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 far edge of the continent, the end of the line, the sea the “last” frontier. It was surrounded by the vast rural West, with all the accompanying myth, but it was not home to cowboys, nor prospectors—if people came looking for gold, it was in Alaska.
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
