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 class, then, involved the relationships and the experience of workers themselves—with one another, with the authorities, with the employers and their press, and with the police. These were historical relationships in a process. The story of the great General Strike of 1919 and why it occurred in Seattle and nowhere else can only be understood with this in mind. The challenge is to expand our field of vision in time, stretching it both backwards and into the future, and geographically not contract it. We have to consider the roots of the strike, to follow the development of a movement, to see this historical moment in context. And this is well worth doing, all the more so as it happened one hundred years ago, far from the strategic centers, isolated from revolutionary strongholds, on the very edge, hidden in the shadow of rain forests, in the gray morning light of the Sound. Much of the Seattle story is forgotten. However regrettable, this is understandable. What is not understandable is that when people refer to the history of the General Strike, it is often as something insignificant or peripheral, simply a blip on the graph of lost causes—or worse, condescendingly corrected to make it fit into more acceptable narratives.
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
