both Seattle and Tacoma, was reduced to less than 4 percent of the population. In 1889, the Great Fire razed the central business district. The nationwide depression of 1893 was devastating in Seattle, leading to a run on the banks, foreclosures, and plummeting land values. Some residents simply fled, taking with them whatever they could. Seattle’s city treasurer, Adolph Krug, escaped to Canada, taking with him $225,000 in public funds. The president of the Buckley State Bank of Tacoma left with $30,000.
By chance, gold was discovered in the Yukon Territories in 1896. Next year, the arrival of the SS Portland from Alaska, carrying sixty-eight miners and “one ton of gold,” transformed Seattle. It was estimated that as many as 100,000 men (plus a few women) passed through Seattle on their way to Alaska and the Klondike. Only a fraction of this number would become actual prospectors. Far fewer became rich. However, in Seattle, every business prospered, and real estate values soared. “Anyone who owned or could lease a ship, no matter how old, no matter how unsea-worthy, could find passengers. One captain hitched up a series of rafts, loaded two hundred passengers and a herd of cattle.”2 The merchants outfitted would-be mining men, then refitted them. The banks financed whatever they could, offering cash to those who returned gold. Salmon canners fed the hordes, beginning the deadly onslaught on the species.
Seattle in those years was recast. An essentially Wild West frontier town became the progressive regional center of the 1910s. This occurred remarkably fast, but not evenly. Seattle would never become a boss-driven urban catastrophe of the kind revealed by the work of the turn-of-the-century muckrakers, including Lincoln Steffens’s pathbreaking account The Shame of the Cities.3 Shipbuilding and associated industries thrived, but none did better than the saloons and brothels on Skid Road. With thousands of single men pouring into the city, men with money to spend and time to kill, prostitution thrived. There were more saloons in the business district than there were restaurants or dry-goods stores. The city’s Hillside Improvement Company would, at one point, purchase several acres for a “model red-light district”; it would include a 500-room brothel, the biggest in the world. Seattle, at least in Skid Road and its environs, became an “open town” where easy money abounded.4 Certainly, then, there was enough to be ashamed of. Seattle’s political battles in the decade were framed by Skid Road and what to do about it. In these struggles, the working-class movement, although most often siding with the progressives, found itself increasingly isolated.
Ironically, it was the infusion of gold-rush wealth that underwrote this transformation and shaped economic development. It created the basis for a diversified economy. Seattle would not become a single-industry, company town (not until the 1950s anyway). James E. Casey founded United Parcel Service in 1907. William Boeing founded his corporation in 1910. The new wealth also shaped the city’s class system. It gave Seattle’s professional classes independence from the timber employers, railroad men and their like, the masters of the frontier economy. It also underlay the politics of municipal reform and enterprise, efficiency in government and management, and moral virtue. These were all in line with the national progressive movement. Then, too, it created the structures of a class system that had more in common with the industrial centers of the East than the company towns of the frontier West. Its population, diverse in occupation, skill, gender and national origin, was overwhelmingly comprised of industrial wage workers.
Seattle’s progressive middle class pursued a “beautiful city,” free from the vice and corruption of the East. It supported planning, municipal ownership, provision for health, education, and the future. The feminists of the movement, the middle class “club women,” suffragists, social workers, and others worked to improve the conditions of the city’s poorest, children, single mothers, the elderly.