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 settlements rendered the threat immaterial. The hysteria of the authorities aside, the CLC and the IWW understood strikes in terms of immediate, short-term reforms: the general strike in the woods began with demands for clean bedding, showers, and decent food in the logging camps, then the eight-hour day. This was the path to power, in both the short and long term; the new society would be built piecemeal in struggles in the shell of the old. The CLC’s view was much the same as the IWW’s, though the long term was longer. Was, then, the general strike an effective weapon? In the forests? Yes, it seemed. In Seattle? A strike going beyond a work stoppage, beyond a single industry, had never been tried in a city. Not until 1919. No one knew.
NOVEMBER 11, 1918. THE WAR WAS FINISHED. There were wild celebrations everywhere, in France, Britain, and the United States, spontaneous demonstrations of relief and happiness. Millions took to the streets of Paris and New York. In London, “a primitive jamboree” ensued, with crowds roaring, cheering, drinking, copulating in the shadows. In Brest, in Brittany, where the American soldiers first disembarked, the city was “wild with joy,” factory sirens howling, the ships’ whistles screaming in the harbor. The American soldiers still there were hugged and kissed. On November 7, the Seattle Star had pronounced, “War Is Over!” At once, people took to the streets. In the morning, the mayor was awakened to find the streets already filled, his planned proclamation of a “holiday” irrelevant. Makeshift bands appeared, people banging garbage can lids, lunch buckets, car horns blasting. Then came the sailors, ordered out to make the celebration official and properly patriotic. Then the shipyard owners closed the yards, foremen shepherded the men into the streets, swelling already huge crowds. The entire length of Second Avenue became gridlocked.
“The war to end all wars,” the patriotic papers repeated without a blush. Ten million lost in the slaughter on the Western Front, 36 million casualties. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were millions more dead, vast swathes of devastation, and the heart of the continent in ruins. New armies emerged, this time of scavengers and homeless, creatures without hope. The Seattle Star featured a half-page, triumphant Jesus, captioned “Peace on Earth.” Then came the mindless boastings of victory and babble about “sacred unions,” “homes for heroes,” and “democracy at full tilt.”
The workers of Seattle had never really supported the war, unless, of course, one reduces it to “supporting the troops,” the mantra in all wars. The Union Record’s response to the war’s end was rather more subdued. News from the front competed with accounts of “revolution” in Germany and the shortcomings of the wage awards promised to the shipyard workers.8 Still, workers celebrated, especially if it meant an end to long hours, short pay, and conscription, on the one hand, or charges of “sedition” and “criminal syndicalism,” the red squads, raids, prison sentencess on the other. The death toll was high: of the nearly five million Americans who served in the First World War, 116,000 were killed. The Battle of Meuse Argonne alone took the lives of 26,000.
The “peace,” however, was short-lived. The same day the Seattle Star cried out, “War Is Over!” it reported that sailors in Kiel, the home of the Kaiser’s high seas fleet, had seized the ships. “The crew of the dreadnoughts Kaiser and Schleswig mutinied and waved red flags yesterday morning. They arrested their officers, 20 of whom were shot…. The sailors threaten to blow up the ships if they are attacked.”9 Soldiers in the town’s garrison had joined them, and the city was effectively governed by a council of sailors, soldiers, and workmen. Thousands more were soon marching with red flags, and the revolt was spreading. There was street fighting in Hamburg, mutinies spreading. “Several garrisons in Holstein have deserted and are reported marching on Kiel, waving red flags.”10 The revolution in the West, it seemed, had begun.
In the winter of 1918, much of Seattle—the schools and most public places—was closed, as a result of Spanish influenza. Fifteen hundred were dead already; it was unclear if the epidemic had ended. Still, the first loggers were drifting back. They joined others—wandering, homeless men on the city’s mean streets, waiting for work to resume. This was ordinary in Seattle’s winter. Now, however, newcomers appeared, some still in uniform, wanting work. The Union Record reported that peace abroad was bringing hunger at home. A union representative from the Metal Trades Council told reporters that he had been approached “by 15 soldiers in just one night, all for bed and board.”11
The paper foresaw unemployment and “bread lines coming.” “It looks as if that move for the six-hour day or even the four-hour day, in order to pass the jobs around, may be needed in a hurry, right here in Seattle.”12 The Machinists of Hope Lodge responded by ruling that “no member shall under any circumstances be allowed to work more than eight hours during a current work day, or more than 44 hours in a working week.” They proposed “a shortening of the work day policy as palliative to unemployment, for civilians and discharged service men alike, as a result of the large number of men suddenly thrown on the labor market.” The Lodge also adopted “a clause for their new working agreements providing that when conditions arise in any plant whereby men are to be laid off, that instead of reducing the force, the hours be reduced to six hours per day, five days a week.” The Lodge also instructed members that “they must accept employment only through the union offices so that the disgraceful features of the ‘job hunting’ to which American working men have been submitted may be eliminated as far as possible.”13
The shipyards, the core of Seattle’s economy, nevertheless still seemed to prosper. The Star’s lead headline read, “American Shipbuilding Will Continue, Declares Schwab.”14 Charles Schwab, the head of Bethlehem Steel, who had been charged but not convicted of war profiteering, was viciously anti-union. President Wilson appointed him Director General of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, its board given wartime control of all shipbuilding in the United States. Seattle’s shipyard workers had chafed under his wartime regime, and the high cost of living became the issue. Thus, the killing in Europe, most of it, had not been finished a month before the Metal Trades Council, representing the shipyard unions, took a strike vote. Members overwhelmingly rejected the pay “awards” (salary adjustments) of both the shipyard owners and the wartime Emergency Shipping Board. Their demands were for wage increases and for raising the pay of the least skilled to reduce inequality in the yards. They were not alone; across the country workers believed they had sacrificed for the cause of war, but that the “high cost of living” had been an unfair burden. The demand everywhere was for wage increases. Real enough in itself, the demand was also an indication of deeper frustrations and dissatisfactions. The strike wave of the war years—an
