They supported reform in general, but when the Municipal League reported in its organ News on the longshoremen’s strike and lockout of 1916, it showed its hand. The report claimed that blame for the violence and wharf fires could be attributed equally to both sides. Yet it asked only that longshoremen cease such activity, making no such request of the Waterfront Employers Association.28
There followed strikes of miners, waitresses, streetcar drivers, shipyard workers, laundry workers, and longshoremen. These were all contested, but backed by the CLC, they were mostly won. At the same time, a feminist women workers’ movement emerged within the larger Seattle working-class movement. Organized in 1911, the Seattle Women’s Union Card and Label League (SWUCLL) grew through the war years, assuming an increasingly important role in the labor movement. According to historian Maurine Greenwald, the SWUCLL’s work was multifaceted: members promoted or challenged labor movement policies, encouraged consumers to purchase only union-label goods, discussed writings, attended lectures by well-known women activists, worked with middle-class club women, and responded to changing economic conditions. Label League activists came to identify themselves as “houseworkers” and women workers in the home, who wanted to liberate women from confinement to the household.29 Greenwald also writes that the SWUCLL “had a membership of five hundred women, including most of the working-class female activists in the city.”30 It supported the strike at and subsequent boycott of Seattle’s then largest department store, the Bon Marché, leading to the recognition of the Retail Clerks Union.31 The SWUCLL often took the initiative in labor’s political campaigns, organizing in favor of the initiative and the referendum. It led the 1914 campaign for a universal eight-hour day and was a driving force in organizing parades and demonstrations, recruiting Mother Jones to lead the Workers’ Memorial Day March of May 30, 1914.32
3. THE TIMBER BEAST
Seattle was an island in a still immeasurable sea of timber. The Pacific coastal forests were estimated to contain nearly two-thirds of the timber in the country, and the Washington State forests accounted for the largest part of these. Washington had the greatest concentration of softwood trees in the world.1
Forests blanketed the lower slopes of the Cascades, the southern and western sides of the Olympic Mountains and the uplands in the southwestern corner of the state. On the coast itself moss-laden cedars anchored the earth’s last-standing temperate rain forests. The region’s prevailing northwesterly winds swept in from the Pacific to meet first the coastal ranges, then the Cascades. Together they wrung rain from moisture-laden air down upon a unique region. This is the wettest area of the country, and the great conifer forests thrived in it. The climate’s year-round precipitation, including during the summer’s warm months, coastal fog, and cloudy skies favored the conifers. Their ability to withstand late-summer drought and occasional winter freezes gave them an advantage over deciduous trees.
Western Washington’s forests were, and are still, dominated by Douglas firs. Commercially they are the most valuable. These massive trees could reach a height of 380 feet and a girth of sixteen feet. They were just one of a dozen giant conifers in the lush, ancient forests of Sitka spruce, western hemlock, western red cedar, and yews that might contain thousand-year-old trees. Thirteen species surpassed heights of two hundred feet. Cool summers, the dense canopy of the forest, and limited undergrowth created gardens of ferns and flowers. There was an abundance of wildlife—deer, Roosevelt elk, black bear, wolves, plus countless smaller creatures and dozens of species of birds. This ecosystem was sustained in part by the massive salmon runs. Salmon fed the animals, fertilized the land, and was the lifeblood of the indigenous peoples.
The people—Makah, Suquamish, Puyallup—coexisted with the forest. They did not live in it; it was too dense to encourage everyday travel. Instead they lived in permanent villages along the shore, often where rivers met the Sound or the sea. They carved cedar logs into canoes and totem poles. They split cedar for the planks of their longhouses. Women pounded cedar bark into rope, mats, baskets, and garments. These people led rich lives; there were few places where life was as easy, encouraging extensive arts and crafts, and allowing for ceremonies and celebrations. The rivers teemed with fish, and the tidelands were a cornucopia of sustenance. The people did, however, collect berries and herbs in the forests. They hunted there and sometimes sought solitude for reflection and prayer. There might be clearings, but it was limited. They were not farmers.
When the white settlers came there to farm, they encountered obstacles. Clearing, the first necessity, was a challenge. The great trees had to be felled, which was difficult enough and left behind massive stumps, nearly impossible to remove. The soil itself was thin; what there was was sandy, gravelly, and acidic. Cultivators made instead for the Willamette Valley in Oregon or sought out river bottoms, though these were relatively few, and the limited flatland in the region often lay beneath steep mountain slopes in narrow valleys always subject to seasonal flooding.
In the 1880s, the new railroads brought many thousands to the Washington Territory, but the majority were not seeking farms. Rather they sought work, finding it for better or worse in the burgeoning extractive industries. They became miners, fieldhands, and above all, loggers—the men who would strip first the shores of the Sound, then the river valleys, and finally the foothills of the great mountain ranges—the Cascades and the Olympics—of their ancient forests. The West was transformed by settlers: the farmers and the pre-proletariats. They were, however, just the hired hands of others, the eastern, often European financiers who orchestrated the invasion of telegraph lines and railroads, tools of choice in the scramble for the riches of the West. They tied this new economy to an expanding global market, thereby linking it also to crises, competition, and global booms and busts, and making it dependent on the government.
Timber was at the center of this economy, but it was years before the railroads became the prime shippers of timber. Rough timber first left on coastal schooners, often those leaving from Seattle’s deepwater, sheltered Elliott Bay. The railroads revolutionized transportation. They also cleared a path for speculators, land agents, bankers—men seeking wealth, by fair means or foul. They came from the banks and offices in New York, Boston, and St. Paul, and included the point men for the greatest “Interests” of the era: the railroad men, James J. Hill and Edward Harriman; the banker J. P. Morgan; the world’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller; and the lumber baron George Weyerhaeuser. In 1900, two out of three workers in Washington State toiled in its woods, in the lands of the Lumber Trust. The Trust, according to IWW organizer James Rowan, was “the ruling power, [which controls] not only the industry, but the local, and sometimes the State machinery of government, with its powerful and corrupt influences.” It was “industrial feudalism … in its worst form.”2
The Seattle settler Henry Yesler built the city’s first lumber mill in 1853. It was steam-powered and sat just above Elliott Bay, cementing Seattle’s relationship to its waterfront. But the transformation of a local, near subsistence economy based on milling into a massive industry was driven not by the early settlers. Rather, it was the work of that new class of men, the robber barons, individuals of great wealth, ambitious in extreme, and utterly ruthless when they needed to be. Rockefeller personally underwrote the industry that would transform these forests forever, turning this last frontier into an industrial colony. These men sensed their chances instantly, and each in his way rushed to seize the resources and the key positions of the industrial society being hastily assembled. They established themselves as “lords of ‘empires’ in iron, railroads and oil, to be held naturally for private gain, and once held, defended them to the last breath of financial life against all comers.”3
The party of Lincoln initiated the massive transfer of power to the new captains of industry in an emerging large-scale capitalism. By the 1850s timber was already an essential component in the development of large-scale industry. Timber too had its “conquistadores,” every bit as avaricious as California’s. By the end of the century, half a dozen men owned the Northwest’s forests. “Great central lumber companies like the Weyerhaeusers’,” wrote
